Seattle Noir (17 page)
Enrique made his free hand into a fist. “Don’t worry, baby, nothing can spoil
your
looks.” Then he punched her. Twice. Pretty hard—left a big welt on her cheek and bloodied her nose.
“Damn, Enrique,” said Gabriella, wiping at the blood with the palm of one hand.
“Why me?” I asked Gabriella.
“You were available.” She glanced at Enrique. “Shoot him,
now,
” she ordered. “Get it over with.”
“My pleasure.” He cracked a cocky grin. “So long, sucker. Hope she was worth it.”
“Just do it!” Gabriella yelled, giving Enrique an impatient shove. The unexpected jolt caused the gun to go off. Lucky for me, the bullet missed but I actually felt it whiz by my head.
I did the only thing I could in that moment of confusion: I barreled straight into Enrique, buried my right shoulder in his mid-section, and grabbed hold of his gun hand.
Gabriella screamed. As we struggled for the gun she stepped in to help her man. She hit me a good one, then scratched my face, but I held on.
That’s when the Glock went off again. A couple times.
Bam bam!
Gabriella collapsed to the floor, blood gushing out of her like a fountain.
“Baby!” Enrique yelled. “Baby!”
He forgot all about me for a second. I wrenched the gun away from him.
The man fell to his knees beside her and cradled her head in his arms. “No, no, no,” he repeated when he realized she was probably dead. “No, no…”
“Get up, you bastard,” I said, my head swimming, my knees weak. The Glock was shaky in my hand, but still aimed square at his head.
I took a deep breath. It was over. I had him.
Then he surprised me.
He charged me just like I’d done to him.
Except it didn’t work for Enrique—I squeezed a shot off at the last moment. His head exploded like a melon hit with a sledgehammer.
Blood and brains all over me, I sat down on the bed and tried to gather my wits. I felt sick. Felt even sicker as I stared at the three lifeless bodies sprawled around me in the bedroom.
How long I sat there like that, I don’t know… All I know for sure is that I finally picked up the phone and called 911.
August 24, 2009
Editor
Noir & Intrigue Mystery Magazine
PO Box 473
New York, NY 10051
Dear Editor:
So, that’s my short story, “The Wrong End of a Gun.” I sure hope you’ll publish this. I worked very hard on it. It’s all true. And I also hope you won’t be put off by me being an inmate here at the Twin Rivers Correctional Facility.
I know it sounds clichéd, but I got the kind of justice that African Americans get all the time: lock us up and toss the key, never mind the evidence. I am innocent, I swear. I couldn’t afford a decent attorney. I’m doing fifteen-to-
life. That’s the best my public defender could get.
I’ve tried the newspapers, TV, and radio—I even tried 48 Hours and 60 Minutes—but nobody would listen to me. That’s why I have written this like it’s a mystery story. I figured maybe it would be good enough to publish in your magazine. I sure do hope so. My appeal was turned down. You’re my last chance. I think a lot of people will understand this story and like it and buy your magazine. It could do you and me both a lot of good.
I have enclosed a SASE like it said to do in the Writer’s Market.
Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely yours,
Conrad Sinclair
Inmate #SN/IR-4569
Build. C
c/o Twin Rivers Correctional Facility
Monroe, WA 98057
T
he grizzled morgue attendant manhandled the makeshift plank table to the center of the hot, small, noisome viewing chamber. James Robbins Jewell took an involuntary step back as he watched. Not since attending the funeral of an uncle who had stepped off a curb on New York City’s Canal Street and directly into the path of a beer wagon had Jewell seen someone who had met a violent end. He had been twelve that summer.
Now twenty-four, he put a handkerchief to his nose and mouth, then willed his stomach not to betray him and add to the charnel house smell of Seattle’s Cherry Street morgue.
Hardly a predicament in which I expected to find myself
, he thought. Jewell had been an Immigrant Inspector with the Treasury Department for all of four months.
As if reading his mind, the attendant, a squat, copper-haired fellow with the map of Ulster stamped all over his brogue, said, “First time with a corpse, hey?”
Jewell shook his head. “No, but it’s been years.” He didn’t mention the fact that this was his first opportunity to do anything besides sit behind a desk and copy forms in the regional office since he’d been posted to Seattle three months earlier.
“And why, pray tell,” the attendant continued, “comes a Treasury man to claim this Chink?”
“Ask your cousins among the bulls about that one,” Jewell replied drily. It was 1889, and Washington Territory stood on the cusp of statehood. The Irish, among the first non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants to the region, had set about doing in Seattle what they had done in such large Eastern cities as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston: filling the ranks of the local constabulary. Seattle’s tiny police force numbered right around twenty men; split almost evenly between Sons of Erin and Norwegian immigrants.
The attendant reached beneath his filthy apron and retrieved a pipe and tobacco pouch. “Wouldn’t touch a Chink, hey?”
Jewell shrugged. “Where did they find him, again?”
The little Irishman struck a match, touched it to his pipe, and puffed a couple of times while pulling back the sheet where it covered the corpse’s lower half. Squinting at the tag attached to one big toe, he read haltingly,
“South shore…
Mercer Island… half-mile west of Clark Beach.”
Straightening up, the man said, “No wonder our city fellas wanted nothin’ to do wi’ this one. Mercer Island’s unincorporated county, not city turf.”
“The King County Sheriff disagrees. Says the currents running through south Lake Washington pass right by the city proper, and that’s most likely the place where the corpse originated. Says he’s too busy and hasn’t enough deputies to put on the case of—”
“A dead Chink,” the Irishman finished for him. “McGraw’s no Chink hater. Gave a fair account of himself a couple of years back, during the Queen business.” He said it as if he expected the younger man would be familiar with the reference. He wasn’t.
But Jewell nodded as if he was, thinking it must have something to do with the Chinese troubles with the local Knights of Labor back in ’86. “So, since this fellow is obviously a foreigner, the city and the county decided that this becomes a federal matter, and they contacted my office. My superior in turn fetched me and sent me down here to take possession of the poor unfortunate.” Steeling himself not to vomit, he motioned for the attendant to pull back the sailcloth tarpaulin covering the body.
The dead man had obviously spent a lot of time in the water. His eyes were gone, and his features so bloated that it was difficult to tell whether he was Chinese, Indian, even white. Jewell stepped closer to get a good look at the cold, quiet lump of mortality laid out on the plank slab like a feast on a trencher.
The Chinamen Jewell had seen before, both back home in New York and during the three months he had spent in Seattle, had all worn their hair in the same manner. They completely shaved the front, sides, and back of the skull, leaving only a circular topknot along the crown of the head: grown long and braided down the back.
The naked corpse before him sported a similarly shaven head. There was, however, no topknot to speak of. This man’s hair was far shorter, and lay in a loose halo about his head, as if to draw attention to the deep, jagged cut that ran from ear to ear along his throat. The only other injury that Jewell could find on the body was a missing right pinky finger. Bloating caused by the corpse’s watery sojourn made it impossible to discern how long its owner had gone without the finger. Old wound or new, Jewell had no idea.
Lake Washington had done equal damage to the corpse’s remaining fingers, expanding them to the size of sausages. These appendages sported long fingernails, blackened by what Jewell had come to recognize as prolonged opium use.
“Poor devil,” he muttered. “How do we even know he was Chinese? See?” he pointed at the corpse’s head. “No pigtail.”
“Likely cut off,” the Irishman said. “Big insult to the Chinks, cuttin’ their hair. Did ye mark how the rest of his hair is cut like a slant’s, though? And,” he said, pulling a canvas bag from one of the shelves that lined the walls of the gruesome little room, “he was wearin’ these when they found him.”
Jewell inspected the contents: heavily wrinkled black trousers and an equally bedraggled red tunic, both of Oriental design and obviously made of silk.
“No shoes, no hat, no other possessions?”
“He’d washed around in the lake for a while, captain.”
“These clothes are not much to advance upon. Aside from arranging for a burial up on Capitol Hill, I’m uncertain as to what other service I or my office can be of in this matter.”
“Lovely fabric, silk,” the little man said.
“I hardly think—” Jewell began.
“Strong,” the morgue attendant went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Holds a design or a dye better than most other fibers. Oh, I’ll allow that it shrivels right up and looks an ungodly mess if it’s gotten too wet, just as this Chink’s togs have. But look.” He held up the red silk of the dead man’s shirt for Jewell’s inspection. “It’s even got the poor soul’s laundry mark right here inside the collar.”
“A pauper’s grave over in Lake View is the only place this is headed.” H.M. Porter looked at his new gold watch, wound it, then returned it to the pocket of a vest so expansive, ten dead Chinamen might easily have hidden within it.
H.M. (short for “Hamilton Menander”) Porter, a Treasury Department agent of countless years’ service, and for exactly two more days head of the territory’s Immigrant Inspection Division, stretched his considerable bulk backward in the chair he’d had shipped west by Sears, Roebuck, and Co. the previous year.
“Dead Chinaman; in the water since the great fish swallowed Jonah. No one’s reported a Chinaman missing; ergo, no one cares.”
Jewell stood staring out the window of the single-room clapboard building that had housed the territory’s sole Immigration Inspection office since it had ended its previous incarnation as a dry goods store the previous winter. Like nearly every other Seattle street, Seventh Avenue was unpaved, rutted, and prone to turn into a morass when it rained.
But that spring of 1889 had been unseasonably warm, especially for Seattle. Many an old-timer had remarked upon the unlikely pleasant weather they’d been having. Now the first week of June, Seattle’s infamous late-spring rains showed no signs of reasserting themselves in their wonted seasonal patterns.
When Jewell had arrived in the city only a short three months before, the street on which their window faced had been home to the usual assortment of rivulets, puddles, and wagons stuck here and there in mud up to the axle. And “puddle” was too tame a word, a poor choice of descriptor for the standing rainwater that by turns eroded and covered the byways of Seattle’s primitive urban grid. Horses had been lost in them. Pigs had gone squealing in them. Drunks had been fished from them. Children had been known to drown in the intermittent quagmires that dominated Seattle’s streets.
Looking out upon the sunlit street from the musty confines of what was rapidly beginning to feel like a prison to him, Jewell balked at the thought of even three more days spent shuffling papers. He might as well just be locked up in the iron cell that occupied one corner of the building, the place where illegals were held while awaiting deportation. After Porter’s retirement things might be different, but at the moment, two days felt like an eternity.
“It’s a laundry mark, sir,” Jewell said. “How long might it possibly take to pursue it in the Chinese community?” He looked from the street over to where Porter sat waiting out the remaining hours until his retirement. “Besides, they’re Chinese. Just where would they have been able to go to report one of their number missing?”
Porter reached for his new watch again, looked longingly at it, as if willing the minutes to go by more quickly. “Immigrant Inspectors are not to involve themselves in local civil matters.”
“Perhaps you ought to have thought of that before you sent me down to collect the body, sir.”
Porter gave a sigh so violent that for a split second Jewell thought he might be having a seizure. Looking at his watch a third time, the older man said, “If only Clute were here. He’d know what to do.”
Clute.
The man Jewell had been sent to replace. The fellow whose abrupt resignation had reportedly been greeted within the hallowed halls of the Treasury building back east in Washington City by a satisfied and protracted silence.
Clute, who had an answer for everything. Clute, whose efficiency and commitment to his profession had allowed Porter to commence his life as a pensioner a couple of years early in everything but name. Clute, who understood and respected the Celestials who Immigration Inspectors were supposed to be encouraging to return to their homes in China. Clute, who had left his letter of resignation on Porter’s desk and promptly vanished.
“But Mr. Clute isn’t here, Mr. Porter. I am. In scarce two days’ time you’re to be pensioned off. In the three months I’ve been here you’ve had me hard at it, mastering the intricacies of our particular bureaucracy. This is an opportunity for me to gain some experience working outside of our office, while I still have you as a source of advice. Your sagacity and good counsel will be sorely missed once you’ve returned home.” That last part was sheer flattery. Porter had done little over the past three months save arrive late, take long lunches, and leave early. “Why not make the most of this opportunity while I still have you here?”
At first Jewell thought he might have overplayed his hand. Porter sat there staring at his watch for a number of heartbeats. At length he asked, “Where’s the body, anyway?”
Jewell blinked once while Porter’s question registered. “They need a day to release it. Paperwork, I was told.”
“You’re hell-bent on following this up, aren’t you, lad?”
“In this man’s shoes I would want my mother to know what became of me.” When Porter said nothing, he continued, “It’s the Christian thing to do, sir.”
Porter gave a loud rumble that might have been a chuckle or it might have been a grunt. “The Chinese,” he said slowly, “seem to know very little of either Christianity or sentimentality. In China, life is a cheap commodity. This fellow’s family likely wrote him off the day he set out for
Gum Shan
”—he used the Cantonese name for America; it translated as “Gold Mountain” in English. After pursing his lips and squinting at Jewell for thirty seconds, Porter finally said, “If I forbid you to pursue this, you’ll just wait out my remaining days and then set about it on your own anyway, won’t you?” Rather than wait for a reply, Porter sighed and looked at his watch again. “You have one day, young man; all of today and till 12 noon on the morrow. I expect you here not one jot later. After all, there’s still the matter of the collection of that body.”
When Jewell began to thank him, the older man cut him short.
“I can spare you the rest of today and tomorrow morning, but nothing further. Do I make myself clear?”
Jewell savored the feel of the sun on his face as he headed downhill in the general direction of Chinatown. No clouds today; the sky bright blue. Off away to the west across the Sound the jagged snow-capped peaks of the Olympics showed themselves. Gulls reeled and swooped overhead, looking for their next meal.
Taking the Skid Road, Jewell wove his way in and out of the foot and wagon traffic to be expected on so glorious a June afternoon. Known alternately as “the Mill Road” and “Yesler’s Drive,” the Skid Road was the first (and, to that point, only) paved street in town.
Built at public expense at the direction of former mayor Henry Yesler in order to more easily get freshly cut logs downhill to his huge sawmill on Front Street, the Skid Road ran straight down Seattle’s steep western slope all the way from the timberline where it crested First Hill to the fill-dirt of the waterfront. Surprisingly, Yesler’s primitive plank pavement did its work, serving as the “skid” that gave the avenue its name, and keeping logs being sent down the hill from sticking fast in the ever-present Seattle mud.
Such a reliable thoroughfare quickly sprouted residences and businesses running along both its sides. The Skid Road already boasted saloons, general stores, two millinery shops, a carpenter, a tinker, a hostelry, a cobbler on the corner of Fifth, and, at the foot of the hill, the elaborate cornice work and hand-carved façade of the three-sided, three-story Occidental Hotel stood on the corner where James Street dead-ended into it right in front of Yesler’s massive mill.
This growth had made the Skid Road the anchor of Seattle’s burgeoning downtown, and had spilled over onto neighboring streets, such as the spot a block to the north where the significantly pious whitewashed bulk of Trinity Church rose. As far as Jewell knew, Chinese were not welcome within. Furthermore, not a single business lining Seattle’s busiest street was Chinese-owned.
The first Chinese to come to the area during the labor shortage of the late 1850s had been welcomed by Seattle’s white settlers. When businesses began to fail in response to the panic of 1873 and available jobs dried up, Chinese laborers, always willing to work hard for lower pay than white men, became less welcome. Anti-Chinese riots periodically broke out across the Northwest, culminating in the Knights of Labor successfully running nearly two hundred Chinese out of Seattle aboard a steamer bound for Victoria only three years earlier.