Free Relentless by Ed Gorman

certainly don’t want some sordid murder hanging over our heads.”
        I’d forgotten about the lieutenant governor, whose name I couldn’t remember anyway. “So you want me to just arrest somebody, is that it?”
        “Well, it would look better if we had somebody charged with it and in jail,” Toomey said. They were both too stout to wear the kind of sharply cut suits they did, but that didn’t deter them, of course. They wore matching pearl-colored derbies, too.
        “And you could always let him go free after the lieutenant governor left,” Grice said.
        I laughed. Couldn’t help it. “I’m glad law and order means so much to you. Murder isn’t much more than an inconvenience to you, is it?”
        “Is it wrong to have civic pride?” Grice said.
        “Some hayseed kills a visitor,” Toomey said. “How does that look to important people, do you think?”
        “A ‘visitor’? You two know anything about David Stanton?”
        “He came into the taproom several nights,” Grice said.
        “He was a well-traveled man. He had a lot of wonderful stones.”
        “I’ll bet he did. And I’ll bet at least half of them were true, too.”
        “He was an educated man,” Grice said. “He talked about how either Phil or I could become governor if we wanted to.”
        You couldn’t go wrong buttering up two pampered blowhards like these two. Easy enough to imagine Stanton painting them pictures of themselves as great national leaders rising up to lead the masses to the promised land.
        “You sure he didn’t mention anything about the presidency?”
        Grice said, “I’m going to ignore that, Marshal. You’ve obviously come to the conclusion that you should have arrested Ken Adams. And now you’re going to try to make yourself look better by belittling us.”
        Deke Newton, my senior night deputy, came in. “There’s somebody up front who says he’s got information about the murder. Says he saw something he wants to report. You want me to handle it or you want to?”
        Toomey said, “I don’t mean to be rude here, Deke, but when you’ve got two members of the town council talking to the high marshal, isn’t it obvious that you should handle this yourself?”
        Deke started to say something, and then stopped. What was the point of trying to be reasonable with two legendary national leaders like these?
        “You handle it, Deke. I’ll talk to you later.”
        Deke nodded and left.
        “I’m sort of surprised he couldn’t have figured that one out for himself,” Grice said.
        I usually saw these two only at town council meetings, the other two members of which acted as my protection.
        They kept Grice and Toomey from doing their pompous worst, and interrupted their orating whenever it looked as if I might jump up and do sizable damage to their sizable frames.
        “Now,” Grice said, “where were we?”
        “I think you were asking me to arrest somebody before the lieutenant governor gets here so we can tell him that the murder is solved and the kingdom of Skylar is safe again.”
        “You don’t have to take that tone with us,” Toomey said. This would have been something for all the schoolkids to overhear. There were too many towns where the law would give in to two showboats like these and jail a possibly innocent man just to make things look good.
        “I do when you’re asking me to do something this shoddy. I admit he’s a strong suspect. And he admits he was in the room and had seriously thought of killing Stanton. But he said Stanton was dead when he got there. I have to weigh what he said against his wife committing suicide. There’s at least as good a possibility that she killed Stanton. I wanted to give him at least a little while with his kids. Their lives have just come apart. They need their father. I’m looking to ride