Hop Alley (11 page)

Before I had traveled three blocks a horrible, rhythmic wheezing sound burst forth through the brume, twenty feet or so distant, I thought. Alarming as it was, congested and panicked, it had also a comfortingly familiar quality; I nonetheless flattened myself against the wall and awaited its arrival with my fists clenched, and in a moment I saw a mass begin to take dark shape, moving unquestionably toward me. It waddled from side to side, suggesting an enormous razorback boar loosed inexplicably upon the metropolis, and I finally called out to it.

“Who’s there?”

The sound stopped, replaced by a single sharp breath, and I heard a familiar voice call back. “I have a weapon,” it cried, feminine and brash, old and belligerent. “I’m not afraid to use it, either.”

“Mrs. Fenster? Is that you?”

“Mr. Sadlaw?” She came a little closer and her round, double-chinned face emerged from the mists, wide-eyed at finding me outside the house at this hour. I surmised that she had been running, if that was the word, from her sister’s house.

“It’s me. Would you care for an escort home?”

She nodded. “That would be most agreeable, Mr. Sadlaw.”

I reversed direction and walked alongside her, slowing my pace to accommodate her short legs and limited wind. “And how is your sister? Improved, I hope?”

“Much improved, thank you.” She seemed to take no pleasure from this, and we were silent until we reached our front door.

“I’ll resume my promenade, then. Good evening, Mrs. Fenster.”

“Good evening, Mr. Sadlaw.”

She disappeared into the house, clutching her handbag. Before I started walking again I saw another silhouette wobbling in my direction. It was the boy, hopped up presumably and likely as not just back from a Market Street whorehouse.

“Evening, Mister,” he said as he came to the door.

“Evening, Lem,” I replied, and I resumed my walk.

S
CHRAFFT’S WAS THE
only illuminated structure on its block, its entryway a rectangle of washed-out, undetailed yellowish white. Within it was considerably quieter than the previous evening, and the fog spilled inside the enclosure to lay low about the floor. The bartender nodded at me. “Time for one drink, then I’m closing.”

“Thought you were open all night.”

“Some Saturdays we are. On a night like tonight we might
as well go with the laws and shut down at midnight.” He spoke with a German accent, southern, I thought, though it was hard to tell in English.

He drew me a beer and I paid my ten cents, and he went back to his conversation with a red-faced gent whose hat had fallen off twice in the minute and a half I’d been there. There was no orchestra tonight, and no women to dance with anyway. The half dozen patrons scattered throughout the establishment were silent and grim-faced, and I wasn’t overly sorry to be chased out.

Then without warning, six or seven feet away from me, one rummy stood halfway up from his bench and gave his neighbor a good sock in the jaw, with remarkable accuracy and speed for a man as deeply in his cups as he appeared to be. There was a clacking as of teeth colliding unexpectedly and the second man went down with a high-pitched cry of alarm and pain as the first man stood over him hard-eyed and panting. “That’s for what you said about my wife, you damned hunk of dogshit.”

“I didn’t say nothing about your wife, you was the one saying things. All’s I said was ‘uh-huh’ and nodded my head.” Blood and spittle leaked from his mouth, and his lisp sounded like a loosened incisor or maybe a bitten tongue.

“Agreeing’s the same as saying it,” the first man said, and he stalked out the front door with the bartender’s wary eyes trained on him.

When he was out the bartender stared at the fallen man, and when he had his attention he said simply, “Out.”

“Hell, Jakey, I didn’t do nothing, he just up and hit me for no reason.”

“I said out, and if you want to come back tomorrow, you’ll do what I tell you.”

Grumbling, the defeated man rose, wiped his gory lip onto his filthy shirtsleeve, and shambled past me to the door. The smell of fresh blood played counterpoint above the deeper, dankish odor of his clothing, and the whole sad tableau evoked, not unhappily, memories of my own saloonkeeping days. I looked back at the bartender and saw that he held a billy club, slapping it into his left hand one, two, three.

“Some nights is nothing but trouble,” he said. “You’d think charging a dime a glass we’d lose some of that trade.”

I nodded and took another drink from my glass and then set it, two-thirds full, on the bar and walked away.

I
SLEPT WITHOUT
dreams, or without any that I could recall the next morning. Upon waking I made my way to the kitchen table where my morning papers awaited me, the
Bulletin
atop the pile as usual, and I sensed that Mrs. Fenster and the boy were waiting for me to react to it. The headline was larger than usual, a banner across the front page.

“Shall I read it?” I asked, and neither one responded. I began:

MURDERED IN HIS BED!

OUR PRESSMAN HIRAM COWAN ATTACKED ABED

AT DOCTOR MARCY’S HOME AND CLINIC—

DOCTOR MARCY THREATENED WITH A REVOLVER—

HE IS CO-OPERATING WITH THE POLICE

Two China-men Were Seen Entering His House—

They Arrived on Foot and Left the Same Way—

Police Certain They Are Still in Denver.

           
Hiram Cowan, who was yesterday reported to be recovering from the wounds he received from an assassin outside the Silver Star Saloon, was last night shot and killed as he lay unconscious in the clinic of Dr. Hamilton Marcy. Dr. Marcy, having opened his front door to a pair of pigtailed China-men, was quickly held at gunpoint, blindfolded, and forced into a closet with his wrists tied before him. As he worked to remove his bonds he heard a pair of gunshots, and when he managed to open the closet door, which had been blocked shut with a chair, he found his attackers gone, and his patient dead with two shots to the brain pan. Morphine and other opiates were taken
from the surgery, though whether robbery or murder was the motive for the deadly visit is undetermined. The doctor has been interviewed at length by the Denver Police Department and has furnished a general description of the apparently kindly Orientals to whom, thinking them in need of medical assistance, he opened his door last night; however, he told the
Bulletin
, he saw them but for a moment before his life was threatened and his eyes covered. Mr. Cowan, a valued employee of the
Bulletin
, leaves behind a wife and four children under the age of twenty.

“S
ORRY ABOUT YOUR
father, Lem.”

The boy looked confused, as if he couldn’t imagine an appropriate response, and I asked him and Mrs. Fenster if they would require time off of work for the funeral. She shook her head no, and the boy, watching her, followed suit. I ate my breakfast, reading the rest of the
Bulletin
as I did so, and then took the papers with me to the privy.

My reading was not particularly conducive to the activity at hand, consisting as it did mainly of incitements to violence. In the
Rocky Mountain News
an article on the killing railed against the Chinese, noting pointedly that while Chinese women were not allowed to partake of stupefactants, many of Hop Alley’s clientele were white women, and many of them middle class and respectable. Several papers that had previously ignored the story
of the shooting enthusiastically ran articles relating cursorily the facts of the case, followed by lengthy editorial rantings over the Yellow Threat to Labor, Morality, and White Rule.

The boy and I did not discuss the matter while we worked that morning, and after lunch I sat up on the roof printing the previous day’s portrait sittings. They were an eclectic mix: a homely debutante with her enormous mother, the latter poised to marry a penniless associate of her late husband’s and the former bitterly opposed to the union (I gleaned this from their dialogue during the sitting, not one word of which was directed to me); an emaciated old miner who wanted a picture to send his brothers and sisters back in Pennsylvania; a newly married couple setting out for one of the mining towns where he was to make his fortune; and the elderly Chinese launderer. I imagined Hop Alley was in for a rough time of it tonight, with revenge-taking for the death of the pressman by men who never met him, with no concern for whether that vengeance was being visited upon Cowan’s killers or their blameless compatriots. I wondered about Dr. Marcy’s account of the theft of his morphine, for I had never heard of a Chinese hypo fiend; my understanding was that they used only opium, taken strictly by the pipe, and there were many hundreds more white morphine addicts in Denver than Chinamen altogether. I suspected he’d taken advantage of the incident to invent a theft that would cover his selling of morphine to hopheads, and I suspected further that the newspapers all knew this to be the case but didn’t want to give up a chance to stir things up.

Upon descending to the gallery at one o’clock I found a man in a policeman’s uniform seated in a stuffed chair there, smoking a cheap-smelling cigar. A more-than-usually sullen Mrs. Fenster, engaged in cleaning the glass cases, introduced him to me as Patrolman Heinecker of the Denver Police. I thought I had seen him a time or two, rousting drunks and harassing streetwalkers.

“I just had some inquiries for Mrs. Fenster regarding her brother’s death,” he said, looking quite pleased with himself.

“Brother-in-law,” she corrected sharply, plucking at the hem of her apron.

He was clean-shaven and ruddy of complexion, though whiskey may have accounted for the latter. Two of the brass buttons of his blue tunic were undone, and his cap sat crooked on his head. “Mr. Sadlaw, do you know where this lady went last night?”

“She was here, as she is every night.” I didn’t quite understand why I felt compelled to lie, but it came out as naturally as the truth might have; I hoped Mrs. Fenster hadn’t already contradicted me, and she raised her head and sniffed as though vindicated.

“Because you see, one of Doc Marcy’s tenants downstairs from his surgery seen two old ladies come to call, both of ’em stout and short of stature, shortly after the arrival of the Chinee. The doc didn’t see ’em, but the dead man’s widow says to us, that sounds like my sisters, short and fat.” He licked his lips
and looked over at Mrs. Fenster, who stood with her plump arms crossed over her broad, shapeless bosom. “Just wondering if Mrs. Fenster had any thoughts on the matter.”

“None at all,” she said.