The local widow took his sleeve to sit him down beside her as she said, “I can tell you. From time to time I have tea in the kitchen with Mammy Palaver. She gathers mighty fine herbs for some … female complaints, and you’re not the only one who enjoys gossip.”
He grinned sheepishly and replied, “When we do it it’s called investigation. Another nice lady I know once told me I had a swell job to go with my nosy nature and authoritarian disposition.”
Widow Farnsworth arched a brow to ask, “Oh? Just how nice to you was this younger girl who found you so dominant, Custis?”
He didn’t tell her about another widow, a tad older than her, down Denver way. They all seemed sure any other woman in a man’s life had to be younger and prettier.
He said, “We were talking about more important gals. You say you know who the late Constable Payne might have been messing with?”
The pretty young widow shrugged her bare damp shoulders inside her fluffy robe and replied, “There was no might about it, according to the darkies. Prunella Thalman, the druggist’s spoiled wife, carried on with others as well, with her servants serving them refreshments in bed!”
Longarm whistled and asked, “Are we talking about the druggist who runs that undertaking business in his cellar?”
She nodded. “Karl Thalman. He took care of my poor Frank after that sudden heart stroke two years ago. That’s why I was sure poor Sarah was in good hands.”
Longarm grimaced and said, “So was Amos Payne, when his lover gal’s husband got to embalm him the other night! I’d as soon not talk about all that prodding and poking even a friendly undertaker has to do, seeing we’re all going to go through such treatment some day if we’re lucky enough to get buried decent.”
She blushed a mite as she murmured she could imagine what a less friendly undertaker could do with that big suction pump to the lover of his wife.
When he asked if the colored help thought the boss man knew what was going on under his own roof while he was at work, Constance told him she didn’t know. So he said he meant to go find out.
She followed him out to the foyer where his hat still hung. As he reached for it she shyly touched his sleeve again and pleaded with him to come back and tell her as soon as he knew anything.
He smiled wistfully down at her, hat in hand, and said, “There’s no saying how late that might be, if I find out anything. Whether I do or don’t, I hope you understand I have to get it on back to Denver in the morning.”
She sighed. “You told me. That doesn’t give us much time, does it? I’ll be waiting here, Custis, for as long as it takes, or until that damned train leaves in the cruel sunlight of reason!”
So he took her in his arms and kissed her. It seemed the only way to say so long, and she bumped and ground hello as she kissed him back. But he still busted loose and headed back down the slope. For she’d been right in more ways than one when she’d said they didn’t have too much time.
The drugstore was closed and shuttered for the night when Longarm got there. But he saw light from the cellar window to one side. So he circled around for the cellar entrance. They’d told him Thalman had to get that dead gal packed right for her long lonesome journey home.
But when he hunkered down by that barred window, he saw Sarah DuVal was not the body old Karl Thalman was working on with his pants down. The nice coffin Constance Farnsworth had paid for was across the cellar on a pair of sawhorses. The body on the embalming table was alive as well as naked as a jay. She seemed to be a colored gal in her teens who could move like she’d been at it for years.
Longarm stood up, strode on to the cellar entrance and lit a smoke to give them time to settle down a mite. He’d finished his long cheroot and was thinking about some discreet knocking when he heard some laughing from below and stepped clear as the sloping cellar doors popped open and the druggist cum undertaker helped the colored gal up the steps with a grab at her ass that made her giggle some more.
Then they spotted Longarm and froze in place, as if embarrassed, even though they’d both put their duds back on.
Longarm nodded casually and said, “Evening, Mister Thalman. I was just now coming to see if you were through with that French Sarah.”
Thalman tried to look professional as he stiffly replied that he and his assistant, Emma Lou, had just finished.
Longarm knew that was true. He took a deep breath, let half of it out so his voice would sound neither too high or too low, and said, “That’s swell. Is there any way just the two of us could have a few words in private, Mister Thalman? What I wanted to talk to you about ain’t for any young lady’s delicate ears.”
Thalman gulped, told the pretty colored gal to run on home alone, and suggested the saloon catty-corner across the street out front.
As they headed across, the stars were winking on up above, and it was a good thing there was going to be a full moon rising any minute. For there were no street lamps and the light from the few places still open made for mighty tricky lighting. Thalman tried to hold out, but halfway across he stopped to blurt out, “Is it about Constable Payne and my Prunella?”
Longarm glanced around at the shifting inky shadows up and down the dusty street and quietly replied, “We’ll talk about it over in that saloon you suggested. I like to have my back to a wall when I ask delicate questions of any grown man.”
Chapter 17
As seemed usual in the once booming John Bull, business seemed as slow as hell in the dinky hole-in-the-wall establishment the druggist across the street had suggested. One old cuss with a drinker’s nose was holding up the bar with his belly as they entered. But as Longarm and the druggist took a table against the back wall, the oldtimer staggered past them through a beaded curtain, allowing he had to take a leak out back.
The barkeep came around one end of the fake mahogany to greet Karl Thalman as the regular he likely was. Longarm said they’d have the usual. As the barkeep went back to fetch whatever they were fixing to have, Karl Thalman stared soberly at Longarm and said, “They told you my Prunella fucks around. They told you true. Prunella would fuck a snake if somebody would hold its head down for her. I can’t tell you whether she’d been carrying on like that with either of those dead gunslicks. It wouldn’t have surprised me, though. Over the years I’ve caught her with total strangers from, say, fourteen to forty. She doesn’t like ‘em much younger or older than that. She says it takes a grown man’s dong moving with childish passion to satisfy her soul.”
Longarm said he’d read an article by some alienist in Vienna who said gals like that were driven by a desperate itch no mortal man could ever quite satisfy, so they had to keep trying.
Thalman nodded gravely and said, “Certain drugs help. That’s why despite all her wild ways she’s never really wanted to leave me.”
The barkeep came back with two shandies, half lemonade and half beer. Longarm thought that was a waste of either, but he’d said they’d have Thalman’s usual, so he had to be a sport.
As they found themselves speaking in private some more, Longarm asked Thalman, “You mean you don’t want her to leave you, despite what you say she is?”
The skinny middle-aged man sighed and replied, “Did I tell you she was built like a Greek statue, had a pussy as tight as a schoolboy’s ass, and never, ever gets tired of moving it just right? She only fools with other men because she just can’t ever get enough. On the other hand, any man married to a freak like my Prunella gets all he wants and then some, any time he wants it. She never invites any of her lovers to the house after I get off work.”
Longarm could see why Thalman liked lemonade in his beer. Talking about his wayward wife left a nasty taste even when it wasn’t your woman you were talking about that way.