The Big Both Ways (40 page)

The barman walked over with a glass and set it on the table. George took the bottle from Ellie’s hand, poured himself a drink, and left the stopper off the bottle.

Ellie swung her head up and tried to keep it level with the horizon but without much success. “How can you help me?”

“I’m here to take you into custody as a material witness in the killing of Ben Avery.” George took a drink and winced as the whiskey scoured its way down.

“You have to be a Seattle cop.”

“Why’s that, Ellie?”

“Because the Floodwater boys don’t want to be seen talking to me.” Ellie took another long drink.

“And the local cops?”

“This town doesn’t have local cops as far as I can tell. They got miners association thugs and Floodwater. That’s all they need.”

“Ellie …” George moved his chair in closer and lowered his voice. “Ellie, this is awful whiskey. Why don’t you let me buy you something better.”

Ellie waved her good hand across the table as if to clear everything away. “Sure. Why not?”

George craned his head around and called over to the barman. “Get us two cups of coffee, some kind of sandwich with meat in it, and two shots of your best brandy.”

“You buying?” the barman asked.

George nodded, then turned back to the broken woman at the table. “You killed Ben Avery, didn’t you, Ellie?”

Ellie covered her eyes with her uninjured hand. Her body was shaking now.

“What about those boys in Ketchikan?” George asked.

“I don’t want to talk about Ketchikan.” Ellie looked around for a new drink.

“You should understand. I’m not saying you did it alone. You had some help there.”

“I’m not going to talk about Ketchikan.”

“Let’s talk about Seattle then. You were working for Floodwater, weren’t you, Ellie? Your name was on that informants list.”

“I don’t have the list …” Ellie looked around the room half-expecting to see Avery coming from the afterworld with a club. “And besides it wasn’t all about the list,” she said, her shoulders slumping forward, her voice starting to crack.

“Then what was it about?” His voice was low, confidential, as if no one else would ever need to know.

“It was about staying alive, I suppose,” she said, and slumped deeper into the chair. “Or I suppose you could say I whored myself out to Floodwater.”

An empty ore truck rolled past the bar and the building shook on its pilings.

“Did Avery kill David Kept?” George leaned in.

“David Kept …” she said, letting the words escape like a long held breath.

“Tell me about it,” was all the detective had to say.

The drunken Red stared down at the bloody wrappings on her hand.

“Everybody was selling information to the Floodwater ops. Hell, it was like there was no real organizing being done anymore. The Party, even the unions, were making up their shortfalls selling secrets to the private detectives.”

“But the good union man, the crusader David Kept, didn’t like the arrangement,” George offered.

Ellie looked up at the police officer, whom she hadn’t seen before but had always known was on his way. She spoke softly and slowly, not a speech and not a confession but a statement of fact. “There was someone in his own union on Ben’s payroll. David Kept was going to confront Ben Avery. David Kept had an informants list. I don’t know how the hell he got it but he had it. Ben Avery killed Kept. Used his own gun and put the body in the trunk of the car and then told me to get rid of the evidence. I was on the hook with Ben already. Just as you said, I was on the list. He figured if things went bad with his alibi he’d pin the killing on me.”

The barman brought the coffee. Ellie pushed it away with her left hand, then winced with pain, keeping her eyes shut for several seconds.

“Why did you stop at the little farm near Everett?”

“I don’t want to talk about anybody else.”

“Come on, you met Ben Avery there?” George raised his voice and the bartender’s eyes flickered over to their table for a moment.

“Christ, no,” Ellie said. “Ben screwed up. Kept had the papers in a case. Ben had the case in the trunk. Ben forgot to get the papers out of the trunk when he turned over the car to me. He needed those papers back. But I had them.”

“But Floodwater would need those back,” George offered.

“Sure, but why should I give him back what he was using to blackmail me?”

“So who was the stooge in David Kept’s union? Come on Ellie, you had the list.”

“I lost the list.”

“Come on, Ellie.”

“All I wanted was to get out from under. Money for flying lessons. Money to just fly away.”

“Were the men in Ketchikan on Avery’s informants list?”

“I’m not talking about Ketchikan,” Ellie said articulating each syllable in a drunkard’s diction.

“Why talk at all? Why not keep on moving? Head to Canada. Ship out on a freighter.”

“You know as well as I do, I’m not making it out of this town. Not after Ketch-i-kan,” she said in a loopy stage whisper. “I’m just hoping they keep my niece out of this. But hell. I don’t know now … Floodwater owns this town.”

George walked over to the bar and asked for a pitcher of milk. He stirred some into both of the coffees and pushed a cup close to Ellie. He wrapped his hands around the warm coffee mug. Ellie pushed her coffee away.

“What about the revolution, Ellie? Will it come?”

“Bits at a time maybe. I don’t know.”

“What about these poor saps out on strike. What will they get?”

“They’ll get a beating. Then they’ll get a token raise.”

“So they get what they want.”

“They get a few more cents. But they’ll die down there, slaving for someone else’s prosperity.”

“But for better pay.”

“It doesn’t matter what the pay is. They’ll never jump ahead in line. They’ll never be the ones deciding who lives and who dies. Paid slaves.”

The barman brought the sandwiches and the glasses of brandy. He set the tray on the table and laid out the sandwiches and shots before them as if it were a banquet.

“Three dollars for everything,” he said, and George paid him.

“Ellie,” he said, after the barman walked away, “I don’t want you to tell me about Ben Avery and how he died. I don’t want you to tell me until after you hear my proposition.”

Ellie took too big a bite out of the sandwich. She could only hold it in one hand and a slice of greenish-looking meat fell out onto the table. The dirt on her hand rubbed off onto the soft white bread.

“All right,” she blurted through her stuffed mouth.

“Because you are right. You’re in a dead end here, Ellie. Either these union boys are going to kill you or Floodwater will.”

Ellie chased the bite of sandwich down with the shot of brandy. “So?”

“I want to take you into custody here. I book you as a material witness to Ben Avery’s murder.”

“So I can be hung down in Washington?”

“Listen to me, Ellie. You are a material witness. I get you out of here. You give me everything you have on Floodwater’s operations and you testify truthfully in the Ben Avery murder investigation and we set you up with something nice back down in the States.”

“I testify truthfully in the murder investigation?”

“That’s right, Ellie. The way I see it, Slippery Wilson probably killed Ben in self-defense. Ben was going to kill him for protecting you.”

“Slippery Wilson. He’s my hero, all right.” Ellie rattled the empty brandy glass around on the table. George turned, whistled to the barman, and waved his finger over the glasses.

“All right then. You testify truthfully that you saw this Slippery Wilson character kill Ben Avery.”

“I suppose I could do that,” Ellie said. The barman brought her another drink and she stared down into it as if it were a wishing well.

Slip never found Ellie that night. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to find her. He should slip up into Canada. Leave the girl with Carl on
The Shepherd
, she’d be better off anyhow.

As the darkness came on, the bars got louder with the clatter of glasses. Some of the bars had phonograph records that hissed out their thin music through small paper speakers. As the evening went on, fights started. Two men were grunting and rolling out into the street, pulling each other’s shirts over their heads and throwing roundhouse punches that flailed into the dirt like parts of a broken combine.

From the gutter a half-naked man with blood running down his chin put his bottle down for a moment and looked up at Slip. “Whachyou looking hat?” the drunk blurted.

Slippery eased around the corner and out of sight. He had to go back to the boat for his tool kit and he was not going back without something to show, something to talk about so he wouldn’t have to face the silence of avoiding Annabelle’s questions. So he started asking about Amos Tisher, the boy from Boot Cove who never wanted to go home.

Amos wasn’t hard to find. There was only one bar where the workers of the new miners association felt safe to drink. They all were given temporary memberships in the Arctic Brotherhood Hall. The hall itself was easy to find because of the hired thugs standing around the front.

Slip asked the barmaid and she pointed Amos out. The young man was by himself in the corner watching the billiard game. He was chewing tobacco and spitting in the coffee cans that were set around the back wall. He spit like a kid eating watermelon and he rolled his shoulders when he thought someone was watching.

Slip walked up to the young man. “Your father’s down in the harbor,” he said. “He wants to talk with you.”

“Excuse me?” the kid said with a silly tone that he probably thought sounded tough.

“You heard me. Let’s walk down to the harbor. Your father wants to talk with you.”

“Yeah, well maybe I don’t want to talk with him,” Amos said, rolling his shoulders and smirking like a guilty child.

Slip was not in the mood. He reached up, grabbed Amos by the throat, and whispered in his ear. “Listen, son, if you don’t walk out with me right now, I’m going to tell all your scab playmates that you are a Red and that you work for Ellie Hobbes.”

“I don’t know no Ellie Hobbes, mister.” The kid leaned back and pulled Slip’s hand away. “Go peddle your papers, bub. I ain’t going anywhere.”

“You filthy Red bastard,” Slip yelled at the top of his lungs, and the two billiard players put up their cues and stared. “I ain’t selling out my friends for no radical claptrap,” Slip then swung down hard on Amos’s chin and stepped back to watch the kid fall.

There was a scuffle in the Arctic Brotherhood Hall, but most of the drunks sided with Slip, who loudly asserted that the kid was an informant for the striking miners union. He insisted that the kid had been pumping him for information about when the scabs would make their move. Drunkards swore and spit on the boy in righteous indignation. But soon enough the scuffle was getting bad for business and the Floodwater boys threw them both out on the street.

Amos sulked as they walked down to the harbor. “I ain’t going back. I hate sheep,” he muttered.

“You like dying in the mines?” Slip pushed him along.

“I ain’t gonna die. I’m careful.”

“I don’t think you know how many ways there are for a scab to die on the job.” Slip pushed him down the wharf, where they found a kid in a skiff just coming back from fishing who was willing to take them out to
The Shepherd
.

Ellie Hobbes woke up on a cot set up in the back of the bar. George Hanson had paid the barman two dollars to let her sleep there and a couple of bucks more for a good breakfast when she woke up. Ellie woke up feverish. She had had vivid dreams about dead people walking up from the water carrying signs. They walked slowly and didn’t speak. Their signs were blank. Ellie was sick. Her hand throbbed down in the bones and the skin burned against the wrappings.

When she sat down at the bar a new barman stepped back, held his nose, and waved his hand as if Ellie’s dressings were crawling with flies. “I tell you, doll, you better get that thing cleaned up or you’ll lose the whole mitt.” Ellie thanked him for his concern and ordered some corned beef hash and a beer.

Ellie had been drunk when the policeman from Seattle had been buying drinks. Her memory of the night was slurred with the
images of her dream and the pain pounding through her body. She remembered his offer. Go into his custody and provide information. Tell a tale about the night Ben Avery died and live in peace.

The beer was warm and the hash was mostly salty potatoes, but she forced them both down. The cop had been selling a fairy tale. Ellie Hobbes knew there would be no peace. She ate the hash, tapped the top of the bar and fished into her pocket, but the barman waved her off.

“It’s covered, doll. Go get that hand looked at.”

Ellie nodded and stumbled out of the bar. The morning was overcast, the clouds still shredding up through the spruce trees just in back of town. The air felt like a cold steam bath, so she put up her collar and asked a boy where the scabs were holed up.

Outside the New Miners Association Hall, men in clean work clothes stood two deep. Some had their arms folded. Others shifted from foot to foot watching everyone around them. Two had homemade bats in their hands, the fat ends resting lightly on their shoulders. Ellie tried to push past them but men crowded around. She told them her name and they moved aside so Ellie could step inside. Three guards stopped her on the way to the back room. They didn’t search her because two of them didn’t want to get near the smell of her bandages. When they asked after her business she told them her name was Ellie Hobbes and that’s all they needed to know. One of them went to the next room, came back quickly, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

“In there,” he snapped. When the door opened a man with wire-rimmed glasses sat behind a card table. He was rolling a cigarette. There was a revolver on the table and a chipped ball bat leaning against the back of his chair.

“It’s about time you came in, Ellie,” he said.

Ellie sat down in the chair across from him. “I need to see your doctor,” she demanded.

“I can see that,” the man said. He licked the seam of his
cigarette and rolled it between his fingers. “We can arrange medical services for members in good standing, Ellie.”