To which he could only reply, “Tell my boss how sorry I was for being so dumb, I reckon. It’s mortal hard to get a conviction when the defendant has compromised the arresting officer. That’s what they call it when a lawman fools with a suspect. Compromising.”
She set her cup aside, took his away from him, and was suddenly in his lap with both arms around his startled shoulders as she told him in a sultry tone, “Goody! I want to compromise you!”
So he hugged her back and reeled her in so they could kiss and swab one another’s tonsils with their tongues while he slid a free hand inside her house robe to discover that she wasn’t wearing so much as a nightgown under it.
But as he ran his palm up the inside of a creamy thigh to where things felt warm and fuzzy, she pulled her face back just enough to giggle and say, “Not here! In my bed, the right way, you silly!”
So he swept her up in his arms and carried her the short way to one awesome amount of fun. She’d slipped out of her robe and slid a plump pillow under her voluptuous hips by the time he’d shucked his own duds fast. Then she wrapped her naked legs around his bare waist as he entered her with no shilly-shally as if they were old pals, though her innards were sweet, hot, unexplored territory to his raging erection, bless her rollicking rump.
To her credit, and unlike a lot of women, even women who’d come right out and told you they’d been married one time, Constance made no effort to explain how she’d learned to fornicate so swell. Nor did she comment on some positions he suggested, save to say how good they felt. But once they had to pause for their second winds long enough to share a smoke, Constance snuggled closer and said, “Now that I know you never suspected me, what on earth has been going on around here? Those crooks with C.C.H. had poor Gaylord murdered so he would never show us that simple trick with Wilkinson rails, right?”
Longarm placed the cheroot to her lush lips as he shook his head and said, “Forget that holding company entirely. I was just explaining to another curious kid how you start by eliminating everyone who has to be innocent. T.S. Nabors is a tight-fisted bargain hunter, but he’s smart. It would have been dumb to order outsiders such as that Englishman and a federal deputy murdered when he could have had nobody but your own self disappear, at half the cost and a whole lot more discreetly. You saw yourself how easy it was to have your two-faced maid drop out of sight, and the clincher is where her body wound up.”
Constance handed the smoke back, objecting, “Sarah was found on C.C.H. property, dear!”
He set the cheroot aside, saying, “By C.C.H. hired help, in the hopper of a stamping mill, for Pete’s sake. I saw what was left of a body run through such a process up near Deadwood a spell back. I knew who it was beforehand. it was just as well. There’s no way to identify a corpse chewed to bits and sort of blended with a mess of rock dust.”
She shuddered against him—it felt swell—and said, “Brr. I don’t think I’d like to be run through a stamping mill. But you just said C.C.H. owned it, remember?”
He nodded and said, “That’s what lets ‘em off. T.S. Nabors would have had to be way dumber than a mine manager ought to be if he hid a dead body in his own stamp mill and never turned on the steam engine! Think how simple it would have been for the man in charge of the whole shebang to just reduce little Sarah to nothing anyone would ever have noticed.”
She did, but demanded, “Then who, if not them?”
He said, “I was able to eliminate old Jed Nolan, cheap and greedy as he’d be as well. He was trying to hog all the cows in this park. But he hadn’t been stealing them. They were standing there in plain sight, waiting to be stolen. It’s been my experience that not even a range hog steals his own cows.”
She began to toy with the hairs on his belly as she confessed he had her totally confounded.
He took her wrist to move her hand down where it might do them both more good and told her, as she took the matter in hand, to let him start from the beginning again.
She tweaked his limp member playfully and allowed she was all ears. He said he’d get her for that and continued. “Jed Nolan was planning on an even bigger herd on more open range. His foreman, Buck Lewis, was planning on stealing the herd he had and driving ‘em over to another boom to sell ‘em sudden at a handsome price. He’d recruited Oregon John as a guide over the mountains and that drifting badman, Quicksilver Quinn, as a badman.”
“What about that mean Ginger Bancott who shot poor Gaylord?” she asked, moving her hand faster as she felt some response down yonder.
Longarm said, “Forget Ginger for now. He was just another killer on the dodge. The cow thieves never recruited him.”
She started to ask who had. He warned her to hesh and went on. “Set Ginger aside for now and come with me to the Elk Rack Hotel where a wayward gal named Tess Jennings was sleeping on the sly with yet another drifter. We’re still working on whether she’d run off from home, a husband, or a house of ill repute. She had no criminal rec ord.”
“But I thought she was that bandit Bunny McNee!” Constance protested.
He said, “Not so fast if you want me to get to the point in time. She wasn’t Bunny McNee. The real Bunny McNee is a short soft-looking lad who may or may not be a sissy as well as a bandit. As of now, nobody on our side knows where he might really be. The so far unknown saddle tramp Tess Jennings was traveling with had her dress as a man for some reason that might have made more sense to them.”
“I’ll bet she was hiding out from a jealous husband!” the young widow decided. Longarm didn’t bother to say jealous idiots had been known to act scary. They’d already talked about Will Posner.
He said, “Let’s keep on eliminating. The shabby couple must’ve been low on money but expecting some. He might have been a gambling man, hoping his luck would change. At any rate he put her into the hotel as a single, then snuck up the service stairs after dark to steal his half of a double room. You can’t hide every sin from hotel help. So they figured a young sissy boy was entertaining some brutal queer-lover, and who’s going to knock on any door at a time such as that?”
She stopped beating his meat. You had to admire a gal who knew just how to get along with a man in her bed. He knew she wanted to hear the end of his story first. So he said, “Whatever the deal, her traveling companion deserted her. He may have had to skip out on other card sharks. He might have just gotten tired of her. She wasn’t all that statuesque with her shirt open. So the poor thing was stuck there, eating in her room and putting it on the hotel tab she had no way of paying. Then she finally just tried to skip. She boarded your narrow-gauge at the last moment, and might have made it if, through no fault of your own or anyone else, your combination hadn’t been stopped by rocks on the tracks and backed up the grade with her, after the hotel had already spread the alarm. So
