Dulcy took a step over silverware and just missed a china shepherdess’s painted head, then slid on a pearl, one from a long, broken string. The bedroom floor, partly visible through a doorway, was dusted with feathers, as if someone had taken a knife to the pillows. This was rage, not a robbery. She paused before she managed to walk to the open window near the gutted sofa. The pavement had no body.
Dulcy ran to the stair railing. Lewis looked up from helping Samuel and Irving with a jellied Rex. He smiled—she was calling his name from the mezzanine, after all—but his mouth drooped as he took in her expression. The tavern roared, sound working like bellows on the glass doors at either end of the lobby, and as Lewis dropped Rex with a bad bounce, the door at the end of the lobby blew open. Hubie Fenoways, no longer singing, crawled into the room with Lennart Falk behind, lashing him with Durr’s ebony-and-silver cane. It looped so quickly through the air Dulcy could hear it whistle over the crowd and Hubie’s screamed imprecations—duck-dicked motherfucker sardine bait buggering —and Lennart Falk switched to stabbing at him with the cane, spearing him until the shaft broke and stuck in the man’s jaw. Hubert crawled on, smashing into a glass case of tourist souvenirs, screaming fucker fucker fucker and choking on blood while the broken end of the cane wiggled in the air like a conductor’s baton.
Lennart Falk lifted what was left of the cane, and Dulcy saw Lewis run toward him, swinging the elevator attendant’s stool. He brought it down in a slashing motion and knocked Falk to the floor. When Hubie turned to snarl, Lewis kicked him flat.
???
Lennart Falk freely admitted to destroying Miss Randall’s room. “I am looking for a beautiful woman,” he said. “If she is not dead, she has stolen from my employer.”
Beautiful —a small stab of pleasure, mixed with a recoil. Lennart had come to believe Miss Randall, though plain and skinny now, might be the confident woman he sought. His client was clear about the need to reclaim property.
What property? He couldn’t say, or explain why his client might think Leda Remfrey was still alive. Samuel, who witnessed the interview, quoted other phrases like hunnerts of towwsants and ruint in love. Lennart had searched in Salt Lake and Denver and Omaha, then backtracked and moved along the northern line, asking questions in rooming houses and hotels from Spokane to Duluth. He had brothers who had the same task in New York, Chicago, San Francisco. He agreed that Miss Randall did not seem to be the thief he sought. He admitted to Bixby—Gerry Fenoways was dead drunk—that he had lost his mind after the stress of seeing the dead girl.
“The scum police officer stuck his finger into her,” said Falk. “I protested, and he lied about what he’d done. But I walked away, I tried to be calm.”
After the viewing and before the caning, Falk had telephoned Seattle, drunk a half bottle of whiskey on an empty stomach, and decided that his prey was indeed Miss Randall. He entered her room and lost any remaining control during his search.
Then he made his way to the saloon, where Hubie was waking his dead mother or his dead job. Macalester had already marched to city hall to demand his firing, and Gerry had been so drunk, and so upset about their mother, that he waved a hand and let it happen. A rational man would have found a different bar, but Lennart wanted a drink, and while he watched the bartender open a bottle of gin, Hubie let everyone know that Falk’s reaction to the body had been to throw up. Siegfried Durr told him to shut up, and most of the men in the tavern said anyone would have done the same, but Hubie kept cracking jokes, and Lennart Falk had three shots of gin—boom, boom, boom—while he listened to the merriment.
“After Hubie has a few, he swells into a giant,” said Samuel. “Bloodlust sets in. His mind flames, his mouth opens. Mellifluous filth emerges.”
Some of the filth: Hubie called Falk a cod-fucker and a fiordpaddler, and added lines about reindeer and Lapp women. Durr tried again to silence Fenoways, but it was too late: Falk drained a last gin, picked up Durr’s cane, and speared Hubie in one thigh—“gaffed him like a fish ”—then wiped the tip clean with the barman’s cloth. Hubie fled toward the door but managed a last insult: he said, in so many words, that the girl’s body had aroused the Swede. Falk surged toward him, stabbing at Hubie’s back, his legs, his retreating ass; as they broke into the lobby, he flicked off Durr as if he were a bug and sank the cane deep into Hubie’s jaw. The silver tip was still where a tooth used to be.
Falk said he regretted having tossed around a nice young woman’s unmentionables. He did not regret what he’d done to Hubie Fenoways, but his employer would be happy to make reparations to everyone involved, despite his near financial ruin. Gerry finally left the Mint Saloon to arrest him, and the rumor was that he beat Falk for the next several hours until Bixby managed to lock the Swede in a cell and temporarily hide the key.
???
“I don’t have anything to steal,” sobbed Miss Randall, when she and Eugenia returned from the theater at midnight. “Beyond my aunt’s necklace and earrings. And I did offer to give those back.”
This was interesting. Dulcy, drunk and daubing at the girl’s tears, thought that maybe everyone had a dirty little secret; maybe Dulcy wasn’t alone in this world. She began to warm to poor, kleptomaniacal Miss Randall, until the girl added: “They don’t understand how cruel they were, how much I deserved some sort of present. Why would they send me away?”
Dulcy, who had stumbled into crime, loathed her for her incompetence and greed and self-pity. Her dislike only deepened when she sobered up: the next day, she hated everything, right through coffee and lunch. Her head buzzed and her stomach dipped, and her suffering only ebbed with a larger terror, when Irving told her that Gerry Fenoways, who wanted revenge for his brother’s ouster and beating, had insisted that someone travel from Seattle bearing bail money, to personally escort Falk home.
Dulcy made a show of using the telephone and took the train to Denver, telling Eugenia that she needed to meet her sister-in-law, who was en route from New York to Los Angeles. After a few days at the Melton—she didn’t dare return to the Brown Palace—Dulcy called Margaret, who was very proud of her recent purchase of a telephone, and said that an amazing man, so interesting, so strange looking had come to retrieve his brother Lennart. When Henning Falk had arrived late, he’d found the jail locked tight, no one on duty, and he’d eaten a late dinner with Samuel and Lewis. In the morning he met with Gerry Fenoways, handed over a bag of gold, then bundled his brother onto the next train, after visiting the body of the girl and giving Leonora Randall an up-and-down that had sent her weeping to her room.
Dulcy came home. The next morning, a little man from Utah was ushered into Hruza’s and recognized his wife from a pattern of moles on the breasts.
Fruit