by Ed Gorman
The old man brought his long arms up over his head, held them there a moment, then crashed his hands down upon the keyboard.
He wasn’t just banging away, though. He’d struck a chord — one with a low, ominous tone. He repeated it twice, loud and quick, then let it float there in the air like a black cloud.
Then came a ray of sunshine cutting through the gloom — a bright melody that echoed out of the piano ragged and off-tune yet still merrily — almost manically jaunty.
“London Bridge Is Falling Down.”
There was more laughter, and a few men actually started to sing along. But the recital didn’t last long. One quick run-through of the song and Keys was done. He dragged his stool back around to his resting spot, slumped against the piano, and closed his eyes.
As floor shows go, it was pretty pathetic. Certainly, the Bella Union and the other big concert saloons had nothing to fear from this place. Yet the performance brought down the house: Men were still clapping and stomping their feet even as the geezer slipped back into his slumber.
I glanced toward the end of the bar, thinking I might share a little eye-roll or shrug with my brother. But there was nothing to share … because there was no one to share it with.
Old Red was gone.
Johnny was leaning over to share a whispered word with the barman, and I could finally see around his stout frame just fine. Yet all I saw was wall. I jerked my head this way and that, searching the rest of the room. In vain.
It had been all of a minute since I’d turned to watch Keys tickle the ivories (or give them a good beating, more like), and in that time Old Red had left somehow. Yet he couldn’t have gone out the front door without walking right past me, and the back door was over by the piano — I’d have seen him leave thataway, too.
Now, my brother can be cantankerous, and I’ll admit there have been moments I wished he’d just go away. But never had I ever dreamed he might actually up and do it — simply vanish without so much as a puff of smoke. So sudden was his disappearance, in fact, that I might have doubted my own sanity, worrying that this “Gustav” was a figment of my imagination much as my crazy Uncle Franz once befriended a potato he addressed as “Herr Berenson.”
I quickly spotted proof that I wasn’t loco, though — and that something foul was afoot.
When I glanced back where Old Red had been standing, I noticed that there were two half-full glasses on the bar next to big, burly Johnny. The barkeep picked one up, emptied it out beneath the bar, then began giving the glass a vigorous spit-shine with a filthy rag.
If my brother had heard the call of nature and slipped off to the w.c. (or, given the character of the place, the back alley), why would the bartender be cleaning out his glass? And if Gustav had simply elected to leave, why wouldn’t he have collected me on the way out?
Which meant Old Red was gone, but he hadn’t left. He’d been taken.
I looked down at the bartender’s feet, leaning forward as far as I could without tipping head over heels and landing atop his brogans. Unlikely as it was, I had to make sure Gustav wasn’t down there behind the bar trussed up like a beef ready for the brand.
He wasn’t, of course. All I saw was a slop bucket, what looked like a tap handle (perhaps for the secret stock of drinkable beer squirreled away for specially favored patrons), boxes filled with assorted bottles, and — good information to have — a short-barreled shotgun just like Cowboy Mag’s. It must be a regulation in The Barkeeper’s Handbook, right between “Water down whiskey” and “No credit to cowboys”: “Keep scattergun under bar.”
The bartender caught me gaping his way and shot me a glower so sour he could have poured it out and sold it as lemonade.
I forced myself to smile.
“Don’t worry about me, mister — I learned my lesson.” I picked up my beer and splashed half of it over my tonsils. “Glug glug glug, right?”
The barman didn’t bother responding, which was fine by me. What I needed right then was to be ignored. I had me some heavy-duty thinking to do … fast.
Of course, the person best suited to bust such a puzzle was Old Red himself, and I couldn’t very well consult with him on his own kidnapping. And turning to the law wasn’t an option. The Barbary Coast’s a precarious place for policemen, and they usually don’t go there at all except in squads of ten or more. I’d probably walk a dozen blocks before I saw a single cop.
Yet there was someone I could turn to, I realized, though he wasn’t on hand, either: Mr. Sherlock Holmes. True, Gustav was the expert on Holmes, but he only knew of the man through me — I read him John Watson’s tales of the great detective each and every night. Whatever my brother had heard about deduci-fying, I’d heard, too. It was just a matter of putting it to work.
I closed my eyes and dredged up Old Red’s favorite Holmes quotes.
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence.”
Useless.
“Little things are infinitely the most important.”
Useless.
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
Useless … and pretty danged silly.
“When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Which might lead me to conclude that — as my brother could not have flown through the ceiling or dug down through the floorboards — Johnny and the bartender must have eaten him while I had my back turned.
Useless useless useless.
Unless …
I had turned my back, hadn’t I? And why? To watch a sorry old sot flail away at a piano — because the barkeep told him to.
Keys’s little routine might have been a distraction. But a distraction from what? He hadn’t blocked anyone’s view of either door. He’d just made a lot of noise.
So maybe it wasn’t the sight of something he was covering up so much as the sound. The opening of a hidden door, perhaps, or the workings of some secret mechanism.
“Exclude the impossible,” Holmes had said. All right. If my brother hadn’t been taken out to the left or the right, that left only up or down. Maybe one wasn’t so impossible after all.
I threw back my head to guzzle the last of my beer — and get a peek up at the ceiling over the spot where Gustav had been standing. There was nothing to see but rafters and cobwebs.
I put down my glass and dug a dime from my pocket.
“Shot of rye for the road,” I said to the bartender. Then “Dagnabbit” as I let the coin slip betwixt my fingers. After bending down to retrieve my money, I took a good look at the floor at the far end of the bar.
When I stood up again, I was grinning — and gritting my teeth.
“Here you go, my good sir,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster considering how much I wanted to pop off the barman’s head like the cork from a bottle. I dropped the dime in front of him. “And you’ll see no sippin’ from me this time, I promise you.”
Silent, scowling, the bartender thumped down a shot glass and sloshed it full of liquid the color of tobacco juice. Which was pretty much what it tasted like, too.
I tossed it down with one swiping swig and set the glass back on the bar.
“Keep the change.”
I got no thanks. The barkeep just snatched up my shot glass, gave it a single swipe with his ratty little rag, and set it aside, ready for the next paying customer. He was drifting back toward his big buddy Johnny as I turned to go.
Heading for the door, I kept myself to an easy amble when what I really wanted to do was dash. It was torture not glancing back to see if Johnny and the barman were watching me — and maybe noticing the wisps of short-cropped cherry-red hair peeking out from under my bowler. But if little things are the most important, then even such a trifling show of nerves might be all it would take to arouse suspicion … and quash what slight chance I had of saving my brother.
I finally knew where he was, and I couldn’t very well get there myself wi
th a bucketload of buckshot in my back.
I managed to keep my gaze straight ahead.
The sunshine was blinding-bright when I stepped outside, but a few blinks and the ink spots disappeared. I set off down the street still keeping myself to a mosey, just in case.
Before I reached the first corner, though, I finally allowed myself that look over the shoulder. I saw drunks, chippies, and rowdies aplenty, but no sign of Johnny or the barman.
I spun around and hustled back toward the deadfall.
I didn’t go inside again, though. Instead, I turned down a narrow alley that ran along the side of the saloon. A dozen quick strides brought me to an angled doorway jutting out from the building — the entrance to a storm cellar. I bent down and gave the rickety twin doors a cautious tug.
Locked. Bolted from the inside.
I paused to consider my options … and sighed when I realized how bad the best one stunk.
I knocked. Lightly, politely at first, then rougher when I remembered that nobody did anything politely in the Barbary Coast.
“Who is it?” a man called out from down below.
I chanced an answer, praying it didn’t call for a brogue or falsetto or some other giveaway trait.
“Johnny.”
“Already?” Muffled, shuffling footsteps drew closer to the door. “Bit early, ain’t it?”
“So?” I grunted, hoping Johnny didn’t have a lisp. The doors rattled.
I stepped back, rattled myself but knowing there was but one way to proceed.
“It’s just that it ain’t dark yet …” the man said.
The doors began to swing open.
“… and we’ve only got four EEP!”
By the time he saw my face, my kick had almost reached his.
As Old Red is fond of pointing out, I manage to put my foot in my mouth pretty regular-like. This was the first time I’d ever put it in someone else’s, though. It didn’t go in far, of course. Just enough to send the man flying back into the cellar minus his front teeth.
I jumped down after him, giving him a toe to the stomach twice before he could so much as let out his first groan. He was a scrawny, grubby little fellow, and I might’ve felt bad about treating him so rough if not for what I spied piled up in the shadows farther back in the basement.
Men. Four of them, splayed out on a rotten old mattress directly below the lines I’d noticed in the saloon floor — the trapdoor.
From underneath, I could see the wooden slat that pulled out to drop it open and the jointed rods leading up through the ceiling, perhaps to that extra beer tap tucked away beneath the bar.
I didn’t care about the how just then, though. It was the who that truly troubled me, for stretched out atop that mound of men was my brother, his body as limp and lifeless as the barman’s rag.
I glowered down at the little fellow I’d just put the boot to and brought my foot up again without so much as thinking to do it. I can’t even say what thoughts were in my head at that moment. It’s as if there were no thoughts at all, just an explosion of red and black and a great, awful noise like the scream of a steam whistle. I’m not sure what I was about to do — stomp the poor pipsqueak to a pulp, I suppose. Certainly, that’s what he assumed.
“No, mishter! Shtop!” he cried out, mush-mouthed with blood. “They ain’t dead! I work for the Chicken!”
I froze with one foot hovering over the man’s face, wondering if my first kick hadn’t knocked something lose in his head.
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“The Chicken — the Shanghai Chicken! Johnny Devine! Thish ish hish plashe! We’re crimpsh, not killersh!”
I set my foot back down on the dirt floor.
“Crimps?”
The word tickled a memory of newspaper and magazine articles I’d read about the Coast. “Shanghai,” too.
“You mean you aimed to sell them fellers off to crew sea ships?”
The little man nodded. “Jusht got an order from a Norwegian whaler. A dozen men jumped ship the shecond they made port, and they need replashementsh.”
I stared hard at Gustav and the men beneath him, noticing only now the slight up-down of their chests and the raspy sound of ragged breathing.
“We jusht drug ‘em. Laudanum in their drinksh. They wake up later with headachesh, that’sh all.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, starting toward my brother. “Wake up on some leaky tub in the middle of the Pacific, you mean.”
As I drew closer to the Chicken’s victims, I noticed another pile in a darkened corner beyond them — a heap of a good two dozen hats, with my brother’s white Stetson up top like the snow-cap on a mountain.
Then I saw the swollen purple bump on Gustav’s forehead. Those headaches weren’t brought on by laudanum alone.
I spun around just as the little crimp staggered to his feet and started toward me with his blackjack raised high.
“Thank you, friend,” I said. “Now I don’t have to feel bad about this.”
“This” being a swift kick to the unmentionables followed by a roundhouse that flattened the man’s nose and blew out his candle.
I left the crimp lying in Old Red’s spot atop the stack of soon-to-be sailors. I wasn’t happy about leaving those other fellows to the Chicken’s not-so-tender mercies, but even so large a man as me can only manage so much dead weight at once, and acts of charity would only get us shanghaied all over again … or worse.
I toted Gustav home draped over my back, something that surely would’ve aroused a touch of curiosity just about anywhere else. This being the Barbary Coast, though, all I got was the occasional wisecrack along the lines of “Good thing one of you can handle his liquor!” By the time we were back in our room at the Cowboy’s Rest, Old Red was starting to stir.
“You all right, Brother?” I asked once I had him stretched out on our bed.
Gustav’s eyelids fluttered, then went wide. He pushed himself up to a sit, one hand pressed to his head.
“What the h____we doin’ here?” he groaned.
That’s right: “What the h____are we doin’ here?” Not “Thank you, Brother.” Not “How’d you find me?” Not “I owe you my eternal gratitude and will never give you guff again so long as I shall live.”
“What are we doin’?” I said. “Well, you are sittin’ up when you should be lyin’ down. And me, I’m thinkin’ I liked you better unconscious.”
Old Red waved a limp hand at the war bags we kept piled up in the corner.
“Best get those packed up quick. We gotta go.”
I started to ask “Why?” but didn’t even make it through the “Wh — ”
“Oh,” I said. And I set to packing.
Not five minutes later, I was helping Gustav hobble down the stairs. Our clomping drew Cowboy Mag from her barroom.
“How about a little hair of the dog, boys?” she asked, friendly as can be — until she noticed the bags I was dragging behind us. Lickety-split, her smile spun around into a frown.
“Ain’t no dog done my brother like this. It was a Chicken … and a snake,” I said. “Speakin’ of which, I been tryin’ to remember — how’d you say you got your nickname again?”
Cowboy Mag planted herself before the door. With her plump arms and legs akimbo, she made quite a formidable roadblock.
“Don’t think you’re leavin’ without settlin’ up with me first.”
“We wouldn’t dream of it,” Old Red said, his voice still hoarse and trembly. He gave me a pat on the back. “Brother, would you mind?”
“Certainly not.”
And I propped him up against the wall, put down our bags, and truly settled accounts with ol’ Mag.
Now, for the record, let me state that I have never struck a lady, and I never will.
Let me add, however, one obvious and important fact: Cowboy Mag was no lady.
With best wishes of (and hopes for) publishing success,
O. A. Amlingmeyer
The Cosmopolitan H
ouse (Hotel), Oakland, Calif.
August 8, 1893
STEVE HOCKENSMITH is the creator of mystery-solving cowboys Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer. The Amlingmeyer brothers first appeared in Ellery Queen in the story “Dear Mr. Holmes,” and the Sherlock Holmes-worshipping drovers have returned to Ellery Queen’s pages three times since then. In addition, Hockensmith has completed three novels about their adventures. Thanks to the first, Holmes on the Range, Hockensmith was a finalist for the 2007 Edgar, Anthony and Shamus Awards in the Best First Novel category. The second (On the Wrong Track) was published in March 2007, and the third (The Black Dove) hit shelves in February 2008. Hockensmith is currently at work on a fourth Big Red/Old Red novel. Though he considers himself a Midwesterner at heart, Hockensmith currently lives in California’s Bay Area. He shares his home with the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect son and a slightly imperfect cat.
The Instrument of Their Desire
BY PATRICIA ABBOTT
In 1931, my brother raised the money to hold on to our house by hiring out our older sister to a dozen men in town. Ronnie lay down with twelve men over a period of a few weeks that winter, saving us from the soup line, the poor house, the end of the line.
When the last man left her bed, Jim took the crumpled five and added it to the money in the Typhoo tea tin. Bills worn to velvet from the callused hands of the men of Coryell’s Crossing. He placed the seventy-odd dollars in the same envelope our father put his goodbye letter in a few months earlier, resealing the envelope and placing it in the mailbox. He hoped Mother would think that Daddy, wherever he was, had found a way to pass along some money. Which was what happened the next day when Mother waved the bills triumphantly in our faces. She made the back payments on the house, cleared up an outstanding bill or two and filled the icebox.
Later that year, Mother got a real job in a hospital, and we took a step back from the precipice where we had teetered. I doubt it ever occurred to Mother that Daddy hadn’t sent us the money. She’d often speculate aloud about the circumstances of his … gift, wondering what he had gone without to raise it. Later still, she wondered why he never sent another cent. Despite that disappointment, his single act of generosity made her soft on him, and whenever Jim said something harsh, she’d defend Daddy, reminding us of his sacrifice. Jim probably had to swallow down the truth, telling himself it was better she didn’t know. How could he tell her that poor Ronnie had saved us?