CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The One Note Saloon where Daphne Dumont chose to start her chosen career was probably the worst dive in El Paso. Patronized mainly by cowboys, railroad workers, and a seasoning of gamblers, con artists, and sporting gents, more dead men had been carried through its batwing doors than any other drinking establishment in town.
When the place burned down in 1889, the citizens of El Paso breathed a collective sigh of relief, but that was still a few years in the future.
When Daphne stepped into the One Note for the first and last time, it was a Friday night. Everybody had folding money, and the guy at the piano was playing a rousing rendition of “I’m a Good Old Rebel” that drowned out the ten chimes of the railroad clock above the bar.
The saloon was a dangerous, violent cesspit, the kind of place where the first thing a new bartender learned was when to duck and the whores wore bulletproof corsets. The last preacher who tried to reform the drunks was hung in the belfry of his own church. It was said he kicked so hard and for so long the bell clanked for fifteen minutes.
Daphne, confused by the noise, peered shortsightedly through a haze of smoke that was so thick it seemed to have been knitted together by giant spiders. She stood at the edge of the dance floor, her folded parasol in her hands and an expression of dazed bewilderment on her face.
A tap on her shoulder from behind made Daphne turn to a woman in a yellow dress, a brassy blonde with heavily made-up eyes and a scarlet ruby of a mouth. Her voice rose above the din. “You lost, honey?”
“I want to be a whore,” Daphne said. “Am I in the right place?”
The woman’s smile was thin. “Oh, you’re in the right place, no doubt about that.” She looked Daphne up and down from her scuffed ankle boots to the top of her head and was obviously not impressed. “You sure you want to be a whore, honey? It’s a demanding profession.”
“Yes. I . . . I think so . . .” the girl said. Her chin took on a determined set. “Yes, I am sure.”
“Then you’ll need to talk with Pete Pace. He runs the place.” She steered Daphne to an empty chair. “Sit there and I’ll bring him over. Maybe you can work the cribs. My name’s Pearl, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Pearl. My name is Daphne.”
“Oh my God,” Pearl said before she swept away, her silk petticoats rustling under her dress.
Pete Pace was a splendid creature with slicked-down black hair parted in the middle and a pencil-thin mustache. He wore a brocade vest, boiled white shirt and string tie, and on his feet patent-leather shoes with pointed toes. He extended a beringed hand to Daphne and said, “Up. Let’s take a look at you, little lady.”
Like Pearl before him, he was less than impressed. “Daphne . . . that’s your name?”
“Yes. Daphne Dumont.”
“Well, Daphne Dumont, you ain’t much to look at,” Pace said. “And I mean no offense by that. It’s just that what you have to sell, men may not be willing to buy.”
Pearl untangled herself from a sporting gent and stepped to the table. “Pete, I figured she could work the cribs,” she said, almost shouting above the bedlam of noise, the roars of men, and the high, false laughter of women.
“Maybe.” He stared at Daphne. “Back there against the far wall are three small, curtained-off rooms. Nothing in them except a cot and a chamber pot. Those are cribs, understand?”
The girl nodded. Pace wasn’t sure if she understood or not.
“The house takes forty percent of all you earn,” he said. “Set your price at two dollars and on a good night you can still clear fifteen, sixteen dollars. Does that set all right with you?”
Again Daphne nodded. She seemed a little dazed by the commotion going on around her.
Pace sighed as though he’d made a decision that displeased him. “Pearl, can you fix her up with a dress and shoes? Maybe do something with her face and hair?”
“I’m sure I can find a dress and shoes to fit her,” Pearl said. “The rest won’t be easy.”
“I know, but do what you can, huh?” He shook his head and said to Daphne, “Girl, you know why I’m doing this? It’s not on account of you being pretty, because you ain’t. It’s because I have a heart of solid gold.”
* * *
An hour later Daphne Dupont was transformed from a plain Jane to a plain Jane trying to look like she wasn’t. She wore a red dress two sizes too large for her that had once belonged to a well-endowed whore who’d quit the business, and red shoes adorned with a gold fleur-de-lis that were a size too small. Her hair was piled, more or less, on top of her head and held in place with pins. Her face was made up with cheek rouge and lipstick, hastily applied by Pearl since, for her, time was money. The end result was . . . disastrous.
But Daphne, embracing her new role, thought she looked beautiful.
* * *
His name was Barney Koerner, a tall, muscular man who’d been in several shooting scrapes and had a minor reputation in and around El Paso as a gunman. When the deadly shootist Dallas Stoudenmire was city marshal, Koerner had kept his head down and stepped softly, but now that Stoudenmire was dead, Koerner claimed he was “the cock o’ the walk in El Paso.” A bully and an abuser of women, he was drinking in the One Note the night Daphne made her dreadful debut . . . and the stage was set for a display of Koerner’s latent sadism.
The girl’s ordeal began innocently enough. She stood on the edge of the dance floor, knock-kneed in her short dress, her eyes wide as she beheld sights and sounds she’d never experienced before in her life. She smiled at the big, yellow-haired man who strode across the floor toward her, shoving aside dancers in his path.
“Well, well, what do we have here?” the man said.
“My name is Daphne Dumont,” she said.
“I bet it is.” Koerner grabbed Daphne by her thin arm. “Let’s rub bellies, lil darlin’.”
For a couple of minutes, to the tune of “Clementine,” the big man cut a rug, displayed some fancy footwork and knocked around the other dancers on the crowded floor like a bowling ball striking pins. But then he steered Daphne toward the bar and yelled, “Hell, that’s enough. Lady, you’re just too damn ugly to be dancin’ with!” He pushed her hard toward a man at the bar, a puncher with rodent eyes in a small, triangular face. “Here, Ellis, you take her.”
The man ginned and said, “Hell, Barney, I don’t want her.” And he pushed her back.
“Over here, Barney!” another man yelled.
Koerner laughed and threw Daphne at him.
“Hell!” the man yelled. “I ain’t dancin’ with her. She’s as homely as a mud fence. Here, take her back.”
Soon a circle of men formed and to the cheers, clapping, and laughter of the crowd, Daphne was thrown from man to man like a ragdoll. At first she laughed, thinking it was all part of the fun, but then it began to hurt. The game got rougher, more violent and bruising. Strong fingers dug into Daphne’s arms and shoulders, tugged at her breasts, and Koerner, his face a vicious mix of cruelty and amusement, slapped her around.
Suddenly for Daphne Dumont, the game wasn’t fun any longer.
* * *
Ira Cole was playing poker with some other old-timers when the horseplay on the dance floor began. He watched for a while, but when he saw the girl who’d come in with Buttons Muldoon and Red Ryan being abused, he threw in his hand and quietly slipped out of the saloon door.