She said she’d lost track of the times the deadbeat had cheated her by adding her tip to his tab in pencil. So one got the impression she was not what might be called a friend of the dead person found in that patent cell.
When they got to the recently vacated grocery with a cool root cellar, Longarm was pleased to see Nate Rothstein had posted a night watch on the property. The junior deputy naturally knew Longarm by sight, and anxious for any distraction at that hour, said he’d be as pleased as punch to show them around down below.
He led them to the cellar stairs with a railroad lantern, and they followed him down into the dank darkness. Longarm had to help the jittery waitress on the stairs. He didn’t care much for the faint but nasty odor either. It was mostly the smell of damp earth and mildew, but that first one, gunned by Amos Payne in the depot, had been dead long enough to notice. Matilda Waller pointed at the late Ginger Bancott and asked, “Didn’t they say that red-haired boy had been shot? How come he looks as if somebody beat him up real mean?”
Longarm said, “They bloat and get red-faced before they get dark and start to shrivel, ma’am. Could you hold that lantern over this one they just brought in, Deputy? You’ll find this one way fresher, Miss Matilda.”
The late Bunny McNee or Tess Jennings only looked a mite waxen around the tip of her snub nose as she reclined on her own planks across sawhorses. Someone had been thoughtful enough to shut her eyes and place some pennies on the lids. The waitress gulped and almost sobbed, “That’s him, I mean her. He, she, or it stayed up in that hired room day and night alone, save for the times Peony says he, or she, had a rougher visitor. Will I look like that when I am dead?”
Longarm said soothingly, “Probably not, ma’am. When the undertakers do right by you, your eyes and mouth stay shut by themselves and you don’t stink or turn funny colors.”
He started to explain some details of the embalmer’s craft, but decided not to. That friendly undertaking gal who’d explained just what they did to hold folks together long enough for a dignified send-off had doubtless been more used to dead bodies late at night.
He nudged the waitress and gently told her they could leave now. He didn’t have to tell her twice. But she waited until he’d thanked the town deputy and had her headed homeward before she said, “That was awful! Whatever made you suspect the girl killed tonight in the jailhouse might not be the boy who ran up that swamping bill at the hotel? The fact she was a girl disguised as a boy makes those visits from a rough lover more sensible than Peony put it.”
He said, “Sense is what I’m trying to make of this whole can of worms. All three bodies answer to descriptions of wanted outlaws. But I’ll be switched with snakes if I can fit the three of ‘em together in a sensible pattern. Both the red-haired Ginger Bancott and the darker Quicksilver Quinn had dishonest but obvious means of support. I can see why either, riding with the sort of tomboy we just viewed, might want to keep her at a hotel instead of in the bunkhouse with the rest of the boys he wanted to fade in with. After that, it would be just plain stupid to refuse to pay her hotel tab. An owlhoot rider of any experience would have known that’s no way to hide out in a small town.”
Matilda said, “I don’t think she was messing with either of those dead boys we just saw. You were right about redheaded hotel guests attracting notice, and that other one, Quinn, had another girl here in town.” Longarm brightened. “Are you sure? Might you know this other local lady with such poor taste in men, Miss Matilda?”
To which she demurely replied, “My friends call me Matty, and I don’t know why I’m attracted to rascals either., I don’t know the serving girl they say that handsome stranger in town had been seen with a lot. But her name is Sarah Something and she works for that Widow Farnsworth. Most everyone in town who doesn’t work for C.C.H. seems to be working for that rich widow these days.”
Longarm said, “I’ve noticed. I think I know the maid of whom you’ve heard gossip. She ain’t there no more. Let’s hope she turns up alive so I can question her about old Quicksilver. That does present a sort of pattern, when you study on it with your eyes half shut.”
The waitress held his arm tighter as she demanded, “What do you want with that sassy Sarah and her high-toned ways? Was that true what Peony told me about you and her the other night?”
He said he wasn’t sure what she was talking about, and was quick to explain, “Just before they killed her to shut her up, the gal we had down as Bunny McNee told a beanery serving a supper crowd that she’d had enough and wanted out. The maid called Sarah was sparking a hired gun and working for a lady who’d hired a man murdered by a hired gun. That might add up to a pair of scared quail all this gunfire flushed!”
She didn’t seem to follow his drift. He was still working on what it all meant in any case. So he asked if she knew a place where they might have that ice cream he’d promised her.
She laughed. “At this hour?” she asked, and suggested they just get on back to her place, where she just happened to have something stronger than ice cream on hand.
So they did. She said she felt no call to tell anyone they were back seeing it was almost closing time downstairs.
Once they were up in her small neat garret room, she sat him on the bed, bolted her door, and poured something in two hotel tumblers by the moonlight through the overhead skylight. It smelled like malt liquor and tasted even better. Matty said she’d bought it for female complaints. As she cast aside her shawl and sat down beside him to clink glasses, she had to allow that a gal sleeping alone at high altitude seemed to have a heap of itchy turning and tossing to complain about.
He gravely replied he’d heard the same from some Denver ladies only a mile above sea level. As they sipped the strong stuff, they agreed that an article they’d both read about thin air made some sense. For everyone knew ladies suffering from consumptive lungs got passionate as well as wan and lovely, like that Miss Camille with all those lovers in that novel by Mister Dumas. It seemed possible that feeling breathless made a natural gal feel, well, breathless.
As she poured another round, Matty confided she’d spent many a breathless night up there behind the false front. When she sat back down closer, she breathed heady fumes in his face as she demanded, “Why did you make Peony so breathless last night, you silly?”
To which he could only reply, “It was my understanding the chambermaid of whom you speak is a happily married woman, Miss Matty.”
The waitress giggled and said, “I’ll bet she is. She said it made her feel really swell when you hit bottom. She said nobody had been in her that deep since she was way younger and skinnier. Did you really do that to her, you dog?”
Longarm didn’t want to talk about doing it dog-style to a gal he’d never even kissed. He was mighty peeved at Peony for bragging on that with a husband waiting at home for her. He was peeved at himself for the way it was getting him hard, just thinking about that big rump of the cheating chambermaid moving in time with his thrusts.
He said, “I never talk about such private matters one way or the other. Careless talk can mess up another pal’s fish story when nothing happened, or make a pat feel like a fool when something did.”
She leaned even closer and purred, “You mean if I was to lose my head like Miss Camille you’d never tell anyone downstairs? I ain’t as coarse-natured as Peony. I could never look another in the eyes and say right out that I’d just kissed a bigger dick than my husband’s!”
He allowed that did sound sort of coarse. And then she was groping at his fly in a way that threatened his buttons, so he told her he was better at undressing his fool self. Then he rolled her in for a kiss that would have done the breathless Camille proud as they fell flat across her mattress together. But damn if she didn’t have his old organ-grinder out of his fly by now and damn if it wasn’t hard as a rock. So without preamble or taking off as much as her dining room apron, the breathless waitress rolled atop him, straddled his fully clad form, and just hoisted her skirts to haul the crotch of her newfangled and naughty French underdrawers aside and impale her warm wet innards on his raging erection as they both gasped deeply in that thin mountain air.