No Pity For the Dead

by Nancy Herriman

  “No need to thank me, sir . . . Mr. Greaves,” Taylor replied, entering the room behind Nick and taking his usual chair. “Ain’t got no wife to mind what I do.”

  “Did the beat cop have anything to say about the Golden Hare?” Nick asked. He’d told Taylor about what he’d uncovered in the basement of the saloon, leaving out any mention of Owen Cassidy.

  Taylor pulled a cigar from his coat pocket along with a friction match, which he struck against the floor. “Said you’re lucky you got outta there in one piece. He also claimed to have never heard of Dan Matthews or Virgil Nash, although the way his eyes danced around when I mentioned Nash’s name made me wonder if he’s been paid to say that.”

  “The police chief wouldn’t be happy to hear your suspicions. He’s been trying to clean up the force.”

  “Good luck with that!” said Taylor. He puffed on the cigar to get it to light. “However, the cop was real familiar with Rob Bartlett. Bartlett and the locals go a long ways back, and not in a friendly sorta way.”

  “Did you manage to talk to Matthews, though? That Cassidy kid took it on himself to keep an eye on the fellow’s boardinghouse yesterday and said he never caught sight of the man.”

  “I talked to his landlord on my way in,” said Taylor. “Apparently, Matthews was holed up in his room like a scared rabbit yesterday, which is why Cassidy didn’t spot him. But the landlord also said he went to check on Matthews late last night, because he didn’t come down at his usual time for Sunday supper, and Matthews wasn’t in his room. In fact, it looked like he’d cleared out.”

  Nick cursed. See what I mean, Cassidy? This job is nothing but frustration.

  “Matthews was at the Golden Hare Saturday night,” said Nick. “I wonder if he met someone there who encouraged him to leave town. Or if Bartlett did. Cassidy saw Bartlett near Matthews’ lodgings yesterday.”

  “That’s what his landlord told me, too.” Taylor leaned his head back, a stream of smoke issuing from between his lips. “That a visitor had come by to see Matthews, but the landlord only saw the back of the fella and couldn’t describe him. Must’ve been Bartlett.”

  A fist rapped on the doorframe, and Officer Mullahey stepped into the room. A big man, he was ornery enough to have once suffered a broken nose from a fist connecting with it. He didn’t like to admit that the fist had belonged to another cop. Or that he’d started the fight.

  “Have you heard from the police in Virginia City?” Nick asked him.

  “Not yet, Mr. Greaves. But you’ll want to hear about a message that just came into the station,” he answered, glancing over at Taylor puffing away on his cigar. “While you and Officer Taylor were back here in your office.”

  “I have every right to be in here, Mullahey,” Taylor responded touchily. The tiff between the two men was as annoying as the one between Nick and Briggs. “So don’t be looking at me like that.”

  “Well, the policeman who took the message came lookin’ for me. This mornin’, a body was found in a ditch. The man’s neck was broken,” Mullahey said. “And my money’s on the body belongin’ to one Dan Matthews.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Guess that explains where Matthews went,” said Taylor, flicking a look at the body crumpled in the ditch and turning pasty. This one was in much better shape than old Virgil Nash’s corpse, however. Still fresh.

  Dr. Harris had arrived and managed to assemble a coroner’s jury from out of thin air. A remarkable feat, considering how few houses there were in this area south of the city. The laborers from a tree nursery across the way, its almond trees and evergreens organized into neat rows like mustered soldiers, had stopped their work to stare. A few Mexican vaqueros in sombreros and boots, headed into town from Rancho San Miguel to the southwest, sat astride their horses and gawked. And if those weren’t enough spectators, workers building a house on a neighboring lot leaned over the property’s picket fence and pointed. It always amazed Nick how curious folks got whenever there was a dead body to be seen, as if a glimpse of the deceased gave them a peek into their own mortality.

  “What was Matthews doing on this road, though?” Nick asked.

  “Skipping town, of course,” said Taylor.

  “It would’ve been easier and quicker to take the train.” And possibly safer as well.

  The tracks ran a few hundred feet distant. Right then, a train from the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad approached, the locomotive chugging smoke that trailed off in the breeze. It whistled past, disturbing the small number of promenaders strolling through the Willows on a Monday morning, not far from where Nick and Taylor stood.

  “Maybe it wasn’t until after the last train departed San Francisco for the day that he decided he was in a hurry to vamoose,” said Taylor.

  “But why leave last night? He could’ve run off Friday, once he’d figured out he could be a suspect in a murder investigation.”

  Taylor paused to consider, his gaze following the train as it rumbled south. “He got scared all of a sudden? Thought we’d learned something that would definitely pin the murder on him?”

  “Or did somebody else get scared and encourage Matthews to leave?” asked Nick.

  “Because Matthews knew who’d killed Nash . . .”

  “If he did, I wish he’d shared the name with us before he ended up dead.”

  “Want me to bring over the fellow who discovered Matthews’ body?” Taylor asked. The man in question was standing near the house builders, who were pestering him with questions. Wearing a suit of dark clothes and a bowler hat, he was dressed as though he had been bound for the city until finding a body had changed his plans. Up at the man’s clapboard house, a woman had come to stand on the porch along with a small child, the girl clutching her mother’s tan checked skirt. “He wasn’t much use earlier. Pretty shaken.”

  Even in rough-and-tumble California, it wasn’t every day one found a dead body in a ditch. “Bring him over.”

  While Taylor went to fetch the man, Dr. Harris finished with his jury and dismissed them.

  He spotted Nick and came over. “Looks like Mr. Matthews broke his neck. Died instantly,” he said. “Who is he? The name’s familiar.”

  “He’s the man who found the decaying body of Virgil Nash in Jasper Martin’s cellar,” said Nick. “Any signs that it could have been murder?”

  “Looks like an accident to me,” the coroner answered. “The contusions along his arm and head suggest he fell—probably thrown from a horse, an arm outstretched to break his fall—and landed awkwardly enough in the ditch to snap his neck. I haven’t located any other wounds on him. Of course, I’ll have his body hauled back to town for an autopsy, but I don’t think my conclusions will change. Oh, and here.” Harris dug around in the pocket of his coat, pulling out a coin purse. “Fifty dollars or so on him. Didn’t have time to count it all. And this, too.”

  Nick took the purse, the coins clinking against one another, and the engraved silver watch Harris held out. Not what you’d usually find on a man who’d been renting rooms in a run-down lodging house near the Barbary. “Nash’s? Didn’t his widow say he carried a silver watch?”

  “Maybe you have your killer, Greaves.”

  Nick pocketed the coin purse and the watch. “Maybe.”

  With a tip of his hat, the coroner strode toward the wagon that had pulled up near the ditch. Taylor brought over the man who’d discovered Matthews’ body.

  “This here’s Mr. Lombardo,” said Taylor. He left to help the wagon driver hoist Matthews onto the bed of the buckboard.

  Mr. Lombardo’s weather-beaten skin and broad shoulders made him look as though he’d be more comfortable at the docks with the whalers and fishermen than living down here on the southern fringe of the city, nestled in among the scrub and sand and cattle.

  “Detective?” he asked warily.

  “Tell me how you came to find the bod
y, Mr. Lombardo.”

  “This morning, I go out early and I see a pile in the ditch,” he answered, his voice rising and falling in the rhythm of native-born Italians. “I go to look and it was the man. There.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the wagon driver, who was busy wrapping Matthews’ body in a tarpaulin.

  “And when you found him, you didn’t touch him or move him?”

  “A dead man?” The Italian crossed himself. “No. I see and I tell the police.”

  Nick should commend the man for not searching Matthews’ clothes and coming across the coin purse and watch. Lombardo likely could’ve used the money, if the condition of his property—weeds cropping up, the unpainted fence, a cracked windowpane—accurately reflected the balance of his bank account. His wife and daughter had gone back inside, but the woman was watching them through the first-floor window.

  “Did you hear anything unusual overnight? See anything?” Nick asked him.

  “Last night I am in bed and I hear the horse galloping. Then a shout. But then nothing,” said Lombardo. “I do not go and see. Very late. My wife, she look through the window. It is so dark and the fog heavy. She sees nothing also.”

  “There was nobody with him?”

  Lombardo raised his shoulder, his hands lifting in unison, palms up. “We cannot see. But when I remember the shout, that is why I think to look for the person this morning. The fog, it is still thick, but I could see him.” The man shuddered and made the sign of the cross again. “There is a bad place in the road here. I show you.”

  Nick followed him over to the dirt road. Matthews’ body was gone, carted away on the buckboard that was now lumbering toward the city. Harris climbed onto his horse, saluted Nick with a tap of his hat brim, and trotted off. The vaqueros kneed their mounts and rode off as well. Taylor was speaking to some of the neighbors standing around. Since most of them were shaking their heads, Nick expected his assistant wasn’t learning much.

  “Here.” Lombardo gestured at the ground. A gully stretched across the road, leaving a sizable gap. “Bad for the wagons.”

  Nick looked from the break to where Matthews had been lying. If he’d been riding fast through here last night, in the fog and the dark, and his horse had stepped into the gully, it would’ve stumbled. And Matthews would’ve been thrown clear as easily as water from a duck’s back. Nick crouched on his heels and examined the dirt. There were gouges in the packed earth. It was possible they could have been made by the hooves of a horse trying to regain its balance.

  He stood. “Thank you, Mr. Lombardo. You’ve been very helpful.”

  The man left and Taylor rejoined Nick.

  “Well, sir?”

  “It seems that Matthews came through here late last night. The horse he was on must have stumbled and thrown him. But Lombardo didn’t notice if anybody was with Matthews. Too foggy last night,” said Nick. “Also, Harris found a bag of money on Matthews and a fancy silver watch.”

  Taylor whistled. “So he did rob Nash!”

  “Not necessarily. We don’t yet know that those items came from Nash, and we don’t know how Matthews came to have them in his possession.” But if the watch was Nash’s, they had just linked Matthews to the man’s death. He either killed Nash himself or knew the person who did.

  Nick lifted his hat, ran fingers through his hair, and reseated it. He looked out over the rolling hills, dust swirling and the fog retreating to the north. Over a ways, a windmill turned lazily in the breeze. The carpenters working on the neighboring house had returned to their hammering, and Lombardo was back inside with his wife and kid. Sparrows chattered in nearby shrubs. A peaceful place, with fresher air than what hung over the city some days. Peaceful, if you disregarded a man implicated in another man’s murder having been found in a ditch with his neck broken.

  “It’s sorta nice out here, ain’t it?” asked Taylor. “Away from town.”

  Maybe I should buy a homestead out here. Who would he share it with, though? Because the only woman he could see himself sitting with on the porch had a missing husband who hadn’t had the common decency to turn up dead.

  Still, he could build a house for himself. Give Riley a real yard to roam in. Get some chickens, too. They’d had chickens back on the farm in Ohio. Shiny black Hamburgs that Meg would chase around the farmyard, angering their father. He missed that life, but Nick knew why they’d left. Their cattle had died from anthrax, and his father had lost the desire to start over. So they’d come out west to California looking for . . . what? His father hadn’t wanted to pan for gold like everybody else when they’d arrived in ’53. Maybe Uncle Asa had convinced him there was something better to be had out near the ocean than what he was trying to wrestle from Ohio’s clay soil, from the fields near the stream that flooded too often, from the apple trees that never produced enough to make up for what the birds and the bugs ate. Did his father regret listening to his brother? Meg might still be alive if he hadn’t listened, and she—or her children—could right now be chasing her own black Hamburgs.

  “Sir?” Taylor was squinting at him. “Should I go talk to Bartlett?”

  “I’ll go,” said Nick, returning his focus to the case and dismissing the thoughts of a homestead and chickens. He was a cop, a life that didn’t leave much room for domesticity. And frankly he couldn’t imagine Celia Davies wanting to live out here with a bunch of chickens. She needed proper English tea and lace doilies and whatever else it was that women like her required. He wasn’t fooled by her plain brown holland skirt and red blouse to think she might be happy changing out straw in a coop.

  Even if he wished otherwise.

  * * *

  “The child could come any day now, Mrs. Kelly,” said Celia. Too soon. The baby had yet to turn head down; the possibility it never would became more likely with each passing day.

  Maryanne, her face shiny with sweat, pressed her hands into the mattress to sit upright. She leaned against the pillows propped at the head of her bed and stared at her belly bulging over her legs. “You’re worried, aren’t you?”

  “No more than I normally am, Mrs. Kelly,” said Celia with a comforting smile. It was a lie but a worthwhile one.

  Straightening, Celia gave a stifled groan for all her aches from yesterday’s adventures, then lifted the bedsheet and covered Maryanne with it. The other woman spread her fingers across the swell. They were trembling.

  “The more you rest, the longer we can delay the baby’s arrival,” said Celia.

  “I’m trying, ma’am,” she said. “And I did ask the woman who lives next door if she could go to the grocer’s for me yesterday. Do you know what, Mrs. Davies? She actually did.”

  “I told you that your neighbors would help.”

  There were footsteps in the hallway, and John Kelly stepped into the room. He carried their sleeping infant daughter in his arms. “And how is she, Mrs. Davies?”

  “I did not realize you were here today, Mr. Kelly,” she said.

  “Mr. Hutchinson knows Maryanne’s unwell.” He looked at his wife. “How are she and the baby, then?”

  “She must continue to rest,” she said. “The contractions are growing more frequent and increasing in intensity. We do not want the baby to arrive too early, though.”

  “Don’t worry, John,” said Maryanne to her husband, seeking to soothe the furrow in his brow. “I won’t ask you to stay with me and ignore your work. Our neighbor will help me again, I’m sure.” She turned to Celia. “Mr. Martin has hated the delay in repairing his offices so much that he even asked John to meet with him yesterday and review the progress. On a Sunday, of all days. The man’s a tyrant.”

  “Now don’t be sayin’ that, Maryanne,” reprimanded her husband. “His money puts bread and butter on our table.”

  “Yesterday?” Celia asked him. “After the excitement at Cliff House, I am surprised Mr. Martin wished to meet with you, Mr
. Kelly. We all left so shaken.”

  “Excitement, Mrs. Davies?” he asked, shifting his daughter in his arms and causing her to stir. “What happened?”

  “Someone pushed me over the wall above the cliff,” Celia answered, watching his face. After all, he was one of her suspects.

  “So that is why your palm is scraped,” said Maryanne.

  “Yes.” Celia had scratched her hands when she’d clutched at the rock wall; she buffed her fingertips across the tiny scabs on her skin. “Fortunately, Mr. Hutchinson grabbed me and prevented me from falling to my death.”

  Maryanne gasped. “Mrs. Davies!”

  “There is no need to be alarmed, Mrs. Kelly,” said Celia. “I did not mean to cause you to worry for me.”

  “You should be more careful, ma’am,” said Mr. Kelly, his expression as unchanging as the expression on a ventriloquist’s doll. He did not, however, look guilty.

  “I endeavor to try, Mr. Kelly.” Celia rose and folded away her stethoscope, then gathered her shawl and medical bag. “I shall return tomorrow.”

  “If you have the time,” said Maryanne.

  “I most certainly have the time for any and all of my patients,” Celia replied, and bid them both farewell.

  She touched the sweet face of the child sleeping in Mr. Kelly’s arms and stepped around him to descend the stairs and exit the house. When she was a few doors distant, something made her turn and look back—just as the curtains in the upstairs window flicked back into place.

  * * *

  “I’m looking for Rob Bartlett,” Nick said to Frank’s workers, the entire bunch lolling about on overturned barrels and empty crates in the enclosure behind the offices.

  He’d found the building itself empty, tools discarded, all work stopped. No Kelly. No Martin. No Frank. And all his employees enjoying a break in the sunshine. When the cat’s away . . .

  One of the men spat a stream of tobacco juice into the corner. “Bartlett ain’t here.”

  I can see that. “Perhaps you can tell me where he is, then.”