knew him well enough to talk dirty. She described young McNee by name, and called the other the strange one, although she made them both sound a tad strange.
She said she’d thought at first they were arguing about money, with McNee bawling like a worried gal that his visitor had said he’d bring some of the next time, which was then. But when she’d moved in closer, to sort of dust the wallpaper closer to McNee’s door, the stranger had been saying he wanted his “buggy bunny,” which did sound something like money when you studied on it. She said McNee had allowed he didn’t want to be abused for no good reason by a promise-busting polecat, and that then the stranger had slapped the smaller McNee hard enough to make him cry like a gal some more and promise some mighty vile-sounding tricks that had sounded even sloppier once they’d wound up on the bed.
When Longarm asked how she knew they’d been vile on the bed, Peony giggled and confided, “The bedsprings in Room 203 are the loudest on this floor. I’ve never gone for that Greek stuff. As I told my first husband, a man too small to enjoy a woman right ain’t much of a man to begin with. I’ll be switched if I can see why any sort of boy would be willing to let a man abuse him that way!”
Longarm put the cheroot to her soft lips as he mused, half to himself, “The younger and smaller riders along the owlhoot trail don’t have to be all that willing. Bullies with no respect for the property rights of bankers and railroad stockholders tend to take what they want, when they want it, from anybody they have the edge on. We’ve been wondering why they had a puny young kid riding along on all those robberies. If they call him Huggy Bunny, that may account for them managing to avoid our usual informants in the whorehouses of many a trail town.”
Peony gave the cheroot back to him as she asked, “You mean Bunny McNee rides with a band of queer outlaws?”
Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring into the darkness and replied, “Most lifetime crooks tend to be what the alienists who study queer folks describe as degenerates. Whether they start out favoring gals or not, they spend so much time in prison that they learn how to make love to milk bottles, ham sandwiches, or one another. Old cons like to brag they ain’t the ones being queer when they beat up and rape the kid cons they call queers. There’s nothing on McNee’s yellow sheets, I mean criminal record, about him doing any hard time in state or federal prisons. But I reckon his fellow gang members had learned about such matters during their own misspent youths.”
He took another drag and asked her to describe the one she’d called older and bigger as well as strange.
Peony shrugged a plump shoulder against his bare ribs and said she’d only glimpsed the rascal at a distance, headed the other way down a hallway that was always sort of gloomy. She was sure he’d been dressed cow, in a blue denim jacket and jeans and with a foray hat with its crown pinched higher than most Colorado riders seemed to favor.
Longarm nodded and said, “Some of the gang members are suspected of hailing from Texas. It’s a long shot, but they have a dead gunslick in blue denim on ice in a root cellar down by the jail. Might you be up to viewing the late Ginger Bancott, come morning and less call for the neighbors to gossip about us leaving this hotel together?”
Peony shook her brown curls against his bare shoulder and replied mighty firmly, “I’m not about to be spotted leaving this hotel with you at any hour. I told you I never got a good look at that rascal in the hallway, and didn’t somebody say Amos Payne shot that Bancott boy after he’d just shot some Englishman at the depot?”
Longarm nodded. “We might have leaped to a hasty conclusion. We know Ginger Bancott was a professional criminal who’d once killed a man for money down Texas way, and he had on a blue denim outfit as he was gunned right after killing another.”
She nodded and said, “Right, that stranger from England.”
“Or West-by-God-Virginia!” Longarm cut in. “Stranger is the word to steer by as we move poor Gaylord Stanwyk off the same train I came in on, striding alone into the depot in a suit and tie as well as Stetson and riding boots. After that, we were just about a perfect match as to height and build. I’m not saying we were doubles, but he was the only one who described at all like me, and he was walking alone as I brought up the rear with a bunch of local folks and some baggage!”
Peony marveled, “Good heavens! Are you saying it was you that dead boy was out to kill, honey?”
To which he modestly replied, “It wouldn’t have been the first time the pals of a crook I was coming for tried to discourage the notion. I can already see a few holes in such a plot. But the jails of this wide country would be less crowded if crooks plotted as smart as me. And besides, who else could have been expecting me? I’d only just wired Constable Payne I was on my way here to transfer a federal prisoner. I didn’t know another soul in town, and vice versa.”
She demanded, “What good would it have done Bunny McNee if a pal had murdered the first deputy sent to fetch him? Wouldn’t your outfit have simply sent a second, or even a third?”
He sighed and muttered, “I wish you wouldn’t confuse my elaborate plots with simple facts. Are you certain you couldn’t help us out in that root cellar, pard? I mean, it’s dimly lit, and mayhaps if we sort of rolled him over so’s you could view him from behind in dim light …”
She sat up, moving the bedsprings considerably, as she swung her button shoes to the rug and said, “Thanks for reminding me how late I seem to be getting home from work. What time is it, lover?”
Longarm groped his pocket watch from the vest he’d somehow left on the rug on that side and struck another light to declare with a chuckle, “Lord have mercy if it ain’t just going on midnight! I could swear we’ve known one another at least a full hour, and speaking of knowing one another, in the Biblical sense, how come you’re putting on that seersucker uniform so soon? I was fixing to finish this cheroot and suggest a position you may not have ever tried before.”
The pleasantly obese chambermaid sighed wistfully and replied, “Hold the thought until at least Thursday night. Tomorrow is my day off, and I’d never be able to explain tomorrow night to my husband! For some reason the jealous thing keeps accusing me of fooling with other men when I’m not home picking up after him.”
A big gray cat woke up in Longarm’s stomach, swished its bushy tail, sharpened its claws on the roots of his bars, and lay back down, along with his suddenly limp pecker, as he quietly allowed he’d have been much obliged had she told him earlier she was married up.
As she went on pinning her hair with the back of her uniform wide open to her exposed tailbone, Peony giggled and asked if it would have saved her from a ravaging she sure would like to thank him for. Then she asked him to be a lamb and button her up the back. So he lit the bed lamp to do it right and told her to just hesh when she started to go into her female complaints. For he’d met females who complained they weren’t getting enough in the past and he found it tedious to make up self-serving excuses.
