Lone Star 02

by Ellis, Wesley

“Just incredible!” Lewis beamed. “You are to be congratulated, Jordan. To have learned so much about the head of a Tong! How ever did you pry the information out of Chinatown?”

  “I didn‘t, Arthur,” Moore smiled. “There’s no way a Caucasian can get anywhere in Chinatown, these days. The Chinese are too wary, too frightened.” Moore scowled as he flicked his cigar’s ash into a sand-filled, standing ashtray next to his armchair. “You can blame Dennis Kearney for that.”

  “Earlier today, Mr. Kearney’s name was thrown into my face,” Ki said.

  “And so it would be,” Moore replied sardonically. “Pardon my curiosity, but are you—”

  “I am of Japanese heritage,” Ki explained patiently. “And I should think curiosity was a requirement of your profession,” he added, his smile fleeting but unmistakable.

  Moore’s easy grin reappeared. “Kearney’s a soapbox orator who has managed to get himself a following made up primarily of unskilled workers. These men are being forced out of their jobs by Chinese who are willing to work for a pittance. The Chinese and Japanese aren’t the only targets of Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party. He often rants about the wealthy as well. His followers are mostly decent folks, angry and bitter over their economic situation, but decent nonetheless. Unfortunately, some bad apples have caused a few ugly incidents. There have been lynchings in Chinatown, and just recently, a poor Japanese fellow was clubbed to death in Japantown.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a place,” Jessie said.

  “Yes, there are some ten thousand Japanese living together in a neighborhood huddled on the fringe of Chinatown,” Ki informed her.

  “As compared to the fifty thousand Chinese living in Chinatown,” Moore added.

  “Well, then, if it wasn’t in Chinatown, where did you find out so much about the Tong?” Jessie demanded.

  Once again, Lewis blushed. Why, even the ever-brash Moore seemed slightly embarrassed, from the way he lowered his eyes in order to avoid Jessie’s frank stare. “Will you two stop acting like bashful schoolboys and come out with it?” Jessie groaned, totally confounded.

  “I already explained to her about the... bordello...” Lewis shrugged. “Just come out with it, man.”

  “Well, the bordello is where I did most of my investigating,” Moore began, his voice tentative. “This is difficult to explain to a woman. I decided to pose as the wastrel son of an Oregon lumber tycoon. Fortunately, San Francisco is large enough, and I’m obscure enough, so that I was able to infiltrate the right after-hours clubs with my cover intact in order to meet the people who could get me into that bordello. I threw around a lot of money—your money, actually, Miss Starbuck.” Moore chuckled. “I made it known that I was looking to smuggle Chinese coolies into Oregon to work at my father’s lumber mill. In that way I gained an introduction to Chang himself.” Moore shuddered. “I must say, looking into the old devil’s eyes, and seeing that steel claw of his, certainly made me wonder if I was going to have to move out of San Francisco after this job is finished. Anyway, many of the city’s so-called leaders—business executives, government officials, and so on—frequent the bordello, which, by the way, is extravagantly, wonderfully luxurious...” Moore’s voice trailed away.

  “I expect we’ll see the costs of those luxuries on your expenses bill,” Jessie murmured hotly. “Would you mind telling me what my money bought?”

  “Yes, ma‘am,” Moore winked, taking another puff of his cigar. “First of all, it bought me the acquaintance of Harris Smith, the waterfront commissioner. After I’d picked up enough bar chits, he became quite friendly and talkative. He even offered to open up the port to me. The deal was that I’d pay Chang to bring in the coolies, and pay a small bribe to Moore for letting them slip into the city. How I was to get my slaves to Oregon was to be my problem.”

  “Wonderful!” Lewis enthused. “You see, Jessie? My plan in working! We can set up Moore’s payment to Smith so that newspaper men can document it! The mayor will have to fire him!”

  “Chang later approached me with the offer to ship the coolies directly to the Oregon coast, thereby cutting out Smith, and saving me—and my daddy—some money,” Moore scowled. “Old Chang wanted to get his steel claw into the lumber business, I could see it in his eyes, which were as cold as those of the fish he used to butcher...”

  “Chang has clippers of his own?” Ki asked.

  “Some,” Moore replied. “But these days he likes using iron-hulled three-masters and the new waterfront steam donkeys for unloading heavy cargo that belongs to a European-based business cartel. In order to reassure me that he could indeed deliver the coolies, he introduced me to the representative of this cartel.”

  “He was also a frequent guest of the bordello, I take it?” Jessie asked dryly.

  “I never knew that about old Burkhardt,” Lewis chuckled in response to Moore’s nod. “So the old devil had his flings, eh?”

  “Burkhardt and I became quite good drinking cronies,” Moore boasted. “He’d get soused and then bitterly complain about how this cartel he worked for was replacing him—”

  “That I could have told you,” Lewis interrupted. “Let’s get back to my plan to expose Smith’s corruption.”

  “No,” Jessie said, her voice polite, but steel-firm, so that there was no question as to who was in charge. “Smith is small fry. What we’ve got to do is disrupt the partnership between the cartel and the Tong. Smith will fall when they do. Only then will the Starbuck enterprises be able to thrive peacefully.”

  “Jessie,” Lewis sighed, “you must not let the past influence your judgement. We cannot exterminate either the Tong or the cartel. Smith ought to be our main concern.”

  “Arthur, I disagree,” Jessie declared flatly, but the warning look in Ki’s eyes made her pause, think, and then soften her tone. “Dear Uncle,” she smiled. “Up until now, the one constant mistake the Starbucks have made is in letting the cartel have the first strike. My father made that mistake, and it cost my mother’s life. Years later he made it again, and that time it cost him his life. The cartel has started this skirmish by disrupting our commerce. Soon they will resort to violence. This time, I mean to strike the first blow!” Turning to Moore, she asked, “Did you, by any chance, discover the identity of the Prussian who will take over from Burkhardt?”

  “I did,” Moore replied.

  After a moment’s silence, Jessie demanded, “Well? What is his name?”

  Moore looked apologetically at Lewis, and then confronted Jessie. “I don’t think I’m going to tell you.”

  “But Jordan!” Lewis gasped, clearly astounded. “Why not?”

  “I think I know,” Jessie sighed. “You want more money, Mr. Moore, am I correct?”

  “No, Miss Starbuck, you are not correct,” Moore shot back, his temper rising. “You may have trouble understanding this, lady, but there are some things in my job I won’t do. For instance, I won’t compromise or in any way contribute to harming an innocent person, just because the folks who are paying me harbor some grudge.”

  “But you were willing to help me bring down Commissioner Smith,” Lewis began.

  “That’s different.” Moore shrugged, lowering his eyes to inspect the glowing tip of his cheroot. “Smith is a crook, and that makes him fair game. As far as I know, the person coming in to head up this Prussian cartel is innocent of everything but wanting to do a good job. Sure, this cartel made a deal with the Tong, but that’s no reason for Miss Starbuck here wanting to—as she puts it—strike the first blow against the representative.”

  “I have good reason for wanting to battle the cartel,” Jessie said.

  Moore nodded noncommittally. “If you say so. I never argue with a lady.”

  “But I do!” she cried in exasperation.

  “So go battle them,” Moore said lazily. “But I don’t intend to help.”

  “Jordan,” Lewis interrupted, “I do think we’ve already paid for this last bit of information Miss Starbuck wants...”
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br />   “Then I’ll refund that part of your advance, minus my expenses, of course, Arthur,” Moore offered. “And we can call it quits.” Moore set his cigar down in the ashtray and sat forward, his expression intensely serious, as he continued, “You all have to understand that I often work outside the law. That means I have to formulate my own rules of conduct. I don’t want anything to do with some mysterious grudge—”

  Ki got to his feet. “Perhaps Mr. Moore would tell me what you wish to know, Jessie,” he growled, advancing on the seated private detective.

  Quick as a flash, Moore reached beneath the left side of his coat, bringing out a pistol. The harsh click! of the gun’s hammer being cocked echoed in the now-silent room.

  “You’re a lot stronger than I am, Ki,” Moore smiled. “And from the look of you, you’ve probably spent a lot of years training yourself. Now, I know a little bit about Oriental fighting techniques. I’ve even studied a bit of Chinese boxing with a willing teacher in Chinatown.” He hefted his pistol. “I’d hate to see all your years of effort disappear in a cloud of smoke.”

  “If you fire, you will miss,” Ki warned.

  “And that’s what’s called betting your life, friend,” Moore said evenly, but his smile had faded.

  “Ki, please sit down,” Jessie said. “And you, Mr. Moore, please put away your gun.” She tilted her head to get a better look at the weapon. “Unless I miss my guess, that’s a double-action Colt Model T. The Thunderer, it’s called. A .44-caliber.”

  “Good Lord,” Moore laughed. “How did you come by that sort of expertise?”

  “You mean because I’m a woman?” Jessie smiled back. “Perhaps someday I’ll tell you something.” She winked. “I see you’ve modified your pistol.”

  Moore held the gun in profile. “I’ve sawed off all but two inches of its original six-inch barrel,” he explained. “I really have little call for distance shooting.” He uncocked the pistol and slipped it back into the shoulder holster beneath his coat.

  “What would you have done if you had not had your firearm?” Ki asked.

  “I have it almost all the time, actually,” Moore said good naturedly. “I do apologize for pointing it at you, but I really did not want you to rip my head off.”

  Ki chuckled. “In that case...” He waved away their confrontation.

  “Gentlemen, please!” Lewis moaned in exasperation. “We seem to be at an impasse. Jordan, if Jessie were to tell you why we need to know the new representative’s identity? Might that change your mind?”

  Moore nodded slowly. “It might.”

  “Arthur, it’s really private business—” Jessie began.

  “Excuse me,” Ki interrupted, “but we need the information, and if we do not get it from Mr. Moore, we must seek it out ourselves. That would be both time-consuming and dangerous.”

  After a few seconds’ hesitation, Jessie had to agree. “Very well. Mr. Moore, I ask you to keep this in strictest confidence.”

  Moore nodded, picking up his cheroot and relighting it. “I will if I can, but I have a partner, and if he needs to know some or all of this, I will tell him. Fair enough?”

  “Agreed,” Jessie said, impressed, in spite of herself, with Moore’s straightforwardness. “At the time of my father’s murder, he ran our enterprises from our cattle ranch in Texas.”

  “That’s the Starbuck ranch,” Moore said. “I’ve heard of it. It’s supposed to be huge. It’s where you really grew up, eh? And, I suppose, where you learned about guns?”

  “And about roping and riding and a lot of other things, as well. Anyway, my father was shot dead in an ambush staged on our own land by agents of the Prussian cartel.”

  Moore frowned. “Arthur?”

  “It’s all true,” Lewis assured him. “It’s been substantiated by the federal government’s own investigators. Jessie and Ki, along with a deputy United States marshal named Long, brought the actual killers to justice, at the same time foiling the cartel’s plot to take over the Texas cattle industry.”

  “I’m impressed,” Moore said with unfeigned sincerity.

  “The murder of my father was not the beginning of the violence between the Starbuck empire and the Prussians,” Jessie continued. “But they hoped it would be the final blow in their campaign to illegally take control of America’s political and business establishment. The war actually began long before my birth, when my father first confronted these villains in the Japans. During a series of bloody trade wars between the two business concerns, the Prussian cartel was responsible for the murder of my mother.” Jessie paused. “I was only a child, then.”

  Moore watched the play of passions and memories drift across Jessie’s lovely face, the way dark storm clouds will slowly fill a lovely summer sky. Her large green eyes grew shiny, and for one awful moment he was worried that she was going to cry. But no. Moore saw that she was made of sterner stuff than that. “Were your mother’s murderers ever caught?” he asked.

  “No, but my father retaliated by personally killing the only son of his chief Prussian adversary, the man responsible for issuing the orders to have my mother killed.” The look of steely determination was back on Jessie’s face. “That awful exchange of familial violence capped the bloodshed for some years.”

  “An eye for an eye,” Moore observed.

  “Until my father was struck down.” This time it was Jessie who leaned forward in her chair in order to lock Moore’s eyes with her own. “Ki and I travel the country in order to thwart the schemes sponsored by the cartel. I’ve got the resources of Starbuck Enterprises, and the guidance of a diary of leads that my father compiled down through the years. He’d hired private detectives, you see. Men like yourself. They told him of the various representatives of the cartel—crooked politicians, law-men, businessmen, and outlaws—who are attempting to entrench these foreign powers in our nation.”

  Moore pondered what he’d been told. “I had no idea. I mean, I thought it was—”

  “Will you help us, Mr. Moore?” Jessie asked softly.

  “Wild horses couldn’t keep me out of something like this, and please call me Jordan.” He looked at Ki. “Both of you.”

  Ki nodded. “I would be honored. Now, the name of the Prussian representative? Who is he?”

  Moore laughed. “What makes you think it has to be a man?”

  Ki, Jessie, and Lewis looked at each other, obviously taken aback. Ki’s face began to redden noticeably, and Jessie said, “Ki, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Ki replied hastily, but a dreadful thought had occurred to him. He looked steadily at Moore. “What is her name, then?” he asked, though he was sure he already knew the answer.

  “Greta Kahr,” Moore said.

  Jessie was still staring curiously at Ki. He felt the pressure of her gaze, and turned to face her.

  “I met her this morning,” he said. “When I went back to fetch our luggage, there was an attempted purse-snatching. This woman was the intended victim. I, uh, foiled the thieves.”

  Moore took out his little notebook and a pencil stub. “Do you think you can describe her for me?” he asked.

  Ki’s face reddened to an even deeper shade, and Jessie had to conceal a smile as she remembered Ki’s tardiness in arriving at their hotel. “Go on, Ki,” she said. “Tell Mr. Moore what the lady—to give her the benefit of the doubt—looked like. I’m sure you got quite a good look at her...”

  Chapter 3

  The morning after their meeting with Jordan Moore in Arthur Lewis’s office, Jessie and Ki went down to the waterfront. Lewis had offhandedly mentioned that a Starbuck clipper was scheduled for unloading today. Jessie did not want to miss this opportunity to witness this first, vital link in the chain that made up the Starbuck fortune.

  The day had begun gray and cloudy, with a wind-driven, slanting drizzle that made the cobblestone streets glisten. But by the time Jessie and Ki had paid their five-cent fares to ride the Market Street cable car back to the Ferry Building, and had st
rolled north along the Embarcadero, the sun had broken through the woolly gray of the overcast sky.

  A strong, hot sun had soon dried the last drops of rain off the smooth, stone-surfaced Embarcadero, the huge, manmade esplanade that had taken decades to build and had added dozens of blocks to downtown San Francisco. Before it was built, deep-water ships usually ended up scuttled in the mud flats that had reached to what was now the very fashionable and completely dry Montgomery Street.

  But now the big three-masters could come directly to shore. Jessie and Ki wandered past the ships, staring up with awe at the spiderweb rigging of the cargo vessles, and trying to stay out of the way of the swarms of denim- and canvas-garbed longshoremen. Like ants swarming over the carcass of a dead grasshopper, the longshoremen would disappear into the hold of a ship, to reappear, each man lugging a wooden crate or rag-wrapped bale of goods. Workhorses, their big, blunt heads drooping patiently, stood still except for their fly-whisking tails as the rough-paneled carts they were hitched to were filled with, or emptied of goods. Jessie’s and Ki’s ears were filled with the squawking of gulls, the cries and shouts of the dock workers, and the hissing and clanking of the steam donkeys that were more and more replacing both animal and human muscle power for lifting and lowering heavy loads.

  As they walked, Jessie and Ki spotted the flags of a score of companies flying from the masts of the docked clippers. The larger concerns, sensitive to public opinion, used longshore teams comprised of Caucasians, while the smaller, less established companies hired Chinese, who were supervised by white foremen. Nowhere during their walk did Jessie and Ki see a team where the two races were working side by side.

  At last they reached the Starbuck ship. Flying from the mainmast of the docked clipper, and from a flagpole atop the cargo shed on the dock, were the Stars and Stripes and, just below it, the yellow pennant on which was emblazoned in red the Circle Star, the insignia of the Starbuck empire. The emblem, a five-pointed star enclosed in a circle, was branded on Starbuck cattle; it was stenciled on the crates of Starbuck goods that crisscrossed the country and the oceans; it was carved into the ivory grips of the derringer pressing so snugly against Jessie’s thigh; it was even embroidered into a comer of her lace hankies!