you think I took time off from my counter tips to run it over to you? Mister Bob said it sounded important too.”
“The two of you discussed her message out loud behind a beanery counter, no offense?” he asked as an alarming picture formed in his already puzzled mind. When she confirmed his fear that any number of casual eaters could have heard, and repeated, the contents of the dead gal’s plea, he could only sigh and say, “I understand you carried earlier meals over to the jailhouse for her?”
Ruby nodded. “I thought she was a he until this evening. You could have knocked me over with a feather when she told me she was another gal, and in a fearful fix besides!”
Longarm explained, “We thought she was a he until last night. The reason I’m pressing you about this is to make sure we weren’t slipped a ringer! You’re certain the gal who gave you that message to me was the same person they arrested last week as a boy?”
Ruby laughed. “Now how would they ever switch any he with a she, or even a he with a he, with poor Constable Amos and his own boys watching?”
it was a good question. He said, “Let’s buy them arresting what they took for a pretty deadbeat at the depot and having the same one in a windowless patent cell all this time. That’s still not saying the one sneaking out of a hotel bill he just couldn’t pay was the same one they arrested later, wearing the same outfit and bland baby face!”
The waitress seemed to find that an awful lot of trouble to put some innocent gal through. Longarm thanked her and headed back to the Elk Rack, a half-dozen notions juggled by his brain at once.
When he caught up with Matilda Waller again in her own less-busy dining room, he glanced at the wall clock and said, “Let’s scout up your boss and see if he won’t let you off early. What I want with you is way more important!”
She blinked in mingled desire and dismay, then replied, “I like a man who knows what he wants and goes right after it. But Lord have mercy if this don’t seem a little sudden!”
Longarm paid her no mind as he pushed through the swinging doors to the kitchen. So she followed, timidly, as he found the night manager jawing over coffee with the cook and his swamper.
Longarm flashed his badge at the three of them and explained he needed their waitress to identify a dead body for the law. The gal they were talking about looked more surprised as her boss allowed he could serve any late customer they might have before closing time.
When she complained that the summer night was outside, he went on up with her to fetch her shawl. Like other hotel help who didn’t have a good reason to rent outside quarters, Matilda Waller had a garret room up behind the false front of the Elk Rack. Longarm waited in the hall while she ducked in to fetch her plaid shawl. For some fool reason this seemed to confuse her. As they were going back down the stairs she marveled, “Do you really want me to go with you to some funeral parlor?”
He answered, “Nope. Widow Farnsworth sent that dead Englishman on his way embalmed in a handsome lead- lined coffin. Constable Payne and Deputy Keen will be getting tidied up for their own funerals, even as we speak. But dead riffraff due for potter’s field only get to relax in a root cellar until somebody claims ‘em or they start to go bad, whichever comes first.”
Outside the drably pretty waitress took the arm he offered her, but protested that this was hardly her idea of an evening outing with a gentleman caller as he led her along the moonlit street. He said soothingly, “I’d be proud to buy you some ice cream afterwards, Miss Matilda. I had to dragoon you for this distasteful chore because nobody else who knew Bunny McNee as a male hotel guest was handy at this hour. I was told you carried his hotel meals up to his room. So he must have had to sign for them in front of you, in broad daylight, way more than once, right?”
She said she’d lost track of the times the deadbeat had cheated her by adding her tip to his tab in pencil. So one got the impression she was not what might be called a friend of the dead person found in that patent cell.
When they got to the recently vacated grocery with a cool root cellar, Longarm was pleased to see Nate Rothstein had posted a night watch on the property. The junior deputy naturally knew Longarm by sight, and anxious for any distraction at that hour, said he’d be as pleased as punch to show them around down below.
He led them to the cellar stairs with a railroad lantern, and they followed him down into the dank darkness. Longarm had to help the jittery waitress on the stairs. He didn’t care much for the faint but nasty odor either. It was mostly the smell of damp earth and mildew, but that first one, gunned by Amos Payne in the depot, had been dead long enough to notice. Matilda Waller pointed at the late Ginger Bancott and asked, “Didn’t they say that red- haired boy had been shot? How come he looks as if somebody beat him up real mean?”
Longarm said, “They bloat and get red-faced before they get dark and start to shrivel, ma’am. Could you hold that lantern over this one they just brought in, Deputy? You’ll find this one way fresher, Miss Matilda.”
The late Bunny McNee or Tess Jennings only looked a mite waxen around the tip of her snub nose as she reclined on her own planks across sawhorses. Someone had been thoughtful enough to shut her eyes and place some pennies on the lids. The waitress gulped and almost sobbed, “That’s him, I mean her. He, she, or it stayed up in that hired room day and night alone, save for the times Peony says he, or she, had a rougher visitor. Will I look like that when I am dead?”
Longarm said soothingly, “Probably not, ma’am. When the undertakers do right by you, your eyes and mouth stay shut by themselves and you don’t stink or turn funny colors.”
He started to explain some details of the embalmer’s craft, but decided not to. That friendly undertaking gal who’d explained just what they did to hold folks together long enough for a dignified send-off had doubtless been more used to dead bodies late at night.
He nudged the waitress and gently told her they could leave now. He didn’t have to tell her twice. But she waited until he’d thanked the town deputy and had her headed homeward before she said, “That was awful! Whatever made you suspect the girl killed tonight in the jailhouse might not be the boy who ran up that swamping bill at the hotel? The fact she was a girl disguised as a boy makes those visits from a rough lover more sensible than Peony put it.”
He said, “Sense is what I’m trying to make of this whole can of worms. All three bodies answer to descriptions of wanted outlaws. But I’ll be switched with snakes if I can fit the three of ‘em together in a sensible pattern. Both the red-haired Ginger Bancott and the darker Quicksilver Quinn had dishonest but obvious means of support. I can see why either, riding with the sort of tomboy we just viewed, might want to keep her at a hotel instead of in the bunkhouse with the rest of the boys he wanted to fade in with. After that, it would be just plain stupid to refuse to pay her hotel tab. An owlhoot rider of any experience would have known that’s no way to hide out in a small town.”
