Longarm Sets the Stage by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 11

Once Longarm had explained—more than once—what he’d eliminated, any lawman worth his salt could see what needed to be done. So they got cracking, and as word got out about what he’d done to their red herring the others made it easier by scattering far and wide, eliminating the sheep from the goats because anyone could see only the guilty had cause to run.

They ran far. They ran wide. And within days they’d been rounded up, because they’d run dumb and holed up with kith and kin known to a mostly outraged Mexican community.

Before half of them had been caught, those who hadn’t killed anybody were singing like canary birds to save their own necks, and thus it came to pass that less than a week later Longarm was back in Denver, wishing there was an infernal ashtray on his side of Billy Vail’s damned desk.

Oblivious to the way his senior deputy was treating his rug for carpet mites, Billy Vail said, “You done good. You et cucumbers and performed other wonders, and Governor Wallace thinks you have a crystal ball you ought to patent. So no bullshit, old son, how did you do it?”

Longarm modestly replied, “That process of eliminating you taught me. Once I figured why the same man would want to pass himself off as an Anglo tinhorn, a Mex vaquero and an Anglo businessman without that mustache, I saw the light.”

He flicked more ash and continued, “We all of us see what we expect to see as long as what we’re looking at acts like what we’re expecting to see. Crazy Horse had wavy brown hair and blue eyes. But the trooper who bayoneted him up to Fort Robinson saw a wild Indian because he was acting like a wild Indian. The late and spiteful Dusty Wheeler saw me as a damned Jew because he didn’t like Jews and didn’t like me. Jewish folk or Irish Papists who get tired of Angry Saxons low-rating them find it easy enough to just change their names and pass for Angry Saxons. Jack of Diamonds Walthers with an H was really an Anglo-Mex they called Mike Robles around Santa Fe. They didn’t know him in Cerrillos. Being blue-blooded Spanish and Scotch Irish in country where such folk have been mixing since the Santa Fe Trail was blazed back in 1821, he was as comfortable speaking English or Spanish and, like your pal, Marshal Harris, looked as Anglo or as Mex as he was dressed or acted.”

Billy Vail waved his own stogie and said, “I got that part in your officious report. How come you knew before you had a positive ID that the killing at the Posada de San Francisco was a copycat crime?”

Longarm said, “Wouldn’t eliminate no other way, once I determined an Anglo-Mex who’d come down from Santa Fe with Gertruda Moreno before I could talk to her was the Jack of Diamonds, working hard for us to be misdirected by a mysterious Anglo tinhorn. There

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