The butler rose stiffly to say, “It is customary to ring when you desire something from the staff, suh.”
Longarm said, “I ain’t back here as a guest. I’m back here as the law. I heard Miss Constance call you Edward. If you’d rather I call you Mister I’ll need a last name.”
The butler stiffly replied that Edward would do fine, and added he knew nothing about the murder of that sassy Miss Sarah, save that he’d told the pretty Creole gal not to mess with that Texas trash they’d called Quicksilver.
Longarm nodded gravely and declared, “She should have listened. What I wanted to ask of you would be more in the way of an introduction. I’ve noticed more than a dozen colored folk up this way, and it’s been my experience that there’s usually a colored quarter tucked in some corner of a town this size.”
The butler and the colored scullery maid exchanged wary glances. Edward shrugged and said, “There’s no secret about that. Me and the other household help sleep up under the mansard shingles. The mostly colored railroaders are housed in company cottages on the far side of the round house. Some other colored families here in this tight little town have naturally built or hired other quarters next to the railroaders, on railroad property. Miss Constance don’t mind Her husband treated us decent while he was alive, and she’s carried on as a white boss of quality.”
Longarm nodded and said, “I don’t have time to convince you my folks were too poor to keep slaves in days of yore. Your boss lady, her railroad, and a heap of track-working jobs could be in danger. I need your help to mayhaps head some off. Do I have it?”
Edward nodded gravely, but asked, “What can I do? I just work here.”
Longarm included the young scullery maid as he explained, or verified, what they’d likely noticed already.
He said, “You colored folks tend to be either annoying or invisible to a heap of white folks. When you ain’t getting shot by brutes such as Clay Allison for ordering a drink in a white saloon, you tend to be tolerated, and ignored, as faithful darkies waiting on tables, shining shoes, or whatever.”
Edward quietly asked if Longarm was trying to be funny.
Longarm assured him, “Not funny. Factual. I’ve noticed in connection with other federal cases that white bullies tend to go on talking as if they were alone while colored help is quietly serving them. I’ve noticed that next to barbers, nobody gossips more, in low tones, about the scandalous or just plain silly things the white folks in town may be up to than their colored help.”
The scullery maid was grinning ear to ear. Edward sternly warned her not to get uppity, but confided to Longarm, “She caught that New Orleans gal doing it in the woodshed with that Quicksilver man one evening. But we ain’t about to gossip like that about Miss Constance!”
Longarm said, “I ain’t interested in what a lady might do in her own woodshed. I want to talk to someone privy to all the gossip of all you invisible folks. Before you ask me what I want to know, if I knew all that much I wouldn’t have to ask. I have a whole bunch of balls in the air with no basket to put ‘em in. If only I could connect or disconnect my obvious suspects …”
“You want to talk to Mammy Palaver, the Obeah woman,” Edward said. The scullery maid nodded, with a wicked grin.
Longarm smiled less certainly and asked, “Obeah? Ain’t that some like voodoo?”
Edward said, “Voodoo is a religion. Obeah is serious. Even our good Baptist ladies go to Mammy Palaver for goofer dust or just good advice. So she would naturally hear a lot.”
Longarm nodded thankfully, and asked how he might find this witch woman and whether he should say Edward sent him.
The frog-faced but dignified gentleman of color gravely told him to just ask when he got to the colored quarter. Then he added, “You won’t have to tell Mammy Palaver who you are. She’ll know. All of us heard a powerful lawman was coming our way. It was Mammy Palaver who spread the word you were all right. Your point about white gunfighters gunning our boys for no good reason was Well taken. So we watch you all more than you might think.”
Longarm said that was the very point he’d been trying to make, and left by way of the back door.
He’d already been told French Sarah was over at the undertaker’s, and he figured the dentist and druggist who examined more dead folks than he did knew when a gal had been strangled or shot. So he headed up to the mining operation to examine the scene of the crime.
He walked as far as a barbed-wire fence and a posted gate, where a shotgun-toting C.C.H. man told him all the property beyond was his outfit’s private property, damn it.
Longarm flashed his federal badge and explained he’d come friendly for a look around that ore-stamping mill, or else he’d be back directly with a search warrant and an armed mob. So the guard let him through, and even pointed the way to where they’d found that dead gal.
Longarm would have found the stamping mill in any case. It was three stories high, sending up a lot of coal smoke, and making a dreadful racket near the tracks running through the dusty confusion of tippies, sheds, and such between him and the mine adit set in the bare side of a mineral-rich young mountain.
He found a dusty denim-clad work crew running pulverized and high-graded ore into an open gondola car the same gauge as Widow Farnsworth’s little railroad. A lot more worthless spoil was being piled up, and up, between the stamping mill and a head rill of Mudpuppy Creek. If they didn’t want a little lead with their mud, it was tough shit as far as C.C.H. cared. Old T.S. Nabors would likely declare he shipped as much of it as possible to the smelters down in Golden.
Once he’d read Longarm’s identification papers and figured what he wanted, above the ear-splitting thunder of the steam-powered ore-crushing machinery, the straw boss led Longarm to a nearby office shed, where they could hear one another better behind the closed door.
The straw boss poured them a couple of snorts from a bottle filed under B for Bourbon and told the sad tale of French Sarah about the way Longarm had already heard it.
He was able to explain why the killer or killers had been forced to dump her body where it had been found in time after all. Sipping his own whiskey, the mining man said they’d been working short daylight shifts and added, “Nobody could have ever climbed the open stairs with a body if the mill had been manned and running.”
Longarm said he’d already figured that, and asked if a killer with a knack for mining machinery could have started the mill up, with or without permission, once he’d dropped the poor gal in the hopper up above.
The straw boss pursed his lips and decided, “It’d be possible but tough. We naturally leave a banked bed of coals under the boiler all the time. Takes hours to start a steam engine up from stone cold. But I doubt there’d have been enough steam up to run her and that ore she lays on through the mill. Not without poking and stoking the firebox and waiting for a good head of steam, leastways.”
Longarm tried to picture the scene. It was not a pretty picture no matter how you drew it. He said, “They might have been anxious to leave. They could have slipped both ways through that three-strand fence in the dark, whether the gate was guarded or not.”
The straw boss said, “Some other lawmen scouted for sign along that pesky fence. We never needed one when we were mining high-grade for real gents instead of rag-pickers. They found nothing to say how that dead gal came on the property, dead or alive.”
That notion painted a really ugly picture. Longarm reached in a pocket as he said, “We only know of one local gent she’d been seeing and he’d have been dead when she left the Farnsworth mansion to see someone else.”
He produced the boot heel and cigar band, asking, “Can you think of anyone with business on this site who smokes this brand of cigars or stomps around a mining operation in cowboy boots?”