Longarm smiled awkwardly and replied, “I told you I’d come back and tell you all about Miss Medusa Le Mat if she didn’t shoot me no more.”
Some other faces were peering out into the hall at them by this time. So the widow woman who owned the blamed parlor had to lead him inside and introduce him to the eight other ladies she’d invited to high tea, for Gawd’s sake.
Longarm was introduced to the ladies as the famous lawman they’d surely read about in the Rocky Mountain News. Nobody there made any comments about anything else they’d heard about Longarm. Their hostess served a swell high tea, and knew where many a social body was buried.
They sat Longarm on a chaise between two perfumed society ladies to feed him Napoleon pastries with his tea so he could tell them all about the murderous Medusa Le Mat.
He told them, “Once upon a time there were two trashy kids, orphaned too old to be sent to an asylum. But not old enough to be on their own. So they were sent to live with kin out West. They found themselves on a hardscrabble homestead, treated more like servants than kin, or so the surviving sister says.”
He sipped more tea and quietly went on. “The older of the two used a Le Mat Duplex revolver their uncle had carried in the war to wipe out the whole bunch of them.”
As they all stared owl-eyed, their hostess nodded knowingly and said, “That older sister would have been the one you knew as a Miss Medusa Le Mat, right?”
He said, “Wrong. He was the older brother, Phil Armstrong. But he was still too young to shave and never did grow very manly. He and his kid sister had already been rounded up as young strays. So after they disposed of their aunt, uncle, and feebleminded cousin out back, young Phil put on his aunt’s Mother Hubbard dress and sunbonnet to tell anyone who came by that he was Rose Cassidy, the mother of dim-witted Maureen, who was really his sister, Jane.”
The widow woman pouring the tea said, “Just a minute. You told us those dreadful children were named Armstrong and … Oh, I see. Their own Aunt Rose had married a man named Cassidy, right?”
Longarm nodded, and said, “Their Irish uncle by marriage was this Catholic who’d started out riding for the South and wound up one of General Pope’s Galvanized Yankees, sent west to fight Indians to get out of Union war prisons. That gave him the right to file a homestead claim in Nebraska. It didn’t make him too popular with his true-blue Protestant neighbors. So nobody pestered his Catholic widow and half-witted daughter for details about his dying, running off with another woman, or whatever. When anyone did come by, Phil pretended to be a bitter, reclusive widow protective of her innocent and vulnerable daughter. Jane found it easier to lie without getting caught when she acted like her murdered cousin.”
A fat lady across from him gasped, “Oh, what horrid children! But what about, ah, other children to play with? I mean, as they … grew more mature …”
Longarm shrugged and said, “I just assured Jane Armstrong incest was not a federal crime. So we never went into that much. She seemed surprised we considered murder more serious too.”
Their hostess asked what came next. So Longarm said, “They had a fine time sleeping late and eating all the jam and bread, for as long as it lasted. But as the kid sister confessed, neither cottoned much to honest chores, and you have to work long and hard to wrest a living from the Nebraska Sand Hills. So they took to crime. As mother and daughter, that was easier to get away with than drifters in their teens might have found it.”
He sipped more tea and continued. “Miss Jane says they tried to razzle-dazzle the law by buying and selling modest properties along the way so they’d have a nearby legal address and apparent means. The sister would keep the home going as her feebleminded cousin. The brother would scout about as either Rose Cassidy or some honest young cowboy looking for her, should anyone ask. Once he had a bank lined up he’d recruit some local trash, they’d hit, run to another hideout Phil had lined up in advance, and then he’d double-cross his tools, run home to a nearby legal address, and hide out in plain sight. So it was lucky for me they hung on to some of their property along the way in case they ever wanted to lie really low.”
One of the ladies opined that they sounded mighty sneaky.
Longarm said, “It gets worse. The sister just told me young Phil was fixing to retire Rose Cassidy by having her murdered by a person or persons unknown. He knew I’d survived after seeing him as Rose, and he was having to shave his face all the time in any case. So he got a soiled dove called … Miss Barbara to dye her hair so he could kill her instead of his own mean self. Then he rode sidesaddle in a dress past some witnesses, then astride in jeans for others. His kid sister identified the body as that of her poor mother. I bought that for a time because I’d never seen Barbara Allan alive and only had to see she wasn’t the Little Bo Peep who’d shot me up Wyoming way.”
Longarm modestly confessed, “I spoiled it all by getting into a gunfight with Phil and his pal Buster when they thought I was on to them. I wasn’t. I never suspected the apparent half-wit of trying to drygulch me either, before I caught her praying as a Scotch-Irish Armstrong instead of a Black Irish Cassidy. Like I told her, once you catch a suspect in one fib, you start to catch them in others. But seeing her brother and boyfriend paid Dame Justice off with their lives, we can overlook some of her lesser sins in exchange for a full deposition.”
The other ladies seemed to feel Longarm was mighty compassionate as well as smart. It took their gracious hostess another round of tea-pouring before she managed to get him aside and suggest that she would manage to get rid of her guests and give her help the night off, if he could manage to be faithful to her until after dark.
He assured her he’d try, and he managed. But he sure found it odd, a few hours later, to be picturing that Miss Wojensky from Minnipeta Junction in this very same position he was enjoying so much in Denver.