The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  “No,” Alma says. “At our last meeting he said he was close to finishing his assignment.”

  “How often do you see him?” Kennedy says, taking out a silver case and tucking a cigarette into the corner of his mouth.

  “Nearly every day.”

  “And the man who keeps the boardinghouse?”

  “I’ve only seen him once,” Alma says. “Youthful. Handsome. Not who I expected, given what he’s up to.”

  “Illuminate the situation, as you see it.” Grove sips his coffee. His teeth are long, laced with stains. “Don’t bother being discreet—it’s safe enough to talk here.”

  “Lowry has been at the boardinghouse for a few weeks now,” she says. “Pretty soon after we arrived, he told me he’d gotten himself a spot on the man’s crew.”

  “This is Sloan?”

  Alma looks around as if nervous. She has decided to play it timid—the hanger-on in over her head, competent enough to act as an agent’s assistant but worried about making mistakes. She has guessed what the men have heard about her at the Colorado office: a firecracker, once, but after that Yuma fuckup she’s not to be trusted, not to be given too much to do.

  “No one knows you here,” Grove says, impatient.

  “Yes—Sloan owns the boardinghouse. I told you as much in the letters.”

  “Just keeping the record straight,” Kennedy says.

  “That’s where Lowry’s been living,” she says. “I meet him at a café on the other end of town. I go every day, in the morning, and if he has something to tell me, he comes, too.”

  This would have been their arrangement, or something like it, if Lowry weren’t long dead in San Francisco. Alma would have met with him away from the opium smugglers, so he could pass along information without raising suspicions. His planned cover was a dockworker, and a man like that couldn’t write his own letters—he wouldn’t know how to write his own name.

  “So what has he found?” Grove says. “Besides an entertaining woman?”

  Alma smooths her skirts, her fingers catching on the damp gray twill.

  “Sloan is moving product from Victoria using small boats, and girls,” she says. “Lowry estimates about two tons per month. He’s part of the wharf crew, so he’s seen the crates come into Sloan’s keeping. He thought the customhouse was helping at first, but they have other schemes keeping them busy. Now he believes this goes higher. That’s why he needs time. He thinks the smugglers might be working with a wealthy railroad man, maybe some police. And he’s near to getting proof.”

  Kennedy is nodding, the smoke from his cigarette rising in a jagged column. Grove finishes his coffee. Frowns.

  “Most all of this was in the letters,” Alma says, and there’s no need to feign her annoyance. That ridiculous cipher took hours to piece together, each time.

  “Like I said,” Kennedy says, “we’re just getting the facts straight.”

  “That’s the bulk of what he’s told me,” she says. “Sloan has the girls bring product down from Canada in their dresses and their luggage. They’re moving almost a third of his supply. He uses an old boat to send product through to Seattle. Lowry says he wants to expand to San Francisco next.”

  “I’m concerned about this woman,” Grove says.

  Maybe it was a mistake to mention a woman. Alma meant it merely as a detail, signifying how deeply Lowry had gotten himself undercover. But Grove keeps picking at it.

  “When you say workingwoman, are you using a euphemism?” Kennedy says. “No need to be delicate.”

  “Lowry would get comfortable at a whorehouse,” Grove snorts. “That dog.”

  “She dresses very fine,” Alma says. “And she’s often out with other pretty women. But if you’re suggesting she’s a brothel madam … Well, I don’t know. I don’t know anything else about her.”

  “Remember McParland, out in coal country.” Grove is speaking more to Kennedy than to her—a blunt dismissal. “He near on had a wife when he decided to get out. And he near on decided not to get out, because of her.”

  “Lowry’s only been there three weeks,” Alma says. “Hardly the months-long campaign McParland made.”

  Grove sniffs, looking past her at the gray light of the windows. If he doesn’t expect her to know about recent agency history, he’s not going to expect her to know much else. Her hold on the situation is slipping. Kennedy seems willing enough to listen, but if Grove is in charge—and she can’t get a read on the pair’s pecking order—he might ride roughshod over her plea to wait. She needs three more days.

  “You’re both doing good work,” Kennedy tells her. “But perhaps you need to remind Lowry to focus. I don’t want to come rushing in and ruin the setup he’s orchestrating—”

  “If you did, they might kill him,” Alma says. “He’s seen two men go in the time he’s been with Sloan. Both accused of peaching. And another man—Sloan had his throat opened. All the way to the spine. And his tongue cut out.”

  Pinning Beckett’s death on Sloan will add to Sloan’s reputation as a butcher, and clear any possible suspicion about Wheeler’s involvement in the customhouse man’s death.

  “That is unsavory,” Grove says.

  He signals to the lobby attendant, holds up his empty coffee cup. Alma asks the attendant for a lemon cordial and soda water. A vile drink, especially without liquor added, but it will sting her lips and keep her on her toes.

  “Give him three more days,” she says. “That’s what he asked for. I’ll tell him you’ll be coming in on—what is that? January twenty-sixth—you’ll be coming in on Wednesday, so he better be ready to get out.”

  “We can come to town and not disrupt him,” Kennedy says. “That might spook Sloan into doing something ill-advised, showing his hand.”

  “I don’t like that.” Alma knots her fingers in her lap, stops speaking as the attendant returns with their drinks. The lemon cordial is too sweet. Its sickly fizz tickles her throat. “Lowry’s been putting himself at terrible risk. It’s taken a toll on him—I’d swear he’s lost ten pounds since setting up at that boardinghouse.”

  “What the hell are we going to do in Tacoma for three more days?” Grove pulls at his earlobe. “All that nonsense with the stagecoach and now we’re stuck in the mud here?”

  “You volunteered for this,” Kennedy tells him.

  Alma watches the men over the lip of her glass, peering into the crack between them and trying to see its cause.

  “It wasn’t worth the pay raise,” Grove says. “And I’m sick and tired of your company.”

  He stands, picks up his jacket. His coffee still steaming on the table as he walks toward the street.

  “Where’s he going?” Alma says, worried that he’s headed right for the docks—Grove didn’t want to listen to a thing she said, and if he doesn’t need his partner’s approval to move, he is a danger.

  “Sulking again,” Kennedy says. “He’s been a trial since we passed through Snake River country. Fell off his horse; now he’s afraid he’s getting old.”

  Grove ducks through a smaller, inner doorway near the exit.

  “Are you worried he’ll do something rash?”

  “If by something rash you mean get blazing drunk at the bar.”

  Kennedy leans forward, picks up the other man’s coffee, takes a long sip. He winks at Alma over the edge of the mug, and it occurs to her to laugh—if he’s going to be on her side with the help of a little flirting, she’ll play whatever part he likes.

  “You won’t move too quick on Lowry?” she says, letting herself sound a little breathless. Letting her relief about Grove soften her voice.

  “Sweet on him?” Kennedy says.

  And all she has to do is blush. Sip her cordial.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “He can have his three days. It’ll take that long for Grove to dry out after today, I suspect. But don’t go setting yourself up for disappointment. Lowry has his pretty madam. She’s probably blond, and pink, and plump. Hard for a girl like you
to compete with that.”

  He nods at Alma’s drab dress, the dirt on her knuckles she couldn’t quite scrub clean. She didn’t powder her face. Her thick-boned wrists knock together in her lap. Apart from her clothes and voice, she has made no efforts at female delicacy—and Kennedy is reading her plainness as desperation. As invitation.

  “I know,” she says.

  “Now I, on the other hand…” Kennedy leans forward to set the coffee on the table, his pinkie finger brushing Alma’s skirts. “I am all alone in Tacoma, with only a grumpy old drunk to keep me company.”

  “I have to get back,” Alma says, fluttering her eyes wide. “I can’t risk missing tomorrow’s morning rendezvous with Lowry, to tell him about your plans.”

  “Take the evening boat.”

  Alma glances at the windows, as if she’s considering it. Lets her cheeks heat. As if she’d be excited to have this drooping, pallid man touch her, and after he just called her ugly.

  “Come on.” Kennedy jostles his knee into hers. “I know you Women’s Bureau girls are all the same. Unmarried. Lonely. Just wanting a bit of adventure. Eh?”

  Alma holds her drink with both hands. Looks down at her lap. She is thinking of his leering mouth kicked full of mud. When she looks up again, she is smiling.

  “I’m not opposed to adventure,” she says. “But I want to finish the work first. I have a lot to prove, you know, after my dismissal. I want to show that I can do a good job.”

  He bends his leg away, puts his hand on her thigh. His palm warm through her skirts.

  “I’ll make sure to tell the boss you did a good job.” He leans in, lowering his voice, breath fetid with smoke and coffee. His scarf smells like a dead sheep. “If you work hard. I like an eager woman.”

  “I will work hard,” she says, and his fingers on her leg tighten. “Come on Wednesday.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not until then?”

  “Right,” he says. “Where should we meet?”

  “The French Hotel,” she says. “It’s right across from Sloan’s boardinghouse. A good spot for staging a raid—you can see the house from the bay-facing rooms.”

  “Wednesday. We’ll be in on the first steamer.”

  He squeezes her thigh again. She stands, his hand falling away. Quick scan of the lobby, just in case, but there is no one familiar—no one sitting close enough to hear their conversation. On her way through the door she sees Grove at the bar, a little alcove through the low inner doorway, sipping a tumbler of amber liquid. Drink up.

  Tacoma’s a rough place. Maybe the two agents won’t make it to Port Townsend at all. She could arrange it: pay some tough to find the men now that she knows their faces. Stage their run-ins with a knife. But she needs them alive. She needs them to come down hard on Sloan. Still, the temptation is difficult to shake. She keeps testing herself, to see if she’ll really do it, until she’s back on the Port Townsend–bound steamer, chilled again by the rain, grinning. She bought time enough to set her plan in motion.

  * * *

  Alma hurries through her boardinghouse lobby, cloak hood shading her face. It’s unlikely anyone in the house has ever been sober enough to notice her comings and goings, other than the manager’s coin-counting child. But she has been up and down these stairs for almost two weeks in Camp’s clothes. There are a few curious glances—one staring sailor doesn’t blink or track his eyes after her, perhaps he’s dead—but no one stops her. She unlocks her door. Strips off all the wet garments, the twill and lace, slowed by her aching shoulder and its stiffness.

  In the fading daylight she unwinds her last binding: a long curl of gauze that peels off her shoulder. No blood on it today, just a little clear seeping. Underneath, a pink band of flesh, marked with the pattern of the cloth. A four-inch furrow in her skin. Nell’s neat stitching. No smell, no redness radiating from the wound. It’s healing clean. Her body is strong. Pulsing with health. She loves it.

  All bare, in the center of the room, Alma runs her hands over her skin. Callused palms catching on scars. The gash on her shoulder. The little nubs of scab on her arm and side from where she fell into glass. Her ribs and stomach imprinted with long red lines from the corset’s boning. These marks crosshatched by the angry chafing left by her binding cloth, three inches above and three inches below her breasts. Old bruises fading to faint yellow stains on her rib cage, her legs. She lifts one breast, fingering the rawness underneath it, the stinging flesh. Just a day or two of wearing nothing. How would that feel? To float in a hot bath and dry on clean sheets and sleep. Wake. Stretch. And, maybe, turn to someone. Silk pillows. Warm brown skin under her fingers, under her lips. Quiet laughter. Companionship. That’s how it was once.

  She thinks of Delphine, holding her hand in Nell’s shop, concern in her dark eyes. The way Delphine says her name. Maybe, in Tacoma, they can be lovers again. Share that body connection. That tenderness she hasn’t seen Delphine offer to anyone else.

  Candlelight bats upon the lamp’s glass, flutters in the corners. Her body unclenches, not needing to hold any kind of pose. Rain taps on the window. Voices from the room next door, two men, groaning, a low pulse of sound. Satisfaction. All the strings she’s been laying out, the threads of her plan, are knotting together like they should.

  The light brightens from gray to orange. Alma raises her bowed head, her sense of time disrupted by the unexpected sun. She walks to the window. The sun hangs low on the horizon, showing clear in a gap between thick iron-colored clouds and the jutting rise of Upper Town’s cliff. The light has no heat, but it stains her golden through the dirty glass—her arms outstretched to brace against the casing; her breasts small, nipples dark; the jagged forelock falling just over the edge of her right eye. A few breaths, leaning into the light, and then the sun dips below the cliff edge, leaving her body, the room, dim.

  She dresses as Camp, quick. Already later than she said she would be for her meeting with Wheeler. He’d better have no news about Benson, and good news about McManus. After buying time from the Pinkerton’s agents, after spending her boat ride coming up with a perfect trap, she’ll be damned if McManus is going to be the breaking point.

  It’s full dark when she reaches his offices. No one on the back step, but the Quincy door is open. No one in the hall. It’s too quiet. Something about her boots stamping mud into the carpet, that thick, lonely sound in the single lamp’s light, makes her uneasy. She slides her knife from her vest. Sticks close to the wall as she walks, her hip gliding along the blue paper.

  Around the dogleg, slow, to the last empty notch of hall. Wheeler’s door is closed. Firelight gleams at its bottom seam. No voices. She nudges open the door enough to peer inside. Wheeler sits at his desk, eyes on hers. She waits, braced, for the lunge of motion as someone unseen slams into the door or steps into view with a ready pistol. But there are no sounds save the fire’s snapping. Wheeler raises an eyebrow. Alma steps into the room.

  “Why the theatrics?” he says.

  “The Quincy door was open.” Alma flips her knife, letting him see the flash of it in her hand. Shaking off her nerves. Grinning a little.

  “I knew you were coming. You’re late, by the way.”

  “It’s been a long day,” she says.

  “Your business in Tacoma was concluded successfully?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She takes her usual chair, elbows on knees, right heel jiggling. “I have good news. But how are things here? What did I miss?”

  “It’s been strangely quiet.” Wheeler sets down his pen. “Nothing unusual from Benson. Nothing from Kopp, no warnings that he’s started rumors.”

  “Good. And McManus?”

  Wheeler shakes his head.

  “I don’t know where Tom’s got off to,” he says. “And Sloan hasn’t made his move yet. As I said, it’s been strangely quiet.”

  “Maybe everyone knew I was out of town.” Alma bobbles her knife from palm to palm. “Saving the fun stuff for me.”

  “What’s your go
od news? I could use some.”

  “The Pinkerton’s agents are coming,” she says.

  Wheeler stops, whiskey halfway to his mouth.

  “Excuse me?”

  “On Wednesday,” she says. “Just in time.”

  “You’re going to have to explain why this is good news.”

  So Delphine still hasn’t told him. But she needs a keen set of ears, a keen brain, to help her vet her plan. Which means Wheeler needs to know everything about the situation. There’s an element of showmanship, too, in her urge to share—tell him all that she’s been juggling, let him see how she’s tamed a beast of a problem.

  “Remember how you thought I was with the law?” She walks to the sideboard, pours herself a tall glass of gin. The blue wall going fuzzed as liquor stings her eyes watery. She tests holding the glass in her left hand. It’s all right. Steady enough, her shoulder not wailing even though her elbow is crooked, bearing weight. She picks up the silver-topped whiskey decanter and turns around.

  Wheeler stands behind his desk, his pistol leveled at her. His eyes ferocious.

  “Jesus,” she says, almost dropping the whiskey.

  “Have you sold us out?”

  “No. God damn it, it’s a cover. It’s a cover story. Put the fucking gun down.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not talking to you until you point that somewhere else,” she says.

  He lowers the gun, slow. Lays it beside his glass. Not taking his eyes off hers.

  “All right,” she says. “I used to be a Pinkerton’s agent. My badge got taken away after an … incident. And then the Women’s Bureau was disbanded altogether in ’84.”

  Holding the decanter aloft, in a sign of peace, she approaches the desk. Sets the heavy glass at its edge. He ignores it.

  “I worked for a while as a private detective in San Francisco, helping rich women catch their cheating spouses red-handed. I met Delphine in the city,” she says. “After she came up here, she got in touch with me again. Had me start running jobs for her; for the Families. Then, a few months back, she said she’d heard that Pinkerton’s agents were sniffing around the trade in Puget Sound. She asked me to use my old ties to the agency to get an in—figure out what was up, attach myself to the agent on assignment here, if possible. And that’s what I did.”