The Dying Crapshooter's Blues Read Online Free Page B

back the blankets and stretched in his direction.
    Â 
    They kept the bed frame rattling and the springs shrieking for a good half hour, as her pallid flesh turned pink, then red, and she moaned as if she was in pain, all the while bucking up and down, her arms and legs flailing. When they were finished, she rose unsteadily to her feet, wrapped herself in the blanket, and, with a woozy smile, hobbled out the door and down the hall to the bathroom, her carefully coiffed curls now hanging down in wet rag-doll strands.
    Joe heard voices. One of the other guests had apparently been eavesdropping on the racket from their room and now made some lewd comment, to which Adeline, young lady that she was, snapped back a hearty “you can fuck yourself, mister!” The bathroom door slammed shut, shaking the walls.
    Joe ran into girls like her wherever he traveled: wild, crude, and with little shame, no matter what the family background. He’d heard people claim it was the Great War that had done it,

something about letting loose as the world came to an end. He didn’t know about that. He had been over there for the months right before the armistice and had seen it all: the total obliteration of the landscape; the blind, lame, and insane soldiers; the dead bodies stacked high with horrible contortions frozen on the faces of those who’d been gassed. He had felt death passing close by like a cold wind as he spent his days keeping himself alive, all the while never quite believing that he could. He knew he’d never forget it, and yet he still didn’t understand why it turned good girls back home into rambunctious harlots.
    Joe guessed it had as much to do with the vote. With that right, women started believing that they could enjoy the same abandon as the men, and were making up for decades of corsets, petticoats, and the chastity those devices helped enforce. Crowning all this was a sudden revolt against those pious zealots who had spent the past two decades trying to shove their chosen morality down the throats of one and all.
    Whatever the cause, Joe was pleased with the results. Wild girls like Adeline had a yen for dangerous men, especially those who had seen death at close range, and so he had no trouble luring her into his web. She was ready to go. He also knew that once she’d had her time with him and whichever other rounders she could bed, she’d be ready to
leave,
and find herself a decent man so she could settle into the safety of marriage. Though she would remember the likes of Joe Rose to the end of her days.
    So much for her. As he stared out at the gray morning, his absent thoughts drifted to Little Jesse and the strange violence that had unfolded on Courtland Street. Whatever had happened on that dark street, Little Jesse was about to pay for it with the last breaths of his life.

Four
    The detectives who had been in and out of the Payne mansion since the middle of the night hadn’t learned a thing, except that objects that had been stored away in the master bedroom at the beginning of Saturday night’s charity soiree were gone when it was over. Pricey jewelry that should have been stashed in one of the wall safes had been taken out for the ladies—mother, daughter, aunts, and several cousins—to pick over as they dressed. The box was placed in the top drawer of the dressing table because no one dreamed a thief would have the gall to slip in and out during the Christmas gala. There had been more than a hundred people in the house. And not just
people;
a fair number of the city’s wealthiest citizens were in attendance.
    The officers working the case had been instructed to show up in rough clothes, but that fooled no one, as the word had already started to seep out, just as Mayor Sampson had feared.
    When nothing came to light by midmorning, Chief Troutman swallowed his bile. Unable to reach Captain Jackson at his house on Plum Street, he sent a message by way of