The Styx (20 page)
He leaned in conspiratorially to Byrne.
“Knowledge is money, boy’o, and since your ear is closer to the rich than ours, keep us in mind should ya hear somethin’ juicy, eh?”
Byrne did not dismiss the possibility. Being noncommittal, he’d learned, kept doors open. Haney was right about one thing, information is what the world ran on, be it business or law enforcement. It was a lesson he’d learned firsthand from Danny. He’d have to build a network if he was going to find his brother and survive in this land of sun and heat and haves and have nots. Eventually the binder boys all rose and bid him farewell. A waiter arrived and asked if he was going to use the table for more than drinking and Byrne asked for a lunch recommendation. In minutes was served the finest tasting fish—called yellowtail snapper—that he’d ever put to fork. He stayed for another forty-five minutes, eating and drinking and recording the faces around him. If he was a smoking man, he’d of lit a cigar. Fine fish and fine beer. What more could a man want while sitting in the sun with money in his pocket? The answer surprised him when it came sidelong out of his head. It was the memory of bright chiffon and a waft of gardenia, a glance of tumbling auburn, a glimpse of china skin and the shine of an emerald eye.
A
LL
right Marjory. I’m listening. Tell me what you know.” The McAdams had retired to their quarters in the Poinciana, a suite of rooms that were not the equal of the Birch’s, but the tiffany, Ming, fine leather and dark mahogany were still extraordinary for an employee. Mr. McAdams had loosened his collar, kicked off his shoes and made himself a heavy glass of scotch. He was exhausted from the New York trip but took his favorite place in a high-backed wing chair with a view of the golf course and asked again.
“Tell me what this urgent matter is all about.”
Mr. McAdams was always accommodating to his daughter. Since his wife’s death he had been more lenient than perhaps he should have been. He recognized that he had somehow transferred from his wife to his daughter the need to listen and to some degree share his confidences. He saw it as a way of gaining insight into himself, having the feedback from those who loved and knew him best. They wouldn’t bullshit him. They wouldn’t be sycophantic, sucking up to gain favor or advantage. And he knew they wouldn’t use what they learned to knife him in the back. The conversations were frank—Marjory had inherited that characteristic from her mother. But in certain cases, like this one, he would withhold some truths, just as he had with his wife. Truths that might hurt her. Truths that might hurt his standing in her eyes. But it didn’t stop him from being blunt.
“What is it with this fire that has so intrigued you? What do you know of this dead man found in the ashes?”
Marjory had to calm herself. Her telegraphs to her father had been vague by necessity. And she knew how he reacted to hyperbole and emotion in these retellings of her experiences and concerns. She adopted the style of her mother, serious and businesslike, when she could.
“On Monday, Papa, the servant’s village, the Styx, was burned to the ground. I was out on the porch at the Breakers that night with a friend. A female friend,” she added. This was, after all, her father.
“We smelled the smoke and then saw the glow of flames in the trees and went to investigate.”
“Yes.” McAdams had already been advised of these facts. He already knew who the friend was, the senior housekeeper who his daughter had often been seen in company with. He had decided not to fight that battle, his daughter’s penchant for fraternizing with the staff. He had never wanted to stifle her inquisitiveness or shield her from knowing the ways of people, especially those outside of her class. Such associations had served him well as Flagler’s front man, his forward scout so to speak. “You learn the truth by listening” had been his own private motto, and he would not hamstring his own daughter by denying her that knowledge. In this situation, though, he was concerned his broadmindedness would come back to haunt him.
“Go on, dear.”
“So I went out to the fire site,” she said. “To help if I could.”
McAdams raised one questioning eyebrow. The look was not unfamiliar to Marjory. It was disapproval of her actions, of her logic, but her father would never say a word, just give the eyebrow, point made.
“We watched the fire, while it ate everything up. It was hor…”
Marjory stopped herself short of stepping across the emotional line she knew her father disliked.
“It destroyed nearly everything. The homes and that wooden dance hall and most of their belongings. They were left with nothing.”
“I know you’re concerned. And Mr. Flagler has already taken steps to build accommodations for his workers across the lake. I do believe they will in fact be an improvement in the housing those people had thrown together in the Styx,” McAdams said.
Marjory now abandoned the rule against displaying emotion. “Yes, I know. But it will be no benefit to the poor woman who that abominable blob of a sheriff has accused of killing that man.”
McAdams held up his hand, lowered his head, showing her his acquiescence to the fierceness his daughter owned.
“I know about the body. But please tell me that you did not also witness this.”
“I’m sorry, but yes, a few of us did see the body. It was not so bad as when Mama and I saw that dead little boy in the Bowery that day.”
The memory tightened the skin around Mr. McAdam’s eyes. It was one of the few times in their marriage that he had admonished his wife. Her penchant for social work in the city had led her numerous times into undesirable neighborhoods in the lower bowels of Manhattan, but she had always reassured him with explanations that these were group trips with other like-minded women and they never traveled without escort, often off-duty police officers hand-picked by trusted commanders close to prominent members of their society.
But the idea that his wife would take ten-year-old Marjory along with her crossed all bounds of acceptance. While the entire group was walking near Chatham Square, ostensibly scouting out a location for some cockamamie poor house for unwed mothers, a child half Marjory’s age fell, or was pushed, or simply thrown from the window of a six-story building they were passing. In relating the story his wife had been unable to determine whether she’d heard the gasps before the thud of the body or the other way round. She said she’d tried to shield Marjory’s eyes from the crumpled body that lay before them. But Marjory later had dreams of birds losing flight in midair and reacted with a twitching shock whenever she heard a thump from some innocent occurrence out of sight. She had actually taken one of her dolls and positioned its arms and legs in a horrific tableau that his wife said was a remarkable reconstruction of the dead child’s position on the sidewalk. In time Marjory seemed to have forgotten the incident, but obviously not altogether.
Mr. McAdams, in his dry manner, stated only the facts as he knew them.
“And I understand, Marjory, that the sheriff—and I do wish you would be more circumspect in your descriptions of the man—has conducted an investigation.”
“Which is the entire problem. This so-called investigation has led to a ludicrous assumption that a poor Negro housemaid put a knife into the man and then tried to burn his body to cover the crime and led to the destruction of her own home and entire village.”
Mr. McAdams put his chin in the crux between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand and tilted his head just so. It was a sign Marjory recognized as the point in which the conversation had turned from an exercise in listening to one bordering on argument.
“And this accused woman, did you know her, dear?”
“No.”
“Had not Mizz Fluery introduced you to her?”
“No, Papa.” She hated lying to her father.
“So you did not know that she was a known, shall we say, escort of sorts with a rather tawdry reputation?”
“I did not know she was a prostitute, no,” Marjory said, rising to the debate that was now growing into the kind of lecture from her father she always railed against.
Mr. McAdams closed his eyes at the sound of the word prostitute, as if it were a glob of spittle that sullied both her upbringing and her beauty.
Marjory recognized her limits, and knew from her father’s look that she may have stepped over them. Logic had always been his game. She retreated to it quickly.
“There were several people at the fair on the mainland that saw the woman there. She wasn’t even on the island at the time of the fire.” This of course was speculation and was in fact Marjory’s entire motivation. Had Shantice Carver actually seen something she was never intended to see or not?
McAdams took a sip from his glass and remained stoically silent, but listening.
“And it is quite possible that Mr. Pearson himself recognized the dead man,” Marjory added, letting her ace come out of her hand in an effort to gain favor. “You can ask his opinion. I know he’ll speak to you with candor.”
Mr. McAdams remained quiet in the face of his daughter’s salvo. It was not the effect she was looking for. He finished his scotch with a slight flourish, a signal that the conversation was over.
“I shall speak with Mr. Pearson. And I will also attempt a meeting with the sheriff. Those things I can do under my limited authority,” he said. McAdams lowered his chin, dipping his forehead just so, and looked up at his daughter with his eyebrows raised. It was his conciliatory look, the one that asked for her patience, her discretion and her obedience.
“But please, my dear. Go no further with this until we talk again. I promise I’ll share with you what I can. But please, Marjory, leave this alone for now.”
The look and the slightly pleading tone always cut to her heart, made her feel guilty for adding burden to her father’s life.
“I will,” she said, standing and stepping to his chair. He would get to the truth, to what was known by whom. And then he would share that knowledge with her. That she was sure of. She bent to kiss his cheek. “It is wonderful to have you here.”
W
HEN
Byrne emerged from the Seminole Hotel the next morning he made sure not to step directly into the light. He’d learned that the sunrise in Florida was not the same event as in New York. Unfiltered by smoke and ash and undiffused by a hundred tall buildings and their cast of shadows, the sun here had the power to create temporary blindness to a Yankee whose immediate response was to squint and shade his eyes with a raised hand.
Today the lesson paid off. Byrne stayed back under the shadow of an awning. He spotted Mr. Faustus, leaning against a hitching post in front of shop baring the sign “L.A. Willson, Fine Boot and Shoemaker. Perfect Fits and Most Approved Styles Assured. No Cheap Work.”
Faustus was dressed in dark trousers and a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned tight to the neck and at the wrists. He had apparently left his tailed coat and his vest at home but still wore his high hat. Despite the early hour, he had a lit cigar in his mouth, the scent of which Byrne caught in the mild breeze. Since Faustus’ boots were shined, perfectly sound and in no need of repair, Byrne assumed he was waiting for him.
“Good morning, young Mr. Byrne,” Faustus said, coming off one haunch.
Byrne, his eyes adjusted, stepped down off the porch and joined the man.
“Good day to you, sir.”
“A fine day in paradise, Mr. Byrne,” Faustus said with a flourish of the cigar. “With this mild wind blowing in from the north, the ocean will assuredly be as a child’s soft blanket and it is a perfect morning for fishing.”
“Fishing, sir?”
“Why yes, young Pinkerton. Have you never been fishing on the deep blue sea?”
What Byrne knew of fish was the odor of the docks on Canal Street in the Lower forties, the mongers wheeling their carts up Broadway, the chopped-away heads washing in the slush of the gutters. But his memory of last night’s dinner, combined with Faustus’ use of the description of this fabulous water, caused a spark of interest to flash in his mind. He looked into Faustus’ eyes where there was a certain liveliness that he’d not seen before: no business, no cunning, no historical lesson, just an inkling of adventure.
“Fishing?” he repeated. Faustus raised his immense eyebrows in invitation. Byrne thought of the bait-and-switch of the Bowery, but knew he was too smart if that was the man’s ploy. Besides, Faustus was turning into someone who seemed quite connected in this new town. Perhaps connected enough to know where to find someone named Danny Byrne even if his brother had changed his name. Byrne felt as if Faustus was investigating him as much as he was Faustus. As a result, the man intrigued him. Why not come right out and ask if he knew of Danny and get it over with? Surely he’d been blunt with everyone else. But bluntness did not seem to be Faustus’ style, a trait that Byrne recognized as his own in the past. Could he be an ally, or nemesis? And if he was being subtly recruited, to what end?
Within an hour they were aboard a twenty-six-foot sailing launch, pushing off onto the lake from the docks of A.T. Rose, Boat Builder, on the southern boundary of the city.
When Byrne had agreed to Faustus’ excursion he’d first asked if he would require anything special: clothing, equipment, food.
“Not a thing, young Pinkerton. Just your curiosity,” Faustus had said and winked.
Within short walking distance of the hotel they passed through a boatyard of sorts with hulls in partial repair or stages of construction. The smell of fresh cut wood mixed with that of thick lacquer and paint. Faustus tipped his hat to a craftsman who was at the task of shaving what looked like a pole of fine ash wood into what Byrne assumed would eventually be a mast. Other workers were scraping the dried scales and what appeared to be barnacles from the bottom of a launch that had been pulled from the water with ropes and pulleys up onto a cradle of sorts. The equipment and docks and the wood itself looked new and fresh and hardened in the sun instead of the dank and rotted pilings and the stench of fish and oils and filth Byrne had experienced on the wharfs of New York.