Once they were married, she soon realized that his business enterprises were all confidence games. Not only was
he
a crook, so were all his important-acting friends. And even more, he enjoyed cheating people out of their money. He and his friends laughed long and drunkenly into the night, exactly like boastful children, about this or that scam and how much they’d enjoyed pulling it.
She took a teaching job and prayed a lot. Went to three, four masses a week, hoping that God would answer her prayers and turn David into a decent man.
One night, he asked her to deliver some papers to a certain address. She didn’t want to, but he berated her enough that she finally gave in. The papers turned out to be forgeries of bank documents. When the mark went to the police, he described not only David but David’s “accomplice,” Callie. Thus she became a wanted felon. She found a lawyer and instituted a divorce proceeding. And then she fled Chicago before she could be arrested.
***
“A year later, I met you.”
“I appreciate you telling me.”
“I’ve destroyed your life, Lane. I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “I agree with the monsignor. We need to wait and see how this thing turns out. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Work? But you resigned.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t nose around and ask questions. Besides, I want to see what Edgar’s got in mind.” I told her about my meeting with Bayard.
“He didn’t even give you a hint?”
“No.”
“I want to help.”
“You can help by writing down everything you did yesterday. Write the times down, too, as close as you can remember them. And mention everybody you saw everywhere you went.”
“I don’t know if I can. After everything that happened- it’s all sort of a jumble.”
‘Try. You maybe saw somebody who might prove important and we don’t know it yet.”
She came over and sat on my lap. The rocking chair squeaked. We rocked for a good long time without saying anything. Her head was on my shoulder. The scent of her hair in my nostrils was pretty damned wonderful.
I gave up any hope of relaxing, even here in the rocking chair. I was formulating all sorts of ways Stanton could have been murdered and by who.
***
I spent the first hour in town getting stopped by people telling me they wished I haven’t resigned and that they sure hoped I’d reconsider. I appreciated their words, but at the moment I wanted only one thing and that was to find Ned Hastings.
I had no luck at his hotel, at any of the saloons, at the barbershop or the livery. Hadn’t been there.
I walked into the section where the vice was contained. Barbara Parsons ran the most popular of the three whorehouses. The place was open only at night. I found Barbara in the backyard behind the two-story white-frame structure, tending, as usual on a warm day, to her garden.
She was a slender little thing of sixty-some years. She wasn’t pretty, but she managed to make herself attractive by dressing in proper Eastern clothes. She had a yellow dress on. A merry yellow ribbon decorated the right side of her graying head. She was using a pink can to sprinkle water on her chrysanthemums.
“Looks good,” I said.
“Me or the flowers?”
“You are a flower, Barbara. A beautiful, elegant flower.”
“And you are a bullshit artist, Lane Morgan.”
I laughed. “My mama taught me to always be polite to ladies.”
“Well, then you don’t need to worry about me. I’ve never been a lady in my life.” She covered her green eyes from the sun and peered at me. “I heard you quit.”
“Yeah.”
“I also heard that your wife may be in some trouble.”
Enough preamble. “I’m looking for Ned Hastings.”
“Then you came to the right place.”
I’d expected her to say, at best, that he’d been there and gone. “He’s here?”
“Upstairs. Still unconscious from last night.”
“I didn’t know you allowed sleep-overs.”
“I don’t usually. But I didn’t feel like throwing him in a wagon and hauling his skinny ass back to his hotel.”
“What about Richard?” He was her colored bouncer and factotum. “Doesn’t he usually haul the unconscious ones away?”
“Richard’s a mite indisposed himself. Went to a colored whorehouse in Denver his last trip and picked up a very bad case of the syph. He’s back in Denver now bein’ treated for it. I sure wish he’d get his ass back here. I need him.”
“Mind if I go see Hastings?”
“No roughhousing. I’ve got a lot of nice things in my house and I mean to keep them nice.”
“I just want to have a little talk with him.”
“I hear he’s the one who claims your wife killed Stanton.”
I nodded. “ Stanton ever come here?”
“Just once.”
“You talk to him?”
“Not much. He was real interested in Irene.”
“Guess I’m not sure which one she is.”
“She’s new. Little blonde. Looks like she’s about thirteen or fourteen. She’s actually seventeen. Some fellows like ’em young like that. Seems to give ’em an extra kick for some reason.”
“She around?”
“Should be. Turns out Hastings is one of them who likes his pussy young, too. He kept her up till damned near dawn.”
“Any trouble with him?”
She smiled. “Not that he wasn’t willing to pay for.” Then: “Fact, the little blonde tells me he had a nice pocket full of gold pieces.”
“Wonder where he got ’em.”
She shrugged. “A business like mine, Lane, you never ask. All you care about is if they’ve got it.”
***
The interior of the house was as tasteful as Barbara Parsons’s wardrobe. All very proper furnishings, and a nice big fieldstone fireplace in the parlor where the gentlemen sat as the girls came down for inspection. The framed prints were of idyllic New England scenes. Barbara’s only visible sentimental streak had to do with her girlhood in Vermont.
Most of the girls were gone. They spent a lot of time shopping. Most folks didn’t bother them. There’d been a few incidents, but I was able to get the self-righteous back in their cages before any serious damage was done.
Hastings wasn’t hard to find. I followed the noise on the second floor, his snoring. I peeked in on him. He lay on his back, shirtless, in trousers. A few black flies supped on what appeared to be wine. His near-hairless chest was purple and looked sticky.
I went down to the end of the hall, knocked on the door Barbara had told me to. “Uh-huh.” That was all the acknowledgment I got. I pushed the door open. She sat in a satin sleeping dress. She was a bit thinner than I liked my women, but she had a face that had probably broken a thousand hearts, all clean-scrubbed innocence just waiting to be defiled.
“Hi, Marshal. I seen you out the window. Talking to Barbara.”
I tried hard not to notice her nipples beneath the sheer material. She had a kid grin. “Should I cover up more since you’re the law?”
“I’m not the law anymore.”
Her fetching blond head gave a start. “How come?”
“Long story. Not worth going through. So I have to tell you that legally you don’t have to answer any of the questions I ask you.”
She was shining a pair of fancy black shoes, her small hands quick and deft with the rag. “Barbara bought me these here in Denver.”
“Nice.”
“Comfortable, too.” The kid grin again. “You always hear how we spend so much time on our backs. But we also spend a lot on our feet. It’s kinda funny how that works out.” Then: “So what kinda questions’re you gonna ask me?”
“About Ned Hastings.”
“Oh.” Disappointment in her voice. “He sure does think a lot of himself.”
“How so?”
“Big plans. He told me he’s gonna have a gunfight with you and then go into a Wild West Show somewhere.”
“What else did he say?”
She shrugged small, pale, erotic shoulders. “He said he was gonna have a lot of money when he left this town.”
“He say where he was going to get it?”
“Not really. He started to a couple of times-he was pretty drunk-but then he stopped himself.”
“He didn’t give you a hint or anything?”
“No. I thought he might. But that’s when he started getting sick all the time. I kept running him up and down the stairs. Barbara, she always says get them out the back door and on the grass if they want to puke. She says you stink up a house with puke enough, it always stinks like puke.”
“You told Barbara he had a lot of money.”
“A lot of money for somebody like him. Near as I could figure out, he’s just this drifter with a big mouth and a pretty high opinion of himself. Havin’ that much money on him kinda surprised me.”
“It surprises me, too.”
“When I worked in a Kansas City whorehouse, I spent a night with a couple bank robbers. I was wonderin’ if maybe he held up a bank, Ned, I mean.”
I kept trying to figure out how old she was. Barbara had said seventeen. If that was true, and she’d already put in some time in a Kansas City whorehouse, she’d sure started young.
“Well, I guess it’s time to go pay him a visit.”
“He smells pretty bad. I thought of maybe cleanin’ him up a little. But when I got in there with a washrag and some soap, he just stunk too bad.”
“I’ll hold my breath.”
That grin again. “You’ll need to.”
Turned out, she wasn’t exaggerating. Ned Hastings was apparently one of those young men who didn’t take much to bathing. I got a window open, and then I went over and emptied his boots. A hefty sum of gold eagles fell out, clattering to the floor. His eyelids fluttered. But the noise didn’t deter the steady annoying sound of his snoring.
I emptied his gun just as I had yesterday, and then pitched it on the bed next to him. There was tepid water in the bureau pan. I carried it over to him and dumped it on his face. He must have had some night. Not even the water roused him right away. Usually a man would jerk straight up when you woke him that way. He just made some groggy noises and started wiping the water from his face. “What the hell,” he said.
“Wake up, Ned.”
“Who is it?”
“Sit up and find out.”
“How come you poured water on me for?”
“Because I couldn’t get you awake otherwise.”
“You sonofabitch.”
“Sit up, Ned. Now.”
“Hey,” he said, recognizing my voice. “You’re that damned town marshal.”
Sitting up was a struggle. Getting his eyes open was even more of a struggle. “Hey,” he said once he saw me.
“Hey.”
“You sonofabitch.”
“You know somethin’? You’re almost as aggravating asleep as you are awake.”
“What the hell’s that mean?”
“It means you snore.”
And then he remembered his money. And flung himself on the floor to grab his boot and stuff his hand down inside. “It’s all there,” I said.
“It damn well better be.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“None of your business.”
“Paul gave it to you, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know no Paul.”
I couldn’t take it any longer. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe I just didn’t want to take it anymore. I was sick of his face and sick of his smell and sick of him. I stood up, walked over to him, grabbed his wet hair, and slammed his head against the edge of the bureau. I slammed it twice more.
“You’ve been telling lies about my wife, Hastings. That’s what Webley paid you to do. If I hear you talking about her again, I’m going to break you up into little pieces.”
I gave him a demonstration. I kicked him hard in the ribs. He doubled over.
“You understand?”
He started crying. He sounded young and scared. But there wasn’t any pleasure in it for me. At this moment there wasn’t any pleasure in anything. My life had been so sweet and uncomplicated since I’d met Callie. And now it had all changed. And maybe it wouldn’t ever change back.
There was no sense in talking to him any longer. He knew what he’d done and so did I. Even if he admitted that Webley had paid him to lie, all Webley had to do was deny it.
“You sonofabitch,” he said, crying.
Irene was in the door. “Gosh, Marshal, what did you do to him?” You could tell she felt sorry for him.
“Not anything half as bad as he did to my wife.”
He puked all over himself then, sitting there Indian-legged on the floor, his one boot knocked over on its side, all the gold eagles spilled out like the innards of a cornucopia.
She went over and knelt down next to him and said, “You sure do like to puke.” He kept on crying. He was coming off a mighty drunk. You saw men like that sometimes in the morning in the cell we keep for drunks. Confused and ashamed and scared about the night before. They cry like six-year-olds.
I liked her for taking care of him. She was as mercenary as all whores have to be, but she hadn’t yet lost all of her tenderness. Kneeling next to him, enduring the stench of his fresh vomit, stroking his head, she could have been his sister or his wife.
***
From Barbara’s I walked back to town. Paul’s surrey passed me at one point. He gave me a mocking little nod. Next to him sat his store-window wife looking too severely beautiful to be quite earthly. She didn’t give me a nod, mocking or otherwise.