“Not really, sir,” Malone said. “I just been reading about this Jewett Gang.” The lieutenant’s eyes, he noticed, were even more bloodshot than yesterday morning, and his face was flushed and sweaty, but he looked damn happy for a man who was so obviously hungover. In fact, he was practically beaming. Malone wondered if maybe he had visited the whore camp last night, perhaps gotten laid by the blonde the pimp billed as a genuine Parisian fashion model. From what he had heard, she was quite a hit with some of the officers. He held the newspaper up for Bovard to see. The main headline proclaimed in big black letters: SEARCH STILL ON FOR KILLER OUTLAWS. An interview with the local city engineer discussing the mental, physical, and spiritual benefits of indoor plumbing was the only other front-page story. The war wasn’t even mentioned.
“Yes, I heard something about them,” Bovard replied. Leaning against a porch beam, he pulled his cigar case from his pocket and offered the sergeant one. The Jewett Gang had come up in a conversation he’d had last night with an effeminate theater manager named Lucas Charles. They had bumped into each other in the Candlelight Supper Club, a quiet establishment that carried a decent brandy and was quickly becoming the lieutenant’s favorite watering hole. Lucas was girlishly slender and small-boned, with soft delicate hands and purplish bags under his rather corrupt-looking gray eyes. They had talked about this and that, and then sometime around eleven o’clock, he had invited Bovard to a room he kept above the Majestic Theater, just a bed with an unwashed sheet thrown over it and a red upholstered chair and scattered bouquets of dead flowers and half-empty jars of cold cream. A torn and faded poster of a once famous actor, twinkly-eyed and sporting a top hat and monocle, was tacked to the wall. “Ol’ boy performed here once,” Lucas said, nodding at the picture as he poured them a drink. “Fell in the orchestra pit twice, he was so plastered.” He shook his head. “Poor bastard. Couldn’t remember his lines anymore.”
“Whatever…whatever happened to him?” Bovard had asked nervously, glancing again at the bed. It had become apparent to him over an hour ago that he was being seduced, but now that push was about to become shove, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to have his first sexual experience with such an obvious sissy. Wasn’t being queer bad enough without being so damn blatant about it?
“Cut his throat in Cleveland a week later during an intermission. Made a real mess of the dressing room, from what I heard. I guess they booed him off the stage for the last time.”
The lieutenant took a drink from the glass Lucas handed him as he thought back on his own dark time in the hotel room in Columbus. Fortunately, before he slipped up and mentioned it, there was a knock on the door, and a man named Caldwell entered. He was even more disheveled and limp-wristed than the theater manager. A druggist by trade, he was dressed in a wrinkled white suit and carried a battered straw boater in his hand. A half-smoked cigarette was stuck behind his ear, and his blue tie looked as if it had been dipped in a mustard pot. Tossing the hat in the corner, he kicked off his shoes and produced a vial of tincture of opium from his pocket with a grand flourish. “Damn it, Clarence,” Lucas said, as he locked the door, “I told you to quit bringing that stuff over here.”
“Yeah, but you like it, don’t you?” Caldwell said, as he uncapped the bottle.
“That’s the problem,” Lucas said. “I like it too much.”
Bovard glanced uneasily at the bottle. Jesus Christ, not only were they homos, they were dope fiends, too. From what he had heard, just one little taste of that poison and you were forever after crawling the walls for it. A panicky urge to flee the room swept over him, but, in the end, the greater fear of being viewed as some sort of cowardly boor won out. And so he had stayed, and within thirty minutes of slugging down the drink Caldwell doctored up for him, there wasn’t another place in the world he would have rather been than in that filthy hole with his two new pals.
Malone lit the cigar and dropped the match into a dented helmet that served as an ashtray next to his stool. “According to this,” he told Bovard, “they might be in Ohio now.”
“And isn’t there an outlandish reward being offered for their capture?”
“Five thousand dollars. Or fifteen thousand if you take their heads to this Montgomery tycoon. Lot of jack for three sharecroppers.”
“I just don’t understand people like that.”