The Royal Wulff Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

he thought. Maybe better. Twilight was an amber smear on the horizon; the river glittered in the slanted light. In a few minutes the polish would fade from the surface, the current’s mercurial song would slide into bass notes, and the wild night would claim it against further human intrusion.
    He said, “You’d have liked this place, Pop.”

CHAPTER FOUR
The Woman Who Sang Old Standards
    T he Cottonwood Inn, with its spacious dance hall, Polynesian-mahogany ceiling beams, and high-arched windows, had been, in its earliest incarnation, a terminus station on the southernmost spur of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. It was a place where women carrying parasols against the sun disembarked with their banker husbands for stagecoach rides that would take them one hundred miles up the Gallatin Canyon into recently designated Yellowstone National Park. Built at the edge of wilderness in the 1920s, the inn was a place where you could get a meal, a room, and a whore for a sawbuck.
    When Sean Stranahan walked through its double patio doors on his way back from fishing, it was a place where ten dollars bought you a beer with a whiskey chaser. It also offered, Thursday through Saturday nights, a couple dozen songs from one of the artists who made the Northern Rockies circuit. As the inn stood opposite the cultural center, Stranahan had made it a habit to stop in most nights for a Moose Drool Ale. He was a little sheepish about liking the place. It was, after all, a yuppie enclave in cattle country, but one could reasonably argue that the cowboy bars fronting Main Street were no more authentic, not with ceiling-hung TVs tuned to ESPN and electronic poker machines drowning out the jukebox.
    Besides, the Cottonwood Inn had Doris Sizemore, a broad, beaming ranch woman who had raised eight children with a string-bean husband who wore overalls every day she had known him before hewasted away from lung cancer—this being Marlboro country literally. She took orders with a pencil stuck in abundantly curled hair, barked them back to the kitchen, and had a wink and smile for everyone. Regulars like Stranahan she made a point to sit down with once in a while. She was a good listener who made people open up by praising them to kingdom come and then talking a blue streak until they’d become as exasperated with her as they were with their own mothers. Doris was the only person west of the Charles River who knew about Stranahan’s divorce, the deaths of his parents, even his sleeping quarters in 226A across the creek. She called him Stranny, which his mother had called him as a child to avoid confusion, because his father was also named Sean. He had hated the name, then came to like it once nobody called him that anymore.
    “Who’s singing?” Stranahan asked when Doris brought him the Missoula brew in a long-necked bottle.
    “You haven’t seen her?”
    Stranahan gestured at the stage, where a microphone was cocked over a battered piano. “On break when I came in.”
    Doris clucked, giving him her mother hen look of disapproval.
    “I wouldn’t know her real name, but she calls herself—get ready for this—Miss Velvet Lafayette. She’s a cupcake, though, if you like red lipstick and a long-legged woman. And she’s a good singer. Suspiciously good, if you ask me.”
    She pinched her lips. “A God-fearing woman like myself has a nose for her kind. I could sum her up in one word.” She waited a beat. “Trouble. T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”
    “I was just asking,” Stranahan said.
    She looked sideways at him. “A man is never just asking. Especially one lonely as you are, Stranny.”
    He rolled his eyes as Doris bustled away. It was just like her to make something of nothing… of a woman he had never even seen. Hell,walking in the door, he figured the talent would be a hippie with a six-string and a songbook of mountain treacle. But he kept his eyes on the stage as he took a pull from the bottle. Something nagged at his brain, an