He said, “Can’t say yet. What I thought I’d ask your new constable to try might or might not flush some unusual birds.”
That butler came in. She told him to send a footman over to the roundhouse and tell them she’d send further word when and if she ever wanted that Shay locomotive to move again.
When they were alone some more Longarm explained. “I know for a fact that Jed Nolan told his wife he was headed down your line on a serious business trip. Right about now he’ll be starting to pace the floor of your waiting room. There’ll be others with sensible reasons to ride down to Golden on a workday. There might be some who seem to be leaving town unexpected. We can sort them all out once we let the train leave, stop it in open country a mile or so down the park, and see just who might be aboard.”
She said she followed his drift. Then she swung her slippers to the rug, patted the seat cushions where they’d been, and bade him sit down and tell her how he’d ever gotten so smart.
Longarm remained standing as he modestly allowed, “I’ve been at the same puzzle-solving chores for six or eight years now, riding for the law. You get to where some pieces look familiar, since there are only so many ways a crook can move.”
She asked why he didn’t want to sit down beside her.
He said, “It ain’t what I want, ma’am. It’s what there’s time to do in the time I have to work with. I got to move on now. I only stopped here to ask you to hold that train.”
She smiled up wistfully. “Consider it stopped until you send word you want it to move. You will come back and tell me what on earth’s been going on, promise?”
He smiled back as wistfully and said, “I’ll be proud to, as soon as there’s more time and I have the least notion what I’m talking about!”
He left her there and prowled back through her house to the kitchen, where he found that old frog-faced butler seated grandly at a table, having his cake and coffee served by a skinny young gal of a similar complexion.
The butler rose stiffly to say, “It is customary to ring when you desire something from the staff, suh.”
Longarm said, “I ain’t back here as a guest. I’m back here as the law. I heard Miss Constance call you Edward. If you’d rather I call you Mister I’ll need a last name.”
The butler stiffly replied that Edward would do fine, and added he knew nothing about the murder of that sassy Miss Sarah, save that he’d told the pretty Creole gal not to mess with that Texas trash they’d called Quicksilver.
Longarm nodded gravely and declared, “She should have listened. What I wanted to ask of you would be more in the way of an introduction. I’ve noticed more than a dozen colored folk up this way, and it’s been my experience that there’s usually a colored quarter tucked in some corner of a town this size.”
The butler and the colored scullery maid exchanged wary glances. Edward shrugged and said, “There’s no secret about that. Me and the other household help sleep up under the mansard shingles. The mostly colored railroaders are housed in company cottages on the far side of the round house. Some other colored families here in this tight little town have naturally built or hired other quarters next to the railroaders, on railroad property. Miss Constance don’t mind Her husband treated us decent while he was alive, and she’s carried on as a white boss of quality.”
Longarm nodded and said, “I don’t have time to convince you my folks were too poor to keep slaves in days of yore. Your boss lady, her railroad, and a heap of track-working jobs could be in danger. I need your help to mayhaps head some off. Do I have it?”
Edward nodded gravely, but asked, “What can I do? I just work here.”
Longarm included the young scullery maid as he explained, or verified, what they’d likely noticed already.
He said, “You colored folks tend to be either annoying or invisible to a heap of white folks. When you ain’t getting shot by brutes such as Clay Allison for ordering a drink in a white saloon, you tend to be tolerated, and ignored, as faithful darkies waiting on tables, shining shoes, or whatever.”
Edward quietly asked if Longarm was trying to be funny.
Longarm assured him, “Not funny. Factual. I’ve noticed in connection with other federal cases that white bullies tend to go on talking as if they were alone while colored help is quietly serving them. I’ve noticed that next to barbers, nobody gossips more, in low tones, about the scandalous or just plain silly things the white folks in town may be up to than their colored help.”
The scullery maid was grinning ear to ear. Edward sternly warned her not to get uppity, but confided to Longarm, “She caught that New Orleans gal doing it in the woodshed with that Quicksilver man one evening. But we ain’t about to gossip like that about Miss Constance!”
Longarm said, “I ain’t interested in what a lady might do in her own woodshed. I want to talk to someone privy to all the gossip of all you invisible folks. Before you ask me what I want to know, if I knew all that much I wouldn’t have to ask. I have a whole bunch of balls in the air with no basket to put ‘em in. If only I could connect or disconnect my obvious suspects …”
“You want to talk to Mammy Palaver, the Obeah woman,” Edward said. The scullery maid nodded, with a wicked grin.
Longarm smiled less certainly and asked, “Obeah? Ain’t that some like voodoo?”
Edward said, “Voodoo is a religion. Obeah is serious. Even our good Baptist ladies go to Mammy Palaver for goofer dust or just good advice. So she would naturally hear a lot.”
Longarm nodded thankfully, and asked how he might find this witch woman and whether he should say Edward sent him.
The frog-faced but dignified gentleman of color gravely told him to just ask when he got to the colored quarter. Then he added, “You won’t have to tell Mammy Palaver who you are. She’ll know. All of us heard a powerful lawman was coming our way. It was Mammy Palaver who spread the word you were all right. Your point about white gunfighters gunning our boys for no good reason was Well taken. So we watch you all more than you might think.”
Longarm said that was the very point he’d been trying to make, and left by way of the back door.
