Longarm and the Diary of Madame Velvet, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Teaser chapter
“DROP THEM GUNS OR I’LL SHOOT!”
Some folks just couldn’t follow simple directions. The gal they’d been abducting dropped her shapely rump to the top step with her heels dug in stubbornly as one of them tried to hang on while the other yelled, “Oh, shit!” and whirled on the landing with his six-gun in his hand. So Longarm blew him off the landing to flop ass-over-teakettle down the stairs as limp as a wet dishrag.
By this time Elvira had kicked the one trying to lift her dead weight in the shins, and so by the time Longarm put two hundred grains of lead through the space he’d been in, he too was thumping down the stairs, and yelling like hell besides.
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THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts
Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies.
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LONGARM by Tabor Evans
The popular long-running series about U.S. Deputy Marshal Long—his life, his loves, his fight for justice.
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Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel.
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An action-packed series by the creators of Longarm! The rousing adventures of the most brutal gang of cutthroats ever assembled—Quantrill’s Raiders.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
LONGARM AND THE DIARY OF MADAME VELVET
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Jove edition / October 1999
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1999 by Penguin Putnam Inc.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-17894-2
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Chapter 1
Death came to town in the wee small hours of a raw spring morning, passed by a miner’s shack where a sleepless mother hugged her sick baby to her breast, and reined in at a house of ill repute where a late-burning lamp shone through the lace curtains of a top-story window.
The no-longer-young woman seated at a writing table, with that same lamp etching cruel lines across a once-lovely face, never heard Death moving up the stairs, and Death never knocks on any door. The woman felt another pang, and the lamplight seemed to flicker as she dipped her pen again and quietly told the gathering darkness, “I’ve been expecting you all night, Mr. Death. Have you ridden far?”
Death didn’t answer. Mortals couldn’t seem to understand Death never ranged all that far away from any of them. The woman shuddered and said, “I’ll be with you in a minute, Mr. Death. I just need a few more lines in this diary to leave things nice and tidy.”
But as she began to write some more with her right hand, she felt a wave of numbing pain down her left arm and wistfully asked, “Just a minute more, as a professional courtesy, Mr. Death? We both know you owe me for more than one mere mortal I sent to an early grave.”
But Death took her then and there, with the pen still gripped in her hand and the last entry in her diary unfinished.
As they were leaving town, Death paused to claim that baby too. For if Death paid any mind to the prayers and tears of mortals, how many mortals would ever die?
The late Madame Velvet had been in the habit of taking her late breakfasts in bed at noon. So they found her slumped over the last volume of her unfinished nineteen-volume diary before her cold flesh could get too disgusting. Everybody knew what you did with the dead body of an old whore. It was all those pages covered with neat spidery handwriting that confused some folks trying to tidy up after her.
So later that same April, the bright morning sunlight was dealing a tad less harshly with the stern but handsome features of one Portia Parkhurst, Attorney at Law, as she paced the landing atop the granite steps of the Denver Federal Building in a severe black woman’s suit with a rather silly black hat, with black silk roses growing on it, atop her pinned-up almost-black hair. Portia Parkhurst’s hair was almost black because, unlike the late Madame Velvet, the lady practicing law in a man’s world was inclined to glory in the few silver threads her time before the bar had bestowed upon her. There was nothing she could do but wait for her determined but unlined cameo features to catch up with her prematurely graying locks.
The man she’d been waiting for there was nearly half an hour late. But she’d already heard that U.S. Deputy Marshal Long of the Denver District Court seldom reported for work on time even when it was payday.
In point of fact, she spotted him headed her way at no more than twenty-seven minutes after the hour.
He was easy to spot in a crowd because he strode a head taller than most in his stovepipe cavalry boots. The boots and the coffee-brown Stetson he wore telescoped in a Colorado crush were separated by the tobacco-tweed suit and vest the Hayes Reform Administration inflicted on its civilian federal employees of late. The double-action .44-40 carried cross-draw didn’t do much for the drape of his frock coat. But Longarm, as he was better known to friend and foe alike, didn’t much care. A man who’d packed a badge for six or eight years tended to have enough foes to require considerable stopping power from a sincere side arm. The double derringer he carried at one end of a gold-washed watch chain across his vest wasn’t as noticeable. Like the federal badge he carried pinned to his wallet, it wasn’t supposed to be. By the time anyone had forced Longarm to prove he packed a badge or a concealed belly gun, he was likely to feel right irritated with them.
Longarm’s gun-muzzle-gray eyes lit up when he spied the trim figure in black hovering at the top of the steps like a pretty little buzzard. He ticked the brim of his hat to the lady lawyer as he joined her on the landing, smiling down at her and causing her heart to skip a beat when she recalled the last time she’d been gazing up at his tanned features and heroic mustache at even closer range, from her pillow. So she said, flustered, “That’s not why I’m here. I meant what I said about you and that married woman up on Capitol Hill, you shameless rogue!”
To which Longarm calmly replied, “I plead guily to being no better than I ever said I was, Miss Portia. But fair is fair, and that widow woman I’ve been consoling up on Sherman Street ain’t been married for some time. I never mess with married women. I never mess with single gals who throw chinaware at me and tell me never to darken their doors again, as I’m sure you ought to be convinced by now.”
Portia sighed and said, “Lord knows I meant it when I hurled that fine Wedgewood creamer at you, Custis Long! But that’s not what brings me here this morning. I’ve helped you with legal advice from time to time, and right now I have a delicate probate problem I need a little help with. Most of my other gentlemen friends are just members of the county courthouse gang, and there’s a federal angle I’d like your opinion on.”
It might have been fair, but it wouldn’t have been smart to bring up some gossip he’d heard about her and a surrogate judge, a married surrogate judge.
He said, “We’d better let me report in to my office lest I lose my imposing federal position, Miss Portia.”
He escorted her inside. On the way up the stairs he asked who they were talking about. She asked if he’d seen the obituary in the Rocky Mountain News on the notorious Madame Velvet, who’d died from a heart stroke out Mulligan way in the nearby Front Range.
He hadn’t. But when they came to the oaken door of Marshal Billy Vail’s office, Longarm stuck his head in long enough to yell, “Got a lead on that Mulligan case, Henry!” and ducked back out to take the bemused Portia Parkhurst by one arm and run as, somewhere behind them, a plaintive voice called back, “What Mulligan case? The boss said he wanted to see you the minute you came in!”
Longarm whipped Portia around a corner in the marble corridor and explained, “That was Henry, the squirt we have playing the typewriter in the front office.” Then he opened another oake
n door and hurled her into utter blackness despite the time of day.
He shut the door and bolted it after them as he struck a match to light a fixture on the wall. Its wick needed trimming. The light it shed took ten years off the deliberately mannish appearance Portia affected before the bar. As she gazed around in wonder, she saw they were in a small windowless chamber where a leather chesterfield sofa, a card table, and four bentwood chairs shared such space as there was with floor-to-ceiling file cabinets. As he waved her to a seat on the sofa Longarm explained, “Used to be nothing but files in here before they moved the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and most of the Ute Nations clean out of Colorado along with a heap of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. None of the powers-that-be around the building ever had any call to come here in person for any files. So a pal from the stenograph pool showed me how they’d fixed it up for playing cards and such when things were slow around here.”
Portia, who prided herself on cross-examining, smiled sweetly and asked, “What was the stenographer’s name and was her game, strip poker? Or did you get right down to business on this chesterfield?”
Longarm tossed his hat on the table, spun a bentwood chair around to straddle it like a pony, and replied, “Neither one of us is on trial here, Miss Portia. You said you wanted to talk to me about some Velvet Madame in Mulligan. I haven’t asked you to talk to me about toad squat since you busted that chinaware on my poor head.”
Portia laughed despite herself and said, “I hit the door-jamb as you were storming out on me, you big oaf! I never meant half the things I might have said that night, but you made me so mad, sparking that rich widow and me at the same time!”
Longarm shrugged and asked, “Who was this Madame Velvet? Seems to me I recall old-timers mentioning the name in connection with an earlier day when Denver was still called Cherry Creek and Colorado was still a part of Kansas Territory. Why did they call her Madame Velvet?”
Portia wistfully replied, “They say she was pretty as a picture and as soft to the touch as velvet when she arrived in the Colorado gold fields less than twenty years ago. I know they struck gold around ‘58, but the whores and gamblers only arrived with the gold rush of the ’60’s that helped the Union win the war. They say Madame Velvet was this young widow who’d fallen on hard times and came West to seek fame and fortune. How could she have gone from young and soft to old and tough in such a few short years?”
Longarm suggested, “The life she seems to have chosen takes more out of a gal than taking in washing or slinging hash, and there’s no saying how old her beauty was when she first put it on the market in mighty busy times. I know I ain’t as soft and velvety as I looked back in West-by-God-Virginia when nobody had ever heard of Abe Lincoln and our spread still lay in the western hill country of the way bigger state of plain old Virginia. We all get older. Whores and hound dogs get old faster than the rest of us. So this Madame Velvet was better known as a whore back when it was the Union Forever and Pikes Peak or Bust?”
Portia sighed and said, “So well known, and popular, she soon had her own parlor house near the junction of the South Platte and Cherry Creek. It got burned down in the Great Fire of ’63. She rebuilt not far below that infamous Larimer Street Bridge.”
Longarm winced and said, “I was back East, attending this war they were giving at the time. But I’ve heard the tale from old-timers. So let me guess. Your Madame Velvet had to rebuild again after the Great Flood of ’64 lifted the Larimer Street Bridge off it’s foundations to tear through a mess of Downstream Denver like a big old blackboard eraser. They tell me the Rocky Mountain News wound up way off down the South Platte, stranded on the lone prairie, once the waters went down.”
Portia said, “Madame Velvet didn’t rebuild here in Denver. By then they’d dug into the mother lodes over in the Front Range, and her kind follows boom times as tight as sharks trail a New Bedford whaling ship. So over the years she ran houses of ill repute all up and down the Front Range from Pikes Peak to Fort Collins, with her last few years over in nearby Mulligan, where there seem to be enough hardrock men making a steady three dollars a day to keep her and a modest crew of very modest soiled doves going, now that the bonanza times are but bittersweet memories along the Front Range. But Custis, in her day Madame Velvet was something to see, presiding over Roman orgies that would make a Nero blush, with more than one unsolved killing on or about many a parlor house over the years. Unsolved until now, that is. Madame Velvet was a walking, or should I say horizontal, encyclopedia of Colorado, before and after the war and statehood. She and her girls served hard young toughs who’ve since gone on to become important men in Colorado business and political circles. A lot of them left some mighty ugly skeletons in more than one whorehouse closet, and wasn’t Colorado under federal law before it became a state under Grant in ’76?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “Doc Evans was appointed the territorial governor, but ran things sort of locally under his tight Denver political machine. Much the same as New Mexico Territory is being run today. So we don’t have any federal warrants out on Billy the Kid and the other survivors of that Lincoln County War. Washington’s point in appointing territorial governments is to let somebody else run a territory. How did you find out so much about this Madame Velvet’s misspent youth in a prewar Colorado neither of us can personally recall, seeing Madame Velvet’s dead and can’t tell anybody much about it now?”
Portia glanced about as if afraid she’d be overheard as she almost whispered, “That’s just it! She can! Why she did it I shall never in this world understand, but almost from the day she first sold herself three ways for a dollar in a Cherry Creek crib, the poor disturbed soul kept written business accounts of her sordid business in volume after volume of those leather-bound diaries sold in stationery stores. I’ve listed nineteen, each covering roughly a year, with some of the early volumes amounting to confessions that could have put her in prison for life had she been lucky. In one entry she as much as tells us right out how she rid herself of a brutal pimp with generous helpings of flypaper syrup over his breakfast waffles. Another entry accuses a man who is now a state senator of beating a girl to death who laughed at his virile member. And there’s no statute of limitations on manslaughter!”
Longarm grimaced and said, “If there was, it could still make it sort of hard to get re-elected come November. How did you come by all this inflammatory information, Miss Portia?”
She said, “As the probate attorney retained by the Madame’s heirs, two nieces of the deceased who were Kansas spinster shopkeepers and knew next to nothing about their late father’s wilder sister. They might have preferred to forget the whole thing when we contacted them, had not a considerable estate been left to them. To their expressed disgust, it seems the wages of sin pay better than selling ladies’ notions in Wichita.”
Longarm said, “So I’ve heard. But what do you expect this child to do about the estate of a dead soiled dove, Miss Portia?”
She said, “One of the spinsters agrees with me that we should burn that nineteen-volume diary and forget we ever peeked. The other wants to show them to a literary agent with a view to publishing an expose, along the lines of that Mormon girl who claims to have escaped from the harem of Brigham Young.”
Longarm made a wry face and said, “Some Mormons I know tell me that book was a big fib, and James Butler Hickok never kissed Calamity Jane neither. So who’s to say whether the scribbles of an old bawd are worth anything or not?”
Before she could answer, there came an imperious pounding on the door, and Longarm was glad he’d bolted it when a familiar voice called out, “I know you’re in there, Deputy Long! Open the damned door and tell me what you meant about that Mulligan case!”
Longarm put a finger to his lips as Portia stared up at him, wide-eyed as a deer caught in the beam of a jacklight, while out in the hallway, Marshal William Vail of the Denver District Court roared at them, “All right! I’m off to get the damned key, and if I find you in there where I’m sure I’ll find you, you can commend your soul to our sweet Lord, for your ass will belong to me!”
