by John Straley
“Not a friend exactly.” George took up the glass and walked to the icebox. “But a shame nonetheless.”
George poured the buttermilk, then looked over at the young man. “Tell me your impressions of the case so far.”
“Well, sir, I think the woman with the bad hand is Ellie Hobbes. She is one of the people you were looking for in the Seattle matter. I think the three men were sent to find her and she killed them and then left town somehow. Maybe stowed away on a ship or just headed up into the woods. We’ve got officers in Ketchikan working on that now.”
“Have you identified the dead men?”
“I haven’t got a good I.D. from Seattle. They had some gear stored in a bar along the creek but there was nothing printed. No identification or letters, no radical leaflets, nothing.”
George dug into his case and brought out his thin files on the union men. “Here,” he said. “These are photos of Pierce, Conner, and Cobb. It’s a good chance these three are your victims.”
“Thank you, sir,” the young officer looked down at the photographs, a little stunned.
“What about the logger and the little girl?” George asked.
“I’m not sure, sir. I was going to check the cannery in B.C. They might still be there. The girl’s just a niece. Ellie must have left her with the logger, when she was hurt.”
“Why’d your captain send you up to Juneau?”
“One of the whores said this is where the three dead men were headed. My captain supposed that Juneau is where the case would be made. He sent me here to help.”
George set aside his gristly pot roast sandwich and leaned back in his chair. “Now all we need is a yellow bird.”
“Yellow bird, sir?”
“Once the yellow bird gets here we’ll have the whole congregation.”
The Shepherd rolled across the opening of Dixon Entrance without rattling a single cup. Annabelle took her turn at the wheel and Carl watched to make sure she could steer to a compass bearing. The sea swells were smooth and well spaced, so the boat rolled like an old mule with a light load on her back. Carl carved out a direct route into Revillagigedo Channel and north into Ketchikan. It was late in the afternoon when Carl pulled the boat up to the fuel dock and turned to Slip.
“Annabelle can stay here on the boat with the dory and your gear. You go see if you can find her aunt and you bring her down here to get her. If I can’t tie up right here, I won’t be far,” Carl called over to Slip, who was making fast the stern line.
Slip understood and waved to the girl before he turned and climbed up the iron ladder to the wharf. Then he took off running to the hospital.
Annabelle stayed in the wheelhouse on The Shepherd. She was looking forward to being with Ellie again. Annabelle had been frightened by Ellie’s injury. She found it hard to think that Ellie would never have all her fingers again. Maybe the doctors could do something, but Slip said it was pretty bad. She shook her head and tried to shake the ugly thoughts out of her mind.
She missed Ellie’s company. She missed the way she did impractical things. The dory trip had been full of practicality: pulling on the oars to a steady course. Annabelle wanted to talk with Ellie about the virtues of hot fudge and flying airplanes. She wanted to talk to her about what it was like to be in a Lockheed Vega. Annabelle had heard some men talking in the cannery that the Vega was like a flying log. What did they mean? Ellie had told her that Amelia Earhart had flown in a Lockheed Vega early in her career. Now Amelia flew a Lockheed Electra. Were they going to live in Ketchikan and buy a plane? She slid her glasses up her nose and took a deep breath. Asking questions raised her spirits.
Annabelle had hung a set of clothes to dry in the engine compartment of the boat as it crossed Dixon Entrance. The heat from the engine had dried her shirt, pants, socks, and unders completely for the first time in what felt like weeks. As she sat waiting for Slip to bring Ellie down to the boat, she decided to put on dry clothes in case Ellie wanted to go out to get ice cream or something. That would be like Ellie to do something like that, ice cream rather than dinner or unpacking their things in this new place that might be home.
Annabelle put on the clothes and the faint smell of diesel didn’t reduce the pure pleasure of wearing warm clothes. She came back out on deck and wrapped her arms around herself. She felt good for the first time in days. Ellie would come and she could braid her hair nice and tight again. They would talk over things while she did it. She would tell her about meeting the man with the stolen sheep, and about Slip’s adventure on the snag. She would tell about Buddy flying off, and Ellie would understand and she would know just the right way to think about it so that it wouldn’t hurt so much.
Annabelle fell asleep on the skipper’s berth in the wheelhouse. The oil stove in the galley kept her warm without a blanket. She dreamed of flying in a Lockheed Electra around the world. Slip and Ellie were eating ice cream in the back of the plane and all they did was laugh. Yellow birds roosted in the treetops wherever she flew, and if she came down close enough they all flew up in a shuddering yellow haze, yellow birds chirping and calling out louder than the roar of the big radial engines.
The door of the wheelhouse slammed shut and Carl was starting the engine of the boat. Cockatiels fluttered around in her head and her eyes were half open. The door opened and slammed shut again. Slip was pacing back and forth in the wheelhouse.
“Is Ellie here?” Annabelle rolled up on one elbow. She could still feel the pull of gravity as she flew the Lockheed Electra. She could hear Ellie laughing.
“Go back to sleep, now,” Slip said. His eyes were red and he looked pale. For a second Annabelle thought that maybe he had hurt himself, like Ellie.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Did you find Ellie?”
“Go back to sleep, I tell you,” Slip barked at her, and then he went out on the back deck, slamming the door once again.
“Just lay down, honey,” Carl Tisher said. “I’ll wake you up for some supper in a bit.”
She could raise herself up just enough in the bunk to look out on the back deck where Slip was hanging on to the dory. He was leaning out over the water. He looked as if he were vomiting, which seemed strange to her because it was hardly rough here in the channel.
“Everything okay?” Annabelle asked, as she put her head back down on the pillow.
“You just go back to your dreams, honey. We’re just going to head on up to Juneau,” Carl Tisher said in a voice that seemed soft and wet.
He is a nice man, Annabelle thought. Ellie is going to like him.
Her clothes still felt warm to her and the steady vibration of the engine thrummed through her body. Once again she pulled back on the yoke of the Electra’s controls, while a down of yellow feathers fell like snow from the sky.
TWENTY
To Annabelle, Juneau looked like a little town you might find in a snow globe: wooden buildings clinging to the side of a mountain. The big crooked building clung to the steep hill like a giant staircase someone thought to enclose. She sat on the skipper’s berth, bouncing in her seat, thinking that this looked as good as any place to wait for Ellie.
Slip hadn’t said anything since Ketchikan. He didn’t eat supper when Carl cooked up a rockfish he jigged up at anchor. Slip sat on the back deck as The Shepherd motored up past Petersburg and out into Frederick Sound. He slept on the back deck even when Carl told him there was a bunk for him up forward. Only once did Annabelle poke her head out onto the deck and she saw him sitting in the pen that Carl had used to transport his sheep.
“Hey,” the girl said above the motor, “come inside.”
He waved her back into the wheelhouse.
By the time they arrived in Juneau, Annabelle told herself that Slip was crazy and it was definitely time for her to find Ellie. As they eased up to the wharf, Annabelle could see black dust hanging in the air. When she turned to look at Slip she saw a meanness in his face that brought a chill to her heart.
“I’m going to hea
d uptown,” Slip said, helping Carl tie the boat. The girl stood on the back deck next to the dory and he looked at her for a second, filled his lungs with what he knew he should tell her, then stopped.
“I’m going to head uptown,” he repeated.
Carl Tisher grabbed onto Slip’s elbow. “I’ll anchor out tonight. You find Amos. I know you got things on your mind but I want you to find him, understand?”
“I’ll get someone to ferry me out to the boat if I find him,” Slip said. He turned away without a word to the girl.
The pressure building in her chest kept her planted to the deck and unable to speak. Up the hill by the stamp mill, a man walked across a steep sidehill. Rocks clattered down like damp fireworks. Annabelle raised her hand and waved at Slip, who was climbing up the ladder to the top of the wharf.
“I wouldn’t worry, detective, we’ll clean out the damned Reds. We know how to run our own affairs.” The federal magistrate sat across his oak desk from George and Walter. The magistrate was cleaning his fingernails with the point of his Barlow pocket-knife. He was a portly man whose chin was sunk back under several folds of fat. As he ripped the tip of his knife under each nail, he would flinch just enough so that his entire face jiggled. Beside the magistrate sat Tom Delaney, the head of Floodwater’s office in Seattle.
“The strike’s been going on for a month?” George asked.
“Something like that. I don’t suppose it matters how long they stay out; they’ll never get those kind of wages to work in a mine.” The magistrate didn’t look up from his nails.
“They got replacement workers coming in?”
“They even got some stump speakers down there building a fire underneath them. It’s like they got a new union to replace the old one.” He jerked back his hand and looked at a thread of blood winding down the little finger of his left hand. He put the finger in his mouth and sucked at the blood.
“I don’t know. If they did happen to get those wages I might be tempted to be a miner myself.” He looked at the soft white tip of his finger and wheezed out a flatulent laugh.
“Do you have people inside the union?” George said, looking at Delaney who was keeping conspicuously silent.
The magistrate looked a bit confused, and spoke for Delaney. “People?” he looked at the shamus with basset hound eyes. “You mean, like spies?”
George nodded and Delaney was about to open his mouth when the magistrate interrupted.
“Don’t really need spies. Guys come up here to my office and tell me anything I want to know.”
“Just come up here during the day to tell you what the union is planning?” George smiled at the thought.
“They know enough to have their bread buttered on both sides.”
Tom Delaney flicked at a piece of lint on the knee of his wool trousers, cleared his throat, and spoke up before the magistrate had anything more to offer. “We’ve got everything under control, George. You don’t have much to do up here.”
“You looking for Ellie Hobbes?” George asked.
“I’m here to help with the strike situation and head off any civil disturbance. It’s a pretty simple job.”
“Then you aren’t after Ellie Hobbes or Slippery Wilson?”
Delaney shook his head slowly as if he were gently stirring his next thought. “I’m not worried about Hobbes, and I don’t care about Wilson,” he said. He opened his mouth and it looked as if he were going to say something more but then he leaned back in the chair. “I’m not worried about either of them, actually.”
George stood up and dusted off the brim of his hat. He looked from the magistrate to Delaney and back. “All right then,” George said, putting his hat on.
As he turned and walked to the door Tom Delaney said, “Did you hear we lost another operative?”
George turned. “I heard about Fatty. It’s too bad. I suppose it will be hard on his family.” George looked closely at the brim of his hat.
“He didn’t have much of a family left,” Tom Delaney said, though his attention was already turning elsewhere. “You be careful out there, George.” The Floodwater man reached over and closed the door and the edge of the door brushed George’s shoulder on his way out.
George walked down the hill from the courthouse. He knew that if Ellie Hobbes were still alive she wouldn’t be hard to find. The magistrate was a fool—that was plain to see. There were two miners unions in Juneau that summer: the original local that had gone out on strike and the new workers association that was backed by management and the Arctic Brotherhood boys. It wasn’t uncommon for management to try to organize strikebreakers but it was a new twist to masquerade scabs as radical union men. If they had tried that down in the states, the town would have been overrun with agitators from all over the country. But Juneau was a long way from anywhere. It was a landlocked town with its back against the Canadian Coast Range. Any Red who wanted to come here to organize had to run the gauntlet of boatmen and night watchmen. They had to bring everything they needed with them on their back and survive in the town once they arrived.
George guessed that Ellie Hobbes would be drinking. She had a mangled hand and she was separated from the little girl and her running partner. She had a death sentence hanging over her head, and she was running out of places to run. Hobbes was not going to become a radical hermit out on one of the islands. She was a natural born speech giver.
Slip didn’t want to tell Annabelle about Ellie. He didn’t want to say that she had murdered three men and was on the run. After he had come up with nothing at the Ketchikan hospital, a cabby had directed him to the whorehouse on Creek Street. There, John told him Ellie was on the run and under suspicion of murder. The tall black man watched his words carefully so Slip knew he wasn’t telling everything he knew. But one look at the newspaper the black man held out told him that the essentials had been true. There were the three names that the enterprising reporter had tracked down—Pierce, Conner, and Cobb—and then there were some photographs of the men that had been taken on the Everett docks. Slip recognized all three even though he had only a glimpse of Conner and Pierce at Ellie’s meeting hall. But he remembered Cobb as the fireplug on the porch that first morning driving the black car with Ellie. Slip slapped the paper against his leg. Somewhere over his shoulder a withered laugh fell out into the street and a radio played dance music from some distant station. He thanked the man and walked away.
Even though it had only been two days, Ketchikan seemed a long time ago now. Slip had to put the past out of his mind or he would be sunk down with the gravity of all his mistakes. Now he was walking down Franklin Street in Juneau looking for Ellie. Slip had been standing right there when Clyde, the machinist at the cannery, had told Ellie about heading to Juneau, and Slip figured that Juneau was a big enough town with trouble enough for Ellie to hide in. Ketchikan was too hot for her now and Seattle was too far away. Ellie had to be in Juneau.
The late evening sun filled the street like canyon light. People wove their way around the legs of the men sprawled on the sidewalk and heavy trucks rumbled up the street toward the mine. He was walking down the sidewalk when he came abreast of an open doorway. A short man with steel-rimmed glasses stood squarely in the opening and he flipped a cigarette in front of Slip’s legs.
“You looking for work?” the short man said as he adjusted his visor above his eyes.
“Naw,” Slip said and he turned away. “I’m looking for somebody.”
“They’re hiring up at the mine. There’re going to be good jobs up there and plenty of them.”
“Naw,” Slip said. He looked behind the man’s shoulders where he saw the dark forms of men sitting around a card table. Slip could hear the chatter of poker chips and the creaking of wooden chairs against the floor.
“This the hiring hall?” Slip asked.
“Just go over to the new miners association building, down the block and to the left. You’ll see it. They’ll fix you up. Unless you’re in the mood for a card game.” A co
b of yellow teeth appeared in the man’s face. He stepped aside and Slip could see women bringing drinks to the players.
Slip shook his head and started to walk on again when the little man took him by the elbow.
“What’s your name, friend?”
Slip looked down at him and pulled his arm back. “I’m just looking for Ellie Hobbes.”
“You a friend of Ellie’s?” The man looked at him and then spit on the plank sidewalk.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What you say your name was?”
“That’s all right. I’ll just keep looking,” Slippery Wilson said, and he hurried down the street, right past the next open doorway where Walter Tillman had been standing listening to their conversation.
George walked into the bar and saw a blonde wearing three dirty shirts sitting hunched over a bottle in the corner. Her right hand gripped the bottle’s neck and her bandaged left hand was cradled in her lap. This was the unhappiest soul in a town of unhappy souls and George knew it had to be Ellie Hobbes. George walked past the barman, tapped his finger on the mahogany counter, and asked for a clean glass.
“Hello, Ellie,” George said and sat down. “Having a rough time of it?”
Ellie didn’t look up from the glass. “Get away from me.”
“I bet you’re tired of rowing, Ellie. I’m here to help you.”
The barman walked over with a glass and set it on the table. George took the bottle from Ellie’s hand, poured himself a drink, and left the stopper off the bottle.
Ellie swung her head up and tried to keep it level with the horizon but without much success. “How can you help me?”
“I’m here to take you into custody as a material witness in the killing of Ben Avery.” George took a drink and winced as the whiskey scoured its way down.
“You have to be a Seattle cop.”
“Why’s that, Ellie?”
“Because the Floodwater boys don’t want to be seen talking to me.” Ellie took another long drink.