“Are you Anthony Rothrock?” Bushell asked.
“Who the hell’re you?” the fellow repeated, scratching under the left shoulder strap of his dirty white vest - he wore no shirt over it. “A man’s home’s still his castle, ain’t it? That’s what the law says. You come round here bothering me, I’ll set the law on you.”
“I’ll take that chance,” Bushell said, and displayed his Royal American Mounted Police badge. “Not let’s try it again - you are Mr. Rothrock?”
“Yeah, I’m Tony Rothrock,” the fellow said unwillingly. “What’s it to you?” His eyes narrowed. “You got a warrant, Robin Redbreast?”
“No,” Bushell said. “We only want to ask you a few questions.”
“Shove off,” Rothrock told him. “I don’t have to say nothin’ to you, and I don’t aim to say nothin’ to you. You can go take a hike - far as I’m concerned, you can jump down the main shaft of Mine Number One. Take the big smoke with you when you go, too. You want to leave the redhead, that’s jake by me.” He leered at Kathleen Flannery.
Bushell waited for her to go up like a steamer with a punctured boiler. Instead, she turned to him and said in a low voice, “Would you like me to go in there and question him? I will, if he’ll let me - and if you don’t mind.”
That wasn’t really what she was asking. What she wanted to know was, Do you trust me? It was a question Bushell wished he didn’t have to confront so bluntly, because the only answer he’d found was, I don’t know. He kicked at the boards of the tiny porch in front of Rothrock’s door. They were as bare of paint, as cracked and faded and defeated, as any he’d seen in Buckley Bay.
“Go ahead, then,” he said - suddenly, without warning. Before the look of surprise could do more than begin to form on her face, he turned away from her and said, “She can come in, if you’ll let her.”
The miner seemed startled for a moment, too. Then he laughed. Bushell did not find it a pleasant sound.
“Oh, aye, she can come in, all right, that she can.” He disappeared from the window. By her expression, Kathleen hadn’t fancied that laugh, either. Quickly, before the door opened, Bushell said, “If you’re not out in five minutes, I’m coming in after you. Shout if you need me.” She just had time to nod before Rothrock, with drunken, scornful courtesy, waved her inside and shut the door in Bushell and Stanley’s faces.
The two RAMs drew back a few steps from the doorway. Bushell did not want to retreat any further, not only for fear of missing a cry for help from Kathleen but also because the outhouses Rothrock’s home faced were hardly pleasant company. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Chief?” Stanley asked in a low voice.
“Not even close to it.” Now Bushell kicked a the grass of the narrow strip of lawn. It was as tired and dejected as the porch boards. “I hate having to depend on anybody but me, especially someone who’s not a RAM, especially someone whom - “ He broke off.
“God knows what she’s talking about in there with him,” Stanley said, obliquely completing the thought for him.
Bushell lighted a cigar. People coming to use the plumbing facilities stared at him and Stanley. So did the harried-looking women who dumped rubbish in the bins. Those hadn’t been emptied any time recently, and added their sickly-sweet reek to that of the lavatories.
“You know, if I lived in the middle of the other side of these back to backs, I think I’d sooner pitch my tea leaves and such in the gutter than haul them all the way around back here,” Stanley said.
“By the look of some of the gutters we’ve seen, you’ve got what it takes to make a first-rate Charleroi housewife,” Bushell answered.
Stanley drew back in dismay. “You’ve said some hard things about me over the years, Chief, but I don’t think I deserved that.” He rolled his eyes. “Lord, what Phyllis would say if she saw these places - “
“Poor people live like this,” Bushell said. “If you’re not poor, you don’t have to go round the corner to throw away your rubbish.”
“Mm, that’s so,” Stanley admitted. “But from the look of things, not all the ones on this side take much care of the places they’re in, either.” He had simple, straightforward, straitlaced notions of right and wrong. One look at the sad, frowzy homes on this side of the block said he also had a point. Bushell smoked for a bit, then crushed his cigar under his heel. He pulled out his pocket watch and glumly studied the dial. “What is she doing in there?” he muttered.
“More to the point, how long are we going to let her keep doing it?” Stanley muttered.
“I’ll give her another two minutes,” Bushell said, glancing not only at his watch but also at the steadily sinking sun. “If she hasn’t come out by then, I’ll. . . go in.” He grimaced. He wasn’t in control, and he didn’t like it.
He paced back and forth, his short choppy strides showing the worry he wouldn’t acknowledge in words. A couple of seconds before the deadline he’d set himself, the door to Anthony Rothrock’s house opened. Kathleen bounded off the little porch; her pleated skirt flew up enough to show a length of shapely calf.
Rothrock stood in the doorway. “Come back anytime, darling,” he called, and blew a kiss after her. Laughing a loud, half-drunken laugh, he slammed the door shut.
One of Bushell’s eyebrows twitched. “Darling?” he echoed.
If looks could kill, Kathleen’s eyes would have started a massacre. Her cheeks were flushed - not embarrassment, if Bushell was any judge, but fury. Through tightly clenched teeth, she said, “Take me away from here this instant, or I shall go back in there and kill that man.”
“What did he do?” Samuel Stanley asked, the usual, easy good nature dropping from his voice like a discarded mask. His big hands curled into fists. “Maybe we’ll take care of it for you.”
Kathleen shook her head, strands of auburn hair flipping back and forth as she did. “No, nothing like that - nothing so overt. Just take me away from here, please. Can we go back to the hotel?”
Bushell had wanted to track down Red Mike O’Flynn, but another glance at the sinking sun said that was probably not a good idea. He didn’t care to try finding his way through the back streets of Charleroi in the dark, and he didn’t think those streets would prove any too safe, especially to well-dressed strangers. “We’ll go back,” he said resignedly.
“Lassiter will be calling us, anyway,” Stanley said with the air of a man trying to make the best of things. Kathleen did not wait for them to finish talking themselves into it. She simply headed back toward the street and left it to them to follow. Bushell had to push himself to catch up with her. “Did you learn anything from the charming Mr. Rothrock?” he asked, and was rewarded with another murderous glare.
“Chiefly what tyrants men can be,” she snarled, adding, presumably for his benefit, “not that I haven’t already had lessons along those lines.”