Wilde West (36 page)

His heart still pounding, Grigsby walked over to the coat and touched it.

Wet.

Wilde had laid it out to dry.

Grigsby thought:
bloodstains
? Wilde had washed away the bloodstains?

Or had he worn it today, in the rain?

Grigsby walked over to the closet and opened the door.

Arranged neatly along the floor were more shoes than he had ever seen together at one time, in any one place outside a shoe store. Beneath him they gleamed and glimmered in the flickering lamplight, boots and brogues and some dainty, delicate things that looked like slippers for a fairy godmother.

But she would have been a fairly hefty fairy godmother. The slippers were dainty only in construction. In size they were larger than Grigsby's boots.

No one could call those feet average. Except maybe an elephant.

So. The shoes cleared Wilde.

In a way—and it surprised him—he was glad to learn it. He didn't much care for nances, but Wilde, at least, had some style. Some balls, too.

He looked around the closet. Suits, jackets, topcoats, trousers, enough fancy-dan clothes for a regiment of lulu-belles. Pushed against the wall was a large metal steamer trunk, its hasp unlocked. For a moment Grigsby considered opening it. But Wilde's shoes had proved him innocent of the murders, and anything he happened to be toting along on his travels was none of Grigsby's business.

O'Conner's feet
were
average, and Grigsby spent some time going through the reporter's things.

He found three full bottles of liquor hidden around the room, one under the bed, one in the otherwise empty suitcase in the closet, and one in the bottom drawer of the dresser. This made sense—if you were a drinking man, you made a point of keeping some spare bottles handy.

There was also a half-filled bottle of liquor on the table by the bed, and Grigsby, being a drinking man, drank some.

In the top drawer of the dresser he found a cheap cardboard notebook. Opening it, he discovered that only the first page of it had been written upon.

In cramped, scratchy handwriting, it read:

O. Wilde.

Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

That was all.

What kind of garbage was that? Where were his notes, where were the articles he was supposed to be writing?

Grigsby flipped through the notebook again. Empty.

He went back to searching. He found no single-edge knife with a seven-inch blade, and he found no mementos of Molly Woods.

Like O'Conner's, Ruddick's feet were average, and Grigsby spent a fair amount of time searching through the boy's room. In the closet, as he riffled the pockets of the suitcoats and jackets, the smell of lilacs was so strong that his eyes began to water.

On the top of the dresser, beside the empty water basin, he found a small painting in a gilt frame that showed a sleek young man, his hands tied above his head, who was naked except for a pair of diapers, and who seemed pretty indifferent to, or maybe even pleased with, all the arrows sprouting from his muscular arms and chest, and the blood trickling elegantly down his oiled flanks. Clara, raised by nuns, had owned a book of Saints; and, from the arrows, Grigsby recognized the young man as St. Sebastian. The patron saint of lulu-belles?

Inside the dresser, in the top drawer, he found a notebook. He opened it, flipped through pages filled with a rolling ornate handwriting. Scratched-out words and phrases made a scattered pattern like buckshot wounds amid the lines. Poetry, it looked like.

He read one.

Beloved, when I, beside your silken skin,
Trapped in the longitude and latitude
Of passion, consider that our attitude
And history are nothing like akin,
I fear that one day our deepest mood
Will differ, and you, brood-
Ing, will see crime where there is only sin.

Crime? Sin?

Was he maybe talking about murder?

Or maybe just about cornholing?

It occurred to Grigsby that the poem might have been written about Dell Jameson, or someone like him, and he felt suddenly a bit queasy, as though he were holding a piece of dirty underwear. He closed the notebook and returned it to the drawer.

He searched some more, but he found no knife, and no organs belonging to Molly Woods.

Von Hesse's feet were average, too, and Grigsby went over his room carefully. In the closet, a suitcase filled with books, all of them in German. Clothes hanging neatly on their hangers.

More clothes, more neatness, in the dresser. Two small perfectly rectangular stacks of shirts, each perfectly folded shirt perfectly aligned atop the perfectly folded one beneath.

Grigsby glanced around the room. It was immaculate, nothing out of place, not a speck of dust anywhere.

Wilde's room, clean as it was, hadn't been this spotless. Neither had O'Conner's. Von Hesse could've had a different hotel maid, but Grigsby doubted it. And the maid hadn't arranged the shirts.

Clara hadn't kept their own house neater than von Hesse kept his room. Maybe Grigsby should hire the German to help him shovel out the place.

Grigsby searched. No knife, no bits and pieces of Molly Woods.

Henry's tiny cubicle of a room was even neater. It was empty. No shoes, no clothes, no suitcase, nothing.

Had the valet moved to another room? And if he had, why?

Find out from Winters at the front desk.

Grigsby pulled shut the door to Henry's room, locked it and started down the empty hallway.

When he came to 211, the Countess's room, he paused.

She's not for you, Bob.

But maybe she remembered something. She's had all day to think about it. She
told
me to come back.

Bullshit. You just want to see her.

She
told
me to come back.

What was that you said today to Wally, the day clerk? No fool like an old fool?

Grigsby rubbed the toe of his right boot against the back of his left trouser leg, then the toe of his left boot against the back of his right trouser leg. He took off his hat and knocked on the door.

O
FF TO THE WEST,
immense even at this distance, the big bold pyramid of Pike's Peak shouldered aside the lesser mountains as it bullied itself toward the sky. Beyond the dusky pines that fringed the folds of foothills, it lurched up against the milky blue of early morning, the bright snowfield along its flank glazed golden by the light of the rising sun.

Shifting in the saddle against the slow rhythm of his horse, Grigsby winced. He'd come a mile since leaving Colorado Springs and already his hip was aching.

The road was empty. The only sound was the dull steady clop of the horse's hooves against the dirt. To the right, a pine forest still held, between tall straight trunks, below stacked green parasols of needled branch, the dark cool shadows of night. To the left, a hundred yards away, thin sunlight angled along the railroad tracks that ribboned over the rolling green prairie, heading west to Manitou Springs, and then up into the mountains, and over them, to Leadville.

The air was clear and clean, strung with the scents of pine and grass and reawakening earth. To Grigsby it was nearly as sweet, and nearly as intoxicating, as bourbon whiskey. He hadn't been out of Denver for weeks, hadn't been into the mountains for months; and, despite the pain gnawing at his hip, he was glad he had decided to hire a horse for this part of the trip.

If only his hip wasn't bothering him.

But the horse and the saddle weren't responsible for all the aches and pains. A large part of them had been caused by his time last night with Mathilde de la Môle.