But Covina asked, "Can't it wait, darling? I don't know what's gotten into me tonight but I'm still throbbing like a tabby cat in heat and... Would you mind if I sucked you hard again and got on top this time?"
He lay back, legs ajar with the cheroot gripped in his grinning teeth as he told her, "Suit yourself, old pal. But whilst you're at it, here's my plan."
CHAPTER 18
Covina crept back to her own room in the wee small hours lest the hotel help give the show away. Longarm slept later than usual for some reason but finally decided there was no fun lying slugabed when there was no office to report in late to.
So Longarm was having eggs over hash for breakfast in the taproom downstairs when Pony Bodie caught up with him, packing a sheaf of sealed telegrams and a handwritten list on brown paper.
Longarm invited the youth to set and coffee up as he shoved the wires in a hip pocket for later and spread the list on the table beside his own mug.
Pony Bodie said, "I ought to charge you and Western Union overtime. I had to hang around last night until old Herb dozed off in his chair before I snuck into the shithouse with a file drawer. Figuring out what I was doing was a bitch, too. But as I pawed through the delivery slips with your own list in hand, I commenced to see what you meant."
Longarm said they called it a "pattern" in his line of work as he sipped coffee and perused the childish scrawls.
He saw a pattern right off. Pony Bodie had only listed the names of locals getting wires from certain places on certain dates. So most of the names, including Big Jim Tanner, had no more than one or two listings under them. But Preacher Shearer, or at least his manse, had nine that fit like gloves and one left over.
Longarm cocked a brow and observed, "I see you delivered a wire from Pueblo, Colorado, just yesterday."
As the breed waitress put his coffee down in front of him, Pony Bodie said, "Sure I did. You asked me to make up that list long after. I don't know who sent it or what it said because they give me the telegrams sealed. I run it up to the manse early in the day. Way before somebody shot out Miss Rita's bay window. I don't know nothing about that, neither."
Longarm smiled thinly and said, "I know. I asked where you were at the time. You and some pals were spitting and whittling across the street when them shots rang out."
Pony Bodie blinked owlishly at him and said, "I'm sure glad I ain't out to steal that handsome buckskin you rode in on. I don't know who might have been up in that bell tower or how come Preacher Shearer got all them wires from all over. Why don't you ask him?"
Longarm said, "I mean to. Soon as I finish my break fast."
The kid wanted to tag along. But Longarm told him not to and added, "I'd be obliged if you refrained from repeating this conversation to anybody else. Anybody else at all. Comprende?"
Pony Bodie gulped and allowed he did, sort of. So they strode out in the morning sunlight together and parted friendly.
You had to pass the Riverside News before you got to the church in any case. So Longarm stepped inside to find little Inky Potts sticking type in the back, alone. Her hips looked a tad less full than he'd pictured them the night before, going dog style with old Covina.
When she came to the counter with a wary smile on her ink-smudged face, Longarm said, "I'll get right to the point, Miss Inky. Your boss and me don't get along as well as I'd like. He may be innocent of any other crime, or you could be working for a killer. I need your help in finding out. You look smart enough to see it's in your own best interests to help me find out, either way. Your turn."
She gasped. "Oh, dear Lord, I knew being paid a man's wages with nobody trying to get up my skirt was too good to be true! If you had any idea what a girl goes through in the newspaper game!"
He said, "I do. Some of my best friends are newspaper gals. But I never asked about Big Jim's employment policies. He won't let me go through your morgue. I'd be able to tell you why, a heap better, if you were to go through it for me and answer the few simple questions I've put down on this one page from my notebook."
She took the tightly lettered list warily and said she couldn't promise anything. He said, "I ain't asking for promises. I just need some answers. Before you go running with this to Big Jim, be advised I've already caught him in one lie. I'm still working on whether that means he's a self-important small-town big shot or a dangerous felon. So, for your own protection, slip the answers to me discreet as you know how as soon as you can manage."
She said she'd try but made no promises. Longarm had noticed the ones who hesitated to promise you the moon were most likely to show up with something.
He left the newspaper just in time. Big Jim in the beefy flesh was coming down the walk. As they met, the newspaperman asked if Longarm had any scoops for him. Longarm replied it was too early to say and started to move on. Big Jim told him the good looking undersheriff was down the other way, in her substation.
Longarm asked what had made the newspaperman think he was on his way to pester Miss Rita. Big Jim laughed and said, "Come on, I got a darkie keeping house for me, too, and you know how they gossip."
"Almost as bad as the rest of us," Longarm conceded in a disgusted tone before he suggested, "Tell your darkie to tell Miss Rita's darkie that the lady of the house received me in her front parlor on officious business with her hair pinned up."
To say they parted friendly would have been a fib. Longarm legged it on up to the church and knocked on the front door of the adjoining manse until he got tired of that and went around to knock on the back door.
Nobody came. There should have been at least a cleaning woman in charge if the preacher was out saving souls or sending sneaky wires.
Longarm started to go around the front to see if the older man was in the church, itself. Then he had a better idea and moved around to the back to find that, sure enough, there was a gap left in the hedge with just such a shortcut in mind.
Longarm followed the visible path in the yard-grass to a cellar door at the rear of the bigger frame church. It wasn't padlocked. A man of the cloth who ran back and forth a lot likely figured nobody else would notice a cellar door in the shady gap between the church and manse. Longarm could see nobody had any way of watching him as he drew his.44-40 and pulled one leaf of the door up with his free hand.
It was dark and musty at the bottom of the brick stairs. Longarm eased down them, reminded of that old song that went:
Oh the deacon went down To the cellar to pray. And he found a little jug, and he stayed all day!
But there was nothing to be seen or smelled except spiderwebs and, over on a far wall, some chalk drawings on the dark damp bricks.
Longarm moved closer and the right realistic drawing looked even dirtier. He whistled under his breath as he perused the pornographic pictures of male figures in some of the damnedest positions. None of them appealed to a man who admired women way more than shapeless men with impossible peckers and seeingly bottomless assholes.
He moved over to another flight of steps on the balls of his feet, wondering who might have drawn such dirty pictures in the cellar of a church without anybody noticing.
He eased up the steps to a closed door that might lead out to anywheres. But as he cracked it open with his own asshole puckered, he saw he seemed to be behind the altar and that made sense for the gents most likely to sneak into church this way.
Longarm moved around the high-back screen of the altar to see who else might be in church at that hour of the morning. He saw a hulking figure kneeling in a pew closer to the front door, facing the other way because he didn't seem to be praying with that pistol of his own trained on said front door!
Longarm braced his right elbow on the corner of the altar to train the muzzle of his own six-gun steady as he stated in a firm but not unkindly tone, "I got the drop on you, Bergman. Before you turn around, I want you to lay that pistol down and-"