The Investigations of Avram Davidson

by Avram Davidson

  The Liverpool packet-boat was about to sail, he explained, it being the first of the month, the traditional sailing date for packets; and he had heard that the Captain not only had cargo space aboard but was looking for an adventure—the private cargo which all ships’ personnel were entitled to take aboard in amounts varying according to rank. The Captain had bought Mr. Jenkins’s entire shipment.

  The dinner-bell rang, and all three rose. “So there is not, then,” Hays inquired, “any way to trace a small amount of this cotton?”

  “None that I know of. It comes in to the City all the time, lays on the wharves, and anyone can draw a handful from a bale; samples are pulled in the Exchange and discarded—why, sir, the wind blows it about the streets. Can we trace the wind?”

  * * *

  SO MUCH FOR that, Hays thought, as the cab rolled its way downtown. The two murdered men had been sailors and probably had access to baled cotton, at sea or on shore, a hundred times a year—though why one would put it in his mouth and another in his glove was a question which baffled him completely. Perhaps Breakstone had discovered some thing about the glove itself.

  But the Constable hadn’t. It was an ordinary gentleman’s glove, the haberdashers all said, sold by the dozens and the gross.

  Hays sighed, tossed the glove to his desk, and looked at it discontentedly. “I can’t believe,” he said at last, “that it isn’t a clew. Gentleman’s gloves in the Old Brewery? No, my boy, it has to signify. Of course some one might have stolen a pair—no one would steal just one—but he’d not have carried them all the way back home with him; he’d have sold them for a half-dime to the first fence he came across—yes, and drunk up the half-dime directly, too. I am convinced that this glove was dropped by the man who killed Roberts. In which case it does have some thing to tell me. Perhaps I’ve not been listening. Hmm.”

  He picked up the glove and began to examine it carefully, inch by inch, holding it close to his eyes. Suddenly his frown vanished, gave way to a look in which astonishment vied with self-reproach.

  “Ahh!” he exclaimed. “Here’s something I hadn’t noticed before—and shame upon me, too. Do you see it, Mr. Breakstone? No? Fie upon you! Look here.”

  Hays began to turn the glove inside-out, poking at the fingers with the small end of a pen-holder until they were all reversed. “See it now? Eh?”

  Breakstone said, “I see these few wisps of cotton here, sir. But we knew there was cotton in the glove. I still don’t see why. Do you?”

  But Hays did not answer the question directly. “I want you to set to work on a riddle: What connection is there between Roaring Roberts and Tim Scott? And what connection between those two and the man found dead in Dunstan-Slip? What connections in life?—and in death?”

  It was at this moment that the steam-tug Unicorn happened to ram the ferry-boat Governor Tompkins half-way between New-York and Brooklyn. Twenty passengers were thrown overboard, and only nine picked up from the water alive. Hays was no better with a boat-hook than any one else, but his presence on the river served to discourage the presence of those “volunteers” who were more interested in the contents of water-soaked pockets than in seeing the dead brought ashore for Christian burial.

  Five of the missing eleven were found, by and by; and Hays retired from the scene. Experience told him that the rest wouldn’t show up for some time.

  As Breakstone, himself rather wet about the sleeves and shirt-front, made his way along South-street early that evening, he overheard this point discussed. Some thought the full moon would “draw” the dead to the surface, while others insisted that only the concussion of water-borne cannonry could dislodge them.

  Meanwhile, the life of the city roared along. Cargo was laden aboard many of the vessels whose bow-sprits pointed toward the top storeys of the South-street buildings, and cargo was taken ashore from many others. Men with blackened clothes and faces poured coal into the holds of new-fangled steamers. “Cream! Cream! D’licious ice-cream!” shouted the peddlers, not even ceasing their hoarse cries when setting down their wooden pails to serve a clerk or apprentice, safely out of employer’s sight.

  Wine by the pipe, sugar and tobacco by the hogshead, potash by the barrel, rum by the puncheon, nails by the keg, tea by the chest, cotton by the bale, and wool by the bag; shouting supercargoes, cursing carters, hoarse auctioneers, brokers scurrying between ship and shore and sale; grave old merchants and hard young sea-captains, red-faced dray- and barrow-men, pale-faced clerks and fresh faced ’prentice-boys; the reek of salt-fish, the cloying odor of molasses, the spicy scent of cinnamon-bark, the healthy smell of horses, and the sharp tang of new leather—all this was South-street, the city’s premier water-front and the focal point of all New-York’s commerce.

  “Leatherhead! Leatherhead!” yelled a barefooted, dirty-legged boy, passing on the run. Breakstone paid no attention. The leather helmet he wore may not have been pretty, and it was often hot and heavy in the summertime, but—besides the protection it offered from brick-bars, stones, and clubs—it was the only article of uniform the New-York City Watch wore, and he was proud of it.

  Otterburne’s West-India Coffee-House was where Hays had said he would meet him, and there, in an upstairs room overlooking the East-River and Upper Harbor, was the High Constable himself, dipping his mahogany-colored face, for a change, into a mug of Mocha and milk.

  “Have you got the answer to my riddle?” Hays asked, wiping his mouth on the back of one huge hand.

  “Parts of it—I think.” Then Breakstone abandoned his reserve and leaned forward eagerly. “I found out quite a bit when I was out in the boats. Do you know a Captain Lemuel Pierce, who has the Sarah coasting-sloop?” Hays considered for a second, then nodded. “Well, here’s what it comes to: Roaring Roberts, who we found dead in the Old Brewery, had been seen more than once in company with Tim Scott—who we found in the alley three streets up from here. I’d mentioned to you that Scott had spoken of a mate named Billy Walters? Yes, and Billy Walters—who hasn’t been seen of late!—had a great keloid on his left ear-lobe—”

  Hays blew out his cheeks. “So he was the man they pulled out of Dunstan-Slip! This ties all three together with a second cord. And Lem Pierce—?” Billy Walters was said to have sailed with Captain Lem on their last voyage; Pierce’s sloop was a coaster, and Tim Scott’s last voyage was also on a coaster. “Lem has a wicked reputation,” Hays said thoughtfully. “Coercion, crimping, blackmail, barratry, usurpation … I dare say he’s turned his hand to a touch of piracy in his time, too. Where does the Sarah lie now, Constable? You’ve done well,” he added, before Breakstone could answer. “Many a mickle makes a muckle—go on, you were saying?”

  Breakstone said that the Sarah sloop had been down in Perth-Amboy, being over-hauled. Report was that she was on her way to the City, with only the Captain and a man from the ship-yard handling her, and should arrive just before sundown at Bayard’s Wharf.

  “Over-hauling costs money,” Hays observed. “Scott and Roberts had been spending a lot of money, too. Bound together with a third cord, you see. And ‘a three-fold cord is not easily broken,’ says the Proverbs of King Solomon. Come to think of it, there’s another king mentioned in the Book of Proverbs. Yes. Just so. King Lemuel! Well, late to-night, about ten or so, we’ll go down and visit this Lemuel and discuss Scripture—and other things!”

  But when they visited that Lemuel they found him dead.

  * * *

  THEY HAD PICKED their way along the wharf through heaps of firewood the sawyers had prepared and left for galley-stoves. It was well past the farthest zone of gas-light, and neither the dim ships’-lamps nor the tiny Watch-lanterns that Hays’s men had did much more than make the ambient darkness seem darker.

  “Ahoy, there!” Hays hailed a dim figure enjoying a pipe in the cool of above-decks. “Where’s the Sarah? A sloop, just came in early this evening?”

  Afterwards, he was to regret that hail. Then—“Sarah? Don’t know the name, but a slo
op made fast a few hours back, to the forward end of the wharf.”

  Her lamp was trim and bright, her paint fresh, her name bold and red. Captain Lemuel Pierce had clearly not been trying to hide. But no one answered the call and they boarded the vessel in silence. The cabin-door swung open and inside, on the deck, with his scabbard empty at his belt and his knife deep into his throat, lay the sloop’s Captain.

  “He’s still bleeding!” Breakstone exclaimed.

  “Search the ship,” said Hays tersely. And then they heard it—a scrabble, a clatter, a thump, and the sound of running feet. They rushed top-side in time to see a man on the next wharf vanish into the darkness. Pursuit proved vain.

  “He must have hopped over onto the ship behind this one,” Hays said as they returned, winded and chagrined, “when he heard me hail and ask for the Sarah. Ah, well, let’s do as we were about to do, anyway—search the ship.”

  But aside from water-ballast and a very small amount of stores, there was nothing to be found in the hold. Captain Pierce had bought a deal of new clothes, and in one coat-pocket there was a handful of gold eagles.

  “A hundred dollars,” Hays said, slipping the ten coins back. “A fortune for a sailor, but not so for a master. Did we scare off a robber before he could find it? Or was he a robber at all? The log—”

  The log, however, listed nothing between the voyage from Perth-Amboy and one of six months previously to Wilmington, with a mixed cargo of linen, wine, rice, and flour: which was much too early for the voyage.

  “Not an honest man at all, you see,” said Hays, almost sorrowfully. “Didn’t keep a proper log. Even so—to murder a master of craft under my very nose, as it were! There’s insolence for you! Ahum. What is that behind your feet, Mr. Breakstone?”

  The Constable tried to move forward and look backward at the same time, and before he had even completed the movement he answered that it was “Just a scrap of paper.” He blinked at Hays’s steady gaze and air of still waiting, then he blushed. He stooped and picked it up, looked at it, handed it over. Hays gave it a quick glance.

  “Just a scrap of paper? Look again—Leatherhead!”

  The scrap was straight on one edge and jagged on the other, and it had a few words or parts of words on one side.

  “It seems to be part of some kind of legal paper,” Breakstone said, after a moment.

  “Just so.” Hays’s tone was almost grudging. “You ought to have seen it at once and handed it to me to find out what kind of legal paper. Trifles, trifles—but it’s trifles that count! I sign this kind of legal paper by the dozen. Had I a quarter-of-a-dollar fee for each one—which I don’t!—I could have bought a summer-cottage up at Spikin-Duyvil by now. Well, listen: I’ll emphasize the words you see here:

  “‘…a Seaman of this city, and a Man of Color, is known to me on good evidence to be a FREE MAN, and I do further Enjoin all Men of whatsoever Cities, States, Territories, and Nations, to recognize him in such Status and—,’ and so forth. We give these to the Black seamen in case they put in to a port of a slave state or a slave-holding colony or country, to keep them from being seized and sold. Now, what does it tell you?”

  “That the man who killed the Captain was a Black seaman?”

  “Not necessarily—but it hints at that, very powerfully, yes. Some one who wanted the papers of a free Negro sailor was here to see Pierce—he grabbed for it—but Pierce held on tight—it tore. Let’s follow the obvious trail first. We know that Captain Lem had come into money lately. We know the same of Tim Scott and Roaring Roberts. Pierce spent his on the sloop. The other two poured it out like wine. Now. Do you know of any Colored sailors who’ve been known to spend lavishly of late?”

  The wake of a passing vessel rocked the sloop. The cabin-lamp stayed level in its gimbals, but its light trembled a bit just the same, sending shadows across the High Constable’s craggy face.

  “No, not lavishly—that’s to say, not foolishly. But now that I think about it,” Breakstone mused aloud, “Cudjo Washington used to sail, on and off. And just a little while ago he opened an oyster-cellar in lower Collect-street, not far south of Anthony. A dicty place, as I think of it now—dicty for an oyster-cellar in Collect-street, that is. It must have cost him something.”

  Hays summoned the two Night Constables who had been standing guard at the foot of Bayard’s Wharf and the one next to it, told one to rattle at the Coroner’s shutters, and the other one to stand by the body—a task he plainly had no fancy for, but plainly he had even less fancy to refuse Old Hays.

  “And now,” said Old Hays, “we’ll call on Cudjo Washington. I could relish a basin of little-necks or cherry-stones, I believe. But I’d relish information even more.”

  * * *

  THERE WERE MORE men about that night than was usual for the hour, and presently some one called out from a little group which was gathered under a lamp-post.

  “Jacob! Hello, there! Stop a bit.” Hays crossed over and recognized Alderman Ter Williger, Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Jonathan Goodhue the fancy dry-goods importer, and his partner, Mr. Perit.

  “These are late hours, gentlemen,” Hays commented, “for merchants who must be up early tomorrow.”

  “Ah, it’s to-morrow that keeps us up so late to-night,” said Ter Williger genially. “To-morrow is the first of the month—that means tonight is packet-night—we’ve all been staying late at our counting-houses getting everything in order against the packet-vessels’ sailing in the morning. Come and take a glass of lager-beer with us, Jacob: join us in a well-earned quarter-hour of ease.” And, with a Yes, yes, and a Do, sir, Messrs. Goodhue and Perit seconded the invitation.

  But Hays shook his head. “I’m off to Collect-street on business. And while lager is available there, I’ll not invite you to join me. An ugly business and an ugly neighborhood.”

  Ter Williger, Goodhue, and Perit pursed their lips and raised their eyebrows. Jenkins drew out a segar, a match, and a piece of glassed paper, struck fire and lit up.

  “Is that one of the new Congreve matches?” Mr. Perit asked. Jenkins, his mouth occupied with drawing smoke, didn’t answer.

  “Yes, it is,” said Goodhue. “A great improvement over the old acid bottle. Well, well, then, Mr. Hays, we daren’t detain you. Another time, perhaps.”

  “To be sure. Yes, we must go now. A good-night, gentlemen.”

  Collect-street, below Anthony-street, while not offering the amenities of, say, Washington-square, was still a cut or two above the Five-Points. A stranger might be lured into a room here, and beaten and robbed, and he might die of it; but he was not likely to be murdered in the open street for fun.

  Several fences operated almost openly, ready to buy anything from a dead man’s dirty shirt for a penny to a nob’s gold watch for a dollar. There were the usual saloons and “grocery” stores, including that of the infamous Rosanna Spears. But tonight only one place of business on the street interested Jacob Hays. It was easy enough to spot; its lights were brighter and its paint fresher than the rest.

  The Great Republic Oyster-Cellar, by C. Washington, stated a sign-board; and continued, Fresh and Pickled Oysters, Clams, Hard-shell and Soft-shell Crabs, Garnished Lobsters. Fringed Hams, Fresh Country Fruit.

  The interior was neat and clean and contained several tables, a row of booths along one wall, and even the unusual glory of a glass-fronted show-case in which reposed half of a fringed ham, a huge platter heaped high with fried soft-shell crabs, bowls of fruit, and part of a roasted pig with a lemon in its mouth. A whitewashed keg displayed the necks of bottles of ginger-beer, porter, lager-beer, and mead, the rest of the bottles being concealed by cracked ice. On the rear wall were large steel engravings of Generals Washington and Jackson, and a smaller one of Governor Clinton.

  It was, indeed, “rather a dicty place for Collect-street.” It could not very well have been furnished and provisioned on the savings from a seaman’s wages.

  Present in the room were a Negro couple, evidently the proprietor and
his wife, and several white couples, the men and women dressed in clothes which managed to look at the same time both flashy and bedraggled. The customers glanced up from their refreshments, sat for a moment transfixed at the sight of Hays and Breakstone, tensed, exchanged glances, and then as it was made obvious that the door was not being blocked and that none of them was engaging the attention of the law—relaxed somewhat: that is, if slouching in their seats and hiding their faces with arms propped on elbows may be considered relaxing.

  The proprietor, a powerfully-built man in his early middle years, pressed himself back against the wall with something clenched in his fist. His wife retreated wordlessly to a corner.

  “Cudjo Washington,” said Hays, advancing and holding out his staff, “I call upon you, as a citizen of this city, to lay down that oyster-knife.” The implement fell with a clatter.

  After a second Washington said, “Before the Lord, I didn’t know it was you, gentlemen. I thought—” He ran his tongue over his lips, then came forward to the counter with a mechanical smile and an attitude of well-practised deference. “What will you gentlemen be pleased to have?” he asked.

  “A few words with you in your back-room. Your wife can stay here to wait on the patrons.” Breakstone posted himself outside.

  “Well?” asked Hays. It was dark in the room. Only a small piece of candle burned in a saucer.

  “I didn’t know what they was up to, Mr. High Constable. I never found out until it was too late.” The man’s voice was low, but it came from a huge chest and throat, and rumbled out into the shadows. As to what he meant by what he had said, Jacob Hays had no idea at all. He generally avoided opening a conversation with a suspected man in terms of accusing him of a specific crime. Well? was usually opening enough. Often the single syllable put mind and tongue to something quite different from what the High Constable had been thinking of, something of which the High Constable had known nothing. One could, after all, always take up later the matter which had prompted the inquiry in the first place.