As soon as he figured it wouldn’t be rude, Longarm took leave of his fellow boarders, went back up to get his hat, and got back to work in his shirtsleeves by one in the afternoon.
He found his way to the county coroner’s frame house in a nicer part of town, and got there just as the neighborly Doc Forbes, a portly gray figure, was helping his own old woman clear their dinner table.
Forbes allowed he’d heard Longarm was in town and that he’d been expecting him. Forbes said, “I haven’t more than had them stripped and hosed down as yet. I sent for a young B.I.A. practical nurse at the Pawnee Agency. She may be lacking a degree, but I’ve read her paper the New England Journal of Medicine saw fit to publish and I fear she may know more than me about the condition the Burnside boy was suffering from. Nurse Nancy Calder sent in a mighty detailed study of those feeble-minded Pawnee kids she’s been trying to help. It’s not good medical practice to lump all such unfortunates together, and Nurse Calder didn’t. Two out of the five Indian kids she studied read as if they could be long-lost kin to the pure-white Bubblehead Burnside. His real name was Howard, but Bubblehead fit so much better.”
As Doc Forbes led him inside, Longarm idly asked what difference it made once a feeble-minded unfortunate had acted really dumb and been murdered by a mob.
Forbes said, “Easier to show you than to argue about it. Come on, I have them both set up for autopsy down below.”
Longarm followed the older man along the shady corridor and down a gloomy flight of stairs to a musty but cooler cellar. Doc Forbes lit a candle at the foot of the steps and pointed at a heavy wooden door down at one end. Longarm followed him to an even lower, cooler, and worse-smelling root cellar. Forbes raised the candle to light an oil lamp hanging just above their heads between two ominous-looking sheet-draped forms reclining at waist height.
Shaking out the match and tossing it to the dirt floor, Doc Forbes removed the sheet from the longer cadaver as he declared, “This would be the remains of your train-robbing David Lowman, a Union veteran who should have quit while he was ahead. I make it fourteen old wounds all told. That bullet scar on his right thigh being no more than three years old.”
Longarm stared soberly down at the cadaver grinning up at him so cheerfully and replied, “That’s Dancing Dave, all right. He got shot in the leg by a Pinkerton man three years ago, like you said. But there’s nothing on his yellow sheets about his war record.”
Doc Forbes pointed casually at an ugly triangular scar near the hip of that same shot-up leg, waiting for Longarm to say something.
Longarm nodded and said, “Sure. That’s an old bayonet wound. Some units on both sides were issued those same trifoil French bayonets. Nasty sons of bitches to get stuck with, but neither Union nor Confederate in particular.”
Forbes nodded, then pointed at the dead man’s bare left shoulder.
Longarm brightened and said, “I should have looked for that right off. I caught an old Texas rider in a lie one time when he let me see the Union Army vaccination mark he shouldn’t have received had he really ridden with Hood’s Texas Brigade.”
Doc Forbes nodded and volunteered, “No pinpoints of blood in the whites of his eyes. So he died instantly when he hit the end of the rope. You can see without cutting into him how the snap completely separated his neck vertebrae. We’ll open him later to make sure he wasn’t fed prussic acid. But he’s not the mystery.”
Forbes whipped another sheet from the remains of Bubblehead Burnside and said, “Here lies the mystery.”
Longarm stared down at the shorter, stockier body with more distaste than interest. It was easy to see why they’d called the dead youth Bubblehead. He’d been an unfortunate type Longarm had seen more than once in the past. Still gripped in rigor mortis, the moon-faced and squint-eyed kid of fair complexion was grinning wider than he’d likely grinned in life. It was hard to believe even a village idiot could go about looking that idiotic for long.
Doc Forbes said, “Never mind his face. What do you have to say about the rest of him?”
Longarm swept his gaze down the naked nearly hairless cadaver to note the short chunky arms and sort of bearlike torso. Then he saw the dead boy’s privates had been nothing to brag about either. They said it was cruel to speak ill of the dead, but fair was fair and so Longarm had to opine, “I’ve seen twelve-year-old boys hung better. No pubic hair at all around that little bitty pud, and you say he raped that church lady before he stuck a knife in her?”
Doc Forbes said, “No. She did, with her last dying breath. She might have been confused. I naturally examined her body for the county before we released it to her family for the funeral. It’s not as easy to determine virginity as some think, but if this poor defective did get inside her with the little he had to offer, he failed to ejaculate. That’s easy to determine.”
Longarm wrinkled his nose as he stared down at the childlike sex organs of the dead half-wit. He said, “Well, sometimes there’s more than first meets the eye when a man rises fully to the occasion. So let’s say he got it in, or tried to get it in, enough to really upset your average Sunday school teacher. Then suppose she laughed at him, or he thought she was laughing at him, when he just wasn’t the man to rape her right.”
Doc Forbes shrugged and said, “As a country doctor I can tell you many a man with all his wits about him can get mighty upset when his old organ-grinder fails him at the last minute. So who’s to say what sort of a rage an idiot such as this might fly into when he couldn’t get his warped flesh to obey his perverse lust?”
“I can tell you,” declared a firm feminine voice from the darkness near the doorway as both surprised men swung their gaze her way.
Nurse Nancy Calder stepped into the circle of light dressed more for riding than for tending sick Indians. Her brown hair was bound up under a straw boater and her tan poplin riding habit was stained with sweat, dust, or both, depending on which part of her junoesque curves one admired. Longarm felt awkward about the two naked dead men in her presence, but from the way both Doc Forbes and his visitor acted, they both seemed to take such sights in stride.
After a dismissive glance at the dead outlaw, Nurse Calder looked more thoughtfully at the remains of Bubblehead Burnside, nodded as if she knew, and flatly stated, “Mongolism. An almost classic example. It’s harder to be certain with Indians because some of them can have the backs of their heads flattened by cradle boards without really suffering the condition. You never see a fair-featured white child with those eyes and that skull shape without the other features of the syndrome, though.”
Moving around to the far side of the dead half-wit, she took one stiff wrist in hand and raised the plump palm to the lamplight as she pontificated, “Look at these abnormal palm lines and the way the last finger curves inward. There’s a one-in-four chance he suffered a heart defect as well. But I see somebody broke his poor neck for him before he could die young as most of them do!”
“He was lynched, ma’am,” Longarm told her, asking, “You say folks like him are Mongolians?”
Nurse Calder shook her straw boater firmly and replied, “No. They look that way no matter what their ancestry might be. Children with this birth defect are born to women of all races in about the same numbers. A rough average of one out of five hundred deliveries. The statistics were compiled and the symptoms were first described in a scientific manner back in ‘66 by a Dr. Langdon Down. He described them as Mongoloid because of superficial racial resemblance. He showed how cruel the snide remarks about family trees and the sad Mongoloid idiots themselves proved to be. The few cases I’ve been privileged to examine all seemed to bear out Dr. Down’s assertion that, in the main, Mongoloid idiots tend to have placid, friendly dispositions. Most are fond of music and simple games. They seldom if ever commit any crimes, few of them seem to know how to lie, and they almost never lose their tempers, even when others tease them.”