CHAPTER TWELVE
Somewhere a door banged, probably the musicians leaving. Dan Caine heard a hum of conversation drift from the dining room, punctuated by female laughter, a whore playing her part. The air smelled of cologne, perfume, and sweat, and the decay of age, as though the house had just witnessed a dance of the dead. Dan quickly covered the distance between himself and the grand staircase and on silent feet climbed to the first floor above the foyer, where several corridors lined with paintings of half-naked women led to bedrooms. Guttering oil lamps placed on spindly tables provided the only light. To Dan’s right, at the end of the landing was a narrow stairwell leading to the upper floors. He took the stairs to the second story, arranged like the one below, a series of corridors lined with bedrooms. But there were no pictures of naked women on the walls, fewer oil lamps to cast pools of yellow light and dark shadows. The air smelled of rising damp and mold as though the rooms on this floor hadn’t been used in a long time. The walls were covered in dust and spiderwebs and every step Dan took was accompanied by the creak and squeak of protesting floorboards. Like the level below, there was a flight of narrow stairs at the end of the gloomy hallway, and Dan grabbed a lamp and stepped carefully in that direction. But he stopped and smiled when the lamplight revealed writing on the wall, made with either black chalk or charcoal . . .
Donny Harrow done a whore on this spot. July 4, 1878.
Dan’s smile widened. That must have been written before Misty Maguire turned respectable.
Dan’s momentary good humor vanished as he climbed the narrow stairs that led to the upper rooms. When he reached the landing, he stood still and looked around, acutely aware that every step of the stairs had screaked. There were three rooms to his left, hastily built with walls of unfinished timber and roofed with sheets of plywood. Dan figured that these were once intended to be servants’ quarters but were never finished. Each door had a brass, oval shaped number plate with black numbers . . . 31 . . . 32 . . . 34. An oil lamp burned in 32, adding a yellowish sheen to a casement window that was opaque with the dust of years and laced with cobwebs. Barely visible in the gloom, a series of heavy, triangular-shaped beams held up a roof that soared fifty feet above the third floor. It seemed that the builders had finished three levels of the High Time mansion and then called it a day when the English millionaire died and the money dried up. Now the only living creatures that populated the upper reaches of the house were spiders, bats, a man called Beck . . . and a bargain-priced whore.
Dan Caine pulled his Colt, thinking that he’d followed tracks that led to the mansion, but was the man Beck the one he was looking for? Was he really a member of Clay Kyle’s murderous gang? Questions without answers. But he told himself this much . . . he was a vigilante, a breed of men who were not inclined to give a suspect the benefit of the doubt. Dan scolded his hesitation and finally listened to his own advice . . . rightly or wrongly gun them. Better a hundred innocent men die than one guilty man goes free. He frowned. Hell, that wasn’t the saying. Wasn’t it the other way around? The rhythmic screech of bed springs in room 32 put the question out of Dan’s mind. He’d wait until the noise ended and Beck was good and exhausted before bursting into the room and getting the drop. He nodded to himself. It was a plan, not a brilliant plan, but right then it was all he had.
The bed continued to rock and Dan waited . . . and waited. The storm had finally rolled away, leaving only a rumble of distant thunder barely audible above the ceaseless racket of the brass bed in room 32. Dan Caine shook his head. Damn, whoever he might be, Beck brought new meaning to the word cowpoke.
The bed noise reached a crescendo and then abruptly stopped.
Dan wiped his sweaty gun hand on his pants and took up his Colt again. He stepped to the room and made a quick decision. A polite knock on the door and a “Howdy Podner” was out of the question, so . . .
Dan Caine raised his booted right foot and crashed the door in.