No Comfort for the Lost (8 page)

Addie peered around the curtains. “Are you certain you saw someone?”

“It’s nothing, Addie. I am mistaken. The strain of the last few days is making me see things.” She smiled at her housekeeper. “Or maybe I need spectacles.”

“And hide your lovely eyes?” Addie clucked over the idea and returned to the kitchen.

Once she’d gone, Celia scanned the street again. Nothing. With a quick tug of the cord, she snapped the blinds closed.

• • •

“
T
hank you for your time, Mr. Palmer.”

“Anything to help the police, Detective Greaves.” Joseph Palmer had a deep voice, his consonants soft around the edges. Southern origins, Nick would wager. Palmer gestured toward a man standing near the windows. “This is my associate, Mr. Douglass.”

Mr. Douglass, robust and outfitted in a black cassimere frock coat and pants, inclined his head. “Detective.” He leaned against a silver-headed walking stick and eyed Nick, not in a friendly fashion.

“You might prefer to speak to me alone, Mr. Palmer,” said Nick.

Palmer slid a glance at Douglass. “We shall talk later about this matter.”

Douglass nodded. “Good day to you, sir,” he said. He exited the room, his walking stick tapping against the floor, and shut the door behind him.

Palmer pressed his fingertips together while Nick made a circuit of his office, located on the topmost floor of a three-story limestone-faced building. Shelves held books on real estate legal matters and building methods and designs. Maps of California and San Francisco hung on the walls. A red, gold, and blue patterned carpet covered the floor, muting Nick’s footfalls. Overlooking Sutter were two floor-to-ceiling arched windows, through which he saw long shadows cast along the road. Nick could just glimpse the onion domes atop the towers of Temple Emanu-el farther up the street. All in all, a pleasant spot.

“You’ve built up a nice business for yourself,” said Nick, continuing his circuit of the room. “How long did that take?”

“Since I and my family arrived in ’sixty-two,” he answered. “Hard work, but a man cannot be afraid of that if he wishes to succeed.”

“Suppose not.”

Palmer folded his hands over the leather blotter atop his mahogany desk, its wood polished to a blinding sheen, and followed Nick with his gaze. His eyes were hawklike, and he wore a suit of clothes as costly as his friend’s. A gold watch chain looped across his checked silk vest and a ring glimmered on his left pinkie. Nick had once served under an officer who’d worn a pinkie ring. He’d never thought much of the man.

“Would you care to explain why you might be here, Detective?” Palmer asked.

Pursuing a lead that nobody except me is going to care about, now that Tom Davies has been arrested.
“I have some questions about the Chinese girl killed on Monday. I’ve been told you knew her.”

“Ah. Li Sha.” He frowned. “She was a poor creature, God rest her soul. The crime in this city. Hmm. But I would not say I knew her. Not really.”

“Not really?” Nick asked, arching an eyebrow.

“I do not care for what you are implying, sir.”

“So you weren’t a client.”

The man didn’t break a sweat. “What an unseemly suggestion.”

“Okay, so you’d only met her once.”

“Mrs. Celia Davies introduced us at a Chinese Mission function. She was proud of her efforts to assist Miss Li with her new life and wanted those of us who support her clinic to see that her work could go beyond merely curing ills.” Palmer studied him. “I presume Mrs. Davies is the one who told you I had met Miss Li.”

Nick straightened a silver inkstand on Palmer’s desk, aligning it with the desk’s edge. A cedar cigar box occupied another corner of the desk, and the air was sweet with the smell of recently smoked Havanas. Two stubs rested on a brass ashtray. “I’ve learned that on the night she was murdered, she approached somebody for money in order to leave town. Was that person you?”

“Why, no, Detective Greaves. I was in Santa Clara County that night. Had been for a number of days. Looking at some land I would like to buy, as well as visiting some associates of mine who live in that area. I didn’t return home until the next afternoon.” He grazed his knuckles over his goatee. He had hands that had never seen manual labor, his wealth earned by cunning rather than brawn. “I was due to return on Monday, but the horse I hired caught a rock in his shoe and pulled up lame. I rested him overnight, then rode on. Mighty inconvenient.”

“Where’d you stay?” And would somebody verify his story?

“I camped in a dilapidated old adobe I came across. It was raining. I was awfully lucky to find dry shelter, even though I had to share it with a family of mice.”

“Yep. Lucky.” Nick eyed letters stacked in a shallow wood tray. One had come from the governor’s office. This man had friends in places higher than the police office. “Who do you think murdered her?”

“Why, I have not had the time to consider, Detective. But I am sure I don’t know. A woman like that . . .” Palmer shook his head mournfully. “It could have been anyone. There are so many disreputable men in this city. Such a shame.”

A shame that Li Sha was dead? Or that there were so many disreputable men?

“I am wondering, though,” said Palmer, “why the police are bothering with this case.”

“I bother with every single case, Mr. Palmer.”

“Do you, now.” He pushed back his chair and stood, pulling his gold watch from its pocket and flicking open the engraved lid. Nick recognized the signs that he was about to be dismissed. “I wish I could assist further, but I have a dinner engagement in fifteen minutes, Detective Greaves. I’m obliged to wish you a good evening.”

Nick gripped the brim of his hat. “I’ll be back if I have more questions.”

Joseph Palmer snapped closed the pocket watch lid. “I expect that won’t be necessary.”

“How are you?” Celia asked the girl the next morning, even though her patient couldn’t understand her any better than she had on Monday.

Celia set her black portmanteau on the bamboo stool, which teetered, its legs unsteady on the dirt floor. The girl’s eyelids fluttered and her body shook with tremors. This time, her stupor had nothing to do with the opium they’d given her for the pain. This time, the cause was much, much worse. Traumatic sepsis had set in.

The old woman with the long twist of gray-streaked hair watched from the doorway, her face set rigidly, no expression of concern to be read on its broad, flat width.

Celia rested her fingertips on the girl’s uninjured arm, lying atop the threadbare blanket that had been thrown over her. Celia felt for a pulse in the girl’s wrist. Weak and quick. She labored for breath, shaking from the chills of fever, and her face was splotched with red. She was fatally ill.

Celia gently unwrapped the bandages from the wounded arm and removed the wad of linen she’d placed there. Five days. They had left it like this for five days. The wound oozed, and redness had spread up the arm to mingle with the purple bruises.

“She’s poorly, isn’t she?” asked Barbara, entering the room, her limp more noticeable on the uneven ground.

“I wish they had let you see her the other day, because they did not follow my instructions to regularly clean the wound. And now it is too late for her.”

Celia recalled a soldier in the Crimea who’d suffered shrapnel wounds on the battlefront, wounds that had been severe but deemed treatable by the field doctor. By the time the soldier had arrived at Scutari hospital, however, he was delirious and shaking with spasms. Celia and the other nurses had looked on helplessly as the man, once so handsome with his blond hair and gray eyes, had succumbed in a matter of hours.

Once sepsis set in, death followed shortly.

“Bring me some water, Barbara.”

Celia tossed the filthy linens onto the floor and took fresh ones from her bag. Once her cousin returned, Celia set about cleaning the wound, the girl shivering and moaning the entire time. Celia washed the arm with carbolic acid and wrapped it in fresh bandages.

“Tell the old woman I have brought more quinine for the fever. The inflammation itself . . .” She had nothing that would help at this point. “Tell her I will try to find a surgeon to remove that arm. It is all that might save the girl. Tell the woman that.”

Celia would never be allowed to leave Chinatown with her patient and take her to a surgeon. He would have to come here.

Barbara translated for Celia. The elderly woman scowled. A prostitute disfigured by a missing arm was as useless to her as a dead prostitute.

“You bring nobody here!” The old woman said more in Chinese to Barbara, then added, “Go! You no good.” She jabbed a thumb in Celia’s direction.

“We should leave,” whispered Barbara.

The old woman scowled and folded her arms within her sleeves. “You go. You not come back.”

“I shall come back. If not to help your girls, then to help the other prostitutes living in these filthy streets.” Celia grabbed her medical bag. “And have that arm removed.”

Celia marched out of the room and into the alleyway.

Barbara limped as she hurried after her. “Will she die?”

“Possibly. Probably.” Celia slowed, all the while feeling eyes upon them, the watchful behind curtained portals and barred doors. “I’ll try to find somebody to come and remove her arm, but even if the woman allows a surgeon into the room to do the work, I’m afraid it will be too late.”

“Oh.”

From their left, a young Chinese woman darted from a doorway, calling out to them. Celia recognized her as her patient’s friend.

They paused. From a pocket within her loose cotton trousers, the girl pulled out a bundle of red paper strips covered with Chinese writing and handed them to Barbara.

“What are they?” asked Celia.

“Sayings from Confucius that talk about the vanity of earthly things,” said Barbara. “You’re supposed to scatter them on the ground in front of Li Sha’s funeral procession. They’re a sort of prayer.”

Barbara thanked the young woman. They started to walk off, but she tugged on Barbara’s sleeve and looked anxiously around her. No one seemed to take notice of them, though. Not the merchants calling out descriptions of their wares; or the boy climbing the steps of a nearby basement cigar workshop, carrying a crate in his skinny arms; not even the two gossiping women in brightly colored silks who shuffled past.

Their lack of attention didn’t ease the young Chinese woman’s apprehension. She spoke too quickly for Celia to make out more than a few words.

“What is she saying, Barbara?” she asked. “She said
yan
, didn’t she? That means ‘man.’ Is she speaking of a particular man?”

But the young woman grew alarmed by Celia’s questions and fled through a doorway behind them, disappearing from sight.

“She didn’t mean anybody in particular, Cousin Celia.” Barbara glanced toward the empty doorway. “She just wanted to know if the police have found the person who killed Li Sha. That’s all. I told her they’ve arrested the father of her child.”

She began walking toward Washington Street and the constable who was waiting for them around the corner.

“That was not all, Barbara,” said Celia, joining her cousin. “She acted as though she wanted to tell you something important. Something that had alarmed her. If she suspects she knows who killed Li Sha, she has to inform the police.”

“Would the police listen to her?”

“Detective Greaves would.”

Barbara did not respond.

“If that young woman told you something that Mr. Greaves should know, you must speak up.”

Barbara’s eyes were hard, making Celia ponder how well she knew the person standing next to her. “It’s gossip, Cousin Celia. That’s how they are. That’s how Li Sha was, too.”

That was how many teenaged girls were, Celia wanted to respond, but she didn’t, caught off guard by her cousin’s manner. “They are your people, too, Barbara.”

“No, they’re not. I don’t have any people,” Barbara spat, and she limped away through the traffic, the bits of red paper crushed in her fist.

• • •

“
T
om Davies? You can’t be serious!”

Tessie Lange’s tirade carried clearly through the partly open door to the detectives’ office. Nick expected that even if he’d been on the street walking past the station he could’ve heard her screeching at Taylor.

“Is there somebody in this station with any smarts?” she asked. “Tom isn’t guilty of murder.”

Taylor was attempting to quiet her. “Now, Miss Lange—”

Nick heard the angry tramp of boots across the floor and he guessed she was out there, pacing. Just as he formed the thought, he saw her swish across the room, then march back.

“Why are you looking at me like I’m crazy?” she shouted at Taylor. “He’s not guilty!”

Briggs—in the office for once—shook his head over her tantrum. “Jeminy, that one’s madder’n a wet hen!”

“Do you have evidence that would get Davies out?” Taylor was asking, his voice calm. “After all, we did find a knife hidden in his room, and his landlady says he threatened Li Sha—”

“I don’t care what you found! Because I was with him that night and I know he didn’t do it!”

Briggs stopped midchew and whistled, spewing doughnut crumbs onto his beard.
Here’s an interesting turn,
thought Nick. But just as with Wagner, there were always women who were willing to vouch for their menfolk, whether they were guilty or not. Sometimes their willingness came from love. Sometimes it came from fear.

“You sure about that?” Taylor asked Tessie.

“Just let me see him.”

“Visiting hours on Saturday are this afternoon at—”

“I want to see him now!”

Taylor’s chair legs scraped across the wood floor. “Hold on, miss. I’ll talk to somebody about your request.”

Nick’s assistant entered the office, nodded at Briggs, and closed the office door behind him. “What do you think, sir? Captain won’t like it if we let her back there outside of regular hours.”

“She’s here to see Davies now, and the captain doesn’t need to know,” Nick answered.

Chuckling, Briggs got up from his desk. “Eagan’s not going to like this, Greaves.”

“And wouldn’t
that
make you happy?” Taylor shot back.

“Bootlicker,” Briggs snarled, and lumbered out of the office.

Nick watched him go. Their animosity went back a long way, to the day Nick had been promoted to detective ahead of Briggs. Briggs had credited Nick’s uncle Asa with pulling strings with the police chief. He’d never admit the early promotion had come because Nick was a better cop.

“Take her to see Davies,” he said to Taylor. “But tell her she only has five minutes to speak to him. I’m going to listen in the cell-house bullpen and see what we might learn.”

“Got it, sir . . . Mr. Greaves.”

Out in the main station room, Taylor led Tessie Lange off to the jail cells.

• • •

“
W
hy are you here, Tessie?” Tom Davies asked, not getting up from where he lay stretched out on the narrow bunk.

Nick eased the cell-block door closed and slipped into the corner of the bullpen. Tessie wouldn’t notice him here, obscured by a stack of empty crates, apparently forgotten, that had once held ropes, chains, and stakes for closing off streets. Nick could easily see Davies from here, along with Tessie’s hands pressed against the thick iron grate that separated her from the prisoner.

“I wanted to see how you’re doing,” she said, leaning closer, her face coming into view.

At the far end of the six-foot-wide aisle that divided the two rows of cells, the warden snoozed on his chair, his feet pointed toward the corner stove. At the sound of a new voice, he propped an eye open for a second, then closed it again. He wasn’t worried about his prisoners, apparently.

“You’ve seen me. Now leave.”

Davies rolled over on the bunk to face the wall. A white-bearded prisoner across the aisle belched, and his cell mate offered to keep Tessie company when he got out, his lewd suggestions of what they might do together causing the other man to guffaw. Somewhere farther along the cell block, a man was mumbling angrily, when he wasn’t shouting obscenities or crying. There were a few women, too, ladies of the night in soiled bright dresses, their hair straggling, kept apart from the men by a thick wall of iron. People could easily die in a place like this, with its cold and damp, the smell of open slop jars and unwashed bodies, and mold darkening the stone walls. At night, rats scuttled about, nibbling. Preachers said hell was a place of fire and brimstone; if they’d ever come down here, they might think differently.

“Tom, I’ve told them you’re not guilty,” Tessie said, leaning into the grate until her forehead rested against the metal. “I’ve told them I was with you.”

“Why did you do that?” he snapped. He lurched off the bunk, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the empty bunk above. He walked up to the floor-to-ceiling grate and stared at her. The light from a solitary lantern hanging on the far wall illuminated his face, and the black stubble on his chin made him appear wan and sickly. “Just stay outta this, Tessie, before they begin to suspect you, too.”

“I told them that because it’s the truth! I don’t care what people say about me, Tom, if I can get you out of this place.”

“The magistrate has charged me with murder. I can’t be bailed and I’ll be stayin’ in here to rot until I hang.”

“You won’t hang. I won’t let them hang you,” insisted Tessie. “I went to see Connor, but he told me not to bother him about Li Sha.”

Nick wondered if this Connor fellow was the man she’d gone to visit in the Barbary.

“Course he doesn’t want to hear about her!” Davies said. “Hell,
he
probably killed Li Sha, much as he hated her.”

“Don’t say that, Tom! Connor’s your friend.”

“Well, he didn’t like her at all, now, did he?” Davies slipped a finger through an opening in the grate and pointed at her, grazing the tip of her nose. “And neither did you. You and Connor in it together, then?”

She recoiled from his touch. “No!”

Davies withdrew his hand. “Go home, Tessie. We made a mistake, you and me. ’Tis time to forget it.”

“But I love you!”

“Too late to be realizin’ that,” Davies said, watching her face. “And I loved her.”

“How could you have loved a yellow China girl? She wasn’t carrying your baby, Tom. There’ve probably been all sorts of other men since she left that brothel. Don’t be an idiot.”

The white-bearded prisoner across the way, who’d been hanging on their every word, grunted a sound of pleased surprise. The warden started snoring.

Davies curled a fist and pressed it against the iron grate, inches from her face. “You’ve been sayin’ that just to make me hate her as much as you did. There weren’t other men.”

Taylor slipped through the cell-block door. “Eagan was out there looking for you,” he whispered to Nick. “He wants you up in his office in five minutes or else.”

“He doesn’t come in on Saturdays,” Nick whispered back.

“He did today, and he’s mad enough to chew nails and spit rivets. He’s heard you went to see Palmer.”

Nick cursed under his breath.

“Listen, we can put this behind us,” Tessie Lange was saying, with what Nick judged to be foolhardy persistence. “You’ll get out and then you can be with me—”

“Stop it, Tessie. I’ll not be gettin’ outta here,” he hissed, stepping backward. “Go home. Just go home. And leave me be.”

“I won’t give up.”

“Then you’re a fool, woman.” Davies climbed onto his bunk and turned to face the wall again.

“Go get her,” ordered Nick, heading to the bullpen door. “And bring her to my office. I need to ask her about a man named Connor.”

“Your time’s up, Miss Lange,” Taylor announced, striding forward. “Time to go.”

“I’ll get you out, Tom!” she cried. “I swear I will.”

The grizzled prisoner found her vow riotously funny, his cackle echoing off the cell-block walls.