The Big Mitt (A Detective Harm Queen Novel Book 1) (31 page)

“Listen, Peder, I can’t go to Colonel Ames for police protection because he doesn’t give a damn about any of this. We need a new hiding place. Perhaps one outside of Minneapolis, but it can’t be Saint Paul.”

“Harm, ve mustn’t vorry. Do you remember vot my yob is? I’m an organizer. I’ve got a dozen big Norske men vit strapping arms who vill vatch my house night and day.”

“I can’t let you do that, Peder. These men have guns. They’re professional killers.”

“Six of my men ver in da Norvegian army. Dey can handle demselves. De odders are strong as oxen. Trust me, Harm. Dey all love Karoline. She’s helped dere vives and children vit everyting from food to clothing to medicine. Dey von’t let anything happen to her, or anyvone else in her care.”

Taking another half a day to find safe quarters for these young women, as pleasurable as he anticipated it would be, was something he just couldn’t do. Their safety would consume him, but his problems were compounding by the minute and time was important. He knew the best way to resolve this Jiggs Kilbane business would be to nip it in the bud, and that meant confronting the rotten bastard in the flesh.

A cry from the carriage halted his conversation with Peder. He looked back and saw Trilly running towards him, hand held high, with a knife in her hand. He stumbled back, as did Peder, and raised his hands in defense. Her eyes were focused on the door, however, and as soon as he realized this, he bolted after her. She was fast in a skirt, blazing fast. She slipped through the door, a few feet ahead of him, and he heard Peder right behind. What the hell is she going to do? What set her off like that?

He skidded to the door and threw it open, feeling it hit Higgins’s body with a thump. Trilly was there, smoldering hatred on her face, standing over Emil Dander’s seated corpse. She wielded the knife in one hand like some great hunter, and held a clump of Dander’s thick black hair in the other. She’d pulled his head back so his blank expression faced the ceiling, and the gash on his neck gaped open. The sticky congealed blood coating his throat had cracked open and streams of fresh blood turned his red shirt redder.

“Trilly!” Harm shouted. “He’s already dead! What are you doing?”

“She’s yust gone in da head,” Peder said in a hushed tone. “Votever he did to her must have been black.”

Her eyes were glassy, brimming with tears. She glared wildly at Dander, then at Queen. “The monster,” she cried. “Damn him! Damn the monster!” The knife fell from her hand and she fell to the floor, crumpling into an anguished heap. Queen surged towards her, taking her into his arms. He was utterly inexperienced at the art of consolation, especially for a woman afflicted with such sorrow. She didn’t pull away, however, and he felt her body go limp in his hold.

“Harm, I’m so glad he’s dead,” she sobbed.

Once more, Anderson rapped on the door, this time loudly enough to stir whoever else was holed up in the rooms lining the narrow, dimly lit corridor. The smell of burned food and stale piss permeated every cramped inch of the flophouse. The peeling paint and the lone electric bulb swaying from the low ceiling did nothing to instill any cheer in this dark place either. He used his fist this time, and the pounding echoed through the paper-thin walls. The noise was loud enough this time to create a stirring from within. Soon, he heard shuffling feet, and the click of a lock. The door squeaked open, and Anderson heard a muffled voice, gravelly and hoarse.

“Come in, come in.”

He followed the voice’s instructions, and entered the tiny space. A narrow bed was pushed up against the far wall, which contained the only window in the gloomy room. The glass was cracked and filthy and barely let in the waning afternoon light. A wobbly table and two mismatched chairs filled out the furniture in Martin Baum’s little piece of hell on earth.

“How are you, Martin?” Anderson asked. He had to stoop a little to fit under the ceiling.

“I’ve taken quite ill, Dix. Quite ill. As you can see, I’ve slept most of the day.”

Baum wore only a dirty set of flannels. His skin was sallow and sweaty. Anderson searched the room with his eyes and noticed a half-consumed bottle of whiskey poking out from under the bed frame. “This is a bad time of the year for getting sick. You can’t play games with your health. Have you seen a doctor?”

“I don’t have the money for that, Dix. The wife has seen to emptying my accounts.” He gave a weak smile, and sat on one of his chairs. It creaked under his weight, and for a moment Anderson thought it might break.

“Did you get my messages, Martin? I left three of them with your desk clerk downstairs.”

“I’ve been in bed all day, Dix.”

“What is that?” Anderson pointed to an envelope, scarcely hidden under a blanket on Baum’s mattress. In two long strides, and before Baum could protest, he was at the bed and had yanked it out. Fifty dollars.

Baum’s face turned like a thundercloud. “I guess I’d forgotten about that.”

“I don’t know where to start,” Anderson said, shaking his head with disgust. “Do you know what I learned last night? My granddaughter isn’t the dead girl I was led to believe she was. Maisy could very well be alive.” He watched Baum’s face twist into a facsimile of surprise. He already knows, Anderson thought.

“That is spectacular news, Dix! So you’ve been looking for her today?”

“I’ve been looking for information about her. Someone in this town knows who she is, or her name wouldn’t have been slapped onto the girl in the morgue.”

“Of course you know, Dix, that Maisy was like a granddaughter to me as well. We wrote each other many times, and I never forgot her birthday. Uncle Martin, I was to her.”

Anderson had already had enough. He grabbed the other chair and put it next to Baum’s so he could sit nice and close. The stench of cheap booze oozed from Baum’s skin, and Anderson found himself trying to blink it away. “Who visited you, and what did they say about me?” he asked, resting his large hand on Baum’s shoulder. “I know you’ve been served a bowl of cold gruel, Martin, and your situation is difficult.”

“I’m simply under the weather,” Baum replied. He looked down at his lap.

“And that fifty dollars fell from the sky. What kind of stupid fool do you take me for, Martin? Enough of your fimble-famble. I read the newspapers, and I know you do, too. You’re afraid of helping me, aren’t you?”

Martin looked as though he was about to shoot the cat. Anderson stood up, walked to the corner of the room and picked up a crumpled paper bag, sitting about the other trash. He opened it and held it out to Baum, who took it sheepishly.

“If you’re going to throw up your whiskey, do it, Martin. I don’t have time right now for this game.” He glared at Baum, and watched him sink two inches in his seat. “I must say, I never figured you for a liar. So much for our decades of friendship.”

Baum rubbed his eyes until they were red, and looked up at Anderson, ashamed.

“He came this morning. Told me I wasn’t to help you or even speak to you while you were in town. Gave me that money as payment.”

“Who was it? Harmon Queen?”

“No, not him. I wouldn’t deal with that dirty scoundrel for twice that amount. It was another detective. His name is Norbeck. I don’t know him well, but he’s easy to recognize, with his face covered in red sores.”

Glad you’re able to draw a line in the sand when it comes to betrayal, Anderson thought. Looking at his old friend’s pathetic, shivering form, however, softened his anger. Baum had always lived by a strong moral code, but he was also living in squalor and filth. Anderson hoped he would never have to face the same decision Baum had.

“I hope you feel better,” Anderson said. He bent down under the bed, feeling his back burn in the process, and pulled out the bottle of whiskey. He set it hard on the table. “Enjoy the rest of your medicine,” he said, and walked out.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, at this late hour, as Anderson had already suffered a difficult day. He had taken the name Petey gave him, Gottschalk, and visited every flea-bitten, rat-infested nook and cranny where a tramp of that ilk might be hiding. Flophouses far worse than Baum’s, train yards and empty boxcars, places were he expected hobo camps might be. He’d climbed down under bridges. He’d crawled into filthy blind-pig saloons with two barrels and a plank for a bar, serving two-penny-a-glass watered-down beer. He’d gotten absolutely nowhere in his inquiries. It wasn’t that the tramps he approached didn’t recognize the name. In fact, he could see real fear in their faces when he uttered it. They just refused to speak to him. Perhaps it was his brand-new city suit and coat, many steps above the ill-fitting clothes the rail riders wore, but Anderson suspected not. It was Gottschalk himself, who seemed to have a ill-boding reputation that far preceded him.

Anderson walked into his hotel’s lobby, petered out and stiff from padding the hoof. A large fireplace crackling merrily with flame and some comfortable chairs looked too good to resist, and he let his aching body fall into the lushness of a well-cushioned seat. The proprietor, an elderly woman with a pleasant face, plodded over to ask if he needed something hot to drink. He ordered coffee laced with a shot of bourbon.

Today’s work had taken a mighty toll on his old bones, and he’d stopped at a drug store for something to ease the pain. For fifty cents he’d been sold a bottle of Five Drops, manufactured by the Swanson Rheumatic Cure Company in Chicago. The druggist was positive, after a couple of questions, that the sheriff was suffering from rheumatism, and so recommended the medicine highly. As an extra benefit, the druggist told him, it would also treat sciatica, gout, neuralgia, la grippe, asthma, catarrh, croup, backaches, lumbago, headache, toothache, earache, hay fever, liver complaints, dyspepsia, kidney troubles, malaria, heart weakness, paralysis, eczema, sleeplessness, and creeping numbness. The numbness he recognized, but not the physical kind. He had been directed to put five drops into his drink. The doctor had suggested water, but Anderson figured the coffee and bourbon would do just as well. He reached into his pocket for the bottle, but he felt the book, instead.

With nothing else to do, he took it out, and examined it again. It had been read many times, with the pages dog-eared, and notes scribbled in the margins. This had been Gottschalk’s copy, he assumed, a gift to Ollie for services rendered. Why the boy kept it, with the unnatural relationship he imagined they’d had together, baffled him. It was a strange book to carry around, filled with gloom and doom about the events that led up to humanity’s end. He sighed and closed the book, laying it on his lap when his drink arrived. A few sips of this, and I’ll soon be fast asleep, he thought. When morning arrives, though, I’ll be no closer to the truth than I was when today began.

He felt himself drifting, and as his eyes grew heavy he saw Maisy’s image in his head, a little girl, standing on a rock and bent over the edge of a stone well they’d had in Minot, behind the house. She was giggling, and pointing at a duckling that had decided to take a swim in the murky depths.

“Papa, does it live there?” she squealed, her pigtails flopping as she bobbed up and down in excitement.

“I think it is just visiting,” he replied, peering down into the blackness. She grabbed hold of two of his fingers and pulled at them. “Papa, it doesn’t have a home like us, does it?”

“It belongs somewhere,” he replied, stroking her hair with his other hand.

“We need to find its mother and father,” she said, her little lip pushed out in seriousness. “It can’t be alone.”

A hand reached out of the darkness and touched his shoulder. He thought it was Martha, and then opened his eyes. Sadness enveloped him when the hotel’s parlor came into focus and he realized where he was. He looked up to see Tom Cahill straightening his spectacles, waiting patiently for Anderson to awaken.

“Sheriff Anderson, I’m sure you remember me.”

“Of course I do. It was only yesterday. The young man who wrestled me into submission.”

“I apologize again for that, sir. I was trying to help you avoid some embarrassment.”

“It didn’t seem to work.” Anderson smiled gently at the young man, who let out his breath, evidently relieved he wasn’t disturbing him too greatly.

“Unfortunately, not. That reporter from the
Tribune
has caused Mayor Ames problems in the past. He somehow got that past his editor.”

“Probably because it didn’t embarrass the mayor at all. It merely pointed out my presence in an unfavorable light.”

“Well, y-yes sir. You seem to have changed your appearance a little, though, as a result.”

“I thought it best.”

“A smart idea, sir. Anyway, I wanted to find you, to offer my services, as you had asked for them in the morgue. Be your guide through the city, as it were.”

“At this late hour? Pardon my suspicions, Detective Cahill, but I have a hard time believing you haven’t been dispatched by your superiors to keep an eye on me.”

“An astute observation, sir. I would be lying to you if I said that it wasn’t true, so I won’t. I followed you for most of the day.”

“And what did you discover?”

“As much as you did. You’re looking for a German man.”

“And did I locate this German man?”

“No, you didn’t. He seems to be a difficult man to locate.”

“Sit down, son.” Anderson motioned to the opposite chair, and Cahill sat.