Ellen and Mavis MacUlric agreed they felt honored to be on his side. But Ellen was the one who wanted to screw him as soon as she had him alone over at the library after closing time.
He kissed her and fingered her some, but explained he really had wanted to study that directory before sundown. So she stamped a pretty foot and rustled it up for him, demanding, “What do you expect to find, you brute, a signed confession from the kidnapper?”
He sat at her desk, broke his notebook out of a vest pocket, and began to write down names as he quickly moved a fingernail down the many more names of registered voters and property owners listed by the county. He was able to eliminate most right off, of course.
When he said so, Ellen wanted him to take her downstairs and show her some appreciation.
Longarm sighed and said, “There’s nothing I’d rather do tonight in the way of good clean fun, honey. But a mighty dangerous killer is loose in these parts and I have to stop him lest he kill some more. Thanks to you I’ve narrowed my list of possibles down a heap, but not nearly enough.”
He waved his notebook. “When a township starts from the ground up, there’s a tendency for deeply religious folks to build or rent close to the church of their persuasion, whilst folks who ain’t so religious tend to send their kids to the nearest Sunday school of any church that ain’t too unsettling. So I mean to start with white Anglo-Saxon surnames within a spit and a holler of First Calvinist. You can see that leaves me many a door to knock on. I might save some time in the end if I commenced with the principal of your public school. Do you know who that might be?”
She did, but said Mr. Graves was visiting kin back East while his school was closed for the summer. Longarm scowled so blackly she asked, “What did you want to ask him, Custis?”
When he told her, she laughed and said, “Oh, that’s easy. I told you the school and this library were under the same school board here in Pawnee Junction. We naturally keep their old records down in our cellar, having ever so much more room. What did you want to look up? I don’t think that Mongoloid idiot ever attended our public school here in town.”
Longarm was already on his way with her desk lamp, saying, “I know for a fact poor Howard Burnside was never allowed anywhere but that nice gal’s Sunday school. This awkwardly long list includes all the gents with the first name Howard who live an easy walk from First Calvinist. Gents tend to name their oldest boy after themselves. I might narrow things down more if I listed just the possible Howards with poor school records or, better yet, expulsion records. A big dumb white boy looks like a big dumb white boy to colored kids who might be afraid of him.”
She followed him down the stairs, saying, “But I thought that little Timmy said he saw a bigger boy named Howard that awful day at the church and … Oh, good heavens, you’re so clever I could just eat you all up!”
He felt sort of clever himself by the time he’d pawed through a lot of old report cards to narrow his list down to a dozen. So he showed his appreciation for the helpful little gal dog-style on that nearby army cot before he left just at sundown.
There just wasn’t time to let her eat him all up, dad blast it.
Chapter 19
Longarm found young Howard Simmons sitting out front on the porch with his parents in the gloaming as things cooled off and the first wishing star winked on above.
He introduced himself to Howard Simmons Senior, and said he’d like a word alone with the big fourteen-year-old about some other kids who might have been up to some mischief.
The Simmons boy went willingly with Longarm out to the front gate. Longarm smiled down in the gathering dusk and said, “I reckon you know why I’ve come for you, Howard. I’d talked to Nero, Calvin, and that little colored gal you scared that time, just funning with her.”
The kid was either a mighty fine actor who’d flunked the fifth grade, or he meant it when he said, “I don’t know no Nero Calhoun and my folks don’t allow me to play with colored kids.”
Longarm said, “Timmy Sears says he saw you coming out of First Calvinist the day Miss Mildred got hurt. You want to tell me about that?”
The normal-looking but likely slow-witted youth brightened and replied, “Oh, you’re talking about that Sunday school teacher who got stabbed by the Chinee! I heard my elders talking about that. I don’t know why anybody says he saw me at her church. I go to Saint Paul’s Lutheran.”
Longarm led him back to the porch and told his parents the boy had been a great help to him. Then he got out of there before they could ask him how. He checked his list under a street lamp to forge on. But he had much the same luck three more times with other Howards, then at the home of a Howard Masterson who’d named his only son after old John Brown of Kansas.
Then he came to where the widowed Mrs. Howard Tendring lived all alone with her only child, Howard Tendring III. When the poor old widow woman came to her front door by candlelight, she turned out to be a right handsome brunette in her late thirties, with one hell of a set of legs under her, judging by the soft light shining through her thin pongee robe. She looked flustered and said that she hadn’t been expecting gentlemen callers. Longarm ticked the brim of his hat to her and said he was sorry to drop by on a lady after she’d let her hair down for the night, but that he was the law and that he had to talk to her boy, Howard.
She called back over her shoulder to the lad who’d been expelled from school for bullying the smaller kids and threatening his teacher. As they waited she said, “I hope he hasn’t done anything wrong again. I spoke to him sharply about teasing that little colored girl, and he promised me he’d never do it again.”
Longarm never let on her words were news to him. He calmly asked who’d come to her about that accusation. He wasn’t at all surprised when she told him Pronto Cross himself had warned her he’d have to run the boy in if he ever did anything like that again.
When Howard Tendring III loomed in the candlelight behind his far prettier mother, Longarm could see why smaller kids were tense around him. The weak-chinned lout with eyebrows that met in the middle stood over six feet tall on his bare feet and had fists as big as your average blacksmith. He was dressed in jeans and gray undershirt. So Longarm allowed a private chat on the front steps would do.
The sullen-looking kid stepped out, and his mother left their front door open but stepped away from it inside. So Longarm was free to ask the same trick questions. But when he started by saying he’d just come from seeing little Timmy Sears, the sudden flash of candle glow on steel was all that saved him!
Longarm sucked in his gut as he crawfished from a sweeping stab that would have done old Jim Bowie proud. As he felt the end rail of the porch with the cheeks of his ass, he saw the concealed weapon was almost as long and surely as sharp as your average Bowie knife. So he grabbed the big kid’s wrist at the end of the second swing and slapped openhanded, hard, with his free palm.
Howard Tendring III let go of the knife and started running, barefoot, into the night. He crashed through his mother’s picket fence and just kept running, with Longarm close behind.
Longarm had long legs and less worry about where he planted his pounding heels in the dark. But the barefoot boy out ahead was wild with sheer terror and as anxious to get away as Longarm was to catch him. So damned if the distance between them didn’t seem to grow wider as Longarm struggled to get the cuffs off the back of his gun rig on the fly and willed his fool legs to run faster.
Then a female voice cried out through the night, “I’ll hold him and you brand him, Custis!”
So that was about what they did. Fox Bancroft roped damned fine for a woman throwing sideways at a lope in such tricky light. Her loop snapped tight as she slid her pony to a calf-busting squat on its haunches, and Howard Tendring III was flat on his ass in the roadside weeds before he could free himself from her oiled and braided hemp.