Longarm winced. He’d forgotten about that. Hell, it was only idle bed talk that had brought it up to begin with. He’d forgotten about it within seconds of suggesting it. “I was asleep when I told you we’d do that,” he said, trying to wriggle off the hook. “I meant that we’d do it tonight, not last night. Last night I was working. Honest.”
Deborah gave him a deliberately skeptical look, then relented and showed him a welcoming smile. “All right. I forgive you. On condition that you take me out to dinner tonight instead.”
“That’s a deal,” Longarm promised.
“Now about that question I asked you.
“I need a favor,” he said.
“Somehow, Custis, that does not surprise me.”
“I need to get in to see Billy again, Deb. Can you swipe a doctor’s coat and whatever other stuff it will take to make me look like I belong here?”
“Of course. Better yet, I will go with you when you go to his room. A doctor and nurse together won’t seem suspicious, but a strange doctor on the floor might.”
Longarm thought that over and had to agree. Her idea was a good one. “Once we’re inside an’ I can talk with Billy without being overheard, there’s something else I want you to do too. I need to know if there’s any other rooms, on the other floors maybe, with guards outside them. I need to know if there’s other patients who may be being hidden there like Billy is.”
“You think the others might have survived too?”
“Two of them maybe.”
Deborah shook her head. “There were only four people inside the carriage, right?”
“That’s right.”
“The lady was killed, of course. And at least one man. His leg was blown off, and if he didn’t die at the scene he bled to death en route to the hospital. I was on duty that day, Custis. I am sure that he was declared dead on arrival. As for the fourth man—third, I mean, fourth person—I can’t be so certain. But I can find out for you, of course. I’ll take you in to see Billy first. Then I can check on this other man for you.”
“You’re a doll. If we weren’t in public I’d show you how much I appreciate you.”
“Keep that in mind, dear. You can show me tonight.” She smiled. “After dinner.”
“Right. After dinner. It’s a promise.”
Deborah wrapped the remainder of her sandwich in a napkin and tucked it away in the tiny wicker basket she brought her lunch in each day, then stood and brushed her skirt off. “Ready?”
“When you are.”
“Then follow me, Doctor.”
Chapter 35
Billy’s brows furrowed in intense concentration. Frustration too, more than likely. Longarm suspected his boss was having a perfectly awful time staying cooped up in here while there was work to be done out in the rest of the world. “A girl, you say? You think the bomb was thrown by a girl?”
“I can’t prove it, Billy. The fellow who could have was killed in an accident that I’d have to say looks more an’ more suspicious the more I look at it.” Longarm relayed the information he’d learned about Carl Beamon and the two men who’d been expected to make him rich that same night the man was killed.
Billy grunted. “He talked about a girl throwing the bomb?”
“He talked about a girl. A pretty girl. He never exactly said that she’s the one that threw the bomb. But that’s the inference you pretty much have to make when you put the statements together. He told two, three different people that, or something like it. Kept mumbling about a girl. That’s what the driver of the carriage said and the girlfriend”—it seemed kinder to refer to BethAnne as a girlfriend rather than the tawdry little cheap hooker she really was—“and the fellow at the boardinghouse. He told all of them pretty much the same thing, but never got into any detail about it. And in truth he never actually said that this girl, whoever she was, was the one that threw the bomb into your carriage.”
“But why would some girl—not an Indian, but a white girl—why would she want to kill the commissioner?” Billy mused aloud.
“I been wondering that too, Boss. Do you know what I asked myself? On the ride over here I got to thinking. We all been running in pretty much the same direction. We all been thinking in terms of someone that wanted to kill Commissioner Troutman. Billy, we don’t know why somebody threw that bomb any more than we know who.”
“That’s true,” Billy agreed.
“Instead of concentrating on the obvious, Billy, maybe we oughta look at things from some other points of view. Like … is there anybody that might’ve wanted to kill you, for instance, and the commissioner just kinda got caught in the middle? I mean, it was a bomb, after all. Bombs ain’t exactly specific about who they pick out to blow apart. An’ I don’t see it carved in stone anywhere that the thing had to be aimed at Commissioner Troutman. It could as easy have been you they wanted to kill an’ got him by mistake.”
“You’re really sure he is dead, Longarm?”
“Yes, sir. My nurse friend assures me the commissioner was dead when they carried him off that ambulance.”
“But they told me..
“Yeah. I been thinking about that. Attorney Cotton and those politicians did tell you he was still alive. They have to’ve had a pretty good reason for wanting to make you believe that and for keeping you under wraps here all this time.”
“I can’t imagine what that reason could be,” Billy admitted.
