Conspiracy of Silence (Ravenwood Mysteries #4)

by Sabrina Flynn

  "As far as I know there's only one of me," Riot replied.

  Mutton Chops gave him a guarded look. "Police Surgeon, F.P. Wilson. A colleague of mine performed the postmortem on Jim Parks."

  "His report was thorough. I appreciate that. Is this another plague death?" Riot looked over the corpse. Male, Chinese, with an obscene incision splitting the body from shoulders to pubic bone. Flesh was splayed, revealing everything from the trachea down. Swollen lymph glands bulged on his thighs, and oozing sores dotted his skin.

  "We'll know when we're through," Kellogg said. "It doesn't do to jump to conclusions. Bubonic plague shares many of the same symptoms as gonorrhea—on the surface, at any rate. But the dead speak for themselves. What can we do for you?"

  "I'd hoped to speak with you about your missing health inspector—Lincoln Howe."

  Kellogg looked to the third man.

  He looked up from his notes. "A.P. O'Brien. City health officer." Prim and direct, he had a pince-nez on the tip of a pointed nose. "I spoke with the police about Mr. Howe's disappearance."

  "You don't seem overly concerned."

  "Neither were the police."

  Kellogg dropped a lumpy mass of tissue onto a scale, and called out the weight. "Lincoln likely packed up, and took the first train out of town. I don't blame him. Nasty business."

  "You think the plague outbreak scared him off?"

  "That's exactly what I think. The man didn't have the stomach for any of this," said Wilson.

  "And he wasn't very bright," Kellogg added. "He refused the Yersin antiserum. There's a risk of serum sickness, but there's far more risk with the plague."

  "Did you know Lincoln Howe well?"

  All three shook their heads. "He arrived in January from Honolulu," O'Brien said. "Highly recommended. As Wilfred mentioned, he wasn't the brightest, but he was always willing to go where others weren't."

  "How so?" Riot asked.

  "He was a rough sort. So I sent him into the seedier alleyways. Chinese residents were scared of him. They tended to make a quick exit."

  "They hide whenever we're around," Kellogg said.

  The Police Surgeon clucked his tongue. "It's been inconvenient."

  Riot waited for an explanation. Kellogg took up the narration along with a scalpel. "The Chinese are hiding their dead. From what our interpreters tell us, it's bad luck for someone to die in a house. So the living haul the dead to the nearest coffin shop."

  "Or residents stow the bodies somewhere so we can't perform a postmortem. They don't like what we do here, especially cremations," O'Brien said.

  Kellogg's hand disappeared inside the abdominal cavity. "By the time the Health Department hears of a death, residents have managed to hide the body. I'm afraid there's been many more than what's been reported. And at this rate, the plague will spread."

  "Did Lincoln Howe keep a room somewhere?"

  "He gave an address. He was renting a room on Broadway, or so he claimed. But when I questioned the landlady, she said she rarely saw him. His room was empty," O'Brien said.

  "Kept to himself." Kellogg offered.

  "Can you provide a description?"

  Kellogg lifted out another mass of tissue. From its texture, Riot thought it the liver, but it was massive. He placed it on the scale. After calling out the weight, he bent over the organ with scalpel in hand.

  O'Brien adjusted his pince-nez. "Lincoln Howe was five-eleven, one hundred and eighty pounds. A mushroomed left ear, crooked nose, and scarred knuckles."

  "It's a rare honor to speak with an observant witness."

  "My line of work requires precision. I don't see how it's of help, though. There are a dozen boats and trains leaving east at any given time. Howe could be in New York by now."

  "On the contrary, you've been exceptionally helpful." With that description, Riot knew exactly where the Health Department's Lincoln Howe was. "I take it he was assigned to the Globe Hotel?"

  Kellogg looked up, startled. "How could you possibly know that?"

  "Observation," Riot answered. "I wonder if one of you gentleman could tell me what this is." He held up his envelope. "There's a test tube inside."

  O'Brien set aside his pen and note pad, and took the envelope.

  "Careful. I'm not sure what's inside. If anything."

  O'Brien took out the tube and held it to a light. "It's definitely been used. There's a filmy layer inside, but the cork is intact. The microscopist can analyze it after he's done with the stomach contents of this one." He patted the knee of the corpse.

  "I suspect it will prove urgent."

  Wilson frowned. "Why is that?"

  "Instinct."

  The police surgeon's brows shot up. "Notes can wait, O'Brien. Mr. Riot has a reputation that only an idiot would ignore."

  Without a word, O'Brien walked into an adjacent room. Riot followed. It was a cramped, windowless room with a pale man hunched at a worktable. A small electric light illuminated the object of his study.

  "We need this analyzed straight away."

  "I'm not finished with the stomach contents."

  "It's urgent, Philip," O'Brien said.

  Philip gave a sigh, straightened with a crack of his back, and flicked on a switch. Electric light burst into the room from an overhead bulb. Philip snatched the tube from O'Brien, plucked the cork free, and put his nose to the opening. He sniffed. "Musty and sweet," he murmured. "The little buggers are making themselves at home in here." There was affection in his voice.

  Philip tipped the tube towards a slide. A drop touched glass, and he covered it with a thinner piece of glass. The drop spread to the corners. He flicked off the switch, plunging Riot into darkness.

  "A lively little bunch of bacilli," Philip murmured. "I'll need two hours for fixation and dyeing with aniline, and then I'll perform a Gram test."

  Riot spent the next two hours watching three men mutilate a corpse. Always humbling, as Ravenwood would say.

  The adjacent door opened, and Philip poked his squinty eyes into the light. "Where'd you get this?"

  "I found it."

  "Where?" Philip hissed.

  "What did you find?" O'Brien asked.

  "Plague bacilli."

  23

  Five Stories

  Each small piece, seemingly unconnected, is moved into place. A link in a chain of henchmen, each knowing nothing of the next, leaving a trail of ignorance. —Z.R. Journal Excerpt

  RICKETY STAIRS SAGGED UNDER Riot's feet, and his shoulders brushed mold growing on rotting walls. He turned sideways, taking care where he stepped. His guide's back was nearly lost in the underground warren.

  Ma Gee skipped over a puddle. "Watch yourself." His voice was muffled by a handkerchief pressed over his nose.

  Riot dipped his head to avoid the sagging ceiling as he followed suit. The Consul General's detective hurried down the murky passage. To the basement. Ma Gee stopped in front of a boarded-up doorway. The hallway smelled of sewage and rotting eggs—sulfur. A result of the health officers' fumigation efforts.

  "Wong Chut King was found in this room." The lumber yard salesman was the first purported plague death on March seventh. He had been scraping by in the Globe Hotel—it was the worst rookery in Chinatown and known as Five Stories. Riot had seen all five stories, and he could confirm the rookery lived up to its reputation.

  "It was not plague," Ma Gee said. "It was gonorrhea." In Cantonese the word roughly translated to 'poisonous mango-shaped death'.

  Riot eyed the boarded-up doorway. Dim gaslight illuminated a painted 'X' across its center. "Who carried him to the undertakers on Clay Street?" Sau pan po, the coffin shop, translated to long-life boards. Riot had always found the translation whimsical.

  "The caretaker. It's bad luck to have a tenant die inside a home—even Five Stories."

  The basement hallway was covered in mold. There were cracks in the brick, and ominous ooze leaked from pipes. Riot resisted the urge to scratch his arms. Whoever this caretaker was, he was
n't much of one.

  "I'll take you to the caretaker." Eager to be gone from the basement, Ma Gee turned to leave, but Riot gave a slight shake of his head. He moved farther into the dim, and stopped at the next doorway. A thin curtain hung over the opening. Riot used his stick to nudge the curtain aside.

  A single candle burned on a mound of wax. Two bunk beds, three-tiered high, were crammed inside. Flophouses like the Globe Hotel housed bachelors and laborers who usually slept in eight hour shifts, two to a bunk. But today there were only four men instead of the usual twelve. With the tong war and quarantine scare, residents were fleeing Chinatown. The population was at an all-time low.

  The men sat on a bottom bunk playing pai gow, the colored tiles arranged on a makeshift table. When they caught sight of Riot, the men jumped to their feet in the narrow space.

  "I'm looking into a matter for Consul General Ho Yow. About the man who died next door." Surprise widened their eyes. Few expected a white man in a tailored suit to speak Cantonese. Despite their living conditions their clothes and hair were immaculate, and the floor showed marks of a broom having recently passed over it.

  The men glanced at each other. And a fifth stirred on a top bunk. Although young, his back was horribly bent. Riot doubted he could straighten.

  Their gazes traveled over Riot's shoulder, to Ma Gee, who stood in the hallway. "We don't know anything about him."

  "Do you think it was plague?" Riot asked.

  "No," they said at once.

  "That's what I aim to prove—that his death wasn't what the health officials are claiming." Half-truths were the most convincing. His words put them at ease.

  The hunched man swung his legs over the edge of the bunk, the top of his head brushing the ceiling. "Chut King was sick with gonorrhea. He was spending all his money on green mansions."

  Perhaps, but it certainly didn't account for the four other deaths. "Did you know him?"

  The men consulted each other with a glance. A man with horribly pox-scarred cheeks spoke. "We worked at the same lumber yard."

  "What were his symptoms?"

  "He was curled in his bunk. He wouldn't come to work, so I fetched a doctor. But he came down with a fever and began vomiting," the pockmarked man said. "His tongue was white, and he developed the poisonous mango and didn't wake up. I helped the landlord take him to the undertakers. There was nothing else to do for him."

  "Did anyone visit Chut King before he fell ill? A health officer perhaps?"

  The men shook their heads, and Riot moved to the next room. Conversations went much the same, until he came to the final doorway. It was a loose term. The bricks had been removed, or perhaps fallen, and a crude wooden board had been placed over the opening. Riot rapped his walking stick on the board.

  No one answered.

  "So polite, Din Gau." Ma Gee looked amused as he stepped forward and slid the board to the side. They recoiled at the smell. Fuzzy mold covered the walls and leaky pipes. From the smell, Riot gathered those pipes led to the sewers.

  "Worse than rats," Ma Gee muttered, smoothing his sleeves.

  Riot took out his flash light. The electric light barely pierced the small room. It was empty save for a lump on a bottom bunk. A slight rise and fall in the blanket told Riot that the lump was alive.

  He moved into the room. "Hello?" he asked in Cantonese. When a more forceful attempt elicited no movement, he lifted the blanket aside with the tip of his stick. The lump came alive. An old man sprang to a crouching position on the bunk, a knife flashing in his hand.

  Riot deftly parried the weak attempt with his stick. The blade fell, and Riot snatched it up, turning it around to offer it back to the man. "We've come to ask after your neighbor."

  Stunned, the old man blinked. After a moment's hesitation he accepted his knife, and tucked it away in his voluminous tunic. He said something that Riot didn't understand. A different dialect, from one of the surrounding providences of Canton.

  Ma Gee spoke in yet another dialect. It was a question. And the man nodded and replied. The detective looked relieved. They had found a common language.

  "He says that he knows nothing about the man who died."

  Riot studied the crouched old man. It was more difficult to get a feel for someone when he couldn't understand their language. But still, there were 'tells': small flutters of a lash, purposeful eye contact, a ready answer. This old man was too quick to reply.

  "Ask him if we are the first men who've come by asking after Chut King."

  Riot waited for the exchange. At first the old man shook his head. But Ma Gee sensed there was more, and pressed him. "Health officers did come here," Ma Gee translated.

  "Did the health officers come before the quarantine?"

  Ma Gee tilted his head, but he asked the question.

  The old man looked at Riot, and nodded. He held up a single finger. A flurry of words flew back and forth as the two men conversed. Riot had the sense that Ma Gee was reassuring him, convincing him to trust them. Riot caught General Consul Ho Yow's name and Din Gau in the conversation, but little else.

  "He's worried about his safety," Ma Gee finally said.

  Riot reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a five dollar gold piece. "This is enough to buy you a train ticket to anywhere in California, plus room and board when you get there." And just like that, gold loosened the old man's tongue.

  ✥

  Ma Gee and Riot took a deep breath of fresher air. Burning sulfur, roasting pork, and incense were a welcome relief after the interior of the Globe Hotel.

  Men in wide hats and voluminous tunics walked down Dupont Street. Riot tucked back his coat. Just in case. He had enemies in Chinatown. "If I might make a suggestion?"

  The detective glanced at him.

  "Follow the old man and make sure he's safe."

  Ma Gee stuck a cigarette between his lips. "Why? So he'll be fit to testify in court against a white man?"

  There was that. "You never know," Riot said simply. "At the very least he was willing to speak with us. And he's observant."

  Ma Gee struck a match. He took a drag, savoring the tobacco as he considered Riot's words. "I'll question the other residents. Do you know who this health officer is?"

  "Yes."

  "Who?"

  "I want to gather more facts first. We'll interview residents in the other plague death locations."

  "Purported," Ma Gee said, blowing a line of smoke into the air.

  Riot didn't answer.

  "I think it's best if I go alone."

  "Why's that?" Riot asked.

  Ma Gee gestured with his cigarette at men walking by. "Your name is on the Dead Wall."

  Riot looked down the street towards the opening of a dead-end lane plastered with chun hungs—tong-sanctioned assassinations.

  "It's been there before."

  "You will attract attention if you come with me."

  Two white men strolled by, bowlers cocked at an angle, but Ma Gee was right. A Chinese detective asking questions for the Consul General was expected, but a white man with a price on his head? That would hardly put residents at ease.

  "You're right. I'll question the undertaker while you handle the residents. But we need to tread carefully," Riot warned. "Not a word until we report to the Consul General."

  Ma Gee nodded. "When, Din Gau?"

  "How long do you need to question the other residents?"

  "Two days."

  "Send me a missive." Riot touched the brim of his hat, then headed for Sacramento Street.

  Children played in doorways, and a father strolled with his silk-clad daughter on his shoulders. Riot saw him stop to buy her a balloon from a Jewish merchant. It might have been just another quiet day in the Quarter, except that odors of incense, roasting pork, and fish were fighting with sulfur fumes.

  He turned up Washington, onto Waverly Place, and sidestepped a man selling peanuts. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a white man suddenly stop to study a hawker's t
ea offerings. Riot kept a steady pace, the beat of his walking stick clicking with his heels. He cut across the street, in front of a carriage bursting with tourists who were gawking at the Quarter. The white man began walking again.

  It was the way he walked that warned Riot. It wasn't a leisurely stroll through exotic streets or the purposeful gait of a man on a mission. This man walked with both purpose and leisure. It was forced.

  Riot stepped into Wing Sang coffin shop on the corner of Clay and Waverly Place. Scents of fresh pine, varnish, and death permeated the shop. The steady sound of a hammer tapping nails brought a rush of memory back. Riot stopped, gripping his walking stick for support.

  Three years before, as he lay dying on a filthy cot, he had listenined to that very sound.

  The undertaker stopped, and looked up. It wasn't everyday that a white man walked into his shop. He was a small, bent man who tapped on nails with expert precision. "I don't speak English," he said in Cantonese.

  Riot swallowed. Words stuck in his throat. Would he ever be free of these memories? He focused on the feel of cold metal in his palm and the floorboards beneath his feet, until he felt grounded again.

  "Atticus Riot." At the introduction, the undertaker's eyes widened. Too rattled by the sound of tapping nails, Riot had forgotten his reputation. But it was too late to take back the introduction. "I'm investigating a matter for General Consul Ho Yow—" The undertaker started shaking his head, clearly dismayed that 'no sabe' hadn't cut it. "I have a few questions about a man who was brought to your shop on the seventh of March."

  "I don't know anything about him."

  Riot smiled. "I didn't tell you his name yet."

  "I don't know."

  "His name was Wong Chut King. Health officers took him from your shop after he died."

  "It was gonorrhea," the undertaker insisted.

  "I'm trying to prove that very thing for the Consul General, but I need your help."