Longarm and the Nevada Bellydancer by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 12

After things settled down again Longarm got back into bed before three in the morning alone. It didn’t hurt him, but he slept until a train whistle woke him up around nine. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to start that morning in any case.

That fat gal, Bonnie, at the beanery, served him eggs over chili with a pouty expression, black coffee, and a slab of custard pie. She tried to hold her tongue, but before he left she asked him who he’d been fighting over at Sheppard’s Hotel the night before.

He smiled wearily and replied, “Rifle shots do carry, after midnight. But it was my understanding they don’t allow no fighting over women at Sheppard’s Hotel. I got the impression the Widow Brookside runs a sort of prim place.”

The waitress from Cairo scoffed, “You must be a sound sleeper, then. I hear they make a handsome profit renting the same beds more than once a night. Tex Bishop caught her bitty kid brother in Sheppard’s Hotel with an old bawd of thirty or more! They called her Calico and allowed she’d been a dance hall gal until her poor old legs gave out!”

Longarm smiled thinly and mused aloud, “It sure beats all how a jar of olives busted on the walk at one end of the street can turn into a wagonload of watermelons overturning by the time you hear of it down to the other. I was told the hotel management threw Miss Calico out for inviting male guests to her single occupancy and that she’d been a faro dealer, not a dancer, over in Virginia City.”

The waitress shrugged her well-padded shoulders and allowed she could have heard wrong.

Longarm ordered another coffee and suggested, “Let’s study on that. I ain’t as concerned about the morals of a wandering woman described as exotic in appearance as I am her apparent means of support. I’ve been trying to locate a possible shemale witness described as an oriental style belly dancer. A gal known to dance one way might well be capable of dancing another and you’d only have to belly dance now and again to be recalled as a belly dancer by an old admirer.”

Bonnie MacDugal allowed she had no idea what he was talking about.

He said, “That’s all right. I know what I’m talking about. Do you know this dealing or dancing Calico O’Connor to howdy, Miss Bonnie?”

The waitress nodded and said, “She and that young boy she was messing with came by for a bite now and again. She didn’t seem to think much of me, neither. Her teenaged escort, young Luke Bishop off the B Bar B, ordered for the both of them. She just sat there looking smug, as if she was the fat old cat around here!”

“She might have been embarrassed.” Longarm pointed out, adding, “She could have thought you were looking down on her as a pathetic older woman who couldn’t get grown men to buy her chili for her. They tell me

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