Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  “Can we speak to the woman? Where is she?”

  “We’re headed her way now and we’ve already seen the establishment. She works as a maid at The Donkey Inn and the father says that she still does. The employees keep rooms there and that was where Tallo lived with her.”

  It did not take long to reach the inn. The autohorse swished its tail as they disembarked and entered. Raucous but good-humored voices were bellowing within the barroom, the noise coming and going with the swinging of the door. The entryway was otherwise demure, a stout woman at the counter checking in a guest and two men reading papers in armchairs.

  “Help you?” she asked tersely when Scoth and Jesco came to the counter.

  “We are seeking the whereabouts of a man named Tallo Quay,” Scoth said, showing his identification.

  “Put that away!” the woman exclaimed in a horrified hiss. “Chase off good business with that, you will. Tallo hasn’t set foot in this inn in years, so whatever business he’s mucking about in, it’s not here. Get out with you!”

  Unperturbed, Scoth leaned on the counter. “Who is the maid that he lived with when he was here? We must speak with her.”

  The woman lifted the counter and beckoned them in frantically, her eyes on the men in armchairs. They were looking up from their papers. She escorted Jesco and Scoth to an office space behind the counter to have the conversation there. “That’s Merlie Jonkins and she’s not mixed up in anything! The girl barely has a brain in her head to call her own.”

  From the inner pocket of his coat, Scoth withdrew the hand drawn picture of the nervous blonde. “Would this be a fair rendering of Merlie Jonkins?”

  The woman paled. “See here, I don’t want any trouble-”

  “My partner and I are not here to cause trouble,” Scoth said smoothly. He had slipped in referring to Jesco as his partner, but Jesco didn’t mind. “We simply want to ask Ms. Jonkins some questions. Where can we find her?”

  “Upstairs in her room, chances are,” said the woman with an anxious look around them to the entryway. “It’s her day off but she took a wrench to the shoulder last night spotting for Ellna in the bar. I haven’t seen her come downstairs so she must be resting. Just go up and knock on the fourth right-side door nice and quiet-like, don’t scream what you are and barrel your way in!”

  “She speaks as if from long experience,” Scoth said flatly once he and Jesco were going up the stairs, and Jesco snickered under his breath.

  Merlie Jonkins answered the knock. Her left arm was wrapped up in a crude sling made of towels and pins. Except for that, she looked better than she had in Jesco’s visions of her. Although still a slender woman, she had been eating better.

  The room she was within was the same as in the thrall. The wallpaper was peeling, and there was the spindly wooden table. Upon it were stacks of coins. Following his gaze, Merlie said, “’S my tips.” She took a chair by the window. “Police, you said? Here about Beddam?”

  “No, we’re not here about Beddam,” Scoth said.

  She didn’t hear him. “You can’t hold those bunnies against him! He didn’t know he was in anyone’s backyard. He thought he was trapping in a field, not someone’s pets.” She nodded, convinced of Beddam’s innocent mistake. “Who keeps bunnies for pets no-how? Fur and meat, that’s what they’re good for. But these were wearing little blue coats.”

  “I’m not interested in the bunnies,” Scoth said. Jesco could not help but wonder why a man would then think that they were wild bunnies in a field.

  But Merlie Jonkins did not possess a discriminating mind. “If you’re not here for Beddam, is it Sprout? He didn’t mean to-”

  “We’re here about Tallo Quay, Ms. Jonkins,” Scoth interrupted.

  She both blanched and wheezed in laughter. “Ms. Jonkins. Like I’m a proper prat, huh? Nobody calls me that. I’m Merlie. What do you want about Tallo then?”

  “We’re attempting to locate him.”

  “He didn’t come back. He went out that day, two years ago, maybe three now, and didn’t come back.”

  “Where did he go?”

  She began to look extremely nervous. “I told him not to get messed up in rich folks’ business. But he was dead set on getting his pound of flesh from her.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “I don’t remember her name. That rich woman who had a different man in her bed every night of her life. Even women she had in her bed on some nights. That’s what Tallo told me. Sometimes she had two men at the same time, or a man and a woman, like her bed was a party and everyone was invited. Indecent.” She adjusted her sling.

  “Can you tell me how you met Tallo?” Scoth asked.

  “Here. He came in for a drink one night all downhearted. He was on fire. A man on fire! Not real fire,” she clarified for them. “Fire in his heart. Passion. But she doused his fire with cold water and sent him away. After she took what she wanted of him, she gave him that little clock and told him to go. Go back and sell yourself to someone else. But he didn’t want to do that. He cried at me. All the world wanted from him was his body.”

  “Did he stay with you after that?”

  She flushed. “Yes. He had nowhere else to go.”

  “He sounds like he was very angry at that woman,” Jesco said when the stain in her cheeks grew brighter in anticipation of their judgment. The two of them must have started a sexual relationship almost immediately for her to be so ashamed about it.

  “He was!” Merlie agreed. “He was furious. He wanted to make her sorry for not giving him a little something after he’d given her everything.”

  “And how was he going to do that?”

  “Poor people, see, they got dirt on the outside. I’d rather that, dirt you can’t hide. Rich people, they have dirt on the inside. They look clean but they’re not. He knew some of her dirt from living there in her big house. He’d spied on her when she had visitors. And he’d gone through her papers when she was playing with her other men and women. They aren’t supposed to do that, go into her little home office that she keeps. She locks it, but he lifted her keys. He was real careful, put everything back the way it was so she would never know anyone had been in there. And that’s how he got the dirt on her.”

  “Did he tell you what it was?” Scoth asked.

  “It wasn’t so dirty to me. Some of the royal blood, generations past the throne, the ones who have hu . . . humanitarian interests . . .”

  She enunciated slowly and went on. “Those ones, they pulled strings to get her the ground in Lizziner over the competing mines. That’s rich ground, Lizziner, he said. They made sure that she was the one buying it. Some are in Parliament and they aren’t supposed to fund interests like that. It’s against the rules. But everyone does it, and there are Parliament people slipping favors to the other mines in exchange for things. I didn’t really understand all that Tallo was saying.”

  “That’s all right,” Scoth said. “Did he say anything else you remember?”

  “He knew some names. The names of the people giving her favors. He was going to tell someone who worked in another mine so they could make a scandal. But everyone in politics and business is rolling in a mud puddle so what was his little bit of dirt? The game of it is that everyone is filthy dirty and everyone knows it, Tallo said, but everyone pretends to be squeaky clean. You got to show the world how dirty someone else is but still look like roses yourself, or else you’re called a hypocrite. But I told him these are rich people’s games and he should keep his nose out of them. He didn’t, though. He was going to get himself hurt or something, I told him, the only one that gets hurt in the games of the rich are the poor. He was hunting that man.”

  “What man?”

  “The one with the strange name. I can’t recall it. Colomo? Co . . . Cadelmo? It was something like that. Tallo thought the man would be very interested in his information. And then this man could give Tallo a little something in return. The problem was that it was hard to get to the man to tell him.
It was hard to find out where he was, and then he never stayed there long. It was like hopscotch. Tallo would find out the place where he was and take a carriage there to find him, and the man would have just left for somewhere else. Then Tallo would find out the next place and go there, but the man was gone again and Tallo didn’t have the money to keep chasing him around the country. Tallo couldn’t work when he was chasing, so I gave him my money. And often the man wasn’t even in the country. He would travel for months at a time around the world. Tallo sent him letters but never got a reply. It was rude. If I get a letter, I take the time to write back. But this was a very busy businessman, so he didn’t.”

  She stretched her good arm to the table and turned over a coin in her fingers. “Then he found out where the man was going to be again. It had been two years of waiting and chasing and waiting some more. It was in the papers that the man was going to be attending a play in Cantercaster. Tallo got a lot of papers. He knew that this was his moment. He took the little clock and his booklet where he’d copied down the dirt from the papers in her office, his coat and gloves since it was getting cold, and left. He never came back here. I figure the man put him in a theater company somewhere as gratitude.”

  And he never contacted the woman who had supported him for two years? Jesco didn’t ask the question on his mind. It seemed cruel.

  Scoth showed her the timepiece and she touched it longingly. “That’s it. She was rich, rich, rich, and this was all she gave him. She should have been ashamed.”

  “Did he leave anything behind when he left?” Scoth asked.

  “Just a pile of clothes. I gave them away a year ago. He didn’t have much when he came to me. Why are you looking for him?”

  “His name has come up in an investigation of a murder. Tell me: do you know a man by the name of Hasten Jibb?”

  “No.”

  “Did Tallo ever say that name to you?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say the name of the play?” Jesco asked.

  She shook her head. “He might have at the time, but it was years ago. He was always talking about plays and the parts he wanted to have. That was his passion. I couldn’t tell them all apart. I’ve never been to a play. It’s a waste of money to me. The man was going to be at one that wasn’t performed much.” She brightened as her memories came back. “A tragedy. It was a tragedy. People want to laugh these days, or they want romances that end all happily, but this was a sad one.”

  As Scoth spoke with her more, Jesco looked around for something to touch that would put him in the mind of Tallo Quay. The clothes would have been best. Then there was the table, but it was too small to dine at or work upon. It was just decorative to hold some knick-knacks, or coins. Would he have touched that table for any length of time? Jesco didn’t think so. The wallpaper wouldn’t contain much either.

  Then there was the bed. “Did Tallo sleep here?” Jesco asked in a pause of their conversation. “In this same bed?”

  “In that bed? No,” Merlie said, finding nothing odd about his inquiry. “It’s new. The last one got the rot in it last winter and was only fit for fire, sheets and all.” The new bed was someone else’s old bed, and was fairly battered.

  He would have touched the doorknob with his bare hand, but when he looked at it, Scoth caught his eye and shook his head. The detective removed a bag from his pocket and said, “I’m going to need to take your doorknob.”

  “You need to take what?” Merlie asked in bafflement.

  Once they were back in the carriage, Jesco said, “Why don’t you want me to touch it yet?”

  “Because it will land you in bed for days,” Scoth said. “How old is this knob? Eighty years old or more? How many hands have touched it? How long would Tallo ever have touched it except for opening and closing the door? Let’s look at the other information we’ve received before you land in my bed again.”

  “Your spare bed,” Jesco corrected.

  He loved that waning smile. “My spare bed,” Scoth amended. “Drool on yourself later. I think we went about this the wrong way at the start. This isn’t about Hasten Jibb but peripherally. This has more to do with Kyrad Naphates, even though she’s innocent of the murder.”

  “Should we see her again?”

  “Not yet. I want a little more background on her, more specifically, the people around her. Who would have a need to involve her in a police investigation?”

  . . . they hated her . . .

  “They wanted to take the mines away from her,” Jesco said. “It was a fleeting moment in the thrall. She inherited her husband’s company and refused to sell it to the heads of the other companies, or to marry their sons so they could gain control that way. She broke the wall they had set up to government regulation . . .”

  “And she’s trying to gain a Parliament position that would further her reach,” Scoth said. “Then look at that article to appear all of a sudden, just days before she gets voted on. Someone wants to bring her down.”

  “What is the next step?”

  Scoth sat back in his seat. “We need to speak with the journalist who did it.”

  Chapter Eight

  It did not take long to get in contact with Noran Gordano, nor was it difficult to get information from him. Meeting with them at a pub near his publication’s office, he motioned to a booth in the shadows at the back. He was an older man with a large gut packed impeccably into a fine suit, and his eyes were livid. As they sat down, he said, “That was not my article.”

  “But it was your name,” Scoth said as the server delivered three ales. Since the place only carried one kind, there was no need to ask what they wanted.

  “And that’s a damned crime, but that’s how it has been these last years,” Gordano spat once the server was gone. “Word comes down from on high about how they want the stories skewed, and if our articles don’t come across skewed in just the right way, then up top rewrites them and publishes them with our names. I’ve had six articles mutilated beyond all recognition of what I’d written, and this is the second time something has been published under my name without any of my input whatsoever. South Press used to be a respectable publication. Now it’s becoming as trashy as the Freetie. But no more. I’ve accepted an editorial position at the Cantercaster Bulletin. I’m a trusted name in journalism. I’ve been around a long time and written a lot of big pieces. I’m respected. But I won’t be for much longer if it goes on this way, and I’m not going to stand to the side and watch my legacy be ruined.”

  Before Scoth or Jesco could inquire further, he burst, “I’ve always done society-related pieces for South Press. Not that society always is appreciative of what I write. Running charities that can’t account for donations since the money’s gone into their pockets, their overindulged, demonic children who get legacy bids at Nuiten and University of Archangels even though they can hardly read and are drunk from morning to night. Yes, they were very upset about that last piece, especially Lord and Lady Mascoll. Their five children are the bane of Ainscote.”

  He grinned evilly as he remembered the dust-up from that article, and cut off Scoth’s question. “The paper changed ownership and it took a nastier turn. I could write what I pleased before, but it had to be accurate. Fact-checked. So we didn’t get a fleet of solicitors pound-pound-pounding on the door with court dates in hand. Oh, yes, the Mascolls wanted to sue, they threatened fire and brimstone, but I had the police records on each of their children, I interviewed everyone connected to those cases and I had admissions officials from both schools talk to me anonymously about how the legacy applications of fire-breathing, ale-swilling, money-burning, dog-kicking brats are given a wink and nod. The universities get huge donations for accepting them. Lord Dollar who fails every test will beat Polly Pennypockets and her perfect grades every time. Not a single word of my piece was imaginative, if you follow me, and they had to live with it.”

  “You said it took a nastier turn-” Scoth said.

  “Yes, yes, I’m getting
to that. It used to be owned by the Armex family, but they sold it to the Tralonn Corporation. A good lot of the employees were let go; I weathered the turn and the desks filled up with new people. And then I started getting suggestions on what to write. Go after Mr. Pom Fanli, the superintendent of schools. Go after Lady Collia Rotham. The problem I had was that there wasn’t much for stories there in the way the paper wanted. I chase real news. I write stories about matters that impact people’s lives. What I don’t do is give an angel’s fart about a superintendent who wears women’s undergarments beneath his suit, or a lady whose true parentage puts her title in question. That’s the kind of news you’d find in the Freetie, scurrilous, scandalous, stupid, a waste of ink and paper.”

  “Were you ever told to go after Kyrad Naphates?” Scoth asked rapidly as the man paused to breathe. Jesco poured his ale into his own personal cup and sipped it.

  “Of course I was!” Gordano roared, taking in Jesco’s cup swap without interest or comment. “There’s a whole list of people that we’re supposed to go after any chance we get. I wanted to write a piece about her trying to get that liaison position just a month ago and my editor said not to bother since it wouldn’t get published. Why not? It’s newsworthy. Other journalists in other cities wrote about it, but not here where she lives. He said it wasn’t of interest. But a man wearing silk drawers is? I can’t fault a fellow for liking a bit of silk against his skin. The reason an article about her going for liaison was deemed not of interest was because it was positive. The paper’s gone negative as can be, and especially on all those people it doesn’t like. She’s just one of a bunch and that article to come out days ago . . . I won’t make nice about it. I saw red. I didn’t write a single word of that article. I don’t know where it came from. I haven’t ever written an article about her. I actually refused two years ago when they asked me to do a little piece about her getting drunk and dancing on a table at a private party, and how it isn’t dignified at her age and someone saw her brassiere when her dress slipped off her shoulder.”