1906: A Novel

by Dalessandro, James

  "Good, Christian. Whenever you can't argue the issue, change the subject and trot out the martyr speech. Whatever you did, dad did ten times over without being drunk. Or leaving a good man without covering his back side. Dante says the Ninth Realm of Hell, that's the bottom one, is reserved for the betrayers. Maybe they'll save you a seat."

  Christian seethed and Hunter glared across at him, neither brother willing to leap over their father's body to strike the first blow.

  "What's the matter, Christian? You think with dad gone there was going to be nobody around to tell you the truth?" After storing the slide, Hunter pressed Byron's rigid fingers onto an inkpad, rolling each one carefully onto a sheet of paper.

  "Fingerprinting your own father. You think he killed himself?"

  "Process of elimination. I collected bloody fingerprints in the engine room. I'll wager they don't belong to dad or Anthony. Speaking of Anthony."

  "You won't get a lot out of him. Chief Donen had Francis and Max take him down to Agnews asylum, out of his head, screaming it wasn't his fault."

  "I doubt it was his fault." Hunter placed the fingerprint samples in his bag and produced a long syringe. "Hold his arm steady for me."

  Christian used two fingers to gingerly support his father's wrist as the needle slid into a bluish vein. The coagulated blood would not draw. Hunter pushed the tip deeper until a few drops trickled into the syringe.

  "What do you think, Christian? Dad just happened to fall off a boat the night before he was going to throw a net over those bastards?"

  "What the hell you talking about?"

  "You don't know anything about what he was doing, do you?"

  "Only thing he ever said was ‘Christian, you drink too much.’"

  "I wonder where he got that idea."

  Christian's breath came in short, labored bursts. "He drowned. And all your fancy Sherlock Holmes stuff ain't going to change that."

  "You believe what you want, Christian. Someone killed him, and I swear on my father, lying in front me, I will find the bastards."

  "You find out someone did this, they'll answer to me."

  "No. The vigilante days are over. If someone killed him, I'll be there at San Quentin to see them hang for it." Hunter abruptly ripped the sheet off, startling Christian with the sight of the naked corpse.

  "Now, help me position him so I can get some photographs." Christian stared, ill at ease over Hunter's tone. The impulsive young man had all but disappeared, replaced by someone frank and unflinching.

  Chapter 22

  MARKET STREET

  MONDAY, APRIL 16, 1906. NOON

  Kaitlin Staley sat in the window of Hoffman's Grill on Market Street, reveling in the fashionable crowd and clanking trolleys outside and enjoying a new avocation, counting cars. She had lost interest in the Ford A's and N's when the numbers reached nearly one hundred, joyously turning her attention to the cape-topped Pierce Arrow and the jet black Orient, spotting a rare Winton and a front-engined Locomobile, a Pope Toledo and an Anderson Steamer, three different models of Rolls Royce and the grandest of them all, a black Mercedes. She noted the preponderance of steering wheels over tillers and the newest innovation, attached luggage compartments behind the seats.

  During her survey, she savored a hearty amalgam of eggs scrambled with oysters and bacon, a distinctly San Francisco breakfast named the Hangtown Fry due to its popularity with San Quentin's condemned prisoners. With a side of pickled salmon, toasted sourdough with blackberry jam, orange juice, green Ceylon tea, and a coal-black espresso, it was an indulgent twenty-five-cent fare she had decided upon weeks earlier after reading an article about Hoffman's in Sunset Magazine.

  Kaitlin walked out in the mid-day sun and stopped to let it warm her face. She wrestled her bulky carpetbag through the jostling crowd, navigating back and forth across Market Street at the distinctive herringbone crossing lanes.

  She set the bag down at Market and Sansome, staring up at the towering Occidental Building as the City enveloped her: clanging bells, honking horns, rumbling trolley wheels, dizzying spires and massive domes and mansard roofs viewed through the spiderweb of telephone and electric wires crisscrossing the impossibly blue sky. She had read hundreds of stories of San Francisco, but nothing prepared her for the overwhelming effect of it.

  She gazed at the row of skyscrapers stretching the length of Market Street, her treasure trove of photographs springing to life: the wedge-shaped Crocker Building and the onion-domed Chronicle Building, the brownstone Spreckels Building, the angular Academy of Sciences and the towering, eighteen-story Call Building.

  Then she saw it. The Palace Hotel. She stared and hundreds of gleaming bay windows stared back. She stepped forward unconsciously: a clanging trolley shook her from her reverie seconds before she would have stumbled into its path. She shrieked as the burly gripman clanged the gleaming brass bell above his head and doffed his bulky cap.

  Kaitlin picked her way back across Market Street amidst honking cars and thundering wagons, crossing the four cable and horse-drawn trolley lines.

  Turning in a daze down New Montgomery, she froze at the sight of the Palace's massive circular carriage entrance, the gleaming cars and bonneted Landaus bathed in a kaleidoscope of light from the enormous stained glass dome perched above the seven tiers of balconies.

  "Excuse me, ma'am, but you look like a princess in a fairy tale."

  She wheeled to face a thin young man, his black hair plastered against his head, the practiced smile of hotel courtesy etched across his face. "No. I, I. . . I just got off the train a few hours ago."

  "First time at the Palace, I take it?"

  "I have seen pictures and read most everything, but this . . ."

  "Does she live up to her billing?"

  "Oh, my, yes. It is a palace. I read that there are rooms here that cost a hundred dollars for one night."

  "Some more than that. Suites we call 'em. More like a fancy apartment than a hotel room. Some have their own parlors, with a piano and a butler and two bathrooms with hot running water."

  "Like the one where Enrico Caruso will be staying. I read about it in the Kansas City Star."

  "Like that, yes. But, if you're looking for a room here, I'm afraid you're a bit out of luck. Ain't a room left in the city, whole dang country is here to see Caruso. A man from Denver offered me a thousand dollars to find him two tickets. Two tickets. Must be an oil man. Never seen anything like it."

  "I was hoping to get a ticket, even for just one night. I was also hoping to find a room somewhere, you know, like in a boardinghouse or something. I'm a seamstress and I'm planning to be a clothing designer. I came to see all the dresses and gowns at the opera tomorrow night."

  Kaitlin noticed that most of the men making their way through the marbled entranceway were gazing in her direction.

  "Name is Tavish. Andrew Tavish."

  "Kaitlin. Kaitlin Staley. I really came to see Enrico Caruso. You think it's possible to find one ticket somewhere?"

  "Not sure, let me look around," he hesitated. "Let me suggest you don't tell people you're a seamstress if sewin' is what you mean. In San Francisco, that's a nickname for a parlor girl. A fallen woman."

  They were distracted by the horses in the carriage entrance whinnying and stamping. One bolted forward, crashing into another carriage, sending a gray-suited passenger toppling to the pavement, spilling the contents of his valise. Several bellmen rushed to his aid.

  "I'll be glad when the automobiles replace these darn horses," Andrew said. "They've been demented for weeks. And the smell."

  He took a few steps ahead of Kaitlin.

  "Come. Let me show you the Palace."

  Chapter 23

  TELEGRAPH HILL

  APRIL 16, 1906. 1:50 P.M.

  By mid-afternoon that Monday, I had finished setting up Hunter's rudimentary laboratory amidst the wine casks and cobwebs of the Fallon cellar.

  I moved to a rough wooden table and slid a blank sheet of paper into his ou
tdated typewriter—the letters on the old Remington #7 struck the page at the bottom of the carriage roll so you could not see them until they emerged several paragraphs later—and began my column.

  Despite my lingering grief and worry, the words came easily.

  THE HOUR OF CELEBRATION

  One would be hard-pressed to find two more timely operas for the San Francisco audience than Carmen and La Bohème, which represent the secular and romantic school revolutionizing every contemporary art form.

  When Carmen premiered at Paris' Opéra Comique, French aristocracy was scandalized as their teenage daughters, attending the spring débutante, were treated to the shocking sight of an amoral gypsy girl seducing the virtuous young army corporal, Don José, into abandoning both his fiancée and military duty. French society, it is rumored, has yet to recover.

  La Bohème, a Giacomo Puccini masterpiece of verismo, affords an impassioned look at the bohemian revolution currently sweeping the Western world, a broad embracement of art and the human spirit in an increasingly mechanized and impersonal society.

  Does not Carmen's saucy dance recall our own Libertine spirits, Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan, and befit the suffragist movement sweeping through San Francisco and the rest of the country? Does not the noble but impoverished life of the Latin Quarter's young artists in La Bohème reverberate among our Latin Quarter, the lofts and studios of North Beach and Telegraph Hill? Is the unwavering voice of Bohème's ardent young poet Rodolfo not heard distinctly in the uncompromising words of our Frank Norris and Jack London?

  That God has sent his own voice, Enrico Caruso, to deliver His message of impassioned humanity is not to be lost among the glitter and hyperbole. By curtain call the night of April 18, we will have witnessed events that herald a new America, a new world, and a new San Francisco. The voice of God will have spoken to us.

  How well will we listen?

  As I reviewed my handiwork, I tensed at the sound of footsteps on the hardwood floor above, easing when I recognized Hunter's jaunty stride.

  The smell of the morgue still clung to him, as did his anguish. "You saw your father?"

  "I had to do the coroner's job for him."

  Hunter moved past me to his rough-hewn bench. He put a slide into his microscope and leaned forward to the eyepiece.

  "You performed an autopsy on your own father?"

  "No cutting. Just blood and tissue samples, fingerprints, photographs." Hunter pulled the bare Edison bulb near the slide microscope. "This is the black substance I found on the steel cage by the boiler," he said, replacing it quickly with a slide he removed from his leather bag.

  "And this sample came from beneath my father's fingernails." He examined it for a moment. "They look identical."

  "What is it?"

  "Too soft and spongy for rubber. Some kind of animal skin."

  "There was an animal below?"

  "Someone wearing an animal skin of some kind."

  I sat at the Remington, inserted a fresh piece of paper, and typed as we talked. "Do you think someone hid below deck in the engine room?"

  "Yes. Whoever was down there fell against the boiler cage when they hit rough seas. He left this black substance on the sharp edges, and then staggered around, leaving a zigzag trail of blood drops. Then he grabbed the door handle and stumbled when the boat heaved. That's how that bloody handprint got on the bottom of the door."

  "Then he went up on deck to kill your father."

  "My father grabbed him, that's how the same black stuff got under his fingernails. He hit my father with something, a blackjack probably, there's a purple bruise at the base of his neck, oblong shaped, about six inches long. Then he cut the rope and shoved him overboard. From up in the pilot's roost, in that bad weather, Anthony saw none of it."

  "But what happened to the killer?" I asked, typing frantically.

  "There are a few possibilities. He drowned, or he rode the tide to one of the islands, or a boat picked him up before the cold did him in. Maybe he even jumped off near the dock and slipped away before I got there."

  "You learned all this studying Sherlock Holmes?"

  "Arthur Conan Doyle studied Scotland Yard's techniques. Most progressive police department in the world. I read every story I could find about them. It came in handy when I was helping the San Mateo Coroner. We had a minister once, claimed his wife committed suicide. She was on the bed, a revolver in her right hand an inch from her head. The cops were patting the good reverend on the back, offering him brandy and condolences. Only problem is, when someone shoots themself, especially with a .44 Colt, the recoil tears the gun from their hand. Not to mention his wife was left-handed. I compared the handwriting on the suicide note to the guest book from Sunday services. It matched the signature of the church bookkeeper. I went to her apartment and asked for her fingerprints, told her I was going to compare them to the suicide note and that I had already matched her handwriting. She started crying and confessed. She and the reverend were going to move to Scotland and live happily ever after on money the dead wife inherited. They were also pilfering from the collection plate. The cops weren't even going to investigate. That was when I decided once and for all to become a detective. That's all Sherlock Holmes did. Logic and simple observation."

  I pointed to a box on the table filled with eerie photographs, all of people's faces. The faces were contorted, eyes cast in all directions, their lips pursed or protruding. "I'm not sure what you wanted me to do with those."

  "That was an experiment for anthropology class. I'll explain later. Right now, do you think you can stomach another ride with me?"

  Chapter 24

  BARBARY COAST

  APRIL 16, 1906. 2:25 P.M.

  "What the hell are you trying to tell me, Kelly?" Adam Rolf shouted. "After weeks of planning this thing you don't have my papers?"

  "They ain't found the bloody papers," Kelly replied casually. "How else would you like me to give it to ya'?"

  Rolf leaned forward, placing his hands carefully on Shanghai Kelly's cluttered desk. It was the first visit he had paid to Kelly's seedy abode in years, and the cackling voices and buffoonish laughter in the bar outside Kelly's office added to Rolf’s annoyance. "A lot of good it does me to have Byron Fallon in his grave, with those papers floating around."

  "With good fortune, floatin' their incriminatin' little way to the bottom of the bloody bay."

  "Luck is the province of fools and idiots, Shanghai. Right now, my Judas is still sipping my champagne and smiling at me."

  Kelly turned his head to keep an eye on Tommy, dressed in his gray chauffeur's uniform and staring intently back at him. "I got my best men out looking for the papers right now," Kelly said. "Might help if I could offer up a little incentive to 'em."

  "You tell those hoodlums to bring the papers directly to me and I will pay another ten thousand. They have twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours. You bunco me and just remember I've buried better men for less."

  Rolf turned on his heels and was halfway through the door when Kelly called after him. Rolf stopped without looking back.

  "Better make that reward twenty-five thousand, Adam. Plus that supervisor's job you been wavin' in my face. Supervisor John Kelly. Got my dress suit picked out and everthin'. I'll throw your Judas in for good measure, head on a platter, just like last time. And Adam. Bloody Christ. Don't be making threats when you come 'round a man's office. You start a war with me, we'll see who's the first to mess his satin skivvies."

  Rolf jammed his bowler hat in place and stormed through the dark, filthy Boar's Head saloon.

  Tommy lingered behind to stare at Kelly. Tommy had worries of his own. If Byron Fallon had mentioned him in the missing documents, there would be no containing Rolf's fury.

  "You sure you ain't workin' the old man, Kelly?" Tommy asked, examining Kelly's face for a sign he was aware of Tommy's betrayal. "You sure you ain't hidin' those papers somewheres?"

  "Now why would I do a thing like that?" he responded.
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  Tommy fought the urge to kill him on the spot, knowing full well it would not guarantee recovery of the papers.

  Rolf was seated in the Phaeton when Tommy exited the Boar's Head and climbed into the driver's seat next to him.

  "Kelly probably has the papers in his safe," Rolf said as they started off. "He can't read them, and he sure as hell wouldn't trust anyone to read them for him. He's afraid they would sell the information behind his back. He wants to twist the knife, up the ante."

  "Somebody needs to put a shank in the dirty Mick."

  "Once I have the papers and the man who betrayed me, dispose of him by any means you find enjoyable."

  While Rolf and Tommy drove toward Rolf’s mansion on Nob Hill, Antoine Dugay entered Kelly's office.

  "Mr. Kelly. I see Monsieur Rolf is just leave, 'e is not look so 'appy. I 'ave somesing maybe is make him smile very much."

  "What might that be, Antoine?"

  "A girl. Most beautiful girl Antoine ever sees. She is come by za train. Maybe Mr. Rolf is like zis girl very much."

  "Where is the little twist now?"

  "One of my spies, who is work at za Palace, tells me she is just leave there. She promise to contact heem laters. She is so much beautiful zis girl, blue eyes, big teats."

  "You find her, Antoine. I'll make a gift of her to Mr. Rolf. Peace offerin'. I'll forget what you owe me in gambling debts."

  Meanwhile, at a second-floor office at the Portrero Tannery near the Hunter's Point ship building piers, the establishment's owner used a magnifying glass to examine the black substance Hunter had found beneath his father's nails.

  "Seal skin," he said to Hunter and me. "Don't make a whole lot of it. A coupla coats for some of those society dames. Only skin we got that's black like that."