Then she moved her skirts out of the way to give Longarm a clearer view of the two cadavers heaped by the wastebasket near the roll-top desk against one wall.
A youth of about nineteen lay face-down, with his jeans around his ankles, across the spread-eagle cadaver of a no-longer-young but nice-looking redhead with her nightgown up around her chest. She seemed to be grinning sheepishly, eyes half open, as if she felt a tad ashamed of being caught, but was proud of having such a handsome young lover.
Longarm asked if any pictures had been taken of the scene. Pat Brennan said the one photographer in town had just left. So Longarm hunkered down to gingerly roll the dead boy off the woman’s corpse as the lawlady stared soberly down at him and asked if they were supposed to do that.
Longarm said, “It’s a smart bet not to move anything before you’ve frozen things the way you found them in more than one photograph and some field notes, ma’am. After that, you can’t just let things lie endeffinately. Neither of these poor souls figures to smell like roses if you don’t let an undertaker at ‘em. In the meantime, let’s see if they have anything else to say for themselves.”
The two cadavers did. To her credit, if credit was the word Queen Victoria might have chosen, the handsome widow woman cum undersheriff did not look away as Longarm laid the dead boy flat on his back with his limp naked privates fully exposed for all the world to see.
Without hemming or hawing, the Widow Brennan said, “It’s hard to prove whether a man died with an erection in forbidden nooks and crannies or not. The husband—his name’s Fred Mannix—says he didn’t look to see whether they were actually going at it or not when he came home early to catch them by surprise. He’s slick enough to claim it was a sort of blur as she yelled at him to get out and let them finish.”
“So he’d drawn and fired before he’d thought much about it,” Longarm said wearily. “It seems to me I’ve heard this sad story a time or two before. The trouble with it is that you only have to sell it to one juror, and a lot of old boys have pictured themselves in that situation, whether it’s ever happened to them or not.”
The woman who’d been married to a man with a chronic illness gave a hint as to what it might have been like as she sighed and said, “I know. A woman doesn’t have to fool around behind a man’s back when and if he gets to worrying about her doing it. You hear gossip in a town this size. Poor Milly there came to church more than once with black eyes, and if anyone was fooling around it was him, with more than one of our few soiled doves along B Street. But he’s going to get away with it if he sticks to the story I’m sure he made up in advance.”
Longarm hunkered down to arrange the dead woman’s nightgown more modestly as he dryly remarked, “He expects us to believe a woman wears a nightgown until less than an hour before supper time?”
Pat shrugged and said, “My deputy remarked on that. Mannix says she was wearing her housedress when he came home from his notions shop to eat his noon dinner. He suggested she changed into something more, ah, intimate before young Larry there came calling.”
“Would you take off your duds and put on a flannel nightgown if you were planning daylight adultery, Miss Pat, no offense?”
The slightly older woman laughed like a man might have and said, “If I wore anything to greet a lover in, I can promise you it wouldn’t be flannel! But you don’t have to convince me, Custis. I can picture what happened. Mannix just lured young Larry here on some pretext, marched him in here where his wife already lay dead, and then forced Larry to drop his pants before he shot him. All we have to do is prove it. It’s the word of a respected merchant against two dead bodies found in compromising positions. How is the district attorney to prove otherwise to twelve strangers in the county seat who never heard what a louse Fred Mannix was to his long-suffering wife? It’s tough enough to get around that so-called unwritten law when you have witnesses, and we don’t have one witness against the son of a bitch!”
Longarm took the dead wife by one wrist and tried to roll her over.
When the live woman on the scene objected, Longarm said, “I only needed to see the back of that one bare shoulder, ma’am. You got more than one witness here. Miss Milly and young Larry stand ready to make a barefaced liar out of the man who premeditated their murder in cold blood, if you’d like to call him and a witnessing deputy in here now.”
She did quickly. Fred Mannix looked away from the bodies at their feet as he protested he was tired of repeating the same simple story over and over again. He said, “I was an old fool with a young wife and I reckon she felt neglected. I’ve admitted something came over me when I found them making love, and how many times do you want me to allow I shot them both?”
Longarm said, “I’ll run over it once more for you and you just say whether I’ve got things right.”
He tersely summed up the sad short story, and got Mannix to agree that was about the size of it before Longarm shook his head and told the murderous man of the house, “You’re lying and your victims here can prove it. Young Larry lies limp and barely less warm than he was when you shot him less than two hours ago. But the lady you say you caught him making love to is stiff as a plank and cold as them floorboards she’s been laying on all day. They call that rigor mortis. It sets in three to six hours after death, and it takes longer to get as stiff as she was when you caught her with another man. Takes time for the parts of a cadaver pressed to the floor to go purple with lividity, and she ain’t grinning that way because she found it amusing to be shot around sunrise in her nightgown. You forgot the bullet holes in her nightgown when you pulled it up like so, by the way. Then you went over to your notions shop, bold as brass, to lure Larry home with you hours later on some fool’s errand. Did you make him drop his jeans before you shot him, or did you do it for him once you had?”
Fred Mannix looked like he was fixing to puke, but he tried to run instead. So the town deputy between him and the door pistol-whipped him flat, and called him some awful names before Pat made him stop.
Once he had, the undersheriff said, “Run him over to the office and hold him on premeditated murder. I’ll be along in just a little while.”
She was smiling radiantly up at Longarm as she added, “Unless I get lucky this evening.”
Chapter 8
In the end they both got lucky. It might have taken far longer if Longarm hadn’t been trying to work in secret for as long as possible and they hadn’t agreed a saddle tramp who drank with roughnecks made no sense escorting a lady undersheriff to her own home or office.
It took until the sun was setting before the undertaker had taken the bodies away and Pat had deputized a responsible land agent to take charge of the property. Then she and Longarm were free to sneak over to his hotel in the tricky light of gloaming, and slip up the back way to his hired room with some ice. He already had canteen water and a bottle of Maryland rye on hand up yonder.
By this time they’d been jawing about themselves long enough for Longarm to assume her last years of a hitherto happy marriage had been a bit trying. She never low-rated her late husband, but there was no known treatment for sugar diabetes, and Longarm had heard that a lot of men slowly dying from the always fatal ague had trouble getting it up, if they were still up to trying. Pat only said they’d had to amputate a leg before the poor cuss had given up the ghost and left his badge to her. She said she still missed him, or the man he’d once been, but she added, after sipping some rye and canteen water, that she and her man had both been wondering what was keeping Mr. Death so long.
They were sipping in the dark, seated on his hired bedstead, because there was no other furniture and the late spring evening breeze felt fresher with the window blinds open.