I stared at her for I don't know how long before I said anything. "Jim didn't tell me he had a sister-in-law."
"We're not on speaking terms."
"And why is that?"
"Because, Mr. Maverick, I think that James Buckley killed my sister."
Dandy Jim Buckley might have been a lot of things during his lifetime – con man, card cheat, swindler, thief, liar, and utterly untrustworthy. But the one thing that he was not was a murderer. And that I was sure of. "You think Jim killed her? But . . . didn't she die in childbirth?" She looked at me like I was stupid, and I felt that way.
Corinne lowered her voice and explained. "I don't mean he took a gun and shot her. He was more subtle than that, but he killed her just the same. I assume you know his son Jack?"
I nodded. "Although I haven't seen him since he was a boy."
"Jack wasn't enough for him. He wanted Janet to have a baby. And she never should have tried. She was small and frail, not big enough or strong enough to give birth to a child. She was sick and ailing the whole time she carried that child. When her time came to give birth, it was like her body was fighting her. Everything that could go wrong did. It was a little girl they named Nell, and she didn't live twenty-four hours. And from there it was all downhill. Janet kept bleeding, and nothing the doctor could do stopped it. Before I could even say goodbye to her, she was gone."
She started to cry, and before I knew it I had Corinne Stinson clinging to me and sobbing. "And he never even . . . acted like . . . he was sorry."
I don't do well with crying women – my wife would be the first to agree with that. All any of my girls have to do is turn on the tears and I fall apart. Corinne Stinson had just taken her life into her hands, and she didn't even know it. The only thing I could do was hold on and let her cry herself out, which she did, eventually.
"How do you know it was Jim that wanted the baby? Maybe Janet wanted one, too." That seemed to be the most reasonable answer to me; I just didn't know if it was the right answer.
"Oh, she wanted the baby. She wanted to make him happy, and if it was gonna take a baby to do it, then she was all for it. And it killed her."
"Corinne, what if you're wrong? Everybody I've heard from seems to think Jim was really inconsolable when he lost Janet. What if it wasn't his idea at all?"
"Ask him."
"What?"
"Ask him."
"I will. Anything else?"
"Isn't that enough?"
I gripped her firmly by the shoulders and made her stand upright, no longer leaning on me. "This isn't any of my business, Corinne. What I came here for has nothing to do with Janet or anything that happened to her. Why did you think I should know all this?"
"I thought . . . I thought you might be a lawman. Come to get him for something in the past . . . but you're not, are you?"
I shook my head and looked her right in the eyes. "No. No, I'm not. I'm just an old friend who hasn't seen Jim Buckley in a long time." We stood there awkwardly for a minute, until I finally asked, "Have you tried to talk to Jim about this?"
"After Janet . . . passed."
"Not since then?"
Her head shook, but she didn't say anything. "Don't you think it might help both of you if you did? What if you're wrong, and you've blamed him for something that wasn't his fault all this time?" I got no further response from Corinne, and I finally let go of her shoulders and unlocked the front door. "Goodbye, Corinne."
Back to the hotel I went. I had a lot to think about.
XXXXXXXX
I opened my eyes slowly, not quite sure where I was. It took me another minute to remember that I was in Grand Junction, Colorado, and I was here to see Jim Buckley. The past three days all came back to me slowly, and as I sat up I wondered what I was gonna do next.
I knew what I should do – I should get out of bed, get dressed and go tell Jim all the things I'd kept bottled up inside of me for the last I don't know how many years. When I made the decision to kick Dandy out of Little Bend before Doralice and me got married, I never expected our estrangement to go on this long, or for it to bother me this much. But it had bothered me this much, especially the last few years, yet I'd made no attempt to straighten things out until . . . until I heard that Jim was dying.
So now I'd been here part of a week, and I still hadn't told him what I had to say or tried to resolve the issue. What was I waiting for? Some courage, perhaps?
Maybe I didn't want to confront Jim. Maybe that's why, in all this time, I'd made no effort to tear down the wall that had been built up between us. The way things had stood for years, we had kind of an uneasy respite. If I finally told him what I really felt, there would be no resolve, no peace, no truce. Just the end of what had been a remarkable friendship.
I sighed, then got up from the bed and got dressed. It was time to figure out, once and for all, what I was gonna do. That meant it was time to go play some poker.
There were two saloons in town, and I stopped at the one right next door to the hotel – the Grand Junction Pleasure Palace. There were only two games being played, but there was an empty chair at one of them, and I was welcomed in. I ordered my usual black coffee, and spent the next several hours playing draw poker and letting my mind find its own level of comfort. Two or three times Jim's name came up, and it seems he was thought of quite favorably, especially by the businessmen and ranchers in the area; Brother Bret would have choked if he'd heard all the complimentary things said. I was beginning to think I was in the wrong town; either that or I was listening to accolades for the wrong person. Not one thing was said that reminded me of the con man I'd known and gotten into trouble with.
I took my leave from the game around seven o'clock the next morning. I wish I could say my head was clear and I knew exactly how I was gonna handle things, but I was just as confused as I'd been when I began playing poker the night before. On the one hand, I had all my own experiences with Dandy Jim Buckley; the cad, thief, no account swindler that I'd spent so much of my time with when I was younger. We'd gotten thrown in jail together and broken out of jail together; he'd made me laugh like nobody else, he saved my life on more than one occasion. And took advantage of me the one time in that life I'd begged him not to.
On the other hand, I had practically every single person in Grand Junction, Colorado, telling me what a swell fellow James Buckley was; how he'd thought only of the town and its loss to give the city what they needed but couldn't provide for themselves. How he'd denied his own grief to do something useful and fine for the children, now and future generations.
And I still didn't know which one was the real Dandy Jim Buckley.