Looming over Longarm for his own first look at this particular victim, Sergeant Nolan proved he rated his stripes when he took a few thoughtful moments and declared, 'Faith. I know many a man with one gold tooth up front like that, and there's more than one poor drifter with a glass eye. But would you like to strike a match a bit closer to that handsome face?'
Longarm did it, but he didn't like it much. The heat or perhaps the collapse of the ruins had cracked the glass eye staring wildly up from the charcoal remains, but you could see it was almost jade green.
Nolan nodded. 'If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be Brick Flanders in the charred flesh. Sure, they'd told us he'd been seen around Denver last month, and Widow Dugan has taken in disreputable roomers before!'
Longarm shook out the waterproof Mexican match and moved the damp sheeting further out of the way as he muttered, 'Let's hold our fire till we see if this one's wearing that famous ring.'
As Longarm thumbnailed another light further down the charred corpse Nolan confided to the fire marshal, 'They say Brick boasted of having taken a family seal ring from a Union officer at Chambersburg. Himself having ridden as a Confederate irregular before he went entirely bad and all and all.'
The fire marshal naturally asked who in thunder they could be jawing about. So Nolan explained, 'The green- eyed and red bearded cuss was wanted for everything but singing 'The Yellow Rose of Texas.' So how might we be coming with that signet ring, Longarm?'
The federal deputy got rid of that second match as he rose to his full imposing height and replied, 'He lost his famous beard in the fire, and it didn't do his cock and balls a lick of good either. But that distinctive ring on one claw, together with the gold tooth and green glass eye, makes me strongly suspect this burnt bastard has to be Brick Flanders or somebody a whole lot like him.'
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
