Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  —Dance at me death if it ain’t old Pox. I heard you was polishing iron.

  —No, Freddie, that was a whisker. Picaroons what said they was crushers tried to put me up to me armpits, but I seen it was a lay and speeled to me crib.

  —You always was a cove on the sharp.

  —Well, I ain’t puppy. How’s Bob your pal?

  —I ain’t seen her in a stretch. We split out.

  —Black-Spy, you say. I thought you was plummy.

  —As did I. She stagged me to the tappers. Stunned me clean out of me regulars, she did, and I served her out.

  —I’d of staked me intimate she was square as Mary.

  —You’d be hicksam if you did. I tell you she’s

  Madam Rhan.

  —You must of felt yourself a proper put.

  —Stow your wid, Pox. You wouldn’t know a punk if she pulled your kick right under your handle.

  —Don’t take snuff, Scot. If she split on you, why ain’t you in the shop?

  —I had an old shoe. I was headed for jade sure as Grim, but Cap’n Dan dawbed the beak and bought me the iron doublet.

  —Smack the calfskin?

  —Twig me flappers. Am I in darbies?

  —What’s Cap’n Dan’s lay?

  —That’s what’s brought me round. If it’s tobbing he wants, I’m his rabbit.

  —Tobbing’s cheap. He’ll want more than that for his screaves.

  —Old Toast keeps his cues under his top-cheat, that’s dead game.

  —I’ll cap in on that, Freddie, old nug. Flimp me for a finiff if I don’t.

  I don’t know if I got it down exactly as I heard it, and I’m certain—“dead game,” as Pox and Freddie would say—that the spelling’s wrong (assuming it was a written language at all), but it isn’t likely it would read like Fields and Webber if I’d managed to record it verbatim. Most of the other people in the room took no pains to conceal the fact they were listening in, but those who understood what they heard probably wouldn’t have betrayed anything incriminating to the authorities. There in Daniel Webster Wheelock’s reception room was the one place in San Francisco where the criminal code was superfluous. They could have plotted to kidnap the president in plain English and not a word of it would have gone as far as the ground floor. As for me, for all I knew the two were debating the fishing off the Jones Street pier.

  It’s a dead language now in any case, buried along with the Bella Union and the Slop Chest and the Devil’s Acre and old Chinatown beneath the rubble of the ’06 quake and the city they erected on top of it; the current heirs to their underworld territory speak a dreary patois made up of sweepings from moving-picture title cards and cheap novels. In a little while, the last person who ever pattered the flash with a fly cull will be as dead as Barbary. I doubt the city fathers will dedicate a statue to any of them.

  There was more to the conversation, but I didn’t hear it. The door at the back of the room opened again and a man in a wrinkled suit came out, mopping his red face with a lawn handkerchief. He was either an unsuccessful drummer or the mayor. Quinn peered past him, nodded at someone inside, and looked at me over the tops of his spectacles.

  Beecher and I rose and went in, nearly colliding with the impatient fellow in the morning coat, who had started forward from his position beside the hat rack when the secretary nodded. He stopped abruptly, checked at last by a graceful movement from Nero, and pulled at his sidewhiskers.

  “Mr. Wheelock will see you next, Congressman,” Quinn said as the door closed behind us.

  14

  “Oh, Lordy.”

  They were Beecher’s first words upon being admitted to Wheelock’s private apartment, and nine presidents later I haven’t come up with any that serve as well.

  After the businesslike reception room I’d expected to find an office, or failing that one of those fussy overstuffed parlors that varied only in minor details from townhouses on Fifth Avenue to ranches in Colorado, and were even mounted on wheels and coupled to trains going forty miles an hour between Dallas and the Black Hills of Dakota. There would be leather and brass and oak, possibly the head of some dead animal hung on the wall like an old master, and the smell of good cigars and whiskey. The lithographs of Prominent New York Homes in Harper’s Weekly had stamped a sameness of interior furnishing and ornamentation across the most variegated continent on earth.

  However, they hadn’t crossed the threshold of Wheelock’s cloister above the Bella Union Melodeon.

  The walls were covered in blue silk, with peacocks and bridges and doves embroidered in silver and scarlet. Paper lanterns had replaced the gas jets in the corners, shedding warm amber light on the scatter of hand-loomed rugs, black lacquer boxes, golden Siamese dancers, rows of silk-bound books in a bamboo press, and the teakwood table at which the master sat carving a grouse. A thread of incense smoke coiled up from the lap of a plaster Buddha at his elbow, spreading sandalwood scent throughout the room.

  The chamber was twice the size of the reception area, and yet the only Occidental items that had found their way into it were a framed Certificate of Community Service on one wall, issued to The Honorable D. W. Wheelock, signed by members of the Committee of Vigilance for the Protection of the Lives and Property of the Citizens and Residents of the City of San Francisco, and the serge tunic and cap of a fire captain hanging from a peg. Cap’n Dan himself wore a heavy silk dressing gown covered with golden dragons, and a white scarf of the same material around his neck.

  The rest of him might have fallen off the wall of portraits at the Chicago Businessman’s Association. His rectangular face was shaven clean and he had white hair fine enough to strain sugar through, brushed back patiently from a sharp widow’s peak. There was the suggestion of a beak about the nose, and a thin trap of mouth that looked as if it spent most of its time shut tight while the chilly blue eyes beneath their black brows (touched up, I suspected, by the same gifted barber who scraped his pink chin) measured and dissected the speaker and weighed his bowels on a set of postmortem scales. It was an Anglo-Saxon face with a touch of the Nordic, a ruthlessly well-preserved sixty. I’d never seen one more dangerous; and I’d made the acquaintance of rapists, guerrillas, and multiple murderers from Tombstone to Slaughter Springs.

  When we entered, he laid aside his fork and silver-handled carving knife, wiped his hands on a linen napkin, and thrust his right across the table for me to take.

  “Deputy Murdock. Two apologies. A matter of some urgency kept you waiting longer than I’d intended.”

  “What’s the other?” I’d encountered stronger grasps, but there was a bit of the show business in them. His was as natural as a panther stretching its limbs.

  “For not rising. I have an infirmity which plunders the act of its meaning.” He tipped his other hand toward the carved ivory stick that leaned against the table. It was the only reference he ever made to his club foot when I was present.

  “I never could see the sense in it.” I removed the sack of pennies from my coat pocket and dropped it in front of his plate. “Your man Tulip left this behind.”

  He smiled. His teeth were as white and even as Axel Hodge’s, but it was my bet they fit him better at the end of the day. He looked at Beecher, who stood back out of arm’s reach; a habit deeply ingrained, to spare both parties the embarrassment of an omitted handshake. “I don’t know this other gentleman’s name.”

  “Beecher.”

  “A noble one. I’ve read Mrs. Stowe’s book and own a bound collection of the Reverend Beecher’s sermons. Were you named for either of them, by any chance?”

  “I was named for my father. I don’t know where he got it. He was sold before I was born.”

  Wheelock was unabashed, or if he was otherwise, he didn’t show it. “Please be seated. Have you gentlemen eaten?”

  We said we had, although the sight of the grouse with its accompanying plates of green beans and sweet potatoes made poor stuff of the biscuits and gravy in my stomach. We drew up a pair
of bamboo chairs and leaned our forearms on the table.

  “Forgive me while I continue dining. I neglected to break my fast this morning and I’m under my physician’s instructions to maintain a regular diet. Nervous stomachs are as common to my profession as gunshot wounds are to yours. You’re both deputies?”

  I said. “Only during regular business hours. After sundown, we’re road agents.”

  “I heard something on that order, although I hardly expected you to confess to it. What’s your home jurisdiction?”

  “United States District Court, Territory of Montana.”

  “Harlan Blackthorne’s bench. He’s known even here, where we have no shortage of notorious characters. Is he as hemp-hungry as they say?”

  “Only when he neglects to break his fast. He has a nervous stomach.”

  He showed irritation for the first time. It was probably intended. “I was hoping we could discuss this like gentlemen.”

  “There are no gentlemen here, Alderman. In Helena, we hang men like Tom Tulip. We hardly ever hire them.”

  “Well said. However, you cannot fail to have noticed that there is a great deal more difference between Helena and San Francisco than mere distance. When I was still a young man, before there was a Montana Territory, the ship’s masters who docked here referred to the place as Port Hazard. They did not mean the treacherous conditions in the harbor. The gold strikes emptied their crews before they could even drop anchor. Once a mutineer, a man hasn’t far to fall before he turns thief and killer, particularly after he learns that wealth is not so easy to come by as advertised.”

  “It’s the same story where I come from.”

  “Only in the beginning.” Wheelock forked a piece of bird into his mouth, chewed it thoroughly, and washed it down with water from a cut-glass goblet. “It’s the natural order of things that a community is born in blood and pain, passes through an unruly adolescence, and stabilizes in maturity. Abilene and Dodge City have become as safe as houses, and Helena will follow them in time. San Francisco is an exception; the bad element simply will not leave. I blame the mild climate. You will remember that after God banished Adam and Eve from Paradise, the serpent remained.

  “The brigands here have had thirty years to establish themselves,” he went on. “They’ve survived fire and vigilantes and their own wicked company. It’s been one continuous war for nearly as long as you’ve been alive, and you know what only four years of fighting did to the men of your generation, filling the frontier with daylight robbers and every other sort of pillaging scum. The sight of a blue helmet holds no terrors for these creatures. They have their own police force and their own system of justice, from which there is no appeal this side of Davy Jones’s locker. Is it any wonder our decent citizens have been forced to adopt their methods in order to keep the peace?”

  “The nearest Tulip ever got to a decent citizen was close enough to crack his skull and lift his poke.”

  “You malign him unnecessarily. He lives off his harlot wife, along with the small percentage I pay him to collect the tax from Nan Feeny and her fellow entrepreneurs. The proceeds go into the operating budget. It costs money to prevent anarchy.”

  “I didn’t think the Hoodlums donated their time.”

  He smiled again, a strictly hydraulic operation. His face wasn’t connected to the workings of his brain any more than an alligator’s.

  “You’re not that much less infamous than your employer, Murdock. You’ve kept the printing presses in New York and Chicago busy recording your exploits. Even allowing for two parts exaggeration to one part truth, you’re a prime example of the kind of officer that under other circumstances would decorate the lethal end of the gallows.”

  “The difference being that I never cracked a skull I thought belonged to an innocent man. It’s a slim distinction, but it’s what I’ve got and I’m hanging on to it.”

  “You’re a fortunate young man. One wonders, when you let go, how hard you’ll fall.”

  “I’m not a young man, Alderman. And you’re not Abe Lincoln.”

  “Certainly not. I’m a Democrat.”

  Beecher had been exploring a flaw in the table’s teakwood grain with a forefinger. He looked up. “When you two gentlemans is through scratching dirt, we can get to why we’re here. I don’t wonder you got so many people waiting outside. You blow more steam than Old Number Ten.”

  Wheelock, chewing, gave him a look so mild I knew there was murder behind it. Beecher was as good as a barometer for measuring pressure, even in calm weather. A colored man with opinions never failed to turn the tidiest hair.

  The Man of the People finished his sweet potatoes and pushed away his plate. “Your friend has a point. You didn’t return your plunder just to get into my good graces.”

  I found the second double eagle from the attack aboard the caboose and slid it across the table with my index finger. He left it where it was.

  “That’s hardly better. I’ve been offered bribes many times. The amount is usually more substantial.”

  “I didn’t expect it to surprise you,” I said. “It was minted right here in town, and you probably see a lot of them in this condition. By the time they get to Montana, they’ve usually changed hands a dozen times and banged around inside a herd of pockets alongside the coppers and cartwheels and ore samples and whatever else a man might carry with him from camp to camp. This one made it all the way to Gold Creek without a scratch. Can you explain that?”

  “I won’t try. I’m a politician, not a detective.”

  He seemed pleased with this assertion. There’s no accounting for pride.

  “It makes sense if the coin came straight there from San Francisco in the possession of someone who got it fresh from the mint. Short of a written command from a superior officer, I can’t think of a thing that would travel with a man that far that fast. This coin is an order of execution.”

  “Indeed. Well, you’d know more about that sort of thing than I. Most of the murders here are committed in hot blood.”

  “Alderman, do you belong to the Sons of the Confederacy?”

  “I have a sponsorship. I have one with the Grand Army of the Republic as well.” He picked up his goblet and swirled the contents.

  “Isn’t that a conflict of interest?”

  “No. I am not active. I belong to most of the fraternal orders. My constituents are gregarious. There are seven separate delegations among the tong alone, and several splinter societies inside each one.”

  “Do you have a sponsorship with the tong?”

  “The Chinese don’t vote. I would accept, however, if they were offered to Occidentals. It might lead to understanding, and prevent another war like the one we had in eighteen seventy-five.”

  I asked if he contributed to the Sons’ treasury.

  “No. That’s what having a sponsorship means. If I were to start paying dues, I would be ruined in two years. The city pays me only six hundred per annum.” He sipped from his twenty-dollar goblet.

  “Chester Arthur’s an active Freemason. He pays dues.”

  “Chester Arthur’s a Republican.”

  “Back East they think you’re involved somehow.”

  “I imagine a great deal is said of me back East, and that very little of it is true.”

  “Not that much is said. I never heard of you before last week.”

  “I’m not offended. I have no intention of seeking national office.”

  His burnished impassivity was getting the better of me. I wanted to peel it back the way Beecher had started to do. “I was told the Bella Union is the new rebels’ headquarters.”

  “I understand they rent the theater once or twice a month, purely for socializing. However, you’ll have to ask Sam Tetlow for details. He’s the owner of the enterprise. I merely lease this floor.”

  “Where can I reach him?”

  “I cannot answer that because I don’t know. He’s in seclusion, preparing for his defense. He’s to be tried next month for murderi
ng his partner, Billy Skeantlebury. They came to a difference of opinion, followed by an exchange of gunfire.”

  “Who’s running the place while he’s away?”

  He sighed. “That is my privilege. I’ve assumed interim management at his request, in return for compensation in the amount of one dollar.”

  “Why didn’t you say that before?”

  “You would have asked me about Tetlow’s arrangement with the Sons of the Confederacy, and you would not have believed me when I expressed ignorance. I’m only a custodian. I’ve no authority to make changes and I know nothing of any business conducted here before my tenure. That was the condition under which I consented to manage. A man in my position must be cautious.”

  “Not cautious enough to turn him down,” I said.

  He smiled his sterile smile. “Tetlow is a major contributor to the party. He may be acquitted. Stranger things have happened in Barbary.”

  “You might want to reconsider your arrangement. The San Francisco branch of the Sons of the Confederacy is implicated in more than two dozen murders. They tried to kill me twice, and each of the shooters had a shiny new gold piece in his kick. If this keeps up, they’ll make me a rich man.”

  “Or a dead one.”

  “None of us is made of boilerplate,” I said. “One of the men they killed was a United States senator. I doubt they’d hesitate to snap a cap on a city alderman.”

  “All the more reason to remain in the dark.”

  I sat back. “I don’t suppose you could tell me who delivers the rent on the theater.”

  “You’ll have to ask Quinn about that. He handles and records all the transactions.”

  “Can you call him in?”

  He drew a thin platinum watch out of a pocket of his dressing gown. It was attached by four inches of plaited hair to a Chinese coin with a square hole in the center. “I would, but as you know, I am running late. You’ll have to interview him outside.”