Longarm hunkered down, took a deep breath, and lifted the wet cotton from the figure's head. It was even worse than he'd been set for. He'd expected little more than a blackened skull. The glass eye glaring up at him from one ash-filled eye socket took him by surprise, and together with that one gold tooth somehow made the half-cremated man seem uglier, perhaps because they lent distinctive features to what would have otherwise been a featureless charred skull.
Looming over Longarm for his own first look at this particular victim, Sergeant Nolan proved he rated his stripes when he took a few thoughtful moments and declared, "Faith. I know many a man with one gold tooth up front like that, and there's more than one poor drifter with a glass eye. But would you like to strike a match a bit closer to that handsome face?"
Longarm did it, but he didn't like it much. The heat or perhaps the collapse of the ruins had cracked the glass eye staring wildly up from the charcoal remains, but you could see it was almost jade green.
Nolan nodded. "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be Brick Flanders in the charred flesh. Sure, they'd told us he'd been seen around Denver last month, and Widow Dugan has taken in disreputable roomers before!"
Longarm shook out the waterproof Mexican match and moved the damp sheeting further out of the way as he muttered, "Let's hold our fire till we see if this one's wearing that famous ring."
As Longarm thumbnailed another light further down the charred corpse Nolan confided to the fire marshal, "They say Brick boasted of having taken a family seal ring from a Union officer at Chambersburg. Himself having ridden as a Confederate irregular before he went entirely bad and all and all."
The fire marshal naturally asked who in thunder they could be jawing about. So Nolan explained, "The green-eyed and red bearded cuss was wanted for everything but singing 'The Yellow Rose of Texas.' So how might we be coming with that signet ring, Longarm?"
The federal deputy got rid of that second match as he rose to his full imposing height and replied, "He lost his famous beard in the fire, and it didn't do his cock and balls a lick of good either. But that distinctive ring on one claw, together with the gold tooth and green glass eye, makes me strongly suspect this burnt bastard has to be Brick Flanders or somebody a whole lot like him."
He pointed at the girl still cuffed to the fire engine across the way as he continued. "Pending further evidence to the contrary, gents, I suggest you let Miss Lopez go, with one handsome apology, before she takes it in her head to sue the city, county, and entire state for calling her a suspicious greaser."
The fire marshal protested, "She is a suspicious greaser, and the only suspect we have for setting this mighty suspicious fire!"
Longarm insisted, "I can promise you it wasn't a poor but honest hired gal, without even checking her simple alibi. Rosalinda Lopez may have her faults, but she wasn't wanted by the law until just a few minutes ago. So why would she want to murder a wanted outlaw and set fire to the place she lived and worked in as a cover for no crime at all? Brick Flanders was wanted seriously, dead or alive, by four states and the Pinkertons. The federal government wanted a few words with him about a post office robbery as well."
Nolan nodded thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. No matter what she did to him or how she phrased it, she'd have had no sensible reason for refusing to accept the hearty congratulations and handsome bounty money that would have gone with his demise in any way, shape, or form!"
The fire marshal tried, "Maybe she ain't all that sensible, and a firebug in the hand is worth two in the bush! This mysterious glass-eyed cuss wasn't the only one done to a turn in them flames after a mighty determined arsonist poured something like Greek Fire around inside, padlocked the doors on the outside, and... Let me see. I reckon a lit candle, burning down to some tinder in a corner, would have given her time to traipse all the way over to that Mex dance before anyone noticed, don't you?"
Longarm shook his head and said, "Nope. If they back her about the time she'd have arrived and the time the party busted up after three A.M., your notion just gets too risky. Without jumping to half as many conclusions, I'm betting on the coroner's team telling us this one cadaver was good and dead before the fire started. But the other victims appear to have been awakened by the flames, not too drunk, drugged, or even sleepy to have piled up on the wrong side of that padlocked door. I'd only be guessing about how much money old Brick here had left from that payroll robbery up near Fort Collins. But they rode off with heaps of hundred-dollar treasury notes, and last I heard, only a few of 'em had been cashed."
The fire marshal pointed wearily at the still-glowing embers of the Dugan house. "You can kiss any paper money anyone had in there good-bye then."
Longarm frowned. "I hadn't finished. I vote we turn a mighty upset as well as innocent gal loose. What do you gents need, a diagram on the blackboard? A wanted outlaw, last seen packing a tidy fortune in handy treasury notes, is killed by a person or any number of persons unknown, who then help themselves to his money and set fire to his rooming house to confound us, as they have, on the way off to parts unknown."
Nolan stared soberly at what remained of the front doorjamb, a few yards away, as he made the sign of the cross and marveled out loud, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what sort of a nasty devil would burn other innocent souls alive just to make sure this one body here might pass as another victim?"
To which Longarm could only reply, "I'd say you described such a killer or killers about right, Sarge."
CHAPTER 2
Any lawman worth his salt knew something about tracking down outlaws through dusty file cabinets and desk clutter. But Longarm felt he read sign better in the field, and nobody ordered him to delve deeper into the mysterious fire, once the local law had declared it a serious violation of the Denver Municipal Code and the county coroner had confirmed that the glass-eyed cuss had a.36-caliber bullet in his well-baked brain. For everyone agreed with Longarm's notion that some false-hearted pal had killed an outlaw on the dodge for his money and lit out after that clumsy but downright vicious attempt to cover up.
The same logic Longarm had used to clear Rosalinda Lopez seemed to indicate the killer or killers of an outlaw wanted dead or alive had to be a wanted outlaw or wanted outlaws as well. Grim autopsies of the other bodies hauled from the burnt-out rooming house established the old widow woman, along with a neighborhood loafer she either slept with now and again or hired on and off, had died in the fire with four roomers Rosalinda could name, whether they'd been using their real names or not. One of them, old Brick Flanders, had told everyone to call him Calvert Tyger, which had been not only a mite dramatic, but the name of another owlhoot rider entirely last heard of during his funeral oration down Durango way. The other three roomers with any call to have been upstairs in the wee small hours when the fire was set had all died with Widow Dugan and her lover cum hired hand. Meaning the one hired gal who'd survived had never seen the killer or killers. A good two dozen witnesses, some of them Anglo and none known to be murderous arsonists, verified where the Mexican gal had been both before and after anyone could have set fire to the place she worked and lived in. Longarm had felt it only right to put the homeless gal up until she found herself another place to stay and, as it turned out, another job, which she did in twelve hours or so. Young gals who seemed willing to work that hard for little more than their room and board were sort of tough to come by since the Great Depression of the '70s had commenced to fade from recent memory.
So Longarm was working on another chore entirely a few mornings later, and hardly remembering Rosalinda Lopez, when he found his way across Colfax Avenue suddenly blocked by a one-horse shay pulling out of the morning traffic to stop with one wheel rim threatening his balls if he stepped off the granite curb. He took a step back, and would have said something mighty impolite if he hadn't noticed, just in time, who'd been driving that fool shay.
The young widow of a rich old mining magnate could have shown up in a coach and four with a posse of flunkies. But Longarm had noticed she seemed a tad shy about being seen with him by broad day on the public streets of Denver. A week ago she'd allowed she'd as soon never see him anywhere at all, and this morning he saw she'd draped a heavier veil than usual from the brim of her black velvet hat. So he just ticked his own hat brim to her and waited to see if she meant to pull a gun on him or just drive on.
She did neither. She sighed and said, "Come closer, you silly. I don't want to shout at you in the middle of town at this hour!"
Longarm moved closer and rested one booted foot between the rungs of the curbside wheel as he mildly inquired what she wanted to say to him discreetly.
The widow woman with the light brown hair smiled timidly through her veil, "I'm not going to say I'm sorry. It's your very own fault you have such a dreadful reputation, and I still think I was right about you and that Chinese waitress that time. But, well, I guess I bought some malicious gossip about you and that librarian they said you'd walked home after closing hours."
Longarm shrugged and said, "I did walk the lady home, Her quarters weren't all that far from the library, but it was getting dark and she allowed she was new in Denver. Did your back-fence biddies tell you I walked her home more than once?"
The widow woman nodded soberly and replied, "That's not all they told me you and that henna-rinsed hussy had been up to. And you heard me tell you never to darken my door again."
Longarm shrugged and asked, not unkindly, whether anyone had seen him lurking about her brownstone mansion up on Capitol Hill.
She replied with a strangled sob, "No, and it's starting to hurt around bedtime! So all right, I was wrong about where you spent last Thursday night. My biddies, as you so rightly called them just now, told me you'd been seen taking that librarian home after work, and not coming out of her place again until at least as long as a certain gathering down that same block lasted."
Longarm nodded and answered easily, "We noticed all them old hens sipping tea on that front veranda in the cool shades of the gloaming. We've established I walked that librarian home from her new job more than once. Are you asking whether she likes to get on top like some folks I know?"
The young widow he knew well indeed seemed flustered. "Custis! Don't talk that way in broad daylight! I know you didn't spend the night with her, as I was told. I read all about it in the Rocky Mountain News!"
Longarm laughed incredulously and replied, "The time I left a library gal alone and chaste as ever was in the newspapers? Well, I never. I've told them reporters to quit making up tall tales about me lest they get me killed the way they did poor Jim Hickok. Where did it say I'd made a play for that new gal in town?"
The gal he'd been going to town with longer laughed despite it all and declared, "You big oaf! I meant that front-page story about you investigating the mysterious deaths by fire in your own neighborhood. I mean, if you were helping them put out the fire at four A.M., you could hardly have been where those ever-so-helpful friends of mine told me you were, could you?"
To which Longarm could only modestly reply, "I was asleep in my very own bedding when the fire engines woke me up and I done what I had to. Where did your own pals tell you I was spending my lonesome night?"
She sighed. "They were just jealous of another poor widow woman's good fortune, I suppose. Am I forgiven, Custis?"
He chuckled fondly and said, "Sure. You forgave me for that gal who slings hash at the Golden Dragon, didn't you?"
She started to say something meaner, sighed again, and told him she'd be expecting him that evening for a late supper, after things got sort of quiet up along Sherman Street. Then she snapped her buggy whip coyly, and drove on before he could tell her he wasn't certain he'd be free for the evening.
He figured he would be, unless he got lucky. But it seemed sort of reckless to commit oneself to a late supper before knowing who one might or might not meet at noon for dinner.
He went on to serve the federal warrant his superiors at the Federal Building had wanted him to. There was only a little cussing and no real physical danger involved in hauling a rich mining man into federal court on a claim filed under false pretense. But a man had to think ahead if he didn't aim to be saddled with even less interesting chores, and so, seeing the morning was well worn down by the time he'd caught up with that mining man in his private club, Longarm ambled over to a drinking establishment open to the public. It was handy to his office and famous for the swell free lunches they served with moderately priced drinks.
Like many more respectable saloons in towns even smaller than Denver, the Denver Parthenon had side entrances and private rooms toward the back for more discriminating gents and all womankind. So Longarm wasn't too surprised to be told by a swamper, as he was stuffing his face with beer and pickled pig's knuckles at the main bar, that some lady wanted to see him in one of their Private chambers. That was what they called the cubbyholes stuffed with small tables and firmly padded benches.
Hanging on to his beer schooner, but swallowing all the free lunch in his mouth, Longarm followed the swamper back towards the crappers, tipped a whole dime once he'd been shown the right door, and went on in to find himself staring down in Some confusion at the severely uniformed Miss Morgana Floyd, head matron of the orphan asylum out Arvada way. As if to prove that Mother Nature tended to share her favors fairly, the somewhat younger petite brunette, who'd also told Longarm not to darken her door, was built way smaller across the hips than the Capitol Hill widow woman, and Longarm recalled her breastworks as a tad perkier, if smaller. Though if push came to shove, that widow woman had a prettier face to admire, especially while she was doing all the work on top. But little Morgana was a kissable head-turner in her own right.