“You never!” Billy Vail shouted, grinning like a mean kid in spite of himself. “How could you pass off a death mask as a real live gal, for Pete’s sake?”
Longarm shrugged. “Never had to, up close. Old Abner means well, but he ain’t no Madame Tussaud. He just greased the dead gal’s face as she grinned up from her slab, slathered her with plaster of Paris that sets in minutes, and meanwhile, Emma Gould and her own crew were mixing beeswax with face powder on a stove up front. The morgue attendants wouldn’t let Abner cut any of the cadaver’s real hair off. But once he’d pulled the cast and used it to make a mighty off-color but passible wax mask, old Emma and her maid, Willow, gussied up Frenching Ann with a head scarf sort of hiding where her own hair met the wax edges of her new face. Old Abner naturally had crutches and such on hand as well and, hell, what more do you need, a diagram on the blackboard?”
Vail chuckled but grumbled, “You’re going to need a field mission on the double, lest they serve you that summons before we can get you out of their reach!”
Longarm blinked and asked, “Whose reach? The deal I made with the Denver P.D. was that I’d never be called before any Denver judge. They won’t need my testimony. We tricked the killer into incriminating his fool self constitutionally, with neither the use of force or the threat of force.”
Vail snapped, “Don’t teach your granny to suck eggs or lecture this old lawman on the law! I ain’t worried about you being called to the witness stand by the prosecution. Any lawyer worth his salt would surely call you as a witness for the defense!”
Longarm smiled incredulously. “That’s silly, Billy! I was nowhere near that whorehouse when Cartier killed that whore, and all I heard either him or his cellmate say was that he done it!
Vail shook his bullet head and tried to sound like a high-toned lawyer. “The jury has heard all about your Halloween prank on the defendant, Deputy Long. Now suppose you explain just why you went to so much trouble seeing you had no jurisdiction. Or was it because of your, ah, relationship with Emma Gould, the well-endowed Negress Willow Jones, and Frenching Ann? Why do they call her Frenching Ann, Deputy Long? I mean, seeing you seem to know her well enough to tear through the wee small hours playing Halloween pranks with spooky masks?”
Longarm stared aghast. “Hold on! I never in my life had any such relationship as you’re suggesting with any of them ladies! I was asked to help by Sergeant Nolan of the Denver P.D. Him and me go back a ways, ever since the two of us foiled a burglary at the Tabor mansion up on Capitol Hill.”
Vail sweetly asked in that fancy voice, “Is that why I can produce my own witnesses to the simple fact that you were traipsing up and down Larimer Street with notorious women of the town a good hour or more before you went anywhere near my client in his gloomy prison cell?”
Longarm blew smoke out both nostrils, but didn’t paw the rug with a hoof as he quietly asked, “You said you had this field mission for me, Boss?”
Somewhat mollified, Vail nodded his bullet head and said, “They call him Wolf Ritter. His real name’s Wolfgang von Ritterhoff, and before he come across the main ocean and turned total outlaw, he was one of those Prussian Cavalry johns who rode for Bismarck in that Franco-Prussian War a few years back. As the Austrians, Danes, and French could tell us, no Cheyenne Crooked Lancer could hold a candle to a Prussian trooper coming at you with a saber in one hand, a horse pistol in the other, and the reins gripped in his evil grin. But now that things are a tad calmer in that new Germanic Empire Bismarck carved out a few short years ago, such ferocious fighting men have been ordered to wax their pimp mustaches, click their heels on entering or leaving the ballroom, and in sum behave like officers and gentlemen.”
Longarm nodded thoughtfully. “Some old boys who rode in the war we had earlier have yet to adjust to civilian ways. I take it this Wolf Ritter never took too well to heel-clicking and kissing the ladies on their dainty wrists?”
Vail said, “Ritter hung on to his horse pistol, a LeMatt he took off a dead French officer at Sedan. It was kissing a lady of the Pawnee persuasion all over, against her will, that led to his being listed as a federal want. When the screaming Pawnee maiden’s federal Indian agent tried to make Ritter stop, he wound up with nine rounds of .40-caliber and a modest load of buckshot in his guts. The Pawnee victim says the poor gunshot cuss died slow and got to watch as Ritter finished what he’d set out to do to her. Any questions?”
Longarm quietly asked, “Which way did he go?”
Vail said, “South, to the Smokey Hill range north of Dodge. I had you over yonder on another case a spell back, remember?”
Longarm nodded. “You damn near got me killed. But why in thunder would a total furriner choose that stretch of west Kansas to hide out in? I know you said he likes Indian gals. They’re doubtless a change from Austrian, Danish, or French gals. But the South Cheyenne and Arapaho who used to range the Smokey Hill swells are long gone, and the country’s been thrown open to stockmen and … Oh, I follow your drift!”
To which Vail replied, “I was hoping you might. What do you call them High Dutch-speaking Russians who’ve come west to grow tumbleweeds and that red Russian wheat?”
Longarm said, “Mennonites. They ain’t exactly Russian. Catherine the Great, being a High Dutch princess to begin with, invited some unpopular but mighty good farmers to migrate to Russia with her and see what they could do with her back steps. That’s what they call the prairies in Russia, steps.”
Vail said, “Never mind all that. Is it or ain’t it a fact that a mess of High Dutch Holy Rollers with beards and thick accents have infested the Smokey Hills of Kansas?”
Longarm nodded. “Mennonites ain’t Pentacostals “`inclineci to speak in tongues and thrash about on the floor during services. From what a nice little gal told me a spell back, the main reason they got persecuted in their old countries was that they don’t hold with baptizing their kids. That’s why some call ‘em Anabaptists. That ain’t accurate, though. Their founding prophet, a Hollander named Menno, said babies didn’t know whether they wanted to be Christians, Muslims, or hell, Hopi snake dancers when they grew up. So it was a lot more logical to let kids grow up and then baptize ‘em, after they agreed to be Mennonites. But Mennonites call themselves Brethren when nobody else is around.”
Vail rolled his eyes up and groaned, “Ask the kid what time it might be and he lectures you on how to build a grandfather clock! I know all about those High Dutch Holy Rollers getting chased off those back steps by some other Russian emperor’s cod-sacks, and how they didn’t want to go back to that Germanic Empire because Bismarck had started to draft everybody into his spikey-hatted army. I know most of them settled in the Dakota Territory to pray their own way and raise all that red Russian wheat to their heart’s content. The bunch that came down to Kansas to farm even tougher country are the ones Wolf Ritter seems to be hiding out with.”
Longarm asked, “How come? As I understand it, Mennonites don’t hold with violence, military or otherwise.”
Vail said, “None of the simps would know a renegade Prussian officer if they caught him in bed with their woman, and as I’m sure Ritter was the first to notice, all those sodbusting Holy Rollers favor full beards as well as High Dutch accents!”
He saw that hadn’t gotten through to Longarm and added, “Ritter went to that fancy military school where the students get to carve each other’s faces with sabers when they ain’t studying table manners. So he used to be mighty proud of his scarred-up left cheek. Such a distinctive feature on an otherwise average-looking face can be a bother when you’re riding the owlhoot trail with many a murder warrant out after you.”