The Royal Wulff Murders by Keith McCafferty Page B

her. You’d have your own trout stream.”
    “You sound like my mother before she passed.”
    “She really knows how to milk a cow, if you know what I mean.” Doris suddenly blushed. “I didn’t say that, did I?”
    “Yes, you did.”
    “I bet your mother wouldn’t have said that.”
    The lights went down in the ballroom.
    “No. Shssh. We’ll talk about it later. And, Doris?”
    “Huh?”
    “There aren’t any trout in the Musselshell. It’s catfish and suckers.”
    Doris deliberately screeched her chair getting up and walked back to the bar. “Phil,” she said to the logger, “I hear one word tonight and I’ll toss your skinny ass right into the crick.”
    “ I t’s only three hundred. There was some misunderstandin’ on my pay tonight.”
    “I could talk to Doris,” Stranahan said, pocketing the wad of twenties she’d handed over.
    Velvet Lafayette lit a cigarette and waved the smoke away with her hand—the offer, too. She was flushed from singing. A sheen of sweat clung to the smooth skin of her chest, above the scoop neckline of a peach dress.
    “Doris is that old farm girl sits with you?” She added a syllable—“gu-url.”
    “She’s not that old farm gu-url. She’s my friend.”
    “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m from a farm; it’s a takes-one-to-know-one thing, that’s all.” She lifted the hair from the nape of her neck and flipped it over the back of the chair. “It’s hot up there; never thought I’d be sweating in Montana. My mama wouldn’t let me use that particular word. A girl perspired, farm labor sweated. Look, I’m short two hundred from what we agreed on. I can send it to you next week.I’ll be playing near Butte… or maybe it’s Billings. A name like a snake. Near one of those B towns. That’s west of here, right?”
    “One’s west, the other’s east.”
    She waved a hand at the smoke, at the absurdity of directions.
    “Forget the money,” Stranahan said. “You’ve hired yourself a fisherman. It’s not like it’s real work. I take my paints to the river, anyway.”
    “The least I can do is buy you a drink.”
    Doris walked over, stared down at them.
    “Two Wild Turkeys. Ice.” Velvet glanced at Stranahan.
    He nodded.
    She took another pull at her cigarette and tamped it out in an ashtray.
    “That’s my quota. One cigarette when I’m done singing. Three, four a week, tops. Do you smoke?”
    “No. I mean yes.”
    “You either do or you don’t.”
    “My dad gave me a pipe. I puff at it to keep the mosquitoes away when I’m fishing. I’m like Bill Clinton. I don’t inhale.”
    “I do. That pretty much applies to everything in my life. They can put it on my tombstone—She inhaled.”
    “I felt like somebody was watching me today,” Stranahan said.
    “The sheriff. You told me.”
    “No, I think there was someone looking through binoculars from a cabin. More like a log mansion, really.” He looked at her, saying nothing.
    “Why would anyone do that?”
    “I don’t know.” Stranahan held her eyes. “Do you?”
    “What do you mean by that? No, of course not.”
    Doris brought the whiskeys, said they were on the house, wheeled on a heel, and left. Stranahan sipped the drink thoughtfully. Liars embellish their version of the truth. They look off to the left, he’d heard once, something about the lobes of the brain. Liars offer explanations. She hadn’tand he believed her, but it wasn’t the same as thinking that she had told him the whole story.
    She reached across the table and took his hand, squeezing it hard under her thumb.
    “All I’m asking you to do is help me bury my father,” she whispered. She let go of his hand, picked up her drink, and swallowed the amber liquid. Stranahan could feel the burn as blood returned to his fingers. She tinkled the ice cubes in the glass and set it down. She stood up.
    “I’m no longer at the inn. I’m up the street a ways now. Walk me home, Mr. Stranahan.”
    “If I walk you home,” he