Slocum and the Larcenous Lady Read online

  The barkeep didn’t flinch. It was apparent this wasn’t the first time he’d seen his boss drunk, and it wasn’t the first time Chandler had yelled at him, either. He asked, “Just wanted to see if you gents were in the mood for some lunch. We got some nice roast beef and fried chicken, and—”

  “Go away!” Chandler roared.

  But Slocum reached out and caught the retreating bartender’s arm. “You got bread and mustard to go with that beef?” he asked.

  “Yessir, fresh baked this morning.”

  “I’ll take a nice thick beef sandwich, then. And a beer to go with it.” He turned back to Chandler. “Hate to call an end to drinkin’ this good whiskey, but I’d best get some rib-stickin’ food into me, or I’ll pass out before nightfall!”

  Chandler seemed to consider this for a moment before he yelled across the bar, “Hey you!” He appeared to have forgotten the bartender’s name. “I’ll have the same!”

  “Yessir, Mr. Chandler,” came the muted reply.

  “Better damned well be ‘yessir,’ ” Chandler muttered, barely loud enough for Slocum to hear.

  But he did hear it, and he made a mental note.

  Tiger Lil, bathed and dressed and ready for the day in a deep purple silk dress, sashayed downstairs at roughly noon. She expected to find David Chandler waiting on the porch and was surprised when he wasn’t there. The desk clerk appeared from somewhere—possibly the saloon, because she couldn’t imagine him straying any farther from his post—stepped up on the porch, and tipped his hat.

  “Afternoon, Miss Lil,” he said amiably. “Bet you’re looking for Mr. Chandler.”

  “As a matter of fact, Walt, I—” she began before he broke in.

  “He’s over to the saloon, drinking with that fella who rode in yesterday,” he said. “The one who said he knew you?”

  Lil gave her brow an indifferent hike. “If you knew how many times I’ve heard that . . .” she said, and then was drowned out by the clatter of the stagecoach rumbling and banging its way past her en route to the depot.

  She pulled out a hankie and made a show of dusting her bodice and dabbing at her face. “Beastly things,” she said as she watched the coach draw to a halt before its destination: the Butterfield office.

  It was probably packed full of people come to town to see her, she realized. At least, it had been every day so far. They’d had to put on an extra stage each day, just to accommodate her loyal fans.

  Such as they were.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” the desk clerk said automatically, as if he should have controlled the stagecoach, but couldn’t. She could tell he was as besotted with her as the rest of the town.

  She smiled at him rather kindly and said, “Oh, my! It’s not your fault, dear.”

  At that “dear,” the man nearly keeled over. Well, she thought, he wobbled a little. She added, “I don’t mean to keep you from your work, then.”

  She made a classy exit, she thought, and walked up the sidewalk, toward the saloon.

  Up at the Butterfield depot, a man got off with five others. All six had shared the crowded conveyance for no other reason than to see and hear the famous Tiger Lil. The sixth, for one, was sick of listening to tales of her legendary beauty, her nightingale voice, and her fabled charm.

  Bill Messenger stepped away from the others, who milled on the sidewalk, and brushed the stink of travel and too many unwashed bodies off his clothes.

  Or tried to.

  He didn’t have much success. Finally, he picked up his carpetbag and left his companions without a word or a backward glance. He didn’t know them. A bunch of dirt farmers come to gawk, that’s what they were.

  Oh, he hadn’t said a word, but he was here to see Tiger Lil, too, but for a very different reason.

  He was going to kill her.

  He walked down the center of the dusty street, taking in the town, taking in the poster of her in front of the saloon with a single, disapproving grunt, and made his way into the hotel.

  “May I help you?” the clerk asked.

  “Need a room,” Messenger said flatly. “For two days, no more.”

  “Very good, sir,” the clerk said, and swiveled the book toward him so that he could sign it. “That’ll be fifty cents a day, in advance, if you don’t mind. Bath’s another fifty, or you can get one down to the barbershop for a quarter. You just come in on the stage?”

  “Yeah,” said Messenger as he signed the ledger. John Smith. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a half buck in change, and added, “Believe I’ll head down to the barbershop. And it’ll be just the one day.”

  The clerk quickly eyed the ledger and said, “Yessir, Mr. Smith. That’ll be number fourteen, when you get back. Nice view of the main street.”

  Messenger nodded. “Thanks.”

  As he headed back for the door, the clerk called, “Dining room’s right here.” He pointed toward the wide pocket doors and the large room beyond. “And next door’s the saloon. You’re in for a treat, if you like singing, or just looking. We’ve got Miss Tiger Lil Kirkland performing two shows a night. The one and only Tiger Lil, herself!”

  Messenger hesitated and turned his head from the dining room doors, back toward the clerk. “Saw the sign,” he said flatly and walked out the door.

  He headed down the street to the barbershop. Three years back, Lil had taken him for every cent he was worth, but he still had the feeling that she shouldn’t be shot by a grimy man. Didn’t seem right somehow, no matter how low she’d turned out to be.

  No, a man should be clean all over and shaved when he killed her.

  It just seemed fitting.

  Lil stood inside the batwing doors of the Poleaxe Saloon, her arms crossed, her head slowly shaking as she looked across the expanse at David Chandler’s private table.

  There sat David and Slocum, drunker than two lords, trying to fight their way through two of the thickest roast beef sandwiches she’d ever seen. It wouldn’t be too swift an idea to let them know she was there, she figured. In their condition, who knew what they were apt to say? Or what Slocum might let slip!

  Besides, the whole thing ticked her off. They weren’t supposed to be palling around like this!

  David was supposed to be pining away while he waited for her answer, and Slocum was supposed to be drooling over her, in absentia.

  Humph!

  Luckily, besides the two men and the barkeep, the place was deserted, and she slipped back out onto the walk undiscovered. She huffed a little sigh again, at the same time shrugging her shoulders, and turned back toward the hotel.

  But only turned, because she was immediately caught up in what seemed a sea of men: groveling men, scraping and bowing men.

  Now, this was more like it!

  “Hello, boys,” she said with a broad, inviting smile.

  One man managed to croak out, “M-m-miss Lil!”

  If Chandler was too drunk to take her for one of those damned buggy rides and plead for her hand until she wanted to slug him, and Slocum was too sozzled to show her any fun in the bedroom, well then, she’d just have to make her own fun, wouldn’t she?

  And there was nothing she liked better than a pack of fawning men.

  “I was just going up to the hotel dining room to have my midday repast,” she said rather grandly, and began to stroll.

  They followed along like a swarm of gnats, as she knew they would: buzzing and flitting and tripping over their words—and feet.

  She found it amusing. And also comforting, in a way.

  She stopped walking, and so did they. “Would you gentlemen care to join me?” she asked with a finger to her chin—and just the right amount of naïveté. “I’ll bet you fellows just got off that stage, and also I’ll bet you’re as hungry as a bunch of billy goats.”

  This actual invitation—even though that billy goat remark had been vaguely insulting—set them into an even greater flurry of excitement. She counted heads. There were five of them, each one more awestruck and eager t
han the next. And each head was bare, for they all held their hats in their hands as they nodded, suddenly too shy to talk.

  Well, hell. She might even spring for their meal. Farmers, by the look of them. They probably didn’t have a hotel meal more often than every five years or so. If that.

  If Slocum and David could get drunk on their butts in the middle of the day, she could, by God, play Lady Bountiful for one afternoon!

  Besides, her ego could use a few strokes.

  10

  It was close to nightfall, and Charlie, who had been careful to fix up some fences before he came in with the other hands, paced the floor of the bunkhouse.

  “All that walkin’ ain’t gonna cook it any faster,” Cookie grumped from beside the iron stove. He was making beef stew—again—and he was just tossing in a bowl’s worth of raw, sliced carrots.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Charlie said and pushed his way past Pete to go have another look down the road to town.

  But it was empty. Stark, bare, empty.

  He couldn’t believe that nobody had come to tell them that their boss had been killed. Well, actually, he couldn’t believe that he’d missed, that was the truth of it. But he must have, because there sure wasn’t anybody coming from town.

  Of course, he thought, mayhap Chandler wasn’t dead. Yet. Maybe they didn’t want to alarm the ranch unnecessarily.

  But why the hell not? Charlie ground his teeth. He wasn’t that bad a shot, was he?

  He should have waited to see Chandler fall. He should have been made of sterner stuff. He had been, once, long ago, during the war.

  He’d probably been a better shot then, too . . .

  No! Hadn’t he dropped that mountain lion with one shot just last year? It was nearly as far away from him as Chandler had been.

  Well, maybe the cat had been a tad closer.

  Still, it was beyond him that nobody had sent word that if Chandler wasn’t dead, he was, at least, mortally wounded. What kind of a lousy, heartless town was Poleaxe, anyhow?

  Ed Riley came out of the barn and headed toward him. Ed was a bull of a fellow, dark-haired and swarthy complected. His daddy might have been Irish, but his mama had been something else entirely.

  “What you doin’ out here, Charlie?” he asked.

  Charlie remembered when everybody used to call him “Mr. Townsend.” It still rankled, being one of the hired help.

  But he didn’t let on. He said, “Just killin’ time. Cookie’s still butcherin’ the steer.”

  Ed laughed, a rough, deep sound. “Well, believe I’ll go in anyway. I was whitewashin’ the damn corral fences all morning and pitchin’ hay all afternoon long, and I’m past tired.”

  Charlie grunted, and Ed walked away without further comment.

  Once Ed was out of earshot, Charlie muttered, “That’ll be about the last time you get to call me ‘Charlie,’ Ed.”

  He momentarily forgot that he didn’t have the wherewithal to buy back the Circle C. He momentarily forgot that he didn’t own it already, just by the force of his having the guts to pull the trigger this afternoon. And for a moment, he was actually happy.

  As happy as Charlie Townsend ever was, anyway.

  It never lasted too long.

  Bill Messenger ate his supper not at the hotel but down the street at a dingy little cubbyhole called Mandy’s Kitchen. If the kitchen was as grubby as the dining room—or what they laughingly called the place were he, along with six strangers, sat at one long, scarred table—he’d rather not know about it.

  He was cleaned and shaved, had gone down to the livery and checked it out for tomorrow night, just in case he was still in town, and had been in and out of his hotel room twice without catching sight of Lil.

  Which as a good thing. Considering what he had in store for her, that was.

  At least, that’s what he told himself. Secretly, he was half afraid that she wouldn’t even recognize him when she saw him. Sure, she’d bilked quite a few men in her day, but a fellow liked to think he was special.

  He snorted, and the man next to him, a short, balding fellow in a suit that had seen better days, said, “Beg pardon, mister?”

  “Nothin’,” Bill Messenger mumbled, and looked away. “Didn’t say nothin’ at all.” Sure, he’d be out of here before anybody knew what had happened, but it never paid to make a point of being seen, of standing out.

  Especially in a little town where probably half the current population, if not more, had come to see Lil perform.

  They didn’t know the half of it. If they could have seen the continuing performance that Lil had put on with him, they would have cheered and whistled for a week straight. They’d have called her the greatest actress of the age.

  She’d hustled him, plain and simple, and slick and slippery as a bucket full of eels. She’d spent a week in town—that was back up in Cheyenne—batting her eyelashes and promising him her hand, and everything that went along with it. And the next thing he knew, he was married and she was gone—along with everything he owned in this world.

  And he’d been so ashamed of his damned stupidity, so humiliated to have fallen for her line, that he’d left town and tried to disappear.

  But he only sank further and further into poverty and a whiskey bottle before he did something really stupid. Over in the Dakotas, close to the Black Hills, he’d tried to hold up a stagecoach.

  Tried, that was the operative word. He’d been drunk as a lord at the time, and the stage driver had put a stop to his short-lived career as a highwayman—and nearly his life—with one bullet.

  Well, he didn’t limp anymore.

  And he’d served his time in prison. Got six months knocked off for good behavior, too.

  He’d stopped drinking, as well, stopped cold. That was the only good thing he could think of about prison, other than it gave a man time to mull things over, time to plot out his revenge; time to kick himself up one side and down the other for his mistakes.

  That was, when he wasn’t getting kicked around by the other inmates.

  Or the guards.

  When he’d gotten out, the first thing he’d done was to track down Lil. His wife.

  Now, that was a laugh, wasn’t it? She was probably already married to half the men in the West. The ones worth the taking, that was.

  The waiter began bringing bowls out from the kitchen. They served family style at Mandy’s Kitchen, and although he had his doubts about the sanitation, at least they served a lot.

  Actually, the food was pretty good: big, heaping bowls of mashed potatoes and green beans with bacon; platters heaped with peppered pork chops; boats of pork gravy; plates of carrots and celery and sweet pickles and beets. But Messenger was so caught up in his thoughts, both of the past and what he was about to do, that he barely noticed.

  He pushed back his chair when they finally brought out the dessert, and left the café while the other patrons descended on the cherry and apple pies like vultures.

  He had a full evening ahead of him.

  David Chandler, sobered by a big lunch and almost two pots of coffee, ran a brush over his hair one more time, tugged at his jacket, and fussed with his tie, even though it didn’t need fussing with.

  This was it. A truly momentous occasion.

  Straightening his shoulders, he took a deep breath, then walked from his room, up the hall to Lil’s, and rapped at the door.

  He didn’t know if he was more excited or terrified. In a few moments, he would know—with absolute certainty—what his future held.

  The door opened slowly, and there was Lil, absolutely resplendent in a russet gown, its neckline cut low to reveal the deep shadow of her décolletage. Despite himself, he gulped like a boy.

  Lil smiled and came out into the hall, out to him. “Hello, David, dear,” she purred.

  Inside, he went all to mush. On the outside, things were a little stiffer.

  He offered his arm.

  Smiling, she slipped hers through it and laid her little hand over his w
rist.

  He began, “Lil, my dearest—”

  But she hushed him with a finger to his lips. “It’s not quite six yet, David.”

  She was going to drag it out to the end, wasn’t she? But he said, “Yes, my love. I can wait ten minutes longer.”

  He made a show of slipping the watch from his pocket, checking the time, and then said, “Eight and a half, to be precise.”

  She laughed and hugged his arm tighter, pressing her breasts against his arm, deepening the shadow of her cleavage. Now, that was a good sign, wasn’t it?

  Softly, she said, “I swan, David, you just slay me! Now take me down to dinner.”

  Down the street at Mandy’s Kitchen, Slocum finally pushed back from the table. Chandler had finally opted for coffee to sober himself up, but Slocum found that a good meal usually did him better. He’d had three pork chops, a mountain of mashed potatoes, and he’d just polished off his third piece of pie.

  Mandy, whoever she was, was a mighty fine cook and not a bit stingy with the portions.

  The crowd at the table was a motley one, men in dusty suits, men who looked as if they’d just come in off the ranch, men slickered up for something—probably for Tiger Lil’s performance—and one elderly woman who sat at the end of the table and would have nothing to do with the conversation.

  Slocum had stayed silent, too. He been more intent on soaking up all that excellent whiskey with plenty of chuck. But he’d listened.

  The dinner conversation had been about one thing, and one thing only: Lil. She was truly the biggest thing to hit this town in, well, forever.

  In fact, the only one who wasn’t going to see her show tonight—most with plans to stay for the second performance—was the old lady, who frowned disapprovingly every time Lil’s name was mentioned.

  Slocum hadn’t said, but he was going, too. And there was one fellow, at the other end of the table, who hadn’t said much of anything, including his plans for the night.