He hugged her bare body closer to his own as he assured her nobody with a lick of sense had ever fought over the dubious charms of Miss Martha Jane Canary, known as Calamity ever since she’d been fired from a Dodge City house of ill repute for clapping up her customers.
Holding the Post in one hand and a swell tit in the other, Longarm elaborated. “I’ve met up with both Calamity and Jim Hickok in my travels over the years since I came out here from West-by-God Virginia. Old Calamity would have it known that James Butler Hickok screwed her every chance he got, and she’s invited me to screw her every time we’ve met up. But for the record, Jim Hickok was married and not clapped up when he got shot in the back in the Number Ten Saloon.”
The suspicious-natured but pretty gal in bed with Longarm sniffed and said something about there being fire wherever there was smoke.
Longarm shook his head and insisted, “Not when hopeless drunks are bragging in a saloon to greenhorn newspaper reporters. The last time I met Calamity Jane, she was drinking herself silly up in Deadwood. I heard her say how she’d wept and kissed old Wild Bill’s coffin before they could lower it into the cold, cold ground of the Black Hills. But there’s no solid evidence the two of them ever even met up whilst he was above the ground. Nobody who really drank with Jim Hickok ever called him Wild Bill the way Calamity Jane and Ned Buntline’s Wild West Magazine likes to.”
The Denver gal observed, “Calamity Jane has her own Wild West covers now, doesn’t she?”
Longarm chuckled fondly, and explained, “I told Ned Buntline I’d sue him if he ever did that to me. But according to him and Calamity Jane, she rode for the Pony Express and scouted for Custer before she found true love with Wild Bill, just before he was killed with both her and those aces and eights on his mind.”
He snuggled the young widow’s warm flesh closer and added, “Martha Jane Canary was born this side of the California Gold Rush, making her no older than ten or eleven during those few months Buffalo Bill Cody and some of those other blowhards really rode for the Pony Express. At the time Jim Hickok was killed in Deadwood, just passing through a brand-new boom town, Calamity would have been in her early twenties, and they do say she was married up a spell before she took to whoring and serious drinking.”
Since gals used meaner arithmetic on one another than menfolk, the young widow quickly tallied in her pretty head. “If she was in her early twenties when Wild Bill was shot back in ‘76,” she said, “she only would be in her later twenties this very night! Yet she looks so old and gruff on those magazine covers, Custis!”
Longarm kissed her ear and pointed out, “You younger-looking gals are more careful about your hair and grooming, wear more womanly outfits, and try to avoid drunken brawls with bullwhips. Old Calamity is inclined to boast about wonders and cucumbers that never happened, but she’s still led a hard life and it’s commencing to show. So suffice it to say, I never stole her away from old Jim Hickok. And look here. It says I beat Billy the Kid to the draw down New Mexico way!”
“Didn’t you?” she asked dryly.
He laughed and said, “Not hardly. Me and the Kid were still alive, the last I heard. There’s a heap of bull out about him too. But I have it on good authority that young Henry McCarthy, Bill Bonney, or whoever he might be never goes for his gun unless he really means it.”
She repressed a shiver, and said she followed his drift about it being sort of silly to imply two well-known gunslicks would slap leather at the same time and just stand there.
He said, “A heap of such yarns unravel as soon as you study on the way common sense says they’d have to pan out. Old-timers all over the West have started to cite witnesses to impossible events instead of adding and subtracting the possibles. Human beings can do all sorts of loco things. But they can’t get around time and geography. I know they’d rather have eyewitness testimony for a criminal trial. But speaking from experience, I’ll take circumstantial evidence every time. A rattled barkeep who witnesses a sudden flare-up ain’t half as reliable to me as the victim’s blood all over the killer’s boots.”
She said she followed his drift, and then said she wanted to get on top this time. So he let her, and it was swell, but were the truth to be known, making love to the sweetest gal over and over could become a chore by the fourth or fifth night. So even as she was going up and down like a painted pony on the brass pole of a merry-go-round, Longarm caught himself picturing Miss Morgana Floyd, or even better, that barmaid at the Black Cat who kept saying no, in the same position and state of undress. Even though he wryly recalled the time he’d been going at it dog-style with old Morgana while picturing this one’s broader hips in place of the pretty little orphan herder’s.
He decided, as long as he was screwing a daydream, he might as well imagine Miss Ellen Terry of the wicked stage, seeing that that was as close as he was ever going to get to the high-toned English actress who seemed so pretty in her photographs.
Hence, the next morning when he reported in at Marshal Billy Vail’s private home on Sherman Street instead of going to their office down at the Denver Federal Building, Longarm was more than ready to saddle up and ride most anywhere.
Back alleys and kitchen doors were made for gents who didn’t aim to be recognized out of their hospital bed in the bright morning sunlight. So Longarm caught up with his boss as the somewhat older and far shorter and stouter Billy Vail was having ham and eggs with real Arbuckle coffee.
Longarm had just had breakfast, in bed, so when Vail’s wife seated him at the kitchen table, with a veiled remark about scandalous young widow women, he said he’d just have some black coffee.
He knew Vail’s wife hadn’t heard anything about him over the backyard-fence telegraph, because he’d asked the widow gal to give her hired help a swell spring vacation. That meant Vail and his wife were in the habit of talking shop together. Longarm idly wondered, as he sipped her swell coffee, whether she and old Billy were in the habit of conversational screwing dog-style. It was comical to picture, but when you studied on it, nobody looked all that dignified or even rational from the point of view of your average Peeping Tom, and old Billy Vail still drank and smoked as vigorously as anyone else.
He ate good too. Vail washed down a heroic chaw of ham and eggs with coffee and told Longarm, “First the good news. I got the Attorney General in Washington Town to grade Miss Medusa Le Mat up to a nationwide federal manhunt with you carte-blanched to chase her as far and wide as she might run.”
Longarm asked what the bad news might be.
Vail said, “She seems to have chosen far and wide. She must have read the papers by this time. But she doesn’t seem to care to visit you in the hospital. By the way, did you know that stenographer gal they call Miss Bubbles brought you a potted plant all the gals in the steno pool chipped in for, or so Miss Bubbles says?”
Longarm avoided the stern gaze of Billy Vail’s wife as he felt a slight tingle and recalled the mingled scent of cheap perfume and the leather upholstery of that reception-room sofa.
Vail recalled him to the less romantic here and now by going on to say, “Whether she sensed a trap, or figured she don’t have to worry about you unless or until you get better, I want your educated guess on a more recent robbery down in the Big Thicket country of East Texas.”
Longarm forgot about Miss Bubbles on that leather sofa, and listened tight as Vail brought him up to date on what sure could have been the work of the mystery woman with such wicked ways. But the more such jobs she pulled, the more the details varied.