“I want to hear all this from her.” Wheeler leaves his drink on the desk and stalks toward the door.
Alma pushes up from her chair. The flurry of nerves has crackled out, leaving her steady on her feet. But without the fire of a crisis her throat tears into her attention. The cut is weakly leaking blood. She folds over a clean swath of shirt as the big man appears in the hall, towering over Wheeler.
“Watch him while I’m gone,” Wheeler tells him.
“She’ll want to see me,” Alma says. She does not like the thought of Delphine and Wheeler, hemmed up in a room together, discussing her. She wants to hear them when they say her names.
He pulls an overcoat and a hat off the rack, not looking at her.
“She won’t be happy you’re so unkempt,” Alma says. “You’re supposed to be working, not entertaining women.”
And, damn, who wouldn’t keep that woman entertained for as long as possible? Alma lingers on her remembered scent, the silken flesh of her neck.
Wheeler puts a hand to his hastily done tie. The big man in the hall shakes his head. Taps a meaty earlobe. Wheeler wipes his own ear and curses at the carmine smeared on his fingers. At the open cabinet he hesitates with his hands on his collar. But with the other man standing there he can’t be nice about changing in front of her: in his offices everyone knows her as Jack Camp. Alma watches him pointedly, hoping he’ll feel her gaze and squirm under it. He unfastens his collar. Pulls his shirt over his head. The skin of his shoulders is pale, freckled, stretched over shifting muscles. A scar runs from the top of one scapula to disappear beneath the cloth of his undershirt. She follows the pearly line of it to the shadow of his spine, his spine to the muscled small of his back.
“Take me with you,” she says. “I don’t know where you’re meeting her, but she won’t want to make two trips.”
Wheeler twists open a tin of pomade. He angles the mirrored cabinet door to better see himself, revealing the right half of his face to Alma. His jaw works as if he’s chewing on a bit of gristle. He rakes a comb through his hair in sharp tugs.
“If she wants to see you, I will arrange it,” he says.
“You’re wasting time.”
He meets her eyes in the mirror. In the metallic glass, in the privacy of his shadowed toilette, he has allowed himself to be angry. His eyebrows are lowered. He jerks the silk of his tie into complicated knots.
“I am owed an explanation,” he says.
A new shirt, glossed hair, tie tucked into a black vest. Wheeler closes the cabinet, and his face is neatened, too, the carmine wiped from his ear and the anger cleared from his eyes.
“Don’t let him touch anything,” he tells the other man. “And don’t knife him if you can help it. I may be some time.”
Then he is gone. Alma peers across the dim room at the big fellow, who leans against the wall by the door. She wants to test him, pick at him like peeling a scab. See when he tells her to settle down.
Taking Wheeler’s blood-splotched shirt, she walks behind the desk and sits in the leather chair. Sighs. Nothing from her watchman. She clumps her boots onto the cluttered desktop. His gray eyes narrow.
“You get mud on his papers and he won’t like it.” His voice is colored with a rustic twang—Missouri, or Kentucky, though by the sound of it he’s been away for years.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Don’t see how that matters.” He folds his broad arms over his broad chest.
“I’m Jack Camp,” Alma says. “Soon to be working with Mr. Wheeler. So I’d like to get to know the help.”
His beard splits into a gap-toothed grin.
“Boy, you won’t last long, talking like that,” he says.
“Maybe it’s how I got my promotion,” Alma says. “Having a big mouth.”
She winks at the man, whose face closes like a clamshell.
“Now, that ain’t funny,” he says.
“Do you have any cards on you?” She pulls her boots from the desk. At the liquor board she pinches stoppers off glass bottles and sniffs their contents. He is letting her touch more things than Wheeler would like. This suggests laziness, or a tendency to not quite obey orders.
“I’m a mean hand at draw poker.” She stoops to collect her jacket, tosses it over the back of a chair. “I’ll throw down two dollars for the first game.”
But he only stays by the door, arms folded, humming snatches of a song Alma doesn’t recognize. She pours a tall glass of gin. Delphine and Wheeler, Delphine and Wheeler—where are they meeting? What are they saying about her? She feels the sting of a job improperly done: she was supposed to evaluate Wheeler and then make a second report, but he has ruined that plan. Delphine won’t be expecting him—though, knowing her, she’ll be ready nonetheless. Delphine will have something to offer Wheeler to keep him sweet. What that might be has Alma itching with curiosity.
She tips back the last of her gin.
“How about a throwing contest?” She waves her empty glass at the man. “You’ll have to let me get my knife out, but I promise not to gut you.”
“You’re a noisy customer.” As if prompted by her words, he unsheathes his own weapon. From a pocket he produces a pale lump and sets the blade to it. Curled shavings float to the carpet. Alma crosses half the space between them. He is whittling a bird, the neat fletching of a wing already marked and catching shadows.
“Get away from me,” he says, his eyes flickering up from the wood.
“Cut me a couple holes.” She tosses him the bloodied shirt. “From the back, where it’s clean.”
He shrugs. Pierces the cloth, the blade barely making a whisper. He keeps it sharp. Alma thrums with the strong thump of her pulse and is grateful for it. Not much more of that knife would have let all her blood out.
The man throws the shirt back. Dark fingerprints, smelling of pine, mark its cotton. She tears it into long strips. Binds them together. The cleanest scrap of cloth she saves to dash with whiskey and pack under the bandage, against her skin, where it burns like a brand.
Jaw locked, the bruise there aching, she prowls the room’s back edges. The light filtering under the door grows bluer and harder as the sun climbs toward noon. This is tedious, this waiting. It breeds unease. What if Wheeler turns on Delphine after all? In a small room somewhere, where they are alone. Alma can’t remember if he took his gun. Though Delphine is not without protection: one of her heeled boots conceals a stiletto blade, a weapon she’s carried since her youth in New Orleans. It has a ruby in the hilt. She’s let Alma see it, but never touch.
At Wheeler’s desk Alma lifts up a ledger, scans a neat column of names and amounts. Her gun and knife are in the drawer by her hip. She feels them as a warm pulsing, a potential. There’s a twist of wire in her vest pocket. The drawer’s lock would open to it in five seconds. Another sheaf of papers, each signed at the bottom. A few lists that are too densely written to decipher. She picks one up, peering close, and maybe it’s not just smaller handwriting—the lots of names and numerals read like gibberish. They read like code.
“Don’t mess over there,” the man calls. “God damn. Mucking around like a pup.”
Now he stirs, her slothful guard. But he’s only just pushed off the door when the varnished wood shakes with a double rap.
“Shit.” He stuffs the whittled bird into his trouser pocket as he opens the door, his body blocking Alma’s view. “Who are you?”
“I’m here for Camp.”
Something about the voice is familiar. Alma tries to place the speaker as she kneels before the desk, wiggling the wire in the drawer’s lock. A slip, a catch, and the wood slides out quietly, its insides smelling of gunpowder and cedar. She stands up, her knife tucked away and gun holstered before she’s fully on her feet.
“I’m supposed to keep an eye on him,” the big man is saying.
“Mr. Wheeler said to bring him. At once.”
“Well, he’s a fucking handful. Good luck.”
He turns awa
y from the door, motioning to Alma. A Chinese man in black silk stands in the hallway. His face is somber, with no flicker of warmth at the sight of her.
“You’re no fun,” she tells the big man, pushing the gutted, bloodied shirt into his hands as she passes. “I’ll remember that.”
He takes the shirt with a grunt, preoccupied with kicking his wood scraps into a pile that he stoops to collect. Not so careless, then. Though he should have been as neat with her; not let her rummage about, kept her in a chair.
She follows the Chinese man down the hall, rolling up her bloodied shirtsleeves. Her jacket hides the rusty streaks on her forearm. She folds up her stiff collar to conceal the bandage around her neck. Pulls her hat low on her forehead, so she is snug inside her dark clothes like a bivalve in its shell. When she takes the dogleg turn toward the door—no sign of Conaway—she comes up next to her companion.
“How’s things, Joe?” she says, her voice hushed.
“I’m well.” He is quiet, too. “You don’t look so good.”
“Rough morning.”
Then they are at the door. Joe slips through first. Alma gives it a few beats before she lets herself out.
The midday air is glary, brittle with cold. It tears at her broken throat. Her eyes water. She ducks her chin. Squints around until she catches sight of Joe lighting a cigarette under a tailor’s sign across the street. His eyes drift over Wheeler’s doorstep. She descends to the plankboard walkway, sidestepping the high splash of a passing lumber cart.
Denim-jacketed workmen and drowsy sailors flow between them as Joe walks southwest, past the theater and its doorstop drunk, past the steaming washhouses that cluster against the cliff face. Alma lets him lead by thirty paces, trying to tally the years since she last saw him. Five, maybe five and a half. In that time Joe Hong has grown from a reedy kid into a solid young man. When there are gaps in the foot traffic she studies his broad shoulders. The long, regrown gloss of his queue. Back in the city, Joe used to visit Delphine’s gilded Nob Hill home. Those rooms saw lavish dinner parties attended by businessmen and thieves, and from them Delphine ran San Francisco’s most profitable fencing operation.
At the corner, Joe passes under the shadow of a construction crane, its latticed ironwork pitched high into the sunshine. A flat of bricks sways from its winch. The bundle rises, slows, jerks to a halt. Someone shouts. One of the ropes snaps apart with a gunshot of sound. Pedestrians scatter, Joe among them, a horse-drawn carriage caught among the fray. Alma darts backward. In the street the horses kick and squeal as bricks smash into the wooden sidewalk. Flying splinters, sweet-hay smell of dung, screaming; some fool has run under the horses’ hooves. Alma looks beyond the fallen man’s red frantic face, the frantic builders swarming, and finds Joe watching her from the far cross street. She pushes along porches and past gaping shopkeeps until she is beyond the growing crowd and once again trailing Joe’s black-clad form.
The cliff cuts off the road, forcing them east, and he disappears around a corner. Alma stops to check her pocket watch. When she turns the same corner, she is in a narrow alley, Joe squatting against a clapboard wall. Two women snap sheets onto a drying line at the far end of the lane. Otherwise, they are alone. Joe holds out a hand, as if for change.
“Guess who I met on my way up from the city.” Alma lights a cigarette, watching the women twenty feet away bend and reach, their bodies supple. “Your old pal Frank Elliot.”
It had been on the last leg of her journey north, waiting on a wet Seattle dock for the steamer to Port Townsend. Briny funk of seaweed. Sting of pine. Her body wilting after five days of hard travel, boat, then train, then boat again. A man calling her name out of the rain—“Why, Miss Rosales!”—when no one should have known her there. Frank Elliot. A god damn nuisance, as usual.
“He’s here?” Joe’s teeth are bared.
“In Seattle,” Alma says. “Seems he left the law in California and set up a brick business with his missus across the Sound.”
Elliot worked the Chinatown beat, and he loved to use his nightstick on the locals. He went after Joe a few times. Nearly broke the kid’s leg once, and cut off his braid when they met again. But for all his savageness Elliot would not take a bribe. He fancied himself incorruptible. So Alma went for his wife. Loretta Elliot was a pretty thing: young and bored and hungry. She ran distraction on her husband while Alma’s crew was working, and in return Alma showed her a good time. They tangled in a public garden once, their skirts hitched up, crush of violets at Loretta’s back, her hips pulsing so the broken flowers breathed perfume.
“You ought to pay Elliot a visit,” she says. “He’s passing along my greetings to his wife, but you might have a different message to deliver. He’s got no cop posse up here.”
Joe spits at her feet. Tucks away his outstretched hand.
“Thanks for the tip,” he says. “First door on the left.”
She flicks away her cigarette at the door. The wood is weathered, the brass handle tarnished almost to black. It opens without resistance.
Inside: a narrow hall. Its walls and ceiling are papered violet. A trio of white roses nods in a slip of crystal. The cramped space with its prim decor reminds Alma of a hatbox. An expensive hatbox, not without its charms: Delphine is here. Alma smells her perfume. Wheeler is with her, his voice urgent and just this side of angry.
Be careful, boss. Take too harsh a tone with Delphine and she’ll finish you. Alma’s seen it. It happened to Carlisle. To Warner; to Finnegan, the one-eyed Irishman; to so many others in the San Francisco underworld.
Wheeler’s voice comes from behind a door with hinges shaped to look like tiny people. Alma unrolls her shirt cuffs so they show, stained, at her wrists. Up close, the figures crawling along the hinges are cherubs, complete with wings. But there’s nothing angelic about their grins.
“—just be in the way,” Wheeler is saying. “Cause trouble.”
Alma opens the door without knocking. A circular room, small, crowded with a sofa and cherrywood stools and a round table topped by a teapot. Delphine is perched on the sofa, straight-backed and elegant in her rich mourning clothes. She toys with a length of gold chain. Wheeler is seated across from her on a stool, his hair jet-black in the lamplight. A dish of tea on his knee. How like Delphine to pin him down with the lightest touch: two ounces of bone china forcing him to sit placidly and behave himself.
“Saying sweet things about me?” Alma leans against the door until it closes, cool wood pressing into her shoulder blades. “Nathaniel, you shouldn’t have.”
Wheeler’s jaw twitches. His teeth are bared pale beneath his mustache.
“Hello, dear,” Delphine tells her.
She steps deeper into the room to take Delphine’s hand. Her glove smells of jasmine, its silk slick against Alma’s lips. She again remembers the woman in the hallway that morning; her opulent skin, Wheeler’s eyes flashing at the pair of them tight-locked and whispering. And now he’s here to see her bow before Delphine.
Alma’s body flares with heat. Wheeler is watching her. Delphine is watching her. And Delphine hasn’t seen her in men’s clothes since San Francisco days. Back when they were lovers. When Delphine’s attention would often catch on Alma, so she felt the power in her own muscles, saw the beauty of her sinewed forearms in the mirror of Delphine’s eyes. That mirror is on her again. She is aware of the strong slope of her shoulders. Aware of the way her bruises shape her face into harder angles and her bloodied cuffs frame her roughened hands. She lifts her chin, displays the damp bandage beneath.
“Really, Nathaniel,” Delphine says, frowning at the bandage and then at him.
He does not bristle at his name from her the way he did when Alma used it.
“I thought she was with the law.” He takes a sip of tea, thick fingers clasping paper-thin glass. “If you’d warned me otherwise…”
“You are both safe,” Delphine says. “Which means you’re both trustworthy, and that is of the first importance.”
> Alma keeps her chin high. Of course she’s trustworthy. After the long night and morning, after the knife in her throat, to hear Delphine suggest otherwise is grating. There’s no call to hold the Lowry incident over her like this.
Delphine twists the gold chain around her index finger, which is pointed at Wheeler.
“That seventy-five pounds of product,” she says. “I want to know who took it.”
“No one likes a leaky pipeline,” Alma says.
Wheeler takes a sip of tea—choking down some choice words for her, she suspects.
“I’ll give it my full attention,” he tells Delphine after he swallows.
“Rosales will help,” Delphine says.
Wheeler’s eyes meet Alma’s briefly. She grins, showing teeth.
“You can demonstrate how you run things up here,” Delphine continues. “It’s a different world from San Francisco.”
“That is the truth,” Wheeler says.
“And let Nell know I’ll be coming for a visit tomorrow.” As Delphine drizzles the chain into her lap, Alma follows its snaky length to a ruby pendant the size of a hazelnut. “I was supposed to see her this morning, but she was away. At your offices, I believe.”
Wheeler’s woman. She knows Delphine, too.
“Nell,” Alma says, trying out the woman’s name, how it rolls around her mouth. “She’s gorgeous.”
“I have told you to not be distracted so easily,” Delphine says. She is in no mood for play. Her black eyes glitter up at Alma. The ruby disappears into the silken knot of her fist.
“Sorry.” Alma bites back a smile.
“One more thing. Your premonitions about the law coming to town are not wrong,” Delphine says to Wheeler. “We’ll need someone to hang for all our sins.”
“Were you prepared to hang me?” Wheeler sets his tea on the table.
“You know I would not want that,” Delphine tells him. “Not when our future is so promising.”
Words should not be enough to placate Wheeler, yet he is smoothing out, some color coming back to his livid cheeks. Alma does not like this gap in her knowledge: those long unseen minutes when it was Wheeler alone with Delphine, among the blushing pillows.
The Best Bad Things Page 9
