The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  Alma drags her chair closer to the desk, its legs scraping dully over the carpet. Slides a handful of papers away from the edge. Wheeler looks up as she sets her boots onto the corner of the wood.

  “I moved your papers.” Alma nods at the empty space she’s muddying with her heels. “Didn’t I?”

  “You’ve got no manners at all,” Wheeler says.

  “I’m on my very best behavior.” She fishes a tin of candied fruits from her pocket. “That woman, from Beckett’s boardinghouse. You paid her to identify me—but you thought I’d be dead, not hanging around town as your clerk. Will she be a problem?”

  “I took care of it, when I discovered who you work for,” he says. “A few dollars more and the good woman found she had nothing to say to the police.”

  Efficient. Careful, as he always is. Delphine chose wisely when she recruited him. Chewing on a sugary pineapple chunk, Alma considers Wheeler, considers the marked change between them. The understanding. It is of a piece with the sense she had at the Upper Town stairs. A continuation, a day later, of that loosening, that tendency to banter. It doesn’t provide the same excitement as careening into him did. But if it’s a slow burn he’s after, she can meet that speed. For now.

  “Want some?” She holds up the fruit, not bothered about sharing after she’s already eaten her favorites.

  “What is it?”

  “Sugared apricot.” She shakes the metal container, peering inside. “Plums. And one more pineapple, but that’s mine.”

  “I don’t care for sweet things,” Wheeler says.

  “Good. More for me.”

  “Take this to Ah Tong.” He folds the paper he’s been writing on, stacks it with the others Nell doctored. The whole lot he tucks into an envelope, and that into a clean wrapping of waterproof cloth. “To him, not the boy who keeps the counter.”

  “What if he’s not in?”

  “Wait for him.”

  “I was just getting comfortable,” she says, sighing as she hauls her boots off the desk.

  “It’s fifty dollars a paper.” Wheeler holds up the packet. “Plus our cut for the passage: eighty dollars per man, with eleven men coming through. Eleven hundred eighty dollars altogether. Count it when he pays.”

  She does the math, the waterproof cloth slick against her fingers.

  “They don’t all get a paper?”

  “Ah Tong handles that,” he says. “For those who can afford it.”

  Alma shrugs, tucks the packet into her vest, snug against her shirt and the binding cloth beneath.

  “Come back when you’ve finished,” Wheeler says, while she pulls on her cold jacket. “Without dawdling until sundown. Sloan’s product needs preparing, and I don’t trust you with my money.”

  Out in the streets, her face and hands whipped numb by the wind. Ah Tong is at the counter in his fragrant shop. She gives him the papers. Collects his money, handing back five dollars of it for a tin of hard candies, a packet of tea, an ivory-handled fan, and some firecrackers, shiny with foil. The sweets are for herself, the rest are presents for Nell. Mostly because Alma wants to meet Wheeler’s expectations about spending his cash.

  She takes the goods to her boardinghouse and is back at the offices in less than half an hour—a speedy time for the errand, not that Wheeler’s needling about her lateness means a thing. Driscoll is away; the door unattended. Inside, voices are raised enough to be heard in the long part of the hall. Alma steps carefully, keeping to the edges of the carpet where the floorboards don’t squeak, trying to pluck words from the heated blur of conversation.

  “—a god damn embarrassment. And I hear about it from Tacoma, three days later?” This is Wheeler, tight voiced, furious, as she edges around the bend in the hall. “Don’t shake your bloody head at me. This has thrice happened on your watch.”

  Another batch of tar gone missing. It has to be.

  “Someone on his crew is swapping out the lading bills.” This in a brogue thickened with anger, a shade higher than Wheeler’s voice but otherwise its mirror. McManus. “Then the contents match the bills when they get to Tacoma. But not the inventory later.”

  “Take a look at the papers. They’re all straight from the boss.” A deep drawl. So Benson’s in the office, too. “Your boys are the ones with access to the hold. The ones doing the ride-along.”

  “Not on this shipment,” McManus says. “Barker was out. Lyle went to Tacoma.”

  Well, damn. Here’s McManus, bold as brass, accusing Benson and his crew of the tar thefts. But Benson sticks to the warehouse side of things. And McManus’s accusation doesn’t hold much water if his own crew usually handles the shipments: as Wheeler noted, this is the third time product’s gone missing en route to Tacoma.

  “Lyle’s straight,” Benson says. “And he’s too damn smart to try and fuck me over.”

  “Maybe you’re too stupid to see it.”

  “You watch your mouth, you gimpy little shit.”

  Alma steps through the doorway, hoping McManus and Benson will come to blows. Hoping Wheeler will cringe to have her hear his men arguing like this, like a pair of schoolboys. The two men face the desk, Benson’s thick body shielding her from Wheeler’s view. McManus’s fists tight at his sides, fingers flexing, pulsing white. Benson’s thumbs hooked into his belt. McManus is ready for a fight and Benson doesn’t seem bothered by the prospect. He is a solid mountain of a man, with a good eight inches on McManus—and no bad knee.

  “You might want to keep it down,” she says.

  McManus whips around, his face blazing. Benson moves slower. Over the rise of his thick gut Wheeler comes into view, scowling.

  “Otherwise all of Port Townsend’s going to know you think he’s a gimpy little shit.” She shrugs at Benson. “Not that I disagree.”

  McManus lunges at her and Alma flips her knife out into the space between them. The flicker of steel makes him falter.

  “Put your fucking fists away, Tommy.” Wheeler rises from behind his desk, and his gaze, too, snags on the blade. “God damn it. And that knife.”

  Benson chuckles, shaking his head. Alma keeps her eyes on McManus as he backs off, one step, another, uneven, then she slips her knife back into its sheath and comes to stand between the men. Close enough to feel the heat of their bodies. Close enough to feel McManus’s anger, a disturbance in the air, a potential. He’s been told twice not to fight with her, and the words must be fraying, mere threads holding back his teeth, his fury. She is drawn to such displays. She wants to hold match to powder, just to see what happens.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” Wheeler says. “Get back to work.”

  “Didn’t you want—” McManus starts.

  “No. Camp will meet you at Hoop and Barrow. Have the product ready for him.”

  Benson touches his cap, heads out the door first. McManus is hesitant, his eyes shifting between Alma and Wheeler, his nostrils flaring.

  “What are you waiting on?” Wheeler says, and finally, jaw tight, McManus nods and leaves the office.

  Alma closes the door—she has a new appreciation of the hallway’s acoustic powers—and walks up to the desk.

  “Let me guess,” she says. “Another leak in the pipeline.”

  Wheeler gives a stiff nod.

  “How much?”

  “Sixty pounds of Wah Hing. Missing between here and Tacoma.” His hand, flattened on an open ledger, curls into a fist. “McManus and Benson both swear up and down their crew is not responsible. But someone took that god damn tar. Again.”

  Lyle is the obvious culprit—the ride-along fellow, alone with the shipment for hours, then tasked with the handoff to the Tacoma broker. Lyle is on Benson’s crew. But Driscoll was alone and elbow deep in the open trunk of tar. Driscoll is on McManus’s crew. And McManus seemed to be on the defensive, accusing Benson outright like he did.

  “This is on top of the thirty pounds we borrowed for Sloan?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  She waits to see if he�
�ll blame this on her and her plan for locking Sloan in—altering the shipment to take the thirty pounds, and so opening the whole batch to tampering, to uneven numbers. From the way Wheeler’s glaring at her, he wants to blame her. But he pops his thumb knuckle in the vise of his fingers and stays quiet.

  “Are you going to tell her?” she says.

  “I want time to fix it first.”

  “I understand that. I hate looking like I can’t do my job.”

  “Did you get the money?” He is scowling, hard lines bracketing the sides of his mustache.

  She drops Ah Tong’s payment onto the desk.

  “I needed five dollars,” she says.

  “Don’t make that a habit.” Wheeler counts the bills. “It will ruin my bookkeeping.”

  “God help us.”

  He looks up, his mouth stretched into a cold smile.

  “I don’t know if you can do this job,” he says. “It’s a lot of paperwork. A lot of record keeping. Your inattention to detail gives me pause.”

  “I’ll hire a clerk.”

  “No. You’ll learn how to do it properly.” He tucks the money into a drawer, locks it. “But not today. William Peterson needs a checkup.”

  Another runabout. He’s sending her to and fro like a hired boy. It’s not very egalitarian of him, but it gives her time to move freely—time for things like taking her new coded dispatch to the post office in secret. Until Delphine tells Wheeler about the Pinkerton’s angle, Alma doesn’t want him or his boys to notice her letter-sending habits. And Wheeler is following his orders, in a way. Each of his errands lets her trace a new line he’s laid around town, the spiderweb of connections that make moving product possible, the business’s allies and enemies and key locations. Now that she’s got a better handle on the ring—and more product has gone missing, making a fresh trail—she’s ready to plunge in earnest into her investigation. William Peterson is just the man she wants to see.

  “I’m tired of running your errands,” she says, but doesn’t put much heat into the words.

  “Oh? Would you rather do a light bit of filing? Alphabetize the list of Clyde Imports’ distilleries? Sit down for a while. Collate invoices.”

  “Jesus,” Alma says. “No wonder you drink so much.”

  “You know where his yard is.” Wheeler’s voice, almost edged with amusement, flattens again. He holds up a scrap of paper. “Give him this, so he knows he can speak to you. See if the police have been back to visit, or if he’s had other problems. And do not touch him.”

  “Or it will upset Clay, our tetchy bartender.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they related? Cousins or something.” She tucks the paper into her vest pocket. “Why the concern?”

  “They’re lovers.” Wheeler opens a green ledger, its pages dense with rows of numbers. “It’s not mentioned.”

  “How not mentioned is it?” she says. “Peterson’s primed for blackmail with that. And he came off a little meek, the time I saw him. Not likely to stand up to pressure—from the cops, for instance.”

  “It’s not at all mentioned,” he says. “And it is prime blackmail material. Which is why I know it, and why Peterson quietly builds my boats.”

  “We’re in a dirty game.” A brief surge of conscience that she clamps down on, ignores. “The cops were last there on Friday?”

  “As far as we know.”

  “All right. Don’t threaten me with filing that again,” she says, pointing at the paperwork on his desk.

  He laughs, and it’s not a strained sound. But he closes his mouth quick. Lowers his brows. She leaves him to his ledgers, pleased to have gotten to him at all, even if it was through a joke and not something sharper.

  There is still lightness in her step when she walks onto Peterson’s yard. It’s a neat square of plankboards on the water, with a small dry dock and a slatted ramp descending into the bay. A modest boathouse. A keel, some fifteen feet long, is laid out crosswise at the center of the yard. Peterson didn’t build Wheeler’s special cutter here—there’s not the space for a boat that size.

  A gangly youth, his face dappled with pockmarks, sets down the toolbox he’s hauling across the yard. He approaches Alma, wiping his hands on his trousers.

  “Can I help you, sir?” Up close, the boy has a bruise on one cheekbone. He looks to be about fourteen.

  “I’m looking for Peterson,” Alma says.

  The boy’s eyes darken. A ball-peen hammer hangs from his belt, and his fingers twitch toward its wooden handle.

  “You have an order with us?” he says.

  “No, son, I don’t.” She nods at the hammer. “But I’m not here to push you around—I hear you’ve had enough of that the past few days.”

  “Where’s the fucking lathe?”

  The call comes from the boathouse doorway. A tall, sandy-haired man walks into view, squinting against the light, wiping his forehead with his cap. This is Peterson, the big fellow smelling of pitch she barreled into in Wheeler’s hallway. He recognizes her, too, she’s sure—his eyes widen and his hand goes tight around the chisel he’s holding.

  “What do you want?” he says.

  Alma walks past the boy, past the skeleton keel. Peterson’s had a rough time of it. A purple bruise shows livid under the blond stubble of his chin, to one side, near the hinge of his jaw. Yellowness blooms under the skin all the way up to his ear.

  “Let’s talk.” She gestures toward the dim interior of the boathouse.

  “I’m done talking.”

  There is no insolence in Peterson’s voice, just a deep tiredness. Alma doesn’t see a need to push him. He’s not going to give any sparks. She takes Wheeler’s paper from her vest, holds it out. When Peterson unfolds it, his face slackens.

  “Not until the boss says so,” she tells him.

  Peterson closes his eyes. Exhales. When he opens them, he’s looking across the yard at the boy.

  “Go get some lunch, Sam,” he says.

  Alma follows Peterson into the building’s fragrance of sawdust and sap. A hull fills the center of the room, pale brown and beautiful, its planks tight-locked as a puzzle and freshly sanded.

  “You have other men working here?” she asks.

  “No.”

  She takes a turn around the hull anyway, admiring its lines, checking the room’s dim corners. They are alone. Back in front of Peterson, the outside world reduced to a square of light in the doorway, she pulls off her cap.

  “Mr. Wheeler’s sorry for what McManus did,” she says, and this is a lie, but a harmless one. “And I’m just here to ask some questions. Have the police come back, since Friday?”

  “No.”

  “Why would they ask you about Max Beckett?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were you and Beckett friends?”

  “I never met him.”

  “That’s hard to imagine—the customhouse is just across the wharf.”

  Peterson is shaking his head, his broad shoulders slumped.

  So that’s Wheeler’s questions, asked. Now for her own. If Wheeler has the damning lock he claims on Peterson and Clay, the boatbuilder should be scared enough without McManus resorting to his fists. And the day McManus thrashed him—it’s the same day the sixty pounds of tar went missing. The boat came in after the beating. Still, the timing is suspicious. Especially since McManus had a chance to extract more than two cases from Orion if he had his pal Driscoll’s help. Alma didn’t get a good look at the kid as he fled the lower deck.

  “Are you keeping any odd boxes you’d like to show me?” she says.

  Peterson, already pale, goes gray, his mouth unsteady.

  “No,” he says.

  She doesn’t believe him for a second. She walks another circuit of the room, following its square edges. Under a drape of sailcloth: a clutch of stained paintbrushes. At the back of a dusty cubby: jumbled treenails. Spare boards, spars, broken files fill other crannies. A splinter jabs deep into Alma’s thumb as she runs a
hand under a counter. She sucks at it, hot salt blood on her tongue, her eyes hard on the sweating, ashen carpenter.

  “You’re not telling me everything,” she says after her search turns up nothing closer to tar than a crate of old paint cans. “Is McManus hiding something here?”

  “No.”

  “Is that why he beat you?”

  “No.”

  “Can you say anything other than ‘no’?” she says, and the way he cringes away from her has her lip curling.

  “I just want to do my job,” he says. “I’ve always done good work for Mr. Wheeler.”

  “What is this you’re building here?” She nods at the hull.

  “A salmon dory.” Peterson wipes his forehead with his mangled cap.

  “For who?”

  “A salmon fisherman.”

  Alma has to laugh. She licks the insides of her teeth, shaking her head. Peterson does not smile. He looks so tired, so beaten down. If McManus has scared him this well, it’s unlikely her patter of questions is going to crack through that fear.

  “You built Mr. Wheeler’s cutter?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s a beautiful boat,” she says, throwing him a bit of warmth, a bit of praise to draw out his craftsman’s pride. But his face doesn’t change—doesn’t lift or loosen. He swallows hard.

  “This yard is too small for that cutter,” she says. “Do you have another?”

  “Yes, sir. In Irondale, just down the bay a ways.”

  Irondale. Why does she know that name? It sounds with a clink of glass—no, a clink of coins. Poker tables: fold, call. “Call me Mr. Kopp.” Kopp, the railroad promoter, saying, “I’m heading to Irondale.” And he said it to Max Beckett.

  “You sure you never met Max Beckett?” she says.

  “Not that I know of.”

  A final angle. Since Wheeler told her not to use her fists, she’ll go for something else that hurts.

  “How about Malcolm Clay,” she says. “You know him?”