Second Street Station

by Lawrence H. Levy

  “We’re inside,” stated Wei, signaling the Bowler Hat to speak.

  The Bowler Hat obliged. “There are certain parties who would prefer you be elsewhere, and they have asked me to assist them.”

  The warning signals that had been going off since Wei first saw this man now put him on full alert. The Bowler Hat tried to defuse the situation.

  “No need to be alarmed. This is just meant to be a discussion.”

  “Then say what you have to say,” Wei responded as he stood up straight, an accomplishment in itself since he was working a portion of the mine that had four-foot ceilings. Still, his discipline, jujitsu, had kept him in shape, and he was fearless.

  “These parties are very generous men. I am prepared to offer you five hundred dollars to go wherever you please.” The Bowler Hat was authorized to offer Wei more, but having seen the squalor in which he was willing to live, he decided to lower the amount. He had found that saving people money, no matter how rich they were (and his employers were beyond rich), was an excellent way of ingratiating yourself. Considering recent events, ingratiating would be a wise move.

  Five hundred dollars was a lot of money. It would take Wei and Xin many months of hard labor and deprivation to save up that much. However, Wei’s desire to accept the money was countered by something he valued much more: his honor.

  “Thank you for your offer, but I respectfully decline.”

  The Bowler Hat assessed the situation. He had found that all men have a number. Maybe he’d mistakenly assumed this Chinaman could be bought at fire-sale prices.

  “One thousand dollars and two train tickets back to San Francisco,” the Bowler Hat blurted out. He had found that when money was involved, the element of surprise often triggered an instinctive positive response. Judging from this Chinaman’s circumstances, it could possibly spark a heart attack…and that would be fine, too. Either way, his job would be done.

  The Bowler Hat wasn’t very far off. Wei’s heart was pounding strongly. Add one thousand dollars to what they had already saved, and he and Xin could go back to San Francisco, be with their daughter, and start his dream. But Wei had made promises. He had been the driving force in negotiating a deal between the Chinese and white workers. Many of them were depending on him to improve their lives, and in his absence, he knew the deal would fall apart. If San Francisco represented Wei’s heart’s desire, Rock Springs represented his soul, and he couldn’t live with betraying his soul.

  “Tell your employers that I am humbled by their offer,” Wei answered very thoughtfully. “Though it is indeed very tempting, I cannot accept it.”

  “That’s my limit. I can’t offer you more.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if you could.”

  The Bowler Hat definitely did not want another physical altercation. He needed a peaceful, uneventful “Yes,” and he had one last card to play.

  “I doubt whether your daughter would agree with you,” he said. “Tina, isn’t it?”

  Wei Chung was a peaceful man, but when he heard this man threaten his daughter, it touched a nerve in his core that ripped through his body like a hot coal. He was ready to hurt the man and hurt him badly. Then Wei’s cooler, philosophical brain took over. He would not allow this man to provoke him. Even jujitsu, a discipline of which he was a master, had been taken up purely for reasons of self-defense.

  The Bowler Hat spoke as he stepped toward Wei. “I didn’t want this to happen. You forced this on your—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, he was on the floor looking up at the ceiling. The Bowler Hat was familiar with many forms of self-defense. As his body crashed to the floor, he knew the Chinaman was using jujitsu and that he was good at it, possibly an expert. He appreciated the irony. Just when I actually want boring and uneventful, he thought, I get the surprise and challenge I always crave.

  “I have no desire to hurt you,” Wei said. “Please leave.”

  But that was not going to happen. The fight had just begun. The Bowler Hat was an expert boxer who, as a younger man, had honed his skills in bare-knuckle contests throughout the nation. He had also studied savate, the French art of kickboxing, and had become quite proficient at it. However, Wei Chung had not just studied jujitsu. It was a way of life to him, part of a larger Neo-Confucian philosophy that required moral and ethical behavior. It didn’t matter what forms of combat the Bowler Hat had mastered. It didn’t matter that the Bowler Hat was larger and stronger than Wei. This wouldn’t go well for him.

  The Bowler Hat wasn’t used to losing. Every move he made was countered by a faster and more efficient one by Wei. He was being bounced around the shack like a soccer ball, sometimes careening off walls and other times just being slammed to the floor. After a while, the Bowler Hat found it increasingly hard to recover from the thumping he was taking. He needed an edge. He pulled out a knife he kept hidden in his boot, but Wei immediately disarmed him. He went for the gun inside his coat and found himself flying through the air before he could get to the holster. He landed on the table, shattering it to pieces. When he looked up, he saw Wei with the gun, emptying the bullets and scattering them onto the floor. He then tossed the gun into the corner.

  “You’ve had enough,” Wei said. “It’s time to leave.”

  Wei’s generosity repulsed the Bowler Hat. It filled him with hatred, which he welcomed like an old friend. He worked on it, nurtured it, allowed it to fill his soul and give him strength to continue. But what could he do? He had to stall.

  “You’re right,” he uttered in a breathy voice, lying in a pile of wood and scattered playing cards. “I know when I’ve met a better man.”

  While propping himself up from the floor, the Bowler Hat’s hand slid on one of the Chinese playing cards. It was highly unlikely, but it was all he had. He picked up a playing card. It was firm, more substantial than the American kind. That was good.

  Trying to catch his enemy off guard, the Bowler Hat slowly rose. Then he put every ounce of energy into his arm and wrist as he flung the card toward the Chinaman. The Bowler Hat watched as it cut through the air, spinning rapidly, slicing its way toward the Chinaman’s neck. He was amazed. Was it possible this could actually work?

  Wei wasn’t fooled by the man’s weary manner. He knew opponents often played possum. What did puzzle him was what the man thought he could accomplish by throwing a playing card at him. This delayed his reaction, but just as the playing card neared his neck, he raised his left arm to deflect it.

  The last-second move by Wei made the Bowler Hat’s heart sink. He was done. All that was left was to wait for the Chinaman to finish him. But Wei didn’t move toward him at all. He just stood there, completely bewildered as he looked down at his left arm. It was only then the Bowler Hat noticed the playing card was embedded deeply in the Chinaman’s wrist. Blood was gushing out, more than even he had seen in a while.

  Wei frantically searched for something to stop the bleeding. He quickly pulled out the card, removed his shirt, then wrapped it around his wrist. It had no effect. In seconds, the shirt was filled with blood. Wei knew he needed a doctor, but there were none in Chinatown. He’d never make it to the white part of Rock Springs in time.

  The Bowler Hat was now in charge, and his swagger returned. Wei stumbled toward the door, trying to make it out of the shack, but the Bowler Hat threw him to the floor, where he stayed, crunched in a corner, too weak to move, a look of complete disbelief on his face.

  “Before you slip into the next world, I suppose I should tell you why,” the Bowler Hat boasted. “I once saw a man cut through a tree branch with an ordinary playing card. I thought it was a parlor trick, then I practiced it and discovered it wasn’t. I never tried it on a human before. That’s my next step, now that I know it works on chinks.”

  Wei was thankful he could no longer hear. He didn’t want his last thoughts filled with the words of a beast. His mind wandered to Xin and Tina, how much he loved them, how he would not be able to fulfill his dream and thus make thei
r lives easier. His heart filled with sadness. He would never meet his grandchildren, never see them grow up. He would never see any of his family again. Well, maybe in the next life. Maybe…

  Wei Chung was dead. All the Bowler Hat had to do was straighten up the shack so there was no trace of a fight, and it would look like this Chinaman had committed suicide. Clean, no complications. The company would be happy. He removed the shirt that the Chinaman had wrapped around his wrist, and took the knife from the counter where Wei Chung had been cutting vegetables and put it in the Chinaman’s right hand. The appearance of a suicide was now complete, and as he was gathering his knife, his gun, and the bullets, he heard someone at the door.

  Xin Chung always got off work one hour after Wei. The second she entered, she sensed something was wrong. Then she saw Wei hunched up in the corner, blood everywhere. Before she could scream, the Bowler Hat had grabbed her. He snapped her neck, breaking it, and having joined her husband in death, she fell to the floor.

  Suicide would no longer be an option. The Bowler Hat had to stage something that would make sense. He remembered the Chinaman’s necklace and realized a robbery was his only option. He ripped the necklace off Wei’s dead body and stuffed it in his pocket. He searched the shack but found no other valuables. He hastily tossed the cots to make it look like a frantic search (which it was), and he was done. It would have to do.

  The Bowler Hat quietly disappeared under the cloak of night, leaving Wei and Xin Chung on opposite sides of the shack, their dead eyes staring at each other.

  14

  Four days after the Edison tribute, Mary arrived at his West Orange complex to, once again, be informed of a last-minute cancellation of their meeting. This time, though, her reception was somewhat different. Edison had given the officious Mrs. Embry permission for Mary to inspect Charles Goodrich’s office. A touch matronly, Mrs. Embry was in her midfifties and a widow. Mr. Embry, her childhood sweetheart, had been killed in the last throes of the Civil War, and she’d never remarried. She had been Edison’s secretary for fourteen years, and she possessed all the qualities he needed: she was competent, efficient, and most of all, extremely protective of her boss. Mary remembered having joked with Chief Campbell about her and was sorry she had. Mrs. Embry was one of those people whose work had become her family, and she was just trying to do a very difficult job as well as she could. Everyone wanted to see Thomas Edison, and it was up to her to keep them in check.

  Mrs. Embry ushered Mary down a long hallway at the end of the second floor in the main building to Charles Goodrich’s office.

  “Help yourself,” she said while letting her in. “I’ll return later.”

  Goodrich’s office was small and utilitarian. There was a desk, a chair, a tall wooden filing cabinet, and a lamp. He had some antiques scattered around, including a few vases and a music box. Most of them were from the East.

  Mary started going through everything. The files took the longest. From what she could glean, there was nothing unusual. He seemed like a typical bookkeeper: organized, routine oriented, most probably a quiet, innocuous man. It was the same conclusion she had drawn when she searched his brownstone. A couple of hours had gone by, and Mary was just about finished, albeit somewhat frustrated at not finding anything, when Mrs. Embry appeared in the doorway. Somehow she instinctively knew how long it would take Mary to complete her business. It was one of the many mysterious powers that really good secretaries possessed.

  “It’s terrible what happened to Mr. Goodrich,” Mrs. Embry said, showing genuine sympathy. “No one is safe anymore.”

  “Yes, terrible,” Mary replied as she opened the music box. It played a light and airy baroque-style tune, but there was nothing inside pertinent to her case.

  “I’m very fond of music boxes,” said Mrs. Embry, then she hummed along.

  “It’s a musical snuffbox,” Mary responded. “It appears to be very old and, judging from the music, probably of French origin.”

  “Mr. Goodrich adored his antiques, especially those from the Orient.”

  “Really, where did he get them?” Mary was just making conversation. Her mind was elsewhere as she looked around the room again.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Mrs. Embry. “Every so often a handsome Spaniard would appear with yet another one he had purchased.”

  Now Mrs. Embry had Mary’s full attention. “Was his name Roscoe?” Mary asked. “The Spaniard,” she said, eagerly awaiting an answer.

  Mrs. Embry didn’t know. Mary started examining the antiques in the room. On the bottom of one of the vases that looked Japanese in origin, she saw a company name, “Eastside Imports, New York.” She felt a surge of excitement. It was her first real lead.

  Lucette Myers was at police headquarters on a fishing expedition. She insisted she had information so vital she refused to impart it to a lowly police officer, but her real purpose was to hook a man, any man, who could rescue her from her meager existence. She didn’t often get to fish in these waters, and she had made sure to emphasize her most enticing attributes. Her extra-tight corset trimmed her waist perfectly and allowed her ample breasts to stand out. She wore a bustle, and she celebrated it. Along with her bosom, it represented one of the two areas that most stirred men’s fantasies. She had spent hours making sure her bright red hair was curled perfectly in front. Her makeup was overdone, but she was still unattached in her thirties. That fact had to be hidden by whatever means.

  Commissioner Jourdan’s secretary, a Miss Whitehead, approached Lucette but stopped about ten feet from her, as if getting close would taint her. “The commissioner will see you now, Miss Myers.”

  It was painfully noticeable to Lucette that this drab and uninspired-looking woman felt threatened by her mere presence. She hoped Miss Whitehead would escort her to the commissioner and introduce them. She felt the contrast between them would benefit her greatly and set the meeting off on the right foot.

  Jourdan was going over reports. He felt the only activity that could surpass it in boredom was to speak with a lady who insisted she had vital information. Such information was never vital, and he normally relegated these people to an underling. But Lucette Myers had been so persistent, so unrelenting in her pursuit of him, that he finally agreed. After all, he was a servant of the people, and no matter how distasteful it might be, once in a while he had to actually deal with one of them.

  When Miss Whitehead opened his door, he was almost struck speechless. The lady standing next to her embodied everything he desired in a woman. His eyes devoured her. Lucette wanted to write Miss Whitehead a thank-you note for her assistance.

  “Commissioner Jourdan, this is Lucette Myers,” Miss Whitehead announced, barely concealing her disdain.

  Jourdan immediately rose. Adrenaline shot through his body. His mouth opened but no words emerged. Miss Whitehead left, shaking her head.

  Jourdan finally managed to blurt out, “How do you do, Miss Myers?”

  A feeling of self-satisfaction filled Lucette. The fish was on the hook. All she had to do was to keep stroking his ego as she slowly reeled him in.

  “Whoever thought a man in such a powerful position could also be so handsome?” Lucette said, adding a coquettish smile.

  Jourdan beamed, then he smiled, then beamed some more. That was about all he could manage until he resorted to his annoying habit of nervously twirling his mustache.

  “Please sit down, Miss Myers,” he offered politely.

  “Only if you call me Lucette,” she replied.

  She made sure their eyes connected for a moment. He wanted to take her in his arms, but he knew a proper lady like Lucette would take umbrage at that.

  “So, Lucette, I’m told you have some information on the Goodrich murder.”

  “Indeed,” she said. “I know who killed the poor man.”

  This was shocking news, but not shocking enough to stop Commissioner Jourdan from picturing Lucette naked.

  The name “Roscoe” kept appearing.
Mary hoped she would find him at Eastside Imports, which was on the West Side. Such are the vagaries of business names, she thought. Maybe it was once on the east side and moved, or maybe its name reflects that it specializes in antiques from the East. The name also gave the impression that it was a large business, but it turned out to be a small antique shop amid similar small shops and bars on lower Broadway.

  As Mary entered Eastside Imports, a bell attached to the door announced her arrival. Space was limited. Antiques were strategically placed to show them off, but one couldn’t avoid a sense of clutter. They ranged greatly, from sculptures to vases to opium pipe bowls and everything in between.

  It didn’t take long for Mary to realize she was the only “customer” in the store. There was a blond-haired, mousy-looking little man with glasses who was studiously dusting antiques in a section of the shop and would occasionally sneak quick, nervous glances at her. As Mary perused the inventory, she slowly inched closer to him.

  “Lovely shop you have here. A lot of beautiful pieces, mostly from the Orient, aren’t they?” Trying to avoid her, he kept dusting. She spoke louder and more pointedly. “Aren’t they?”

  He could ignore her no longer. His eyes on his dusting, he hastily mumbled, “Yes, the Orient, mostly.”

  She was now close to the man. She knew he was hiding something, and he wasn’t good at it. She waited, watching the tension mounting in him.

  “How often do you get shipments in?”

  “Why, are you a collector, Miss Handley?” The second he uttered her name he looked stricken, as if he wanted to take those words back.