Work Song - Ivan Doig [94]
“The ones we’ve been looking for,” she joked a little sadly as we went to the sorting room to tally these treasures in with the rest.
“Maybe the full inventory will improve Sandison’s disposition,” I thought out loud. “The commotion about the noose seems to offend his civic sensibilities.”
The mischievous laugh again. “Quit being funny, Mr. Morgan.”
“Rab, really, you are not being fair to our employer.” For whatever reason, I felt tender toward Sandison in his upset mood. “I grant you he has a bit of a temper, but we shouldn’t judge him entirely on that. It is a truth as old as humankind that the presence of a shortcoming in a person does not preclude the existence of other worthier attributes in that same—Why are you looking at me like that?”
Rab had the magpie gleam of possessing the hidden morsel. “Don’t you know who Sam Sandison is? He’s the Strangler.”
11
Rabrab’s words went directly to my windpipe.
When I recovered enough air to speak, it was little more than a squeak. “Rab, you might have said so before now. Are you telling me the man I share an office with goes around throttling people?”
“Not that he was ever caught at it himself,” she said, as if explaining etiquette to a child. “He had mugs who worked for him do the dirty work. ‘Necktie makers,’ they were called. Vigilantes.” She looked at me closely. “You know: types who hang first and ask questions later.”
“I grasp the terminology,” I fumbled out. “What I am uninformed about is who my employer has had strangled, and why?”
“Cattle rustlers,” she answered both of those. “Or anybody who looked like one, to those cowboys of his.” Rabrab calculated with the aplomb of a hanging judge herself. “Plenty of them had it coming, probably. But some might have been small operators whose herds some Triple S cows and calves just got mixed in with. You know the saying about a rope”—she looked at me as if I likely did not—“one size fits all.”
“But—” Still stunned, I tried to reconcile the two Samuel Sandisons, the one who petted rare books as if they were living things and the other who used lethal means without thinking twice. “How can a, a vigilante be permitted to run a public institution such as this? ”
“Oh, I suppose people think those old hangings were a long time ago,” Rab reasoned. “After all, Butte is where a lot of people get over their past. Mr. Morgan, are you feeling all right?”
“The start of a headache,” I replied, truthfully enough. It was scarcely twenty-four hours since I had wriggled free from the grasp of the goons and the Chicago betting mob, and now I found out my library refuge was in the grip of a hangman. Whose method of tapping the library payroll budget to accumulate literary treasures in his own name was known only to me. This was an unhealthy turn of events, to say the least.
“MORGAN!”
I nearly jumped out of my hide, but managed to face around to the white-maned figure looming at the end of the aisle of bookshelves. Sandison looked as if he had grown even more enormous since I saw him minutes before.
“Drag your carcass to the office,” he bawled out, turning away, “I want to talk to you.”
Rab bade me off by wrinkling her nose prettily. “He really is something, isn’t he.”
I WENT IN, determined not to tremble. I suppose the blindfolded man facing a firing squad tries that, too. At the other end of the office, Sandison’s black suit was the darkest kind of outline against the stained-glass window jeweled with colors. He swung around to face me, saying nothing, sizing me up. Between us, on his desk, lay the smoothed-out newspaper with the emphatic photograph of the noose.
“Sandy?” I gambled, not for the first time,