The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You passed out?

  MR REED: Yes. When I woke up, there were voices, and so much blood on me I thought I was done for. But I got up. Sloan was there with another fellow. He looked like a hard case, that one. And there was … there was a finger on the floor between them. A bloodied finger. I almost fainted again. Sloan told me to put my jacket on and leave.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Why didn’t you run? Come right to us, turn him in?

  MR REED: Run? I could barely stand. And I was frightened. I’d … I’d messed myself, as well. I was ashamed to leave the house.

  OFFICER HUGHES: You should have come to us.

  MR REED: I couldn’t. I couldn’t. As soon as I left the room, there was a big man waiting for me in the hall, saying he was going to put me in a bed to rest up. I got to know him later, the bastard … His name was Loomis. Big great fat lump, damn his eyes.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You’re quick enough to name him, I see.

  MR REED: It doesn’t matter. He’s dead.

  OFFICER HUGHES: What?

  MR REED: I’m finished, anyway, aren’t I? I might as well tell you everything.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Sit up straight. Did you kill Loomis?

  MR REED: No. I didn’t kill anyone. Please, you have to believe me. I’ll tell you everything I know, but I didn’t kill anyone. And when there were murders, there was nothing I could do to stop them. Nothing.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Murders? Multiple murders?

  MR REED: Sloan’s a hard man.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Let’s go back to the start. Sloan told you to load the Calhoun woman’s body into the boat. Now you allege he’s committed multiple murders. Did he kill her?

  OFFICER HUGHES: Or have reason to want her killed? You said you told him all about her, when he was torturing you. So he knew she’d wanted his cannery keys, at least.

  MR REED: I don’t … I mean, there were her girls.

  OFFICER HUGHES: He’s killed women before? Sir, we’ve never had reports—

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: I’ve heard things.

  MR REED: He didn’t kill her girls. He wanted to use them.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Use them?

  MR REED: To carry dope in from Canada.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Elaborate.

  MR REED: He had some of his own girls already engaged in the trade, and he wanted to use Sugar’s.

  OFFICER HUGHES: How do you mean? What are these women doing?

  MR REED: They go up to Victoria via steamboat, meet with his suppliers in Chinatown, pack a load of tins into the sleeves and skirts of their dresses, into the bottoms of their valises. Come back on the next boat and pass the stuff to Sloan.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Women couldn’t do that. They haven’t the fortitude.

  MR REED: I’d agree with you, if I hadn’t seen the dope they brought back. But they’re terrified of Sloan. He’s got them opium-sick half the time, laying about and smoking with the boarding sailors.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Wretched. Those damn Chinamen and their filth. There’s none of it in the decent places with decent women.

  OFFICER HUGHES: How much opium are the girls bringing in?

  MR REED: I don’t know how much each of them can carry. But it was tallied up in one of the house rooms. There were cases stacked in a closet, and whole crates in the cannery.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Ah. So the usual cargo is crates and crates of opium, after all.

  MR REED: Yes.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Your story keeps changing, son. Why should we believe any of it?

  MR REED: It’s the truth.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: And it wasn’t before?

  MR REED: It’s the truth now. I’m telling you everything I know now.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: I ought to beat you, see what version of the truth that rattles out of you.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Sir—

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Right in the bad shoulder, huh? In the ribs? Right where he knifed you? What version of the truth will you tell me when you’re bleeding all over your shirtfront?

  MR REED: No, please—

  OFFICER HUGHES: Leave him alone.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You sit the hell down, Hughes.

  MR REED: Stop. Stop, please. What else do you want to know? Please. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you anything.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Sir! Let him go.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You don’t come into my jail accused of murder and expect to be handled with kid gloves. And I’ll remind you you’re an officer under my jurisdiction, Hughes. I won’t have you telling me what to do.

  OFFICER HUGHES: There’s no need to beat him. That’s all I mean to say. He’s talking plenty.

  MR REED: Please.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You would’ve shit your drawers seeing some of the things we got up to in the Arizona Territory. You young city cops have policing all wrong.

  OFFICER HUGHES: I understand policing just fine, sir.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: (inaudible)

  MR REED: I’ll tell you the truth. I swear. From here on out, I’ll tell you God’s truth.

  14

  JANUARY 15, 1887

  At Wheeler’s offices she snaps Conaway a salute. The man blinks at her, the thick skin of his forehead wrinkling.

  “Cheer the fuck up,” Alma says.

  In the blue hall she feels her own energy intensely, bottled as it is by the small space, by the low ceiling. By the layered dangers that pressed in on her: Sloan’s boys, Sloan himself, the mangled little man in the alcove, the scents of blood and opium. Her success is pressing in on her. She wants to knock something loose. Punch. The thump of pelvic bones. And Wheeler is there, just there, on the inside of the varnished door.

  She knocks. Doesn’t wait for a call.

  He’s at his desk, where she left him. The gin she poured untouched. Another glass, drained, at his right hand. Papers spread in that mysterious patchwork.

  Once the door is closed behind her, she says, “Sloan’s in.”

  Wheeler sets down his pen, nods for her to go on.

  “First handoff scheduled as planned.” She advances into the room’s smoky firelight. “Thirty pounds on Monday.”

  “He accepted the price?”

  “He knew it was good,” Alma says. “He knew the product was good, too—got the smell off it, and he was interested from then, though he wasn’t playing it that way.”

  Wheeler isn’t giving her much. No flash of approval, no sign that he’s impressed. This gets under her skin, burrows into the itchy restlessness that’s already squirming, making the balls of her feet bounce on the carpet, making her mouth prickle with saliva.

  “So are you going to congratulate me, or what?”

  “For doing your job?” He laughs, a sour downturn of his mouth, one eyebrow ticking upward.

  “For winning our bet.” She flips a chair around, straddles it to face his desk. “Unless you got Edmonds under control in the time I’ve been away.”

  “I never agreed to your little game.”

  “Consider this part of my education.” Alma loops her arms around the chair back and rests her chin on her fists. “I just want to spend some time with our pretty forger. See how she handles finework.”

  The atmosphere between them charges, grows denser. Heat collecting at the seam of her trousers, her legs pressing wide against the chair back, the cutout in the wood there a window Wheeler’s eyes drift toward, yank away from. His mouth is open. Come on. Come on.

  “What could you even do with a woman?”

  “Oh, there’s plenty.” Alma brings her hand to her lips, curls her tongue over one knuckle. Her skin tastes of ash, of salt. “I’ve never had any complaints.”

  His ears are red. His throat. He shifts in his chair, a tiny motion, but the creak of the leather gives him away.

  “Get me a whiskey,” he says, breaking their chain of vision and picking up a sheet of paper.

  Alma’s chair scrapes as she stands. Her boots thump over the carpet. It is good to move, go
od to lean over Wheeler and collect his empty glass—that clove-scented aftershave firing her blood, his ear near and pink and pulsing—good to shake her body loose as she crosses the room to the sideboard. Clink of glassware. Trickle of liquor.

  She walks into the space beside his chair, their boots close, his shoulder warm as she bends over it to set the glass in front of him. He is still. His fingers are still, midword, a splotch of ink clotting on the page.

  “Come on, Wheeler,” she says, her mouth close to his ear. “You used to like me. More than like, if you think back to our carriage ride.”

  “A brief fit of nostalgia.” He pushes her hand off the whiskey glass, his skin hot, grazing over hers. “You seemed stupid enough to be easy company.”

  “Now you know I’m not stupid.”

  She puts her arm along the back of his chair, feeling all the places where their bodies are almost touching: forearm to shoulder blades, bound breast to shoulder, mouth to pink-pulsing ear. Her breath moves the hairs at the back of his neck. He sets down his drink.

  “And still, I see how you look at me,” she says.

  He does look up at her then, his jaw working, and she imagines herself in the prism of his vision: shorn hair dark over her eyes, bruises dappling her jaw, dirty vest streaked with tar from being dragged along the dock, the amber sharp of pine pitch scenting the air around her. She takes Jack Camp’s image and twists it, twists her body into a woman’s shape: shifts her feet so her thighs are parted, angles her bound chest forward. How she would stand if she were in the lewdest dress—something revealing, all indigo silk, made with seduction in mind—except she is in a man’s dirty work clothes. She is being two things at once. Grinning hard like Camp, chin up like Camp. She is in the gray space between identities and he sees her and she is lit up, spark filled, starving.

  Wheeler’s breath speeds. His eyes track over her. One of his hands lifts, almost, off the desk, and while Alma is half watching it he brings it up again, fast, so that she tucks her jaw against the punch. But he instead grabs her collar, yanks her face down to his.

  “Don’t you play around with me,” he says, his voice wet with whiskey. “I’ll have nothing to do with your filthy—”

  Alma lunges, crushes her mouth to his. Her opened throat stinging. She latches rough fingers around the back of his neck. Teeth hard, tongue hard, shoving into him, knee into the meat of his thigh, her hand dropping between their bodies to his groin, and under the warm rough tweed he is hard, she is growling with satisfaction.

  A snap of pain on her cheek knocks her back, off-balance. She sprawls to the floor. Jarred tailbone, jarred elbows. Knees wide. The imprint of his fist flaring hot on her face. All fire, all glory.

  “Oh, yeah.” Her mouth slick with his saliva as she bites her lower lip.

  Wheeler comes to his feet. Slams his hand on his desk.

  “Touch me again, you’re a dead man.”

  She scrambles up, grinning, chest rising and falling rapidly against her binding cloth. A thread of wet on her neck, leaking from the bandage; she has torn the knife wound. Wet on her collar. Wheeler straightens his tie. Knuckles white against flushed skin.

  “Do you understand me?” he says.

  “Yes, boss.”

  More of that, she wants more of that, it’s the kind of moment she lives for, when anything could happen. She shifts her weight from foot to foot, breathing down her eagerness.

  “Get out of here,” Wheeler says. “You’ve done enough for one day.”

  “My day’s just getting started.”

  There is too much space between them for her to see how this jab lands. He hunkers behind the desk, its solid dark wood a breakwater, a fortification. His body sunk out of view. He’s wound up at least as much as she is, and that’s a good way to leave him. Kicked off-balance. Reeling for his dealings with Edmonds. If he can’t fix the customhouse man, Alma will—and win another point over him. Then she can contact Delphine and tell her the score.

  “Boss.”

  She knuckles her cap and pulls open the door without looking back.

  Outside the light has lost its piercing purity and dimmed to the color of weak tea. Clouds shift past the haloed sun. On Water Street the wind threads through crowds of workmen, picking up their smell of smoke and sweaty denim and whipping it across Alma’s face. She knots her collar up high over her opened throat. Stops at the fish market on Adams Street Wharf for hot chowder. The soup is thick with mussels and potato cubes and parsley. Under the makeshift stall’s awning she and three other workmen hunch over their tin cups, shoulder to shoulder, slapping down pennies for another ladle of soup, another slice of rye bread. Alma works through three cups and two loaf heels, her appetite whetted by the chill breeze, by the sparring with Sloan and Wheeler. The man to her left keeps pace, and by the third cup they have grinned at each other in solidarity, but not spoken. She likes his face—the clear brown of his eyes, the clean line of his jaw. His strong thumbs.

  “You win,” he says, when she lays down a coin for a fourth cup.

  Then he’s off into the busy street. Alma chews on a rubbery bit of mollusk, waiting to see if he’ll look back at her. At the corner, he does. She bites into her bread, eyes on his from thirty feet away, showing off her strong, straight teeth. Port Townsend isn’t half bad. She’d like to see more of Delphine—she has to find a line to her, a way to safely pay more visits—but so far there have been more than enough ways to have a good time.

  A crew of roustabouts jostles past, laughing, jingling their pockets to make the day’s pay sing. She follows the broad muscles in their shoulders, hard under damp cotton shirts, as their solid bodies shoal up the wharf. And there. At the Cosmopolitan Hotel’s door, as though wished into being: Delphine. Alma swallows a lukewarm glug of chowder, neck throbbing. Wipes her mouth on her sleeve.

  Delphine’s face is shaded by a black lace bonnet. Her black dress shimmers at the bust and shoulders. It is beaded with jet, or pearls—she is wearing a fortune. Her gloved hand rests delicately on her companion’s forearm. The man’s hat brim hides much of his face. It’s not Wheeler. It’s another white man, dressed as elegantly as Delphine. Wind ripples the mink collar of his coat against his cropped beard.

  A horse cart rattles past, loaded high with barrels. Alma finds the pair again as they step off the hotel’s gilded stoop. She cranes to see the man. Grins when she catches him in profile. Delphine is on the arm of Wheeler’s wealthy friend Judge Hamilton.

  Under the cold shelter of the awning, Alma drinks the last of her soup and tracks the two as they stroll along Adams Street toward the Upper Town stairs. Delphine carries herself as she always does: head high, splendid posture, smooth gait. Lovely. But the judge is interesting, too. He keeps a proper distance from Delphine, as a married man must, holding his arm out for her to depend upon. Yet when she speaks, the upper part of his body inclines toward her. His gaze is fixed on her face. He nods his head closer to hers.

  Perhaps nothing other than a man being friendly with a beautiful woman, more solicitous than he might be with a plain one. But Alma has spent considerable time shadowing stray husbands—the only reliable work she could find on her own, after she was dismissed from the Women’s Bureau—and something about the judge’s demeanor trips the wire of her suspicion. Others seem to notice, too: sailors and gentlemen, ladies and maids, all of them white, look twice at Delphine on the judge’s arm. A few sailors laugh. A blond woman in rose silk watches the pair pass, her face screwed up as if she just ate a lemon.

  Alma wishes she were Delphine’s escort, rather than the errant judge, so she could sneer at all the scandalized passersby. But Jack Camp can’t be seen with Delphine. There can be no connection between Delphine and dirty waterfront business. It would even be dangerous to visit her again in that cheap straw-and-powder maid’s getup, now that more people have seen Camp and could recognize Alma in disguise. Camp’s clothes are a powerful signal—no one expects gender lines to be crossed in such a way—but it wou
ld only take one sharp-eyed onlooker to put Alma in a risky spot.

  She finishes her soup, wipes her hands on her trousers. Her throat aches. Some of the shine is coming off the day. Everyone else can arrange a visit with Delphine. Hamilton. Wheeler. Nell Roberts. Everyone except her.

  Wait—Nell Roberts.

  Now there’s an idea. A line to Delphine that doesn’t involve switching back to women’s costumes.

  “Where can a man find some pretty company?” she asks the lumberman guzzling chowder at her right elbow.

  “Hear there’s some nice pieces at the French Hotel,” he says.

  “You been to The Captain’s?”

  “I ain’t been there. But it looks a treat.”

  “I could use a treat,” Alma says. “Hard week. And I do love dancing on a Saturday night.”

  * * *

  The Captain’s gold sign kicks in the wind, keeping time with the music spilling through the door. Alma shoves through the crowd of men loitering on the stoop. To one side of the door is a window, its glass lit from within by lamps and from without by the reflection of the sunset sky, all orange and crimson fire. Fiddles sweep to a crescendo. She hands a nickel to the doorman and enters the room to claps and whooping in salute to the band.

  Inside, sweat and smoke vie with fruity perfumes for the air’s top note. Gingham-wrapped dancers, curled hair wilting with damp, pull their partners to the bar. The women are rosy with exertion. A few have darker complexions and glossy black braids. Others have the blockish bodies of farmers’ daughters. Nell Roberts is not among them.

  At the bar Alma orders a gin and waits to see who will approach her—which kind of Port Townsend working girl will think Jack Camp is a good bet. She is cleaned up, feeling handsome in newly bought clothes. Her high-collared shirt smells of starch. The stiff denim of her jacket crackles at the collar and elbows. But the trousers are too loose in the groin. She is not yet used to the cut of them, the way they sit over the folded bulge of cloth she’s put in place for the occasion.

  “Care for a dance?”

  A plump little woman cozies up to her. Brown hair, brown eyes, her face heart-shaped and dimpled. Full bosom spilling over the lacy front of her dress. Sweet with orange-blossom perfume. Alma breathes deep before the sweat and smoke close in again.