by Tabor Evans
It was dark and musty at the bottom of the brick stairs. Longarm eased down them, reminded of that old song that went:
Oh the deacon went down To the cellar to pray. And he found a little jug, and he stayed all day!
But there was nothing to be seen or smelled except spiderwebs and, over on a far wall, some chalk drawings on the dark damp bricks.
Longarm moved closer and the right realistic drawing looked even dirtier. He whistled under his breath as he perused the pornographic pictures of male figures in some of the damnedest positions. None of them appealed to a man who admired women way more than shapeless men with impossible peckers and seeingly bottomless assholes.
He moved over to another flight of steps on the balls of his feet, wondering who might have drawn such dirty pictures in the cellar of a church without anybody noticing.
He eased up the steps to a closed door that might lead out to anywheres. But as he cracked it open with his own asshole puckered, he saw he seemed to be behind the altar and that made sense for the gents most likely to sneak into church this way.
Longarm moved around the high-back screen of the altar to see who else might be in church at that hour of the morning. He saw a hulking figure kneeling in a pew closer to the front door, facing the other way because he didn't seem to be praying with that pistol of his own trained on said front door!
Longarm braced his right elbow on the corner of the altar to train the muzzle of his own six-gun steady as he stated in a firm but not unkindly tone, "I got the drop on you, Bergman. Before you turn around, I want you to lay that pistol down and-"
The Black Swede spun around to fire a wild shot that was sure to throw the pipe organ out of tune. So Longarm fired before the crazy son of a bitch could figure out what he wanted to shoot at.
The big and doubtless crazy brake bull reeled but crabbed sideways out of that pew, shaking his head like an angry bull in the haze of his own gunsmoke as he screamed awful things in Swedish and fired yet another shot, into the floor between them, as Longarm blazed away to stagger him backward with six hundred grains of hot lead in him.
Gus Bergman crashed against the recently repaired front door and busted it wide open to land face up on the front steps with a peaceful expression on his ugly face at last.
Longarm strode out into the sunlight to stand over him, reloading, as he muttered, "Jesus H. Christ. How are you going to tell me what's been going on now? Didn't they ever tell you confession was good for the soul? With you dead, you son of a bitch, I'm staring at the damnedest run of pure coincidence or a plot that would cross old Machiavelli's eyes!"
By this time the whole town had come running in response to the gunplay, of course. Big Jim Tanner was first on the scene with Rita Mae Reynolds and two of her kid deputies close behind.
Longarm ignored the newspaperman's questions as the undersheriff stared down at the mess at his feet to exclaim, "I know him on sight. He works for the railroad, and we asked them to switch him to another line when he kept getting into fights. I think his name was Bergen."
Longarm said, "Bergman. I've tangled with him more recent. He was working on another spur line, and I'll be switched with snakes if I can see how anyone knew I'd be riding north that way instead of this way. I know they were watching for me around the Cheyenne railyards. But I met up with this homicidal maniac before I ever got to Cheyenne!"
Somebody in the crowd thought to ask if Preacher Shearer was all right. Longarm said he'd been next door, and there didn't seem to be anybody home.
Rita said, "There's always somebody there. Preacher Shearer has an old Indian squaw keeping house for him. We'd better find out why nobody came to the door!"
They did. Longarm said nothing about search warrants as the law that worked there forced the lock of the back door. They found the plump brown corpse of the middle-aged housekeeper face-up on the kitchen floor without a stitch of clothing on. Her throat had been slit from ear to ear. It was the shemale undersheriff who allowed right out that they'd have the county coroner determine what other crimes had been committed on or about her.
Longarm led the way forward through the house that smelled of blood and crud. He found Preacher Shearer's naked body in a front office, facedown amid blood-spattered books and papers, with a corncob shoved up his ass and a pigging-string knotted tight around his wrists. He'd been stabbed, a heap, with what looked like a Malay kris but was likely a paper knife. It was still in him, betwixt the shoulder blades.
Longarm moved quickly to the door and tried to stop Rita from entering as he tersely told her, "You're right. We'd best wait on the coroner's report, Miss Rita."
She tried to walk through him, demanding, "What happened? Why won't you let me see?"
He said, "What happened looks like the last act of Hamlet directed by the Marquis de Sade. I don't want you to see in yonder because you really don't want to see in yonder."
But she insisted and she was the law with two deputies backing her. So Longarm stood aside and braced himself to hear some screaming.
But old Rita took it like a man, or at least a lady undersheriff who took her job serious, and moved in to scout for sign, being as careful as Longarm about where she planted her feet. It was she who noticed the yellow telegram in a far corner and moved over to hunker down and read it.
Once she had, she stared up at Longarm to say, "Somebody signing his or her name Horny sent this message from Pueblo, Colorado, to this poor dead preacher man, of all people! It says plain as day that their mutual friend Ram Rogers just checked in to the Black Diamond Hotel near the depot. I don't understand this at all!"
From the doorway Big Jim Tanner said, "I think I might. I told you we print all the news that's fit to print. When they pay you to be nosy, you hear things you dare not print. Some say the preacher, there, liked young men. A lot. Young men who've spent much time in prison or hiding out together in lonely cabins tend to learn the same bad habits."
Longarm quietly said, "You told me you'd been tipping off Miss Rita to the whereabouts of wanted outlaws by comparing notes with other newspapermen. I happen to know you never got wire one about half a dozen of the rascals."
Big Jim smiled sheepishly and said, "I was coming to that. That poor twisted sister on the floor was my informant. Like a newspaperman, a preacher hears all sorts of gossip, even when he's not, ah, entertaining young saddle tramps and riders of the Owlhoot Trail."
Longarm whistled low and said, "In sum, he was nibbling on bad apples, and you were blackmailing him."
That had been a statement rather than a question. But Big Jim blustered, "The hell you say! Sorry, Miss Rita. Preacher Shearer was the one who approached me. He never said anything about being queer, and I never let on I knew. He only told me he'd heard the law was after such and such a wayward youth and thought he ought to pass on some gossip he'd heard from poor but more honest cowboys."
Rita was the one who decided, "I'm sorry I just felt sorry for the old two-faced sodomite! I see it all now! He wasn't a criminal mastermind double-crossing his followers for the loot! He was offering a hideout to like-minded outlaws passing through, then turning them in to us to shut them up forever about his depraved secret life!"
Longarm shrugged and said, "Some of the earlier ones might have liked gals. But he'd have surely noticed, the same as the rest of us, how fatal it could be to be wanted by the law in these parts!"
Rita dimpled up at him to reply, "You heard me tell Edith I meant to take Ram Rogers alive. As a matter of fact, I have just the deputy for the task. She and I were just talking about that very villain at my substation. She came up from Cheyenne to complain he'd run off with her shop girl and the contents of her till. Her name is Covina Rivers, and I'd just told her we didn't know where he was when we heard all that gunplay. Come on. I'll introduce you to her while my boys tidy up around here!"
CHAPTER 19
Miss Sarah Bernhardt could not have been a greater actress, nor the Baron Miinchhausen a bigger liar as Longarm shook with
the lady he'd spent most of the night before with in the sheriff's substation near the crossing. The Wyoming widow woman with a grudge against the wanted man who'd robbed her was smart enough just to look dumb when Rita said, a ways into their conversation, "I don't understand how a womanizing rascal who ran off with that young girl who worked for you could have been mixed up with a bunch of swishy boys."
Longarm soothed, "I can. I deal with heaps of crooks who spend as much time behind bars as out pestering women. Most of them tend to part their hair on both sides unless they mean to spend half their lives just admiring themselves, if you follow my drift."
Rita blushed and told him he was awful while Covina pretended not to understand.
She had to catch the early combination south unless she meant to wait all day for the passenger varnish to roll in and back out. Longarm excused himself well ahead of time so's the two of them could enjoy some girlish talk. He'd already instructed Covina how to wire him in code from Cheyenne, using another name, and let him know whether they'd told her to simper up to Ram Rogers and throw down at him to take him thundergasted but alive, or simply shoot him down like a dog.
He went out on the street and headed back toward the church, where most everyone else in town was still gathered.
When he got as far as the newspaper office, he turned in to see how Inky Potts felt about their earlier conversation.
She came right over to the counter, type stick in hand, to sort of whisper, even though they were alone, "I just heard some railroad man murdered Preacher Shearer and his squaw and that you'd shot it out with their killer! Is that true?"
Longarm said, "I ain't sure. I got the distinct impression Bergman was waiting for me in the church next door, with a gun. The preacher and his housekeeper were killed with a big fancy knife. After that I can't figure out how anybody connected with anybody could have known I was going to bum a ride up from Denver aboard a rattler Gus Bergman had already been assigned to police. There was a lady involved as well, and I just can't for the life of me figure out how my meeting up with her could have been ... Hold on! I just remembered something. She wasn't aboard the train when I got on. She came aboard after me! If they had her trailing me... Lord have mercy if a man can't get his brain cells stampeding in every direction if he fails to ride herd on 'em! Have you had time to dig through the morgue for me yet?"
Inky gulped and murmured, "No. I'm paid to work here. But I've been over your list of questions, and they don't look too hard to answer, if you'd care to tell me what sense they make."
He said, "I don't have time to read all the fine print on each and every issue of the Riverside News going all the way back to the last election. So I've asked you to dig out just the columns that might answer what we call key questions. I need them recent obituaries more than anything else, if you're pressed for time."
She hesitated.
He said, "I'm pressed for time, too, Miss Inky. I like to strike when the iron is hot, and the iron could be cooling a heap, even as we talk."
She reached in a pocket of her smock for a note she'd obviously composed ahead of time and gave it to him, murmuring, "Come to this address at high noon. Mr. Tanner has ordered me, directly, not to tell you anything about the way he may choose to run his own newspaper, on pain of instant unemployment. But we are talking about murder, and I guess a girl has the right to see who she wants during her own lunch hour, as long as her boss never finds out!"
So Longarm put the slip of paper away and left looking innocent. He got back to the church to find the crowd even bigger. He saw Pony Bodie and some others there, wearing guns in spite of the city ordinance passed by the ladies who ran the same.
He asked how come and Pony Bodie said, "We're fixing to posse up. Didn't you know somebody murdered the preacher and his old squaw? I just heard you were there. Wasn't that you as shot the railroad man they just carried over to the undertaker's root cellar?"
Longarm said, "You heard right about me. You're the second one who called that fat housekeeper a squaw. She'd have preferred weya if she was Lakota. I take it you all mean squaw in the sense of an unofficious but cozy situation?"
The beanpole snickered and said, "Everybody knew how cozy they was. I mean, sure, nobody ever caught them in the act. But what else would a preacher man with no wife or lady friends be doing with a squaw sharing his bed and board?"
Longarm suggested the poor old gal might have been dusting the furniture and cooking his meals for him when they weren't tearing at each other's duds. Then he went to jaw with more sensible young gents.
Nobody had uncovered any new evidence in the manse. But, by then they'd of course discovered the dirty drawings and some amazing devices made of India rubber in the cellar under the church. Longarm agreed it was sort of shocking to picture prim and proper church-goers singing hymns upstairs whilst double-gaited owlhoot riders were carrying on so wild right under them.
Longarm said he'd read about Canaanites in olden times who'd run a whorehouse smack in their temple, recruiting wives and daughters of their parish to whore with strangers for temple offerings.
The deputy he told this to said he'd always wondered how come the Lord had favored the Children of Israel over them dad-blasted Canaanites.
Longarm consulted his pocket watch as he considered all the mean things folk were capable of around churches. He saw it was going on eleven-thirty and allowed he had other chores to tend.
One involved some straight draft and a ham and cheese on rye before he decided it was safe to slip away from the center of town while so many others were busy eating.
Inky Potts seemed to live above a carriage house in cramped but private quarters up under the shingles. When she let him in, he saw she'd washed her hands and face, albeit there was still printer's ink under her nails, and she'd changed into a calico pinafore or had it on all the time under that shapeless smock.
Her shape was mighty handsome in calico with her waist cinched in like so. He didn't ask why her mousy brown but luxurious hair hung down her back to her shapely derriere. He thought it was just as well she had a job that kept her on her feet more than most women when he saw she meant to serve glazed doughnuts with chocolate milk.
As she carried the tray over, she indicated where he was to sit on the edge of a made-up cot and said, "Take off your jacket and gun, at least, and try to look guilty if anyone bursts in on us. I'd rather have Mr. Tanner think we were secret lovers than have him fire me for going against his orders!"
Longarm asked who was most likely to bust in on them as he shucked his jacket and gun belt to hang them up with his hat.
Inky said, "You wouldn't be here if I really expected to be caught with you. But a girl has to plan ahead if she means to make her way in a man's world."
Longarm told her she reminded him of a hobo gal he'd been talking to about conditions there in Wyoming Territory. As he sat down on the cot beside her, she started going into Women's Suffrage being a snare and a delusion. But he cut her off with, "I could have told you how much fun it is to bring home the bacon, Lord willing and the creeks don't rise. But that ain't what I come for, no offense. Did you get me those obituaries, at least?"
She pressed glazed doughnuts and a tall glass of chocolate milk on him as she replied, "That was easy. We enjoy a healthy climate here in Wyoming Territory, and no more than four local residents have died at all, and only one has been buried in that churchyard across from the undersheriff's house."
She inhaled some doughnut and chocolate milk while he was asking her who they might be talking about.
She said, "Mr. Nathan Hemmings, age seventy-two, with hog farming as his main occupation and pneumonia listed as the cause of death. I know it's been warm since the middle of May, but he caught a case of walking pneumonia last winter and couldn't seem to shake it before it killed him just before the Fourth of July. Is there any point to all this, Deputy Long?"
Longarm said, "Call me Custis, seeing we're secret lovers. The point may be that our hog farmer
ain't been in his grave as long as most in yonder churchyard. By dying so recent he missed the spring thaw entire."
She pondered his words, grimaced, and said, "Please, ah, Custis, not while I'm eating! I know they embalmed him and all, but he's been down there long enough to... You don't suspect he's not down there, do you?"
Longarm chuckled and told her, "That's about the only notion I've yet to consider. I'll take your word we're talking about an elderly victim of walking pneumonia who never murdered nobody and vice versa."
She said she'd brought the one tally of election results he'd asked for, adding it had been deep in the files where she doubted anybody else would ever look. He said he'd read it later. Then he took a deep breath and told her, "Miss Inky, you've been a big help and I know you don't owe me more. But I don't know who else to turn to. I know it's asking way more of you than I should. But I don't know any other gal in town I could ask, so-"
Then he noticed her hand was in his lap as she sighed and said, "You men are all alike, thank heavens. I know you've been here overnight with nobody else to turn to, thanks to our reform administration, But, honestly, can't you silly boys go more than a night or so without any? We girls do it all the time!"
Longarm gulped and declared, "That well may be. But I've noticed you shy violets seem to make up for lost time when you do get worked up!"
She giggled and said, "We're always worked up. We just don't get to show it as often or as openly as you fresh things!"
Then she had his dick out, hard, as she slid off the cot to her knees on the rug, adding, "A girl with a reputation and other unwanted results to worry about learns to bide her time. We're stronger than you men. I've been here in Wyoming since last summer, and this is the first chance I've had, thanks to that old fuss I work for!"
Then she lowered her pretty face to his lap to wet her lush lips and proceed to give him a French lesson that would have cost a week's pay in New Orleans!
As he stiffened in pleasure, surprised at how hard she had him after all that time in old Covina's experienced flesh, Longarm moaned, "Let's get undressed and do it right! I don't want to come this way, you pretty little thing!"