Longarm pinched his hat brim to him and then turned toward the house. Haven stood just outside the entrance portal to the garden, scowling up at Longarm, like a schoolmarm silently chastising an unruly student. He merely hiked a shoulder, and then Haven turned through the portal and followed Mrs. Azrael along a stone walk through the garden.
Longarm followed them both, noting the colorful flowers arranged in flower beds, transplanted shrubs, cacti, and a flowering crabapple tree. The garden appeared to ring the house. As Mrs. Azrael silently walked along the stone path, she stopped and tipped her head back to look up at the tall lawman, who towered over her. She placed a hand on her sombrero’s crown to keep it from falling off.
“You’re a big man, Marshal. Bigger than Stretch.” Her high cheeks covered in wrinkled and dimpled leather, stretched an admiring smile. “Takes one your size to give him his due, which he’s never had, as far as I know. If so, he’s never told his ma about it.”
“Ma?” Longarm said.
“Sure, sure. Stretch is my boy. Favors his father more than his black-Irish ma, don’t he?” She called through the portal where Stretch was swiping dust from his leather leggings with his hat. “Stretch, get cleaned up. Supper in an hour!”
The tall ranch foreman threw an indignant look over his shoulder and dragged his boots in frustration toward the corral, where the bronc rider was just now climbing back into the hurricane deck.
As Mrs. Azrael started climbing the steps to the house’s front gallery, she stopped again and said, “And this here is Stretch’s wife, Vonda.”
Longarm hadn’t seen anyone standing there before, but he saw her now, hovering near a whitewashed stone piling that supported the gallery’s red-tiled roof. He hadn’t seen the girl because, being ash-blond and dressed in a white, low-cut cotton dress, her pale shoulders bare, she’d blended in to the piling and the white clapboard house front.
Longarm’s heart twisted a little, when he saw the heavy-lidded stare the girl gave him, crooking one corner of her full rich mouth that was just the right size for her delicate, heart-shaped face. Her flawless skin told Longarm she probably wasn’t much over sixteen years old, if that, but her body was full-busted, with long legs and ripe hips.
Her eyes behind the heavy lids were the blue of a high-mountain lake at the height of spring. She was barefoot, and now she mashed the toes of one foot down on the other foot—an achingly sexy gesture. Her toes were pink and plump and somehow as alluring as the pale breasts that were half-revealed by the thin, cotton dress. The big lawman’s keen male eye told him this woman-child’s breasts would not be as large as Haven’s, but they’d be full and succulent beneath his tongue.
Had Mrs. Azrael said she belonged to Stretch?
Longarm knew an instant’s fleeting jealousy, which he thought he concealed well as he nodded once to the girl, giving a cordial, professional smile. “I’m Deputy United States Marshal Custis P. Long, and I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Vonda.”
Haven stepped up beside him and dipped her chin to the girl. “I am Haven Delacroix of the Pinkerton Agency.”
The girl kept her sultry, blue gaze on Longarm, continuing to mash her pink toes into the top of her opposite foot and lean beguilingly against the piling, as though she were imitating a cat pressing its body against a man’s ankle.
Mrs. Azrael said in her brusque, raspy tone, tossing her clawlike hand in an urgent wave, “Go on up and tell Angelina to bring ole Whip down. The marshal and Agent Delacroix want to talk to him. We’ll be in the parlor. When you’ve done that, fetch us a jug of fresh water from the well.”
The girl smiled at Longarm, who didn’t think she’d given Haven so much as a passing glance yet, and then pushed away from the porch post, did a fleet, little, dancer’s pirouette, her blond hair flying out from her neck, and then ran through the stout open door and into the house. Longarm heard her bare feet slapping on what he assumed were stone tiles.
“Please, come in,” Mrs. Azrael said, entering the house herself and doffing her straw sombrero. “And don’t mind Vonda. She’s cork-headed and lazy as a rich widow’s cat. Why on earth my son chose to marry her of all the girls he’s had at his beck and call is beyond my fathoming!”
Walking through the doorway behind Haven, Longarm reflected that it sure as hell wasn’t beyond his fathoming.
As he and Haven followed Mrs. Azrael through the cool, dark house, he got the impression that the place had once been much smaller—probably a settler’s cabin. Since then, it had been added onto in various fashions until now it was a sprawling maze.
In some parts, the floors were stone; in others, oak. The walls were adobe brick or fieldstone, a few consisting of vertical wood panels. Most were dark with soot from candles, coal oil, and wood smoke from several iron stoves and brick fireplaces.
The little woman led them into a large room with couches and large comfortable chairs, a desk in one corner. There were a few small bookcases, old-model rifles, an oil painting, and hunting trophies on the walls.
There was also a stout liquor cabinet made of oak, Longarm noticed. He was glad to see the rangy woman amble over to it, curling both feet in a little, as though her ankles were sore.
“Drinks all around?” she asked. She’d hung her sombrero on a peg somewhere in the dark house, and Longarm saw that she wore her coal-black hair very short, with a tortoiseshell comb holding it down in back.
“Why not?” Longarm looked at Haven, who stood with her hat in her hands.
She hesitated for a second then, giving Longarm a vaguely defiant look, said, “Sure.”
“I got some purty good busthead here,” said Mrs. Azrael. “How ’bout some bourbon? Whip used to order it by the case from Kentucky. No doubt played a part in his…”
She let her voice trail off as she looked over her shoulder at the study’s open doorway, through which a young, plump Mexican woman was pushing a wiry, little gray-haired man in a wheelchair.
“Accident,” Mrs. Azrael finished.
The young Mexican woman kept her eyes down as she rolled the little gray-haired man up to the striped rug fronting the cold fireplace and around which most of the chairs and one of the couches were arranged. “Obliged, Angelina,” Mrs. Azrael said. “Start supper, will you? There’ll be two more this evening.”
The Mexican girl did not respond but, keeping her cool, dark eyes lowered, merely turned and strolled back out the study door, leaving the little man in his chair facing the fireplace with all the expression of a blank adobe wall. He was almost as small as Mrs. Azrael, and he wore a black patch over one eye. His skin and his hair was as dry, thin, and as colorless as that of a corpse.
Mrs. Azrael continued pouring drinks at the cabinet. “Marshal Long, Agent Delacroix, meet my husband, Whip Azrael. Don’t take it personal if he don’t say howdy or shake hands.”
Longarm gazed down at the poor old hombre in the wheelchair, both the man’s knees together and leaning to one side. In his stockmen’s boots, gray suit, and a black string tie, he looked as though he were about ride into town for a night of card playing with his moneyed cronies.
But Longarm doubted Whip Azrael ever left the house much anymore. Or, if he did, he likely didn’t know it.
“What happened?” Longarm asked as Mrs. Azrael handed him and Haven their water glasses half-filled with bourbon.
The old woman turned to the door and croaked out, “Where’s that water, goddamnit, Vonda!” To her guests, she said, “Have a seat. Anywhere. Please!”
Longarm chose a leather chair near Whip Azrael, facing the unlit hearth. Haven lowered her fine body into the brocade-upholstered sofa on his left, a low wooden table between them. Mrs. Azrael sat on the couch’s opposite end, her glass in her clawlike hand.