having ham, eggs, and chili con carne with black coffee and mince pie for breakfast. His occasional drinking companion and occasional nemesis, Reporter Crawford, hadn’t made up any lies about him this time, and whorehouse killings were only reported, if at all, on page three. So what the hell.
As he entered the marshal’s private chambers with his own smoke gripped at a jaunty angle between his grinning teeth, Longarm saw at a glance that the older lawman seated behind a cluttered desk had him beat by miles as a human volcano. The blue haze Longarm had to wade through to the leather guest chair on his side of the desk didn’t hurt his eyes half as much as the smell afflicted his nose. He knew for a fact that his boss paid more for those gnarly black cigars, and old Billy didn’t seem to think it was funny when you asked if he was smoking mummified bats or simply bat shit.
Taking a seat and blowing a bubble of sweeter smoke by far, Longarm nodded at the banjo clock on an oak- paneled wall, allowed he was sorry about arriving later than usual, and asked how soon he could go to lunch.
Vail scowled through the haze and growled, “Had you come to work any later, you’d be fixing to leave for supper! But save me the excuses. I get the morning papers delivered to my very door up on Sherman. Have you ever read about that other total asshole called Don Quixote? He went in for saving the virtue of whores too, now that I study on it!”
Longarm flicked some tobacco ash on the rug, having heard that was hard on carpet mites and seeing no ashtray on his side of the desk, and soberly replied, “Miss Baltimore Barbara wasn’t robbed of her virtue last night, Billy. She was robbed of her life, and speaking of book learning, have you ever read about that other total asshole, the Marquis de Sade? They had to lock him up to keep him from abusing gals like Baltimore Barbara, and that crazy bastard never really killed anybody!”
Vail grimaced, blew an octopus cloud of pungent smoke, and observed, “Carbonate Ned Cartier is not a prissy and long-dead Frenchman. He is a registered voter who votes the right way in Colorado, belongs to the mine owners’ association of the same, and smelts forty ounces of silver from every ton of ore he drills, blasts, and mucks up Leadville way.”
Longarm grimaced right back and replied, “Magnates such as Cartier don’t drill, blast, or muck shit. The little folks do it for them, and they get to treating little folks like shit too. He killed that poor working gal, Billy. Threw her out a window like you’d throw an empty bottle or used condom if you were a real slob!”
Vail shrugged and said, “You got him to admit it, and the D.A. is so pleased with you he’d doubtless bend over and spread his cheeks. So how did you manage that, old son? I know the papers say you confronted Cartier and his fibbing pal with the banged-up Baltimore Barbara, but that ain’t possible. I asked. They tell me at the county coroner’s she died of a busted neck and hasn’t moved from that slab in the morgue since!”
Longarm nodded, blew a playful smoke ring, and asked, “You remember that flea circus and museum of natural wonders on Larimer Street, Boss?”
Vail frowned and said, “I do. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Those fleas ain’t trained. They’re just stuck with glue to bitty toys and they pull them around as they try to get away.”
He scowled harder as he continued. “As for the natural wonders in the back, they ain’t half as natural as the fleas! I know for a fact they got this old drunk who was fired from a more famous wax museum back East. When he ain’t under the table, he whips up all those two-headed critters, mermaid mummies, and such out of beeswax and that mashy paper they use for parade floats and such.”
Longarm nodded. “I know old Abner better. One night I saved his hide from some meaner drunks when he was in no shape to fight a mean six-year-old. So he said he owed me, if ever I needed a mermaid or a two-headed crocodile. I didn’t have any use for either. But last night I recalled how you get two heads that look as if they grew out of the same critter. You make a plaster cast of the one real head, and just mix up some beeswax, tinted the same color.”
“You never!” Billy Vail shouted, grinning like a mean kid in spite of himself. “How could you pass off a death mask as a real live gal, for Pete’s sake?”
Longarm shrugged. “Never had to, up close. Old Abner means well, but he ain’t no Madame Tussaud. He just greased the dead gal’s face as she grinned up from her slab, slathered her with plaster of Paris that sets in minutes, and meanwhile, Emma Gould and her own crew were mixing beeswax with face powder on a stove up front. The morgue attendants wouldn’t let Abner cut any of the cadaver’s real hair off. But once he’d pulled the cast and used it to make a mighty off-color but passible wax mask, old Emma and her maid, Willow, gussied up Frenching Ann with a head scarf sort of hiding where her own hair met the wax edges of her new face. Old Abner naturally had crutches and such on hand as well and, hell, what more do you need, a diagram on the blackboard?”
Vail chuckled but grumbled, “You’re going to need a field mission on the double, lest they serve you that summons before we can get you out of their reach!”
Longarm blinked and asked, “Whose reach? The deal I made with the Denver P.D. was that I’d never be called before any Denver judge. They won’t need my testimony. We tricked the killer into incriminating his fool self constitutionally, with neither the use of force or the threat of force.”
Vail snapped, “Don’t teach your granny to suck eggs or lecture this old lawman on the law! I ain’t worried about you being called to the witness stand by the prosecution. Any lawyer worth his salt would surely call you as a witness for the defense!”
Longarm smiled incredulously. “That’s silly, Billy! I was nowhere near that whorehouse when Cartier killed that whore, and all I heard either him or his cellmate say was that he done it!
Vail shook his bullet head and tried to sound like a high-toned lawyer. “The jury has heard all about your Halloween prank on the defendant, Deputy Long. Now suppose you explain just why you went to so much trouble seeing you had no jurisdiction. Or was it because of your, ah, relationship with Emma Gould, the well-endowed Negress Willow Jones, and Frenching Ann? Why do they call her Frenching Ann, Deputy Long? I mean, seeing you seem to know her well enough to tear through the wee small hours playing Halloween pranks with spooky masks?”
Longarm stared aghast. “Hold on! I never in my life had any such relationship as you’re suggesting with any of them ladies! I was asked to help by Sergeant Nolan of the Denver P.D. Him and me go back a ways, ever since the two of us foiled a burglary at the Tabor mansion up on Capitol Hill.”
Vail sweetly asked in that fancy voice, “Is that why I can produce my own witnesses to the simple fact that you were traipsing up and down Larimer Street with notorious women of the town a good hour or more before you went anywhere near my client in his gloomy prison cell?”
Longarm blew smoke out both nostrils, but didn’t paw the rug with a hoof as he quietly asked, “You said you had this field mission for me, Boss?”
