The pallid gal on crutches stopped a few yards off in the gloom, as if to gather strength for a final charge, as meanwhile Longarm jeered, “I’m sure both the judge and the jury will buy a gal you can screw for a dollar diving headfirst out a second-story window as an added thrill. What did she do to get you so riled, laugh at the size of your dick?”
Carbonate Ned Cartier drew himself grandly erect to protest, “Ain’t nothing wrong with this child’s dick! Ask Baltimore Barbara yonder if it wasn’t herself who said I was hung too heroic for her to take me Greek style!”
Nolan quietly asked, “Is that why you got sore at her?”
Cartier shrugged and sheepishly replied, “Wouldn’t you? I’d paid the house three dollars for three ways and she’d only taken me two. When I told her it was hardly fair to charge a man for three ways, then only take him two, she laughed and said there was nothing in any contract calling for either party to accomplish the impossible.”
Longarm noticed the older man in the corner seemed to be trying to get back up while drooling blood. He saw Nolan had noticed the same and finished unlocking the cell door. So all Longarm said was, “Let’s see if we can get this straight. Was it her refusal to do it or her laughing about it that inspired you to toss her out the window?”
Cartier was too smart to answer. But the battered Telluride Tommy blubbered from his far corner, “He said it was the names she called him from the Good Book!”
Cartier snapped, “Shut up, you stupid old fart!”
But the erstwhile pal he’d injured snapped back, “I’ll show you who’s stupid! She was citing Genesis Nineteen, in which the Lord God rains down fire and brimstone on the men of Sodom for trying to corn-hole some angels he’d sent to visit with Abraham and his nephew Lot. Don’t you remember telling me the only thing that riled you more than a cheating whore was a bible-thumping whore, Ned?”
Cartier told him to do a dreadful thing to his poor old mother. Longarm asked Nolan, “You reckon that’ll do it?”
The burly sergeant called back, “Have you got it all on paper for the D.A., Wojensky?”
The police stenographer waved his shorthand pad under a nearby wall lamp and cheerfully called back, “Every word, Sarge.”
So Nolan turned back to the men inside the bars. We won’t bother you gents any more for now, unless either one of you has more to say.”
Telluride Tommy shouted, “Let me out of here and get me away from this mad dog and I’ll have plenty to say! I was only trying to back a pal to begin with, and you just saw how he treats everybody he can git at, the crazy-mean son of a bitch!”
So Nolan hauled him out into the corridor before Cartier could hit him again, then slammed and locked the door again and suggested the remaining prisoner try to get some rest, seeing he’d be facing a long day come sunrise. As Nolan and Longarm walked the bloody but unbowed older man back to the others, Telluride Tommy nodded to the wan-looking figure on crutches and said softly, “You know I had nothing to do with hurting you, and I’m glad you didn’t die after all, Miss Barbara.”
Then he took a second look, stepped closer, and exclaimed, “What in blue blazes?”
So Longarm told him, not unkindly, “That bad-tempered pal you just parted company with was right to begin with. It was all a trick.”
Chapter 3
Everyone needed at least a little sleep. So it was a tad late the next morning when Longarm strode innocently into the office of Marshal William Vail of the Denver District court and was told with a knowing smile by young Henry, the squirt who played the typewriter out front, that this time he was really going to get it.
Longarm shrugged, lit his own cheroot in self-defense, and went on back to the oak-paneled inner office of their boss, the stubby and crusty old Billy Vail. Longarm had skimmed the morning edition of the Denver Post while having ham, eggs, and chili con carne with black coffee and mince pie for breakfast. His occasional drinking companion and occasional nemesis, Reporter Crawford, hadn’t made up any lies about him this time, and whorehouse killings were only reported, if at all, on page three. So what the hell.
As he entered the marshal’s private chambers with his own smoke gripped at a jaunty angle between his grinning teeth, Longarm saw at a glance that the older lawman seated behind a cluttered desk had him beat by miles as a human volcano. The blue haze Longarm had to wade through to the leather guest chair on his side of the desk didn’t hurt his eyes half as much as the smell afflicted his nose. He knew for a fact that his boss paid more for those gnarly black cigars, and old Billy didn’t seem to think it was funny when you asked if he was smoking mummified bats or simply bat shit.
Taking a seat and blowing a bubble of sweeter smoke by far, Longarm nodded at the banjo clock on an oak-paneled wall, allowed he was sorry about arriving later than usual, and asked how soon he could go to lunch.
Vail scowled through the haze and growled, “Had you come to work any later, you’d be fixing to leave for supper! But save me the excuses. I get the morning papers delivered to my very door up on Sherman. Have you ever read about that other total asshole called Don Quixote? He went in for saving the virtue of whores too, now that I study on it!”
Longarm flicked some tobacco ash on the rug, having heard that was hard on carpet mites and seeing no ashtray on his side of the desk, and soberly replied, “Miss Baltimore Barbara wasn’t robbed of her virtue last night, Billy. She was robbed of her life, and speaking of book learning, have you ever read about that other total asshole, the Marquis de Sade? They had to lock him up to keep him from abusing gals like Baltimore Barbara, and that crazy bastard never really killed anybody!”
Vail grimaced, blew an octopus cloud of pungent smoke, and observed, “Carbonate Ned Cartier is not a prissy and long-dead Frenchman. He is a registered voter who votes the right way in Colorado, belongs to the mine owners’ association of the same, and smelts forty ounces of silver from every ton of ore he drills, blasts, and mucks up Leadville way.”
Longarm grimaced right back and replied, “Magnates such as Cartier don’t drill, blast, or muck shit. The little folks do it for them, and they get to treating little folks like shit too. He killed that poor working gal, Billy. Threw her out a window like you’d throw an empty bottle or used condom if you were a real slob!”
Vail shrugged and said, “You got him to admit it, and the D.A. is so pleased with you he’d doubtless bend over and spread his cheeks. So how did you manage that, old son? I know the papers say you confronted Cartier and his fibbing pal with the banged-up Baltimore Barbara, but that ain’t possible. I asked. They tell me at the county coroner’s she died of a busted neck and hasn’t moved from that slab in the morgue since!”
Longarm nodded, blew a playful smoke ring, and asked, “You remember that flea circus and museum of natural wonders on Larimer Street, Boss?”
Vail frowned and said, “I do. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Those fleas ain’t trained. They’re just stuck with glue to bitty toys and they pull them around as they try to get away.”
He scowled harder as he continued. “As for the natural wonders in the back, they ain’t half as natural as the fleas! I know for a fact they got this old drunk who was fired from a more famous wax museum back East. When he ain’t under the table, he whips up all those two-headed critters, mermaid mummies, and such out of beeswax and that mashy paper they use for parade floats and such.”
Longarm nodded. “I know old Abner better. One night I saved his hide from some meaner drunks when he was in no shape to fight a mean six-year-old. So he said he owed me, if ever I needed a mermaid or a two-headed crocodile. I didn’t have any use for either. But last night I recalled how you get two heads that look as if they grew out of the same critter. You make a plaster cast of the one real head, and just mix up some beeswax, tinted the same color.”