He pointed at the girl still cuffed to the fire engine across the way as he continued. "Pending further evidence to the contrary, gents, I suggest you let Miss Lopez go, with one handsome apology, before she takes it in her head to sue the city, county, and entire state for calling her a suspicious greaser."
The fire marshal protested, "She is a suspicious greaser, and the only suspect we have for setting this mighty suspicious fire!"
Longarm insisted, "I can promise you it wasn't a poor but honest hired gal, without even checking her simple alibi. Rosalinda Lopez may have her faults, but she wasn't wanted by the law until just a few minutes ago. So why would she want to murder a wanted outlaw and set fire to the place she lived and worked in as a cover for no crime at all? Brick Flanders was wanted seriously, dead or alive, by four states and the Pinkertons. The federal government wanted a few words with him about a post office robbery as well."
Nolan nodded thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. No matter what she did to him or how she phrased it, she'd have had no sensible reason for refusing to accept the hearty congratulations and handsome bounty money that would have gone with his demise in any way, shape, or form!"
The fire marshal tried, "Maybe she ain't all that sensible, and a firebug in the hand is worth two in the bush! This mysterious glass-eyed cuss wasn't the only one done to a turn in them flames after a mighty determined arsonist poured something like Greek Fire around inside, padlocked the doors on the outside, and... Let me see. I reckon a lit candle, burning down to some tinder in a corner, would have given her time to traipse all the way over to that Mex dance before anyone noticed, don't you?"
Longarm shook his head and said, "Nope. If they back her about the time she'd have arrived and the time the party busted up after three A.M., your notion just gets too risky. Without jumping to half as many conclusions, I'm betting on the coroner's team telling us this one cadaver was good and dead before the fire started. But the other victims appear to have been awakened by the flames, not too drunk, drugged, or even sleepy to have piled up on the wrong side of that padlocked door. I'd only be guessing about how much money old Brick here had left from that payroll robbery up near Fort Collins. But they rode off with heaps of hundred-dollar treasury notes, and last I heard, only a few of 'em had been cashed."
The fire marshal pointed wearily at the still-glowing embers of the Dugan house. "You can kiss any paper money anyone had in there good-bye then."
Longarm frowned. "I hadn't finished. I vote we turn a mighty upset as well as innocent gal loose. What do you gents need, a diagram on the blackboard? A wanted outlaw, last seen packing a tidy fortune in handy treasury notes, is killed by a person or any number of persons unknown, who then help themselves to his money and set fire to his rooming house to confound us, as they have, on the way off to parts unknown."
Nolan stared soberly at what remained of the front doorjamb, a few yards away, as he made the sign of the cross and marveled out loud, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what sort of a nasty devil would burn other innocent souls alive just to make sure this one body here might pass as another victim?"
To which Longarm could only reply, "I'd say you described such a killer or killers about right, Sarge."
CHAPTER 2
Any lawman worth his salt knew something about tracking down outlaws through dusty file cabinets and desk clutter. But Longarm felt he read sign better in the field, and nobody ordered him to delve deeper into the mysterious fire, once the local law had declared it a serious violation of the Denver Municipal Code and the county coroner had confirmed that the glass-eyed cuss had a.36-caliber bullet in his well-baked brain. For everyone agreed with Longarm's notion that some false-hearted pal had killed an outlaw on the dodge for his money and lit out after that clumsy but downright vicious attempt to cover up.
The same logic Longarm had used to clear Rosalinda Lopez seemed to indicate the killer or killers of an outlaw wanted dead or alive had to be a wanted outlaw or wanted outlaws as well. Grim autopsies of the other bodies hauled from the burnt-out rooming house established the old widow woman, along with a neighborhood loafer she either slept with now and again or hired on and off, had died in the fire with four roomers Rosalinda could name, whether they'd been using their real names or not. One of them, old Brick Flanders, had told everyone to call him Calvert Tyger, which had been not only a mite dramatic, but the name of another owlhoot rider entirely last heard of during his funeral oration down Durango way. The other three roomers with any call to have been upstairs in the wee small hours when the fire was set had all died with Widow Dugan and her lover cum hired hand. Meaning the one hired gal who'd survived had never seen the killer or killers. A good two dozen witnesses, some of them Anglo and none known to be murderous arsonists, verified where the Mexican gal had been both before and after anyone could have set fire to the place she worked and lived in. Longarm had felt it only right to put the homeless gal up until she found herself another place to stay and, as it turned out, another job, which she did in twelve hours or so. Young gals who seemed willing to work that hard for little more than their room and board were sort of tough to come by since the Great Depression of the '70s had commenced to fade from recent memory.
So Longarm was working on another chore entirely a few mornings later, and hardly remembering Rosalinda Lopez, when he found his way across Colfax Avenue suddenly blocked by a one-horse shay pulling out of the morning traffic to stop with one wheel rim threatening his balls if he stepped off the granite curb. He took a step back, and would have said something mighty impolite if he hadn't noticed, just in time, who'd been driving that fool shay.
The young widow of a rich old mining magnate could have shown up in a coach and four with a posse of flunkies. But Longarm had noticed she seemed a tad shy about being seen with him by broad day on the public streets of Denver. A week ago she'd allowed she'd as soon never see him anywhere at all, and this morning he saw she'd draped a heavier veil than usual from the brim of her black velvet hat. So he just ticked his own hat brim to her and waited to see if she meant to pull a gun on him or just drive on.
She did neither. She sighed and said, "Come closer, you silly. I don't want to shout at you in the middle of town at this hour!"
Longarm moved closer and rested one booted foot between the rungs of the curbside wheel as he mildly inquired what she wanted to say to him discreetly.
The widow woman with the light brown hair smiled timidly through her veil, "I'm not going to say I'm sorry. It's your very own fault you have such a dreadful reputation, and I still think I was right about you and that Chinese waitress that time. But, well, I guess I bought some malicious gossip about you and that librarian they said you'd walked home after closing hours."
Longarm shrugged and said, "I did walk the lady home, Her quarters weren't all that far from the library, but it was getting dark and she allowed she was new in Denver. Did your back-fence biddies tell you I walked her home more than once?"
The widow woman nodded soberly and replied, "That's not all they told me you and that henna-rinsed hussy had been up to. And you heard me tell you never to darken my door again."
Longarm shrugged and asked, not unkindly, whether anyone had seen him lurking about her brownstone mansion up on Capitol Hill.
She replied with a strangled sob, "No, and it's starting to hurt around bedtime! So all right, I was wrong about where you spent last Thursday night. My biddies, as you so rightly called them just now, told me you'd been seen taking that librarian home after work, and not coming out of her place again until at least as long as a certain gathering down that same block lasted."