Ironhorse

49

We crossed the street to the south side and walked east. There was less commotion, fewer folks moving about in the streets than there were when we had entered Hotel Ark.

“You think those lawyers got something to do with this, Virgil?”

Virgil worked on his cigar for a moment, thinking as we walked.

“Don’t know.”

“But maybe?”

“They looked at each other an awful lot,” Virgil said.

“They did.”

“There was some knowing by somebody about something for this ball to drop like it did,” Virgil said.

“Seems probable,” I said.

“More than probable.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Don’t know,” Virgil said. “But Bloody Bob Brandice and that one-arm conductor fellow didn’t stumble into that Pullman car by chance.”

“What about the governor?”

“Hard to say.”

We walked on. I moved up on the boardwalk. Virgil stayed walking in the street.

“Constable Berkeley seems like an okay hand for a whore handler.”

“Big boy,” Virgil said.

“Serves up some good food.”

“Does,” Virgil said.

“His whores are good-looking.”

“They were.”

We walked on a ways farther, looking for Doc Meyer’s office.

“How much do you think it’d cost for that pretty whore with the baking-soda teeth and the flower in her hair?” I said.

“More than you got.”

“Here we go,” I said.

We came to a narrow two-story structure with a Dentist Office sign on the door. Virgil was standing in the street, looking up.

“Lamp burning,” Virgil said.

I knocked on the door. We waited for a moment, but no one stirred. Virgil stepped back into the street a bit more, looking up to the upstairs windows. I knocked again and looked back to Virgil.

He shook his head.

I knocked again, harder this time. I heard some bedsprings squeak, followed by a man’s voice.

“Hold on, just a goddamn minute, hold on...”

Through the wavy sugar-glass window of the door, light and shadow of a lamp coming down the stairs at the back of the office stretched and turned.

A man’s shadow grew huge against the back wall of the stairwell as he descended the steps. After he got to the bottom step he started talking loudly as he approached the door.

“Don’t you got no better sense than to bother me at this time of night! The cost is double this time of night, just so you know, goddamn double!”