He felt sane as hell as he lay there in the cozy candlelight with a pretty gal snuggled close and telling him how smart he was. His completely satisfied flesh let his brain drift any way it wanted to as it tried to make sense out of the little he really knew.
The only trouble was, thinking clear and detached as he was, he still couldn't make a lick of sense of anything he'd been able to find out so far.
CHAPTER 6
The Durango Free Press was set up across from the Western Union office near the depot. Longarm found a little gray gnome sticking type behind the counter blocking access to the presses and such in back of him. Longarm introduced himself, and the gnome looked sort of wistful and went on about his two-fisted chore as he asked what he could do for a cuss who didn't want to place an advertisement or even buy a damned paper.
Longarm said, 'I've already read your swell paper over breakfast with a pal this morning. Read some back issues on the premises as well. I know you never run no photo-engravings of that jasper who went up in smoke as Calvert Tyger a spell back, but in the unlikely event you took any pictures of the dismal scene...'
'We never did,' the gnome said. 'We can't afford that newfangled Ben Day process, and if we could we'd have never wanted to run no picture of that mess they hauled outten that burnt-down rooming house across the tracks. I heard you was in town and considering an exhumation order. Take my advice and leave the well-done remains in the ground. His own mother wouldn't have recognized him as they were lowering him down, and the worms have had their way with him by this time.'
Longarm nodded soberly. 'A tad over six feet tall and weighing around one-eighty, the last anyone on our side saw of him alive and raw. Might have been harder to judge as they dug him out of the ashes curled up in a ball and baked like a potato, though.'
The older man grimaced. 'You'd do well to rake your spuds out of the coals before they bake that black. I was there and it could have been most any cuss, or critter, you'd like it to be. But your description of Calvert Tyger don't fit the Calvert Tyger we had here in Durango for a week or more before that fire.'
Longarm said, 'Neither did the glass-eyed cuss who died down in Denver under the same name. What did your Calvert Tyger look like, and how come you recall him at all, seeing he was here such a short time?'
The newspaper man wrinkled his nose. 'You'd be as apt to recall a dapper dresser who favored a velvet frock coat and a lavender brocaded vest, and who lit up one of them violet-scented French cigarettes he smoked. After that he was just a tad taller than me but way under six feet, and couldn't have tipped the scales at one-fifty with his boots on. Some say he won at draw poker more often than such a sissy might find safe in towns as raw as Durango. So to tell the truth, I was set to publish his epitaph a good three days before he died in a more unusual way than I'd been expecting.'
Longarm reached absently for two cheroots as he mused half to himself, 'Tinhorns living dangerously have been known to use the name and rep of somebody more dangerous. But it's odd that you had him down as a gambling man from down this way when a certain blackjack dealer up the street couldn't tell me anything at all about such a spectacular sport.'
The newspaper man accepted the offered smoke with a nod of thanks. 'No mystery there. Tyger or whoever he was was a professional to begin with, and a sissy boy after that. He'd have never been interested in betting against them pretty gals at the sucker palace up the street. His game was draw poker, like I said, played in the back room of the Strand Saloon most often.'
Longarm thumbed a matchhead aflame and lit them both before he suggested, 'Run that part about him being a sissy boy past me some more. Were you talking about the way he dressed or the way he liked to make love?'
The older man took a drag, grinned dirty, and said, 'Both. He dressed like a sissy, walked like a sissy, and while I never got to watch, he was seen more often in the company of young boys than any kind of gals. Some say he haunted the gin mills and rooming houses on the wrong side of the tracks because of the young drifters who've got less choice about such matters than a half-way lucky tinhorn.'
Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring and cautiously observed, 'A pal of mine who writes for the Denver Post keeps telling me a newspaper reporter hears lots of things and has lots of suspicions it's best not to print, lest somebody proves you wrong or sues your ass off.'
The cruder version of the Post's more polished Reporter Crawford nodded. 'That's true. There was heaps of gossip, vicious to common sense, when that sissy went up in flames. Are you asking me official or like a pal just smoking and bullshitting with you?'
Longarm agreed they were only bullshitting. So the newspaper man said, 'I'll swear I never said this if you try to use it in court as my say-so. But try her this way. There was a handsome young cowboy and queer whore, according to some, who dropped out of sight the same time. I've never said this to a soul before, but we all like to play detective like Mister Poe, even when we don't write stories for a living. So what if a rich sissy took a poor sissy to his own bitty room and they had a lovers' quarrel?'
Longarm considered and replied, 'Any serious wrestling in a small space lit by a candle or an oil lamp could get mighty heated, and an upset stranger would be more likely to charge into a wardrobe than somebody who knew his way out through the smoke.'
The older man cackled. 'I always figured I'd have made a good detective if I hadn't won that old hand press in a card game on my way West. Would you agree your average sissy boy who'd just about cremated a queer whore with friends in town would have felt any call to linger here in Durango?'
Longarm shook his head. 'Most gents in such a fix would be as worried about the local law, whether the victim had friends or not.'
Then he blew another smoke ring and quietly added, 'That's not to say a queer whore who beat, robbed, and roasted a customer had any call to hang around either. You'd better give me the name and some description of that wayward youth, pard.'
The newspaper man did, as Longarm got out his notebook to take down the probably fake name of Jake Brown and the banal description: a slender youth, dressed cow and having nothing to set him apart from your average run-of-the-mill white cowhand or saddle tramp pretending to be a cowhand as he scouted for easier money in a land of opportunity.
Longarm put the notes away as he shrugged and opined, 'It's sure starting to look like I've been chasing down a false lead. I wish we didn't have to do that so often. But the only way you can tell is by trying. So I thank you for your help in eliminating the late Calvert Tyger of Durango as any likely lead to the whereabouts of the outlaws I had
