Port Hazard (21 page)

I felt the same prickling I'd felt when Tom Tulip stepped forward to sing his own dirge.

“Nan Feeny went out first thing this morning,” Pinholster said. “One more in a string of broken precedents. It was too early for the cable car, so she must have walked all the way to Mission Street. Mrs. Goodhue, who didn't know her, but who was accustomed to women of her type coming to the reverend gentleman for absolution, let her in.

“There are several versions of what happened next. The least dramatic, and therefore the most believable, is Nan emptied that pepperbox of hers into Goodhue's back while he was kneeling in his cabinet, praying for his crusade's success. She was still there when the widow showed in the police. They have her up at the jail. Ah! There it is.”

He turned up the deuce of spades and played it. “Not the ace, but life isn't poetry.”

The Barbary Coast
is no more. The 1906 earthquake managed to do what a half-century of good intentions and sporadic fires could not. A determined rebuilding campaign, followed by journalistic pressure of the Fremont Older type, repressive ordinances, and a beefed-up police presence erected a new city directly on top of the old; one in which there was no place for opium dens, bordellos, and gambling hells in number. It took an act of God to turn the serpents out of Eden once and for all.

I wasn't there to see it. When Edward Anderson Beecher was well enough to travel, I shook his remaining hand at the San Francisco depot, slipped an envelope into his coat pocket containing the money Judge Blackthorne had wired to cover his wages, mileage, and a bonus in partial compensation for the loss of his arm in the service of the United States, and handed him his ticket to Spokane. I was taking a different train to Helena, scheduled to pull out fifteen minutes behind his.

“I reckon I'll have to stay put now,” he said. “Can't lug around no steamer trunks with one wing.”

“Ask a blacksmith if he can fit you with a ball and chain.”

He understood this for the apology it was. “I slipped, boss. You didn't push me.”

“It didn't stop you from saving my skin for the second time.”

He smiled that thin lost smile. What it lacked in candle-power compared to his full grin, it made up for in sincerity.

“Well, it's pale, but it seemed worth saving both times.”

I never heard from him after that. Neither of us had promised to write. We'd been through too much to lie at the end. I like to think that he found his wife and that they took up where they left off; but I'm a sentimental old man who always wants what's best for his friends, having outlived most of them and not having had too many to begin with.

Judge Blackthorne wasn't sentimental. He'd read the report I'd sent, and had only one question for me when I delivered the rest in Helena:

“Are you satisfied with your performance in this affair?”

“I performed it.”

He didn't remind me that my orders were to widen the rift between the violent and nonviolent wings of the Sons of the Confederacy so that U.S. authorities could nullify their power in criminal and civil court, and that I'd disobeyed them by taking on Wheelock's killers directly. To do so would have been an embarrassment, because when deputy federal marshals boarded Captain Dan's train just below the Canadian border and placed him under arrest on more than thirty counts of conspiracy, the entire organization fell apart; Sons from all over the Western states and territories came forward to turn United States' evidence against the killers and those who had directed them. I don't flatter myself that in forcing Wheelock to abandon the security of his position in San Francisco I averted a second Civil War. I just prevented a few more murders and put a dangerous lunatic behind bars.

Not actual bars. Wheelock had still drawn enough water with his former associates to raise ten percent of his million-dollar bail and shot himself in his hotel room in Sacramento the day after he was arraigned. He left a note saying he'd planned to elect himself president in 1884 with the Southern vote. Eight senators and fifteen congressmen from the states that had formerly belonged to the Confederacy issued statements to the press that day, insisting that they'd sooner have backed a Republican.

Nan Feeny stood trial for the murder of Owen Goodhue, was found guilty, and sentenced to hang. Throughout the appeals process and several stays, I pictured her pacing her cell, touching often the ribbon she wore at her throat to remind her how close she'd come to hanging the last time she'd shot and killed a square citizen. (Perhaps not; I picture her as easily untying and discarding it during the long walk from the Slop Chest to Mission Street with the pepperbox pistol growing heavy in her reticule.) Judge Blackthorne wrote a letter to Sacramento at my urging, asking for a commutation to life. Whether it was because of this, or in response to a march on the state capitol building by a ragged band of peg-legged harlots, three-fingered pickpockets, and sundry other shades from Barbary—broken up by some head-smashing on the part of city police, reported in the local papers and carried by wire across the continent—the governor of California granted the request. Nan served ten years in a women's workhouse, then after her release for model behavior opened a restaurant in San Francisco, representing investors who knew how to profit by her notoriety, if not the quality of the bill of fare. The restaurant was the only building on its block not demolished by the big shake; she converted it into a hospital and nursed dozens of the maimed and homeless. When she died in 1916, the supervisors of San Francisco County voted to place a plaque in her honor on the wall of the bank that was built on the site of the restaurant after it was torn down. I'm told it's still there, but I haven't been back to see it.

After San Francisco, I asked Judge Blackthorne for a month's holiday. He let me have three days, at the end of which I was expected to board a train for Oregon; but that's a story for another volume of these memoirs I won't live to finish.

I don't get out much these days. Gout, ancient injuries, and the effects of an intemperate life have banded together to keep me in this furnished bungalow in a dust trap called Culver City, where Famous Players-Lasky pays my rent. In return, I'm supposed to provide expert advice on scenarios for photoplays intended to dramatize life on the old frontier. The producers hardly ever send me anything, however, and I suspect they're trading charity for the privilege of drawing on whatever faded luster my name retains by including it on the title cards. They're fools for their own advertising and think just having it there makes the stories authentic. They're not, the ones I've seen, anyway; not by a rifle shot, but the truth won't play and I'm an old hypocrite, correcting dates and place names and telling myself I'm earning my billet.

A few months ago, someone knocked on my door. I was expecting a courier with a new scenario and stayed put in my chair, calling out that the door was unlocked.

“An old U.S. cove like yourself ought to know better than that,” said my visitor. “There's jigger-dubbers all about this padding ken.”

The sun was behind him. I couldn't see his face, but he had on a long coat like you seldom see in Southern California, with one sleeve hanging empty. It happened I'd been thinking about Barbary just that morning, and I thought at first it was Beecher, come at last to pay a call on an old comrade. Then I saw the stunted legs sticking out the bottom of the coat and knew him for an old enemy.

“You'd think after forty years you'd learned English,” I said.

Axel Hodge wobbled in and closed the door behind him. He was hatless and bald, and his beard had turned white as ash, but his grin hadn't changed. He'd be on his third or fourth set of porcelains by now.

“I was just tipping you the office,” he said. “I ain't spoke but a piece of the lingo for years. It never did signify outside Frisco, and now not even there. I meant what I said about locking that door. This town's boiling with border trash.”

I slid the Deane-Adams out from under the copy of the
Los Angeles Times
I had spread open on my lap and laid it on the lamp table.

He grunted. “That old barker still bite?”

“Only people get old. What happened to the ball and chain?”

“It got too heavy to pack around. I don't miss it. I was running out of things to bash. Old Nan sure served me hell every time I smacked that bar of hers.” He stopped grinning. “You heard she died.”

“Years ago. News travels a lot faster now.”

“I know. Prohibition agents got radio-telephones.” He drew a tall bottle out of his coat pocket and set it on the floor. “A little present from Glasgow, by way of Tijuana. I own the distributorship from here to San Diego.”

I said. “I thought you'd be living off your inheritance.”

He spread his coattails, tugged at the knees of his trousers, and sat on the foot of my unmade bed. His ankles were no bigger around than striplings. He'd been stumping about on those shriveled sticks for close to sixty years.

“The Hodges never did have two coppers to rub together. I told you my granddad was a convict.”

“Your granddad was the father of a soap manufacturer, who named you in his will. You don't have to lie to me, Seymour. Sid the Stump isn't wanted anywhere now.”

He showed his teeth. “Too bad it weren't that way when I could collect. Seymour couldn't put in a claim without digging up Sid, and Sid couldn't be dug up without stagging the tappers. When'd you smoke me out?”

“That last night, when you helped me with Beecher. You said Fat John saved your arm. You forgot you'd told me you lost your hand aboard a ship from Australia. I had my suspicions before that; you talked too much about Brisbane. It was as if you were trying to convince yourself you weren't Seymour Cruddup from Exeter. You're the one who overheard Pinholster asking me about Sid and told F'an Chu'an. And you knew that last night you'd made a slip. That's why you left town.”

“I felt bad about that. I never told Nan good-bye.”

The conversation threatened to become maudlin. I asked him if he knew who killed the old forty-niner in the White Peacock.

“Flinders? I always thought he was Wheelock's.”

“Captain Dan wouldn't be caught dead in an opium den, or doing his own killing. I figure it was Tom Tulip. He did it on his own, to please Wheelock. He wasn't pleased. It brought in Goodhue, and in order to hold him off, the Sons of the Confederacy had to alter their plans to include Goodhue's list of scapegoats. That's why Tulip was the first to go.”

“Poor ponce.”

“Why'd you do it?” I asked.

He wrinkled his bald head. “You just said it was Tom.”

“I don't mean that. Why'd you help Beecher? Before that you tried to talk Nan into letting you kill us both.”

He nodded.

“I thought about that. Still do, time to time. I figure I owed God an arm.”

“What's that mean?”

“There was a fire, and a man with his arm gone and him set to follow. Fat John didn't have to help me in that same spot. I didn't have to help the colored bloke. But he done, and I done. Fat John'd find a better way to say it, wherever he wound up. Under six tons of Chink's Alley would be my guess.” He scratched his stump. “You ever hear from him?”

“F'an Chu'an?”

“Beecher.”

“Not a word.”

“Maybe he struck it rich up North and won't truck with our like.”

“You're a sentimental old man.”

“Well, stow that under your shaper. I got to keep up me own south of the border.”

We talked a bit more about Barbary and then he left. We didn't have anything in common beyond that. He didn't ask why I hadn't told Pinholster that Sid the Spunk was alive; I wouldn't have had an answer that would satisfy him any more than his had satisfied me. It might have been enough for Sid, who had offered his arson skills to F'an Chu'an free of charge for the memory of a mother forced into the streets of Brooklyn. I wasn't sure it would be enough for Axel Hodge the bootlegger.

A week or two later I read a small piece in the
Times
about a rumrunner named Hodge, slain by U.S. Prohibition agents during a gun battle on the Mexican border. The agents said they'd returned fire when Hodge opened up on them with a submachine gun. Submachine guns require two hands to operate. Some things about crime and politics don't change, earthquake or no.

I took a drink of his
postizo
Scotch to his memory. For all I knew, we were the last two people on earth who'd remembered the Slop Chest, the White Peacock, the Bella Union, and all those who passed through their doors. The rest are as dead as Pinholster, whose lesion must have done for him long ago.

There was no follow-up to the story, and the entire account took up just two inches on an inside page near what we used to call the telegraph column, with its news of Washington, miners' strikes, and beer-hall revolutions in Munich. Another column on the same page announced the monthly meetings of the local chapters of the various fraternal orders. It listed the Sons of the Confederacy along with the Elks, the Freemasons, the Rotary Club, and the Knights of Columbus. The current members are doddering veterans and younger men who wish they'd been born early enough to fight for States' Rights. They've never heard of Daniel Webster Wheelock, and I'm not about to educate them. His bones and Barbary's can rot together.