Morgana sighed and said, 'I'm sorry. That was catty of me. But darn it, Custis, a friend I trusted did say you were still seeing that widow lady up on Capitol Hill!'
Longarm resisted the impulse to reach for a smoke as he replied, 'if your spies were jawing about a certain widow woman who never done 'em no harm, I ain't been up to her place for quite some time, as a matter of fact.'
This was true, as far as it went, and women seemed able to tell when a man was really fibbing. So Morgana nodded and said, 'I should have known those other girls were jealous of me. What gave their vicious plot away was the way they overdid the tall tales they told about you. I mean, what would even someone like you be doing with a librarian west of Curtis Street and a wealthy Capitol Hill widow at the same time?'
Longarm couldn't resist answering, 'I dunno. Sounds like fun!'
The frisky brunette with her own notions of fun laughed easily and said, 'I'll bet you would, if you had the chance. But then I read in the Post how you'd been involved in that rooming house with some Mexican lovely, as your friend Reporter Crawford described her. So I naturally had to wonder how you could have been sparking all those other girls if you were over there in your own neighborhood at four in the morning. You should have seen them trying to squirm out of that when I confronted them with the morning papers!'
Longarm shrugged and said, 'I only met Rosalinda Lopez over by that fire. They had no call to say I found her all that lovely as I was questioning her while she was handcuffed to a blamed fire engine!'
Morgana smiled, and reached across the table for his free hand. 'I read how you'd cleared her as a suspect in that nasty arson-murder case, darling. Then, as I just said, certain so-called friends went too far. One of them told me you'd checked into the Wazee Hotel with that pretty senorita. I confess I believed her at first, recalling the time you took me there, to save us a long wet ride on that rainy evening, you said.'
Longarm was starting to grow weary of the game and so, as gently as he could manage, he said, 'Look here, Miss Morgana, whether I was in the Wazee Hotel with you or any gal willing to go there with me is no beeswax of a lady who told me better than ten days ago not to darken her door again. But for the sake of another lady I have no call to leave open to gossip, I checked Rosalinda Lopez into a hotel I could get a good rate from because the poor little gal had been burnt out and had no place else to go. If your pals had been watching closer, they could have told you I never even went up to her new quarters with her. You're commencing to steam me with some squat about a kid I've never even swapped spit with!'
Morgana, who'd exchanged more than that with Longarm, squeezed his big paw harder and assured him she'd already figured that much out for herself. 'I know you'll think it was awful of me, Custis. But when I found out where that Rosalinda Lopez was working, I made it my business to make friends with her by sort of bumping into her a few times at the market down the street. Once we got to talking, it was easy enough to-'
'You're right, I don't like it,' Longarm said. 'Did you get her to tell you how I'd had her name tattooed on my chest, along with two lovebirds and a floral wreath around the whole shebang?'
Morgana stared soberly across the table. 'She seems to think you're some sort of saint she calls a brass lark or something as outlandish, dear. She told me how you talked them out of arresting her and staked her to a fresh start, with no strings attached, and she confided she might have let you have a little, if you'd behaved like anything but a perfect gentleman to a frightened but not too inexperienced young girl.'
Longarm smiled thinly and sighed. 'Why do we always find out at least ten minutes after the steamboat leaves us standing on the dock like the fools we are? What are you suggesting I do now, go hang around that same market till she comes by for some fresher provisions?'
Morgana said firmly, 'Don't you dare. You're taking me to that Sunday-Go-to-Meeting-on-the-Green over in Eastern Park this weekend.'
Then she squeezed harder as she coyly purred, 'We'll get fresh later, after you've melted my resolve with plenty of spiked punch and potato salad, the way you did that last time. I'll slip into the same summer-weight frock, and we'll spread our own blanket in that same grove of weeping willows a little apart from the picnic grounds, and then, as the sun goes down, who knows what I might let you do to me in the cool shades of evening?'
He couldn't think of anything they hadn't wound up trying already. But a good place to take one pretty gal was as good a place to take another pretty gal, and he knew that if they'd told this gal from way out to the west of town about another Sunday-Go in Eastern Park, a gal who lived in East Denver was twice as likely to have heard about it, and made plans of her own involving willow trees in the cool shades of evening.
So all Longarm could say to this other gal was that he'd sure be proud to take her out yonder if he possibly could. For he had almost three full days to figure out why it would be impossible.
CHAPTER 3
After he got back to the office after lunch, Longarm asked Henry, the pasty-faced clerk who played the typewriter and kept the files, whether they had any field work pending, say, over in the Indian Nation or at least a day's ride from the Denver city limits. But Henry said their boss, Marshal Vail, had said nothing about field work on his way to a meeting with Judge Dickerson down the hall.
Henry added that meanwhile Longarm was due to relieve old Deputy Weaver, riding herd on a government witness at a nearby hotel. So Longarm dug a folder on the late Brick Flanders out of the file to give himself some reading on the job and maybe, with any luck, a weekend that would otherwise be awkward down in the southwest corner of the state.
The train robber's doxie who'd agreed to turn state's evidence had been installed in a first-class suite of a second-rate hotel facing Tremont, near the Overland Terminal. Tom Weaver didn't seem too sorry to have Longarm take his place, despite the witness for the prosecution being a junoesque natural blonde who said she'd answer to Honey whenever they got tired of calling her Miss Elvira. She behaved well enough as they were introduced. But as soon as Weaver left, the buxom bawd unpinned her honey-colored hair and commenced to unbutton her calico bodice with a remark about the weather that sounded sort of dirty. She spoke a bit plainer about his stuffy-looking pants as she threw her bare self down on the sofa in the suite's parlor. 'I'm glad now your fellow deputy was a sissy. For you're so much younger as well as tall and handsome. So tell me something, handsome, are you tall in every way?'
Longarm hung up his hat and coat, since she was right about the afternoon heat in downtown Denver, but helped himself to a chair on the far side of the room, closer to the door, and reached for one of his three-for-a-nickel cheroots as he chuckled fondly and told her, 'It ain't going to work, Miss Elvira. I know what them other ladies told you about compromising the arresting officer. I do wish outlaws would quit trying to practice law on the fly, but you see, in this case neither Weaver nor me had anything to do with arresting you and your former lover. So even if you tempted us into greenhorn horny behavior on duty, you or your lawyer couldn't use it in court for all that much. It's established you eloped with the Keller gang from a house of ill repute, and you'll never get the jury to buy one of your mere guards forcing a confession out of you at dick-point.'
