S Hockensmith - H03 - The Black Dove

by Steve Hockensmith

  “Sergeant” my brother said, “where are you takin us?”

  Mahoney glowered at Gustav like he couldn’t decide which eye to poke out first.

  “Look,” he growled.

  Then he took a deep breath, and when he blew it out he seemed to have blown out the flame burning inside him, as well. His tone softened so much he actually sounded civil for once.

  “I just needed to talk to you, that’s all. Alone. You three have been pretty busy today, don’t think I haven’t heard. I need to know what you’ve dug up.”

  “Dug up about what?” Diana asked dryly.

  The big cop sighed, defeated. “Chan’s murder.”

  “Murder?” Diana said, all wide-eyed innocence. “Not suicide?”

  “Yeah, yeah—murder” Mahoney said. “The autopsy won’t be official for days, but it didn’t take the coroner ten seconds to find a wound on the back of Chan’s head. Somebody clobbered him and turned on the gas.”

  “Do tell.” I gave my chin a thoughtful rub. “Seems like I’ve heard that theory somewheres before.”

  “Alright, Brother. The man’s had his fill of crow,” Old Red said. “Tell you what, Mahoney—I’ll answer your questions, provided you’ll answer mine.”

  “Fair enough.” Mahoney took hold of his lapel and pulled, revealing a dull-gold seven-pronged star pinned to the lining of his suit coat. “But this means I go first.”

  Gustav eyed the man warily (while Diana, I noticed, eyed him). Then he nodded.

  Mahoney let go of his lapel, and his badge dropped out of sight. “I’ll make it easy for you. No questions. Just tell me everything that happened after you left Chan’s place this morning. And I mean everything.”

  “That’s makin’ it easy?” Gustav said.

  “Alright, maybe not easy.” Mahoney leaned back (as much one could in that little rolling cabbage crate) and put on the air of a fellow settling in to hear a yarn. “But it’s simple, anyway. Just tell me what happened.”

  “Fine.” Gustav gave me a little sidelong nod. “But I’m gonna let Otto here spin it out. If you’re lookin’ for ‘simple,’ he’s the one to turn to.”

  “You don’t know what a favor he just done you,” I said to Mahoney. “My brother tells a story like a tadpole rides a—”

  “Just get on with it,” Mahoney said.

  So I did, laying it all out while our wagon rumbled slowly through the darkening streets of the city: how we’d met Chan on the Pacific Express; our encounter with him (and Little Pete and the old man, Yee Lock) the day before; our close call at Madam Fong’s; Ah Gum’s escape from the cathouse to tell us about Fat Choy, the hophead/hatchet man; Chinatown Charlie’s tour of the quarter’s opium dens; our attempt to pull the wool over Chun Ti Chu’s eyes only to have him fleece-up our peepers instead; the chase through the Plaza and up over the rooftops; our audience with Little Pete; and finally our rescue by the valiant officers of the San Francisco Police Department’s legendary Chinatown Squad.

  Of course, thorough as my report might have been, it wasn’t wholly unexpurgated. I didn’t volunteer that we no longer worked for the Southern Pacific, for instance, nor did I bring up the items we’d burgled from Chan’s place after we’d sneaked back inside.

  Mahoney listened intently, the occasional puzzled grimace or surprised grunt his only commentary. My brother remained mum, as well. In fact, he didn’t jump in to correct me or scold me for overembroidering even once—quite the uncommon show of restraint on his part.

  As for Diana, she seemed less concerned with what I had to say than how Mahoney and Gustav heard it. She kept her gaze on them as much as on me.

  “And that’s about it,” I said as I wound my account down.

  I looked over at Old Red, inviting him to “remind” me about the scorpion—or the things we’d heard about Mahoney himself. But he just stared back at me, tight-lipped, so I forged on.

  “Seems to us the Black Dove is the key to the whole caboodle. That Hok Gup—she saw something, heard something, knows something . . . something. Cuz if it was just one love-crazy hatchet man killin’ Chan, you wouldn’t see all these other characters in such a rush to grab the poor gal. So we been tryin’ to get to her before she gets herself got.”

  Mahoney nodded silently a moment, then turned to my brother. “And that’s everything?”

  “More than everything,” Gustav said.

  “Hey, I told it quick as I could,” I protested. “This is what you call ‘a tangled web’ we got a-woven here. Most folks couldn’t have unraveled it in less than—”

  “It’s our turn now,” Diana said to the sergeant, cutting me off. “Would you mind if I asked the first question?”

  Mahoney sat up straight, his expression souring with a contempt too intense to have just come over him. It must have been there all along, shackled out of sight. And now it was being unleashed.

  “You’re through asking questions. All of you.”

  He rapped on the ceiling again, and the driver angled the wagon in toward the sidewalk.

  “Well, hell,” Gustav sighed, looking vexed but surprisingly unsurprised.

  “You ain’t gonna keep your word?” I said to Mahoney.

  “I didn’t give my word. I just lied,” the cop replied. “Now, if you want my word on something, here it is: If I catch you back in Chinatown, I’ll throw you in a cell with those tong Chinks we just dragged out of Little Pete’s. And believe you me, they won’t need their hatchets to make mincemeat out of you.”

  The wagon came to a stop.

  “And just in case you’re so thick-headed you need another reason to stay away, here you go,” Mahoney went on. “The Kwong Ducks just put up a chun hung on all of you. You know what that means?”

  “There’s a bounty out for us?” I asked.

  “A big bounty. Five hundred dollars a head.” Mahoney’s broad face contorted into a sneer so extreme he looked like he was about to sneeze. “More than you ass-pains are worth alive, that’s for sure.” He leaned over and opened the wagon’s back door. “Now get out. And just be glad I’m too busy to waste any more time on you.”

  I climbed out first. It was full-on dark now, and there was little light to go by outside. I had no trouble recognizing where I was, though.

  The wind whipping in off the Bay, the clanging of buoy bells in the darkness, the howls of the debauched, the mad/merry music spilling out of the melodeons. We could only be one place—the eastern edge of the Barbary Coast. Mahoney may as well have dropped us into a snake pit.

  I helped Diana climb down to the filth-soiled sidewalk, but Old Red showed no sign of budging from the wagon.

  “Just promise me one thing,” he said to Mahoney. “No matter what it is you’re really up to, you’ll do what you can to help Hok Gup.”

  “Here’s a promise for you.”

  Mahoney slipped a hand into one of his pockets. When he drew it out again, there was a dull shine along one side, as if he was wearing a gold ring on every finger.

  His fist was wrapped around a pair of brass knuckles.

  “Understand me?” he said.

  Gustav nodded. “I’m startin’ to.”

  My brother hopped from the wagon.

  “This is your last warning.” Mahoney pulled the door shut and gave the ceiling a knock. “Butt out.”

  The driver sent his team into the street. The first chance he got, he whipped the wagon around and went clattering back toward Chinatown. Getting there—for him or us—meant passing through a neighborhood so dodgy a policeman wouldn’t walk it alone in the daytime—and this was darkest night.

  In more ways than one, we were further from the Black Dove than we’d been since we’d begun our search for her.

  30

  GRIT IN THE INSTRUMENT

  Or, My Brother Opens Up His Heart . . . and an Old Wound

  After the sun went down, it seemed, the city of San Francisco no longer even pretended the Barbary Coast was anything but its own kingdom, separate and lawles
s—except for the law of the jungle. There were no cable cars running, no coppers on patrol, and of the gas lamps along the street, only one in ten were working. Most of the light to see by came in little streams spilling out of dancehall doorways and bawdy house windows (from which also spilled raucous music, rowdy laughter, pie-eyed men, and half-clothed women). In between these pockets of light and life were long stretches of gloom where dark figures lurched or lurked or merely lay in a heap, moaning . . . or not.

  If the Coast was no place for a lady during the day, by night it was hardly fit for anyone but Vikings.

  “Funny-lookin’ hack you took here,” cracked a war-painted harlot as Mahoney’s police wagon rolled away.

  “Yeah,” added a swaggering little man with the dandified pugnaciousness peculiar to pimps. “That’s the first time I’ve seen one of them wagons drop anyone off ’round here. Usually they’re pickin’ people up.”

  “In the morning,” the strumpet snickered.

  Her mack laughed. “From the gutter!”

  We ignored them—just as we ignored their colleague attending to a customer in an alleyway and the retching soldier bent over on the corner and the trio of young swells whistling at Diana’s shapely figure (or perhaps mine, given my form-fitting britches).

  “One question . . . that’s all I was hopin’ to get in,” Gustav mumbled. “One lousy question . . . .”

  “You’re going back, aren’t you?” Diana asked him. “To Chinatown.”

  He said what I knew he’d say.

  “Of course I am.”

  “Well, then,” Diana replied, “I—”

  Again, I knew what was coming from my brother’s mouth before his lips even parted.

  “No, you’re not.”

  But then Old Red ran a hand over his mustache and looked the lady in the eye, and for the next few minutes everything I thought I knew about my brother was dead wrong.

  “Not unless we settle something first” is how he started it all off.

  The light was dim and Diana recovered fast, but for a split second her eyes seemed to go as perfectly round as a doll’s.

  “So you’re willing to let me come along . . . even with the bounty on us?”

  “Don’t see as I can stop you. And leavin’ you here”—Gustav waved a hand at the squalor around us—“that’d be just as bad as takin’ you back to Chinatown. And it ain’t like I could get my mule-headed brother to drag you off somewheres safe.”

  “No way you’re goin’ back to Chinatown without me,” I said.

  “See?” Old Red said to Diana.

  “What do we have to settle, Gustav?” she asked him. But the asking was mere formality. She knew.

  My brother just tilted his head to one side, his sour expression saying he knew she knew, and the time for game-playing was past.

  “Alright, I’ll make you an offer,” Diana said. “The same one as Mahoney: You can ask one question . . . if you answer one question first.”

  Old Red nodded curtly. “Agreed, but let’s do this quick, huh? We’ve wasted enough time already.”

  The lady gave him a grim smile that didn’t waver even as a gaggle of peacoated (and most likely pee-coated) sailors staggered past hooting lewdly.

  “I’m glad you trust me to honor an arrangement like this, given what Mahoney just did.”

  “Miss, it remains to be seen whether I trust you or not. Now ask.”

  “Alright. Tell me—”

  Diana took in a deep breath, obviously struggling to find the right words. When she had them, she exhaled slowly with an air of satisfaction, like a man blowing out the smoke of his first cigarette in too long a spell.

  “What’s bothering you, Gustav?”

  “That’s your question?” Old Red said. “After all that’s happened today?”

  “Yes. That’s my question,” Diana said. “Don’t forget—I saw you on the Pacific Express. Those were hardly ideal circumstances for you, yet it made no difference. Yes, you lost your temper once or twice, but you were always thinking, always looking, always seeing what no one else saw. Always . . . inspired.”

  Gustav didn’t blush or look bashful. Instead, he seemed abashed, almost embarrassed.

  “And today?” he said.

  “Something’s been distracting you. Getting in the way.”

  “Oh, this is ridiculous!” I spluttered. “A friend is dead and we’re bein’ hunted by fellers with hatchets, and you wanna know why the man’s a tad distracted?”

  I may as well have been yet another stumbling, muttering drunk—Diana and Old Red paid me no mind.

  “I ain’t been at my best, I know it,” my brother said so quietly it was hard to know if he was speaking to the lady or himself.

  “You don’t got nothing to apologize for,” I told him.

  “I reckon there is something that’s been draggin’ on me,” he went on.

  “You don’t have to say another word, Brother.”

  Gustav finally seemed to hear me. “Yeah, I do. To you as much as her.”

  Sweet Jesus, I thought. Here it comes.

  I’d tried to head him off, but it was too late now. The cat was about to come bounding out of the bag, and that little bastard had him some claws—sharp enough to cut my brother deep.

  It was plain enough to me what the extra weight on Gustav had been the past day. And I wouldn’t have minded (much) hearing my brother admit it over a beer later, just him and me. But not here, not now, not like this.

  The truth hadn’t hit me all of a sudden. It had just kept creeping up and creeping up and creeping up behind me until I could feel it there without even turning to look: Gustav was in love with Diana Corvus.

  It was why he’d felt so betrayed when she’d disappeared on us a month before. Why he was so oversensitive about her motives in tracking us down again now. Why his already short fuse had been snipped down clean to the nub.

  Old Red Amlingmeyer had finally opened his heart to a woman. And what could a beautiful, brilliant, witty, wonderful lady like Diana do but slam it shut again?

  I mean, I’d have a hard enough time wooing her myself, and I’m . . . well, me. A crotchety, skirt-shy runt like my brother wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “Back when we was on the Pacific Express, I told you I was through keepin’ secrets from you,” Gustav said to me. “Remember?”

  His eyes were on me in that unblinking way that blocks out everyone else, evetything else—whittles the universe down to just the two of you.

  All I could do was nod.

  “Well, I meant that, Brother. So what I’m about to speak of . . . I wasn’t holdin’ it back from you. It’s just . . . the subject didn’t come up.”

  “Until today,” Diana cut in. Her voice was soft, though, almost remorseful, like she already regretted what she’d pushed Gustav to.

  “That’s right. It come up today—come up and got me riled up. Got me stupid.” Old Red snorted and glanced into the shadows nearby, at the pimp and his pathetic little harem. “ ‘Grit in the instrument.’ ‘A crack in the lens.’ ”

  For once, he wasn’t quoting Holmes directly. These were words from John Watson about Holmes.

  Or, to be more specific, about Holmes’s attitude on a certain subject—one Gustav himself had never discussed with me at any length beyond a grunt and a glower. And as I placed both those quotes (“A Scandal in Bohemia,” page one), I felt my gut curl up tight as a diamond hitch knot.

  “Grit in a sensitive instrument,” “a crack in one of his own high-power lenses”—according to Watson, that’s how Sherlock Holmes viewed love.

  “Brother . . . ,” I said, trying one last time to save his heart from a hiding.

  “Just let me finish it quick,” Old Red said. He locked eyes on the lady. “I’m gonna be plainspoken here, miss.”

  Don’t laugh, Diana, I silently prayed. Be kind. Don’t laugh.

  “Me and my brother,” Gustav began, “we ain’t whorin’ men.”

  I stopped my praying, I w
as so stunned. As professions of devotion go, “We ain’t whorin’ men” leaves a lot to be desired.

  “But there was a time,” Old Red went on, “back before Otto come out on the trail with me, when I did as every other drover does. Even got to be a real regular at a seedy little place down to San Marcos, Texas. Started goin’ there cuz it was cheap, kept goin’ back cuz . . . well . . . I had me a favorite. And, with time, she come to be more than that. She was . . .”

  He choked off into silence, and it took a hacking cough to get himself going again.

  “She was my only. My only ever. And it wasn’t what you might think. I ain’t one of them men gets crazy ideas about a gal just cuz she . . . you know. She and me—we talked. A lot. Bet you can’t believe that, can you, Brother? Me and a woman talkin’, jokin’ . . . dreamin’ together?”

  “I believe it,” I said, the words catching in my throat, coming out as whispers.

  Gustav nodded, then sucked in a quick breath. The rest of the story he spewed out fast, like it was acid he had to spit out before it burned a hole clean through him.

  “Well, one day, somebody up and did to her as is done to so many of them gals, sooner or later. Did it to her mean, crazylike. Did it to her til she was dead. A customer, folks said. Some sick son of a bitch just passin’ through. By the time I heard of it, she’d already been plowed under. And of course there was no talk of a posse, of justice for the likes of her. Other than me and the other chippies, nobody gave a shit except maybe her bastard pimps, and they was just put out about the lost income. Ever since, I ain’t had no use for macks or madams nor any of it.”

  He paused again, his eyes a-glistening in the dim light.

  “So this business with the Black Dove, I reckon it just . . . grits me up a little.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. And I swear to you, at that moment at least, there was not the smallest part of me, not the most minute jot of selfishness or small-mindedness, that begrudged my brother keeping this to himself all those years.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Diana said, and to her credit, she truly looked it. “If I’d known—”