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worked herself up into wheezing fits the sound of which terrified me; she assured me that they were nothing extraordinary and continued to work harder than any woman or man I ever saw.
    Immediately upon arriving in Denver I’d advertised for a housekeeper; it had been years since I lived alone, and I knew I would require daily help in the running of the household if I were to get any work done. I was specifically looking for a woman of the least enticing physical type, with the hope of avoiding temptations that might lead to distracting complications, and Ralph Banbury, the editor of the Denver Bulletin and the owner of my building, had recommended Mrs. Fenster. She had worked in his house for some months before Mrs. Banbury decided she would be happier without her scowling presence and replaced her with a young Bavarian girl, whom Banbury bedded within the week.
    Much later, in his cups, he admitted that if Mrs. Fenster’s brother-in-law hadn’t been one of the Bulletin ’s pressmen, he would have joined the chorus of the town’s other papers in calling for her arrest upon the death of Mr. Fenster, ten yearsprevious. Her story was that she had returned from a visit to her sister in Georgetown to find her husband shot to death in their bed, but the opinion of the U.S. Marshal was that she had come home and found him alive and well and in flagrante delicto with the lonely wife of the greengrocer downstairs. Her refusal to pantomime either shock or grief did little to help her case in the public’s mind, but neither the press nor the police ever succeeded in getting a word out of the other lady, who according to Banbury was so terrified of Mrs. Fenster that she left her husband and the state of Colorado six months later, never to return. Eventually the matter faded away without Mrs. Fenster ever having to spend a night away from her own blood-soaked bed, and a decade later the incident was largely forgotten.
    Mrs. Fenster received three dollars a day from me six days a week (exactly twice what her sister’s boy collected), and on Saturdays she went off into the night with another sister who was even fatter and more dyspeptic than she was, returning Sunday evenings subdued and moodier than usual. I had no idea what they got up to apart from the suspicion that it involved church; every Saturday night before leaving she laid my good black suit out, and every Sunday she returned to find it still laid out, unworn.
    I MADE MY way to the roof and then down via the ladder to the courtyard below, the quickest way to the livery stableon the street behind mine. The studio and gallery were previously operated by a melancholy Prussian by the name of Ernst Nielander who, after three quarters of a decade of operation in Denver, documenting the layers of its social sediment from the opium fiends and harlots at the bottom to the silver tycoons at the top, had found himself yearning to practice his craft in his suddenly peaceable native land. His desire to return was so strong that I was able to purchase the business as a going concern for less than it was worth; when he returned a year later, disillusioned and disappointed, and wanted to buy it back for the same price, I laughed in his face. He left Denver again and, so far as I know, was never heard from thereafter.
    Though the building was nearly perfect for the purpose it generally served, several eccentricities of design made it a less than ideal place to live. Among these was an outdoor johnny that could be accessed only by a ladder from the rooftop, for no access to the rear courtyard was provided from the interior of the building. The arrangement’s only advantage was that it allowed me to exit the property via a gate behind the outhouse into an alley that ran between my property and the livery stable, though reentry via the gate was impossible.
    It was nearly three when I drove my carriage out the door of the stable, bearing a bottle of nerve tonic, in case milady was still mad