A Dying Note

by Ann Parker

  She held her breath. He didn’t say anything more. “Did you see them?” she finally asked.

  He shook his head.

  Disappointment percolated through her. “Can you show me where this was?”

  He nodded.

  They crossed the street, continuing toward Long Bridge, and Patrick took her down a wide alley between two warehouses. “When they bring in the hay, it’s hard to find your way around. Easy to get lost with all the bales, like walls.”

  He surveyed the wharf. Men were working on the far side, loading bales onto wagons. “This end still looks pretty much the same as it did Sunday. Best those men don’t see us.” He slid up next to a towering wall of bales, and Inez did the same. They followed the wall to a gap.

  “Here,” he said and slipped inside. The gap opened into a space, enclosed on three sides by bales and open to the water.

  Inez looked around. “Here?”

  “Yes’m.”

  She stood still a moment, trying to get a feel for the area. The stench from the water, gurgling beneath their feet under the pier, and from the vast garbage grounds up the street was overwhelming. She turned to Patrick. “Did you by chance tell the police about this? About what you heard?”

  He recoiled. “No ma’am! It was none of my business.”

  So, if Jamie had a disagreement here, a fight, most likely the police have not been here looking around.

  She began to walk the inside perimeter, keeping some feet away from the walls, scanning the ground.

  “Ma’am?” He kept pace with her. “What are you doing?”

  “Just looking, Patrick. Looking for anything unusual. Out of place.”

  “I don’t see anything.” He sounded nervous. “We shouldn’t be here. Someone’s going to find us, ask us what we’re doing here, and tell us to leave.”

  “When they do, we will.” She kept her eyes on the planks. They were filthy, scuffed, split, dark with years of use. Random clumps of moldy hay and clots of dirt appeared here and there, along with the detritus of months, years. She stopped, a cold rill running down her back. There, on the planks, a large red stain that stood out from the scuffed-in black mold. Next to it, there was a smaller stain. A handprint? In blood?

  “We oughta leave.” Now Patrick sounded panicked. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  She glanced up at him. At six-four, he was an imposing figure. But his green eyes betrayed the fact that, inside, he was just a frightened boy.

  “Soon,” she said. She moved around the stain and the print, circling, then walked to the nearest hay bales. Something on the ground, nearly hidden by the lower edge of the bale, caught her eye. A container, small, dark brown. A little circular leather box, lying on its side, as if it had been tossed or kicked aside and had rolled up against the hay bale. She picked it up, freed a little brass hook, and opened it.

  Inside was a velvet bed with an empty slot in the middle.

  She knew what kind of box this was. What it was meant to hold.

  Inez’s mind flew to a distant time, ten-plus years past. Her soon-to-be husband, Mark Stannert, placed in her hand a little leather circular box, much like this one, and said, “We’re two of a kind, I knew that the moment I saw you. You’ve stolen my heart, Inez, just slipped it out as neat as a light-fingered Sal. What do you say we make it official, Darlin’?” She remembered the exciting thrill that had run through her from the warmth of his touch and the promise in his eyes. Mark Stannert promised a future full of adventure and new horizons, an unbounded future very different from the one defined for her by her parents and her station. All of it, waiting for her to say yes, to open the little box and let him slide the gold ring inside onto her finger.

  She fiercely willed the memory away. Aware of Patrick’s anxious breathing beside her, Inez tilted the box to read what was printed on the satin lining inside the top—“Barnaby Jewelers, Market Street, San Francisco.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Once Inez retrieved the box, Patrick succumbed to such panic that they were obliged to hustle out of the maze of bales and away from the hay wharf. “You won’t tell Ma or Aunt Bessie about Henderson’s and the wharf, will you?” he asked over and over.

  She assured him over and over that she wouldn’t. Before they went their separate ways, Inez asked him if he knew a Sven Borg. “A longshoreman who works with the lumber ships, I believe,” she said. “He is the one who found the body by the bridge.”

  Patrick shook his head so emphatically that Inez thought he might lose his hat. But then he added, “You could try Johansson’s lumber yard. Johansson is a Swede, and he mostly hires Swedes. Maybe he’d know.” He pointed toward Long Bridge. “It’s one of the smaller places on the docks. Between Sierra Lumber and the San Francisco Lumber Company.”

  With that, he headed back to the laundry, head ducked, hat pulled down, as fast as his long legs would take him.

  Although it was little enough to go on, Inez took heart at the fact that there were three lumber companies in a row close to the bridge. Surely, this Sven would be found at one or the other of them. She started with Johansson’s, hoping luck would make her search a short one. Her inquiry at the office turned up the fact that two Sven Borgs were employed at Johansson’s: “One-eyed” Sven and “Broken-nose” Sven.

  “I’m looking for the Sven who discovered the body by the bridge Monday morning,” said Inez.

  “Ah!” said the foreman. “That’d be Broken-nose Sven.” He narrowed his eyes, suddenly suspicious. “Can I ask why you need to talk to him? We’re very busy right now.”

  “I’m here on behalf of the family of the deceased,” said Inez. Which was true.

  “Wait here,” he said and disappeared out onto the wharf. Inez cooled her heels for some minutes until the foreman reappeared with a stocky man, mid-thirties, blue workshirt, pants, waistcoat, and suspenders, silver-blond hair under his blue-and-gray checked cap, and a fulsome walrus mustache. The foreman turned to him and said, “Tell me when you’re done so you can get back to work.”

  Inez introduced herself and noticed that this Sven Borg did indeed have a nose with a distinct tilt to the right.

  “We talk outside, Mrs. Stannert? I just have a few minutes.” His “vee” for “we,” “yoost” for “just” and “haff” for “have” were all stamped with the typical Swedish melodic tones.

  Once they emerged street-side, Borg leaned against the brick wall of the warehouse. “Do you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Stannert?”

  “Not at all,” she replied. “May I ask you a few questions?”

  He nodded, pulled out a pouch of tobacco and some rolling papers.

  “First, I want to thank you for going to Mr. Monroe’s lodgings and notifying his roommate of your suspicions regarding the identity. You were correct. It was Mr. Monroe.”

  Borg had assembled a cigarette during her short explanation. He lit it, inhaled and exhaled the smoke reflectively, then looked at her with eyes as blue as his faded denim shirt. “May he go with God. Please tell his family for me.”

  “Of course. We are curious, how did you make his acquaintance? You are a longshoreman. He was a musician. What was your connection?”

  “Ja. Well, I have been known to play a squeezebox sometimes.” He squinted up at the sky. “Did his roommate, Herr Klein, tell you about the unions? About Frank Roney, the labor leader?”

  “He mentioned it in passing,” said Inez.

  “Jamie—” he pronounced the name “Yamie”—“he was very interested in organizing the musicians. So, he came to the waterfront, to find others working for the labor cause. That is how I met him.”

  “Are there union meetings here? I apologize, I do not know much about the labor activities beyond what little Jamie told us.”

  Sven gave a half-smile beneath his mustache. “Ja, well, they are quiet meetings, not big as in the sandlots with the
Workingmen’s Party. The eight-hour day was a worthy cause. But in the end, the party was interested in helping the working class. The party is now gone, and good riddance. Their hate of the Chinamen, I did not understand. The party leaders, they said the Chinese steal jobs from honest workers, but I have seen they work hard too, in the factories, in the workshops, in their laundries. I have nothing against hard-working people. They are not on the docks stealing my job.”

  He sucked on the cigarette and exhaled, the smoke carried away in the light breeze. “Jamie, he felt the same. Do you know, there are Chinamen who are musicians? Jamie said he knew some. I think he had dreams that they should organize too.”

  Inez tried to think how to frame her next question. “Do you know of anyone in the movement, maybe someone from the old Workingmen’s Party, who would have wanted to stop Jamie? Or wanted him dead?”

  Borg’s cigarette bobbed as he silently chuckled. “Jamie was a musician. Why would anyone care about a musician interested in learning more about labor organizing? No. No one. Jamie, he liked to argue. Sometimes, discussions were hot. But he only fought with words, not with his hands. He needed his hands to earn a living. Me?” He glanced at his own hand—strong, scarred, scraped, calloused, scabs on the knuckles, and closed his thick fingers into a fist. “As long as I can move the lumber from the ship to the wharf, that is good enough.”

  “Jamie came to meetings here, by the docks?” Inez asked.

  “At a saloon, Henderson’s,” said Borg. “He played there some nights. He would come early, or sometimes stay late, after his time at the piano, and join me, Roney, others, to talk. Until Henderson wouldn’t let Roney in anymore.”

  Inez stared. “At Three Sheets?”

  He looked at her, bemused. “You know the place?”

  “I have heard of it.” Inez thought of what Patrick had told her and how threads formed between perfect strangers, forming a web of connections. Who else was connected, caught in the web?

  “We were there Sunday evening.” He tapped ash onto the ground. “There was one thing.”

  “What?” Overhead, a seagull screeched, then wheeled off toward the bay.

  “Jamie, he told me he had some good news, and would tell me later. Something had happened to make him very cheery. But when Jamie was done playing, he and Henderson had words. I don’t know about what. Jamie slammed the lid down on the piano, and walked out. Didn’t stay to talk. I never found out what his good news was.”

  “Hmm.” Inez tucked that away for later consideration. “Do you think his death was random? He was attacked on his way home or some such?”

  Borg gave her a shrewd look. “He was down in this area many times. He was not a fool. He went after trouble sometimes, but it never caught him by surprise. Not that I saw.”

  “I have one more question,” said Inez, adding, “I know you must get back to work.”

  “Ja, I do. In the office, they are counting the minutes I am out here. If I want to be paid for them, I will need to make up this little break.” His cigarette was so short Inez feared for his mustache.

  So, Inez asked the question she had been wondering about for some time. “How did you recognize him, at the bridge? His face was…”

  “Beaten in.” Borg dropped the remnant of his cigarette—no more than a paper sliver and a tiny tobacco shred—onto the boardwalk and ground it out with his boot. “His clothes. Sunday night, he wore a fancy waistcoat with flowers and a striped jacket. I remember, because he was so cheerful and his clothes were too. I recognized the vest and jacket when they pulled him out.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  De Bruijn absorbed what the police surgeon had told him. “So, he was beaten with a heavy object, but you are fairly certain it was not a blackjack or a billy club.”

  The physician raised tangled eyebrows. “Billy club? Surely you’re not suggesting that one of San Francisco’s finest, one of our own boys in blue was involved.”

  “Not at all,” said de Bruijn, although the thought had crossed his mind. He knew full well, the law had no great love for union activists, given the sandlot riots of a few years previous in which members of the Workingmen’s Party and various unemployed clashed with the police force. Memories would still burn bright concerning those times for those who had been involved.

  He switched focus, broadening his thinking to encompass what heavy objects might be close to hand on a wharf late at night or easily carried from somewhere else. “Perhaps the weapon was a crowbar, a chain, a pike pole, or a bosun’s cosh.”

  The police surgeon scratched his wiry gray beard, which could have done double duty as a bird’s nest. “No, nothing like that. The object would have had a broad, flat surface but also fairly sharp edges. I considered a brick, perhaps.”

  He raised his hand, palm up, as if holding one. De Bruijn noted that although the physician’s face was deeply lined, his hands were still smooth, the hands of a young man.

  The surgeon continued, “There is a brick wharf in the area.”

  “Was he perhaps killed on the brick wharf?”

  “Not necessarily. You look around any of those piers, and you’ll find piles of bricks, pieces of lumber, various heavy metal objects on all of them. All I can say is since he was found by Long Bridge, he had to have been placed in the canal close to that vicinity or a bit upstream. The so-called ‘water’ in that channel is more of the nature of slow-moving sludge. He had not been in the water long, certainly not longer than one night. And he was dead before he went into the canal. I am certain of that. Absolutely no fluid in the lungs.”

  De Bruijn nodded. “Perhaps his attacker used a brick. A convenient weapon. Which means the attack would have occurred somewhere close to or on the brick wharf. The body would have been dragged or carried to the edge of the pier, or simply rolled off. I would imagine he was placed in the water close to wherever he was killed.”

  “That makes sense to me, but you best talk to a detective about your conjectures in those directions. I will say that he was hit not just once, but many times. Twice on the back of the head, many times on the face. If the point was to kill him, the blows to the crown would have sufficed. It’s almost as if the attacker wanted to obliterate his face, his identity, so we would not be able to tell who he was.”

  Which was, de Bruijn thought, almost exactly what would have happened. Jamie Monroe’s true identity as son of a wealthy capitalist might have remained hidden if not for Mrs. Sweet imparting information about the birthmark to Mrs. Stannert. The irony of the surgeon’s remark did not escape de Bruijn. Young Gallagher had come to San Francisco to forge a new identity and divorce himself from who he had been. He had succeeded in doing so in life, and nearly so in death.

  “It’s a bit of a mystery,” continued the physician. “I am sorry, Mr. de Bruijn, that I cannot offer more in the way of information to you or your client regarding the young man’s death. At the time, we had no idea who he was and doubted we would be able to gain an identification, given the state of his body, so the autopsy was brief.”

  He clasped his hands behind his head and his focus wandered over de Bruijn’s head to the wall of books and diplomas opposite. “At least, God, fate, or circumstances have made it possible for him to return home for a proper burial, as opposed to a final resting place in our pauper’s cemetery.” He stood, and de Bruijn did likewise. They shook hands, and the doctor added, “I hope you find out who brought this upon him.”

  “Thank you for your time.” De Bruijn gathered his hat and walking stick. “I have spoken with the police chief. He referred me to Detective Lynch, who is handling the case. The detective was previously a patrolman in the area, so knows the area well. I shall talk with him next.”

  Privately, de Bruijn didn’t think he would get much from the detective. For one thing, Harry Gallagher had made it plain he did not want the police pursuing the matter of his son’s death and intimated
that he had told the chief as well. De Bruijn and Gallagher had had some private words about that. De Bruijn feared that if the killer was made known to Gallagher, his client would exact his own personal justice, outside the law.

  De Bruijn was not a fan of the vigilante approach and told Gallagher so. “We should cooperate with the police and allow them to do their job. They will be far more engaged, now that they know the victim is your son, and they have far more resources than I do.”

  “You have Mrs. Stannert and Mrs. Sweet,” said Gallagher. “Do not underestimate either of them.”

  De Bruijn refrained from shaking his head. What sort of contributions could Gallagher imagine that a madam of a Leadville brothel and a businesswoman, astute though she may be, would offer to his investigation?

  “And if you must employ others for tasks—this Pinkerton woman O’Connell you mentioned, ruffians, whoever—do so. You have a free rein. Money is no object. Timely results are.”

  And time was ticking away.

  De Bruijn coughed and discreetly pulled out his handkerchief, the true purpose being to block, at least a little, the stench from the waterfront.

  Detective Lynch grinned. “’Tis an almighty stink in this part of town. South of Market dumps its garbage just a few blocks upstream. Nearly three hundred wagons a day is the number I hear. Scavengers sift through it looking for rags, old bottles, scraps of iron, oyster shells, whatever might be useful. The rest is shoveled into the water. Although it seems a sin to call what flows here ‘water.’”

  De Bruijn tucked his handkerchief away. “So, this is where the body was found.” He stood with the detective by the foot of Long Bridge, gazing into the listless brown murk that filled the canal.

  “That’s right,” said the detective. “The officers who arrived first fished him out with pike poles. Quite the entertainment for the neighborhood’s idlers and ne’er-do-wells, I wager.”

  De Bruijn could see that he would learn nothing from the scene. “Have you any notion who might have perpetrated the crime? I understand you were assigned to the case and have worked this area for a long time. I suspect you are better able to hazard an educated guess than the other detectives on the force.”