Seattle Noir (19 page)
The walk to the office the next morning was uneventful, as was the morning routine of unlocking the backdoor, then the front, drawing the blinds, and looking over his desk for any pressing correspondence or other sort of paperwork in need of his immediate attention. It was only when Jewell sat down and happened to glance in the direction of the cell that took up one corner of the large room that he realized he was not alone.
An unkempt, bearded white man, black-haired and dull-eyed, half-sat, half-slumped against the opposite wall. He looked neither right, nor left, and took no notice of Jewell, not even when he attempted to speak to him. He was dressed in a ragged Chinese silk tunic and corduroy workmen’s trousers, with Chinese slippers on his feet. His fingernails bore the telltale signs of frequent opium use.
“Who are you?” Jewell asked.
The man ignored him.
“Why are you in the cage?”
The man kept silent, his blank stare unchanging.
A double-folded and sealed note with the word
Porter
typewritten on it lay on the floor in front of the cell. As Jewell stooped to pick it up, he muttered, “If this is from Chin, why is it addressed to my boss, not to me?” It was 8:30. Over the next half hour Jewell considered breaking the seal at least once per minute.
“Ran afoul of a
mui tsai
, did you?” Porter said when he’d finished reading the note. It was five minutes past 9.
“According to Mr. Chin Gee Hee, I did.”
“You’ve done nice work on this, boy. Nice work, indeed. Perhaps I’ve misjudged you.”
“I fail to see how I’ve done anything of the kind. If this ‘mooey jai’ killed our Chinaman, then who is the fellow in the cage? Why does he resist any attempt at communication?”
“The fellow in the cage is the killer of our man, and that man is without doubt Louie Chong. The
mui tsai
played no part in this except that of victim, poor thing.”
“But then why did this ‘paper son’ of Louie Chong’s fight me so hard to keep me from that ledger?”
“Paper son?”
“Yes, the ‘mooey jai,’ that’s how Mr. Chin translated the name: called him a ‘paper son’ in English. Claimed it was a reference to some false identification scheme running rampant through China.”
“A
mui tsai
,” Porter said, “is not a son of any kind. The phrase
mui tsai
in Cantonese means ‘slave girl’.”
Jewell’s jaw dropped. It all suddenly made sense. The slight build, the odd cast of the boy’s features, the piping voice.
Porter went back to perusing Chin’s letter. “Chin’s old partner Chin Chun Hock runs an opium den in the basement of his establishment. The bulls know about it. As long as they get their cut, they turn a blind eye to it, shrug it off as being part of the degenerate Oriental culture. Time was when part and parcel of that den was a brothel stocked with Cantonese girls brought over here by the triads. Chin bought their freedom as part of his deal to leave Hock with the lion’s share of the profits from their partnership. But Louie Chong had pull with the triad, and he’d already bought one of the girls to keep for himself. He passed her off as a boy working in his laundry. You can imagine how else he used her. It was common knowledge among the Chinese. I told you that their notions of charity are not the same as ours.”
“So why did this fellow,” Jewell motioned with his head in the direction of the cell and its occupant, “kill Louie Chong and dump him in Lake Washington?”
“Who can say? Some sense of chivalry, perhaps?”
“I doubt that. Look at the poor wretch. He’s an opium fiend if ever there was one. And where is the girl?”
“She’s gone. Chin didn’t mention what’s become of her, but I have no doubt that she’s not to be found within the limits of King County this morning.”
Jewell sat thinking for a moment. Porter watched him intently. At length Jewell said, “I didn’t see any of it.”
Porter shifted his bulk in the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. chair. “You knew which questions to ask, just not which answers to listen for. But you’ve shown promise I didn’t think you had in you. On the other hand,” he said as he reached for his pocket watch and began to wind it, “Chin did tell you everything you needed to know in that single conversation. You’ve come a long way in three months, but if you’re going to be
the
Treasury Man in these parts, you’ve still got quite a ways to go before you’re ready.”
“Yes sir. Apparently I have much to learn,” Jewell said, chastened.
“Just remember this: it’s also possible to go too far, to be too good at your job. It’s a tricky, tricky balance. Don’t go far enough and you can’t understand them and you won’t get anything constructive done. Don’t get the work done and you risk losing your position. Go too far and you risk much more. There’s a lot more at work in Chinatown than meets the eye.”
“How do you mean?”
Porter motioned with a broad hand past Jewell’s shoulder in the direction of the cell and the wretch who occupied it, the man turned completely inward, focused on the wreckage of a last opium dream.
“That,” he said glumly, “was once Sebastian Clute.”
I
B
efore his star rose Skippy Smathers worked the carney circuit. He always played the dwarf clown. At thirteen he joined Carneytown Circus and right off the bat they made him a solo act. He’d been clowning in that show ten years when one night on a slippery tightrope Mel the Diminutive Man stepped into his life. The way it happened was some kind of kismet.
It happened under the big top in Walla Walla, Washington. Walking the highwire, Skippy lost balance and toppled off, tumbling for a chaotic eternity, pitching and falling until finally he landed with a broadside bounce in the mesh safety net. It wasn’t the first time Skippy had plunged from a high-wire, but this mishap, more topsy-turvy than most, jarred his nerves. Floundering in the net webbing, panic-stricken, Skippy’s fear paralyzed him while the crowd roared: “Go back up! Sissy clown! Go back up!”
He wore a costume of baby clothes, a frilly bonnet, a grease-pencil baby face. The crowd saw an overgrown infant, not a twenty-three-year-old terrified dwarf. Jeers and hisses rained down. But he wouldn’t go back up there. Couldn’t. He sat in the net bawling as the crowd booed the frightened clown-baby.
“Booooo.” “Sissy Pants!” “Dumb midget!” “Booooo!”
In the wings, Mel the Diminutive Man heard the rude din. Grabbing a long baton Mel stepped onto the tightrope, regal in his leotard and tights, a natural born star. The spotlight swung to the tightrope, the crowd naturally rolled their eyes up to the sleek, pixie-like man stepping into the glare. Balancing his weight with the long baton Mel performed slow pirouettes along the tightrope, distracting the audience, while in the net below Skippy foundered in fear’s lap. Somewhere a drummer tickled cymbals, adding to the tension as Mel the Diminutive Man captivated the awestruck crowd.
No longer the focal point, Skippy gradually recovered his nerves, scrambled over to the ladder, up the tightrope, and set a seasoned foot on the taut line. One cautiously arched step after another he moved toward this dark stranger, this apparition, this highwire angel offering his tiny hand. A breathless moment later, Skippy touched that hand to thundering applause.
Mel grinned at Skippy and quipped, “Way to go, sport.”
Mel’s first brush with an audience earned him a standing ovation, but he reacted with scorn and revulsion. After all these years of inventing Mel the Diminutive Man, he had squandered his debut on this claptrap crowd.
II
It was 1973. Mel was twenty-one and had been living off Ma all these years because she insisted her pixie was too delicate for work. When Ma died of exhaustion Mel worried about what would become of him, but not for long. Under Ma’s mattress Mel discovered a fortune in nickels and dimes and quarters that she had squirreled away over the years of hard labor. Her accumulated pocket change would have choked a Coinstar.
Mel fled their rat-infested Yesler Terrace housing project, bought a spanking new Cadillac convertible, and floated over the Magnolia Bridge into the Village, where he parked in front of Leon’s Shoe Repair, ignoring the gawking Magnolians—Mel was probably the first dwarf to ever set foot in the neighborhood—and crossed McGraw Street to Magnolia Real Estate, where he and his bank balance were greeted with equanimity and a firm handshake to seal the transfer of a Magnolia Bluff house deed for cold cash.
Signing and initialing each contract clause Mel noted the bigotry:
Property transfer and residency are restricted to Caucasians.
Forgetting his own place in society, Mel signed it. Had Ma been above ground, she would have slapped him silly. Mel reasoned it was her fault, anyway, her making him rich.
Mel moved into the prettiest house Dahl ever built on Magnolia Bluff, whose namesake cliff plunged shamelessly into the crotch of Elliott Bay, ogled by the hoary Olympics Brothers, envied by eyeballing tourists from the Space Needle’s observatory. To keep him company he replaced Ma with orchids. Certainly his snooty neighbors had no interest in fostering friendship. In fact, they actually shunned him, as if a dwarf neighbor was something to be ashamed of. They would cross the boulevard to avoid him. They never invited him to their fancy estates, and whenever Mel attempted neighborly gestures they would recoil, stammer incoherently, and flee. Except for Joy. His neighbor Joy was the only Magnolian with the guts to befriend a dwarf.
Joy lived in another Dahl house with a city view you’d slit your throat for if you had the bucks to buy it. A regular-sized lady, Joy had jazzed hair and a perfect figure in 1973, was still young and nubile and freshly divorced from Hubby #1. Mel misinterpreted Joy’s neighborly gestures. Thought Joy had the hots for him. So he made a pass and she slapped him so hard he spun across her living room like a child’s top spinner. Even so, they would remain friends through the years. Most of them anyway.
When Mel complained to Joy about the way the other neighbors treated him, Joy said, “Hey, quit your whining. You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on the Bluff back in the glory days.” And she told him how it was growing up in the early Magnolia days, back in the ’50s and ’60s when the rich discovered God’s Chosen Neighborhood.
Over the Magnolia Bridge in those glory days journeyed famous architects and interior designers to build and embellish fine estates for their feathered clientele, Mrs. Danforth Pierce-Arrow, Mel’s next door neighbor, now in her dotage, being one, and Mrs. Neil Robbins being another. The Robbins were Jewish. Jews—even Catholics, as long as they could afford to—were permitted to own homes on Magnolia Bluff, although generally speaking Protestants were preferred. And no colored people, no, no. Magnolians, said Joy, feared and loathed diversity, but back in those days they didn’t call them bigots. Just rich.
On many a day, Joy told Mel, Mrs. Danforth Pierce-Arrow, who’s Episcopal? And Mrs. Robbins, being a Jewess? They would come into the Magnolia Pharmacy at the same time. Maybe nearly collide at the prescription counter? Never exchanged more than a polite nod. Joy saw this all the time growing up in Magnolia.
Mel remarked, “At least they recognized the other’s living presence. Whenever I come upon Mrs. Pierce-Arrow or Mrs. Robbins they just tilt their noses and pretend they don’t see me. Mel, the Invisible Man.”
“Will you ever get over all this self-pitying?” said Joy.
Joy. A regular-sized person who’d grown up in luxury and privilege. How could Joy ever empathize? But she was still reminiscing on the good old days:
Over the Magnolia Bridge came the serving classes, housemaids in crisp uniforms overlain with thin cloth coats, shivering alone at bus stops in darkness on winter nights, snow drifting up to their bare knees before a bus agreed to stop. And the Carnation milkman who always entered homes through the
Deliveries
door or the
Housestaff Only
door, removing his boots before restocking, say, Mrs. Pierce-Arrow’s fridge with glass bottles of milk topped by two inches of thick cream, along with fresh butter and eggs still warm from the nest. At Christmastime, Mrs. Pierce-Arrow would leave the milkman an envelope tucked discreetly into the fridge’s egg section.
And over that glory bridge came roofers and plumbers and electricians to tweak the infrastructure, guaranteeing that all the Mr. and Mrs. Pierce-Arrows and Robbins and even the Catholic families with their unplanned children enjoyed the security and comfort of upper-class loos and hearths. Nothing like crime ever transpired on the Bluff, Joy told Mel, unless you counted when the Marvel family’s colored maid was caught red-handed with Mrs. Marvel’s sterling silver flatware, family heirlooms. The maid insisted she was carrying them into the kitchen for polishing. But Mrs. Marvel fired her on the spot. That was the biggest crime scandal on Magnolia Bluff in those early days, unless you counted three-year-old Dougie Marvel’s appearing naked in teenaged Annie Quigley’s bathroom. Annie, naked in the tub, screamed. And then the summer when little Kathleen Pierce-Arrow got caught playing touch tag with young Neil Robbins. Back then, that was about as criminal as things got.
And, too, the sacrosanct Magnolia Bridge delivered upper-class men like Joy’s Husband #1 in sleek automobiles from their luxurious estates into the city’s languishing heart, where they doctored and lawyered, ran their banks and visited their clubs, and wouldn’t hesitate to drive right over the drunk Indian weaving against the stoplight.
“Back long ago?” said Joy. “What they call Magnolia now? It was an island. Separated from the mainland by a bracken-ishy slough. When the city’s rich folk saw the potential out here, why, they filled in the slough and built the first bridge onto the island.”
“Why did they name it Magnolia?”
Joy shrugged. “It was a mistake Captain Vancouver made back in history. See—”
“I’ll bet Captain Vancouver hated midgets.”
“Mel, how many times have I told you not to refer to yourself and others like you as midgets? You are a dwarf, a small person. You are not a little fly.”
“I hate myself.”
“Oh, stop whining. In my heart you’re bigger than me.”
In her regular-sized heart.
Then one day, less than a year after staking his claim in God’s Chosen Neighborhood, Mel received a call from his banker. “Your account has five dollars left in it,” said the banker. “You want us to apply that to your monthly fee?”
Having exhausted his inheritance on the house and big floater car, Mel needed to “work,” a word only whispered by his neighbors. But he had no real training in any kind of work. Desperation unleashed a flash of genius. He invented Mel the Diminutive Man, learned the tightrope, and joined a traveling carney act. Joy told him, “One day, you’ll be a star, Mel. In my heart, I know that.”
Mel made his public debut in 1973 on that fateful evening in Walla Walla, Washington, when he rescued the famous carney dwarf Skippy Smathers from disgrace. And then Skippy Smathers rescued Mel from financial ruin, moving into Mel’s house and paying monthly rent. Mel regained faith in his future.
When Mel introduced Joy to Skippy Smathers, he felt their instant chemistry. Joy broke Mel’s heart the day she and Skippy wed, Mel standing as the best man. All along wondering to himself,
If Joy is okay with dwarfism, why did she choose Skippy over me? I’ve got more man in me than Skippy has in his little digit.
Meaning finger.
III
While Skippy mounted Joy’s bounteous gifts, Mel spent three years solo, pampering exotic orchids in the solarium of his showcase home, waiting for his friends’ marriage to fail. After the divorce, Mel and Skippy teamed up again, and this time they rode their dreams to Hollywood.
In Hollywood, Skippy’s star skyrocketed, while Mel’s career never took off. Skippy played the little man in every stage and film production where a dwarf counted, while Mel languished in his pal’s burgeoning celebrity shadow.
Mel, destined to play the extra. Mel, destined to lose every casting call to Skippy. Destined, it seemed, to live off Skippy’s earnings, while he propped up the star’s fragile psyche. It wasn’t a proud destiny, and Mel was a proud man. But destiny, like a fickle friend, can turn in the wink of an eye.
They never actually moved to Hollywood. Personally, Mel would have preferred moving from Seattle, fleeing God’s Chosen Neighborhood. Mel wanted to live in Los Angeles, in that house next door to Jack Nicholson, the house he had always dreamed of owning. Overlooking Hollywood’s glitz and glamour. That’s where Mel knew he belonged. But Skippy balked at the idea. Skippy was afraid of Los Angeles. As if Los Angeles was a dwarf-eating monster. And Skippy always got his way.
Twenty years passed. Mrs. Pierce-Arrow got crushed by her dumbwaiter and her son Danforth III now occupied the Pierce-Arrow estate. Neil Robbins married Kathleen Pierce-Arrow, they placed Neil’s parents in a luxury senior complex and now occupied the Robbins nest. Mrs. Marvel, a crotchety crone still lived in the Marvel estate and her servants came and went. Annie Marvel married, had a bunch of offspring, converted to lesbianism, and fled the Bluff.
As the century turned, the bigotry clause disappeared from real estate contracts but that didn’t mean it disappeared from some Magnolians’ deep-seated preferences. Persons of color and dwarfs received a friendly nod at Tully’s but rarely got called over to join a table of fat cats. Nothing much had changed in God’s Chosen Neighborhood.
IV
Mel was lounging on the patio chaise reading
Variety
when he heard “the Sound.” The rubber butt of Skippy’s walking cane thudding on flagstone made Mel cringe. Skippy had adopted the ornate cane as an iconic eccentricity. Thought it made him look debonair. Mel thought it looked ridiculous. A dwarf with a cane.
Mel glanced up. A blue PGA cap shaded Skippy’s face but Mel could sense a sullen pout. Skippy’s arms overflowed groceries, the cane poised to thud again. Sighing, Mel set
Variety
aside and went to help. Mel carried the groceries into the house, Skippy and his cane gimping along behind.
This limp was something new.
“What’s wrong now?” Mel asked tiredly.
“Awful bad news,” grumped the gimper, missing Mel’s reference to the new limp. “If you really want to know.” Skippy paused to emphasize the awfulness, then blurted, “No call back.”
Mel clucked his tongue. “Tough luck, sport.” He thought about bringing up the new limp, but why bother? Skippy would complain about it before long. Mel fed the groceries into the icebox while Skippy hung in the background, a broken shadow watching Mel work.
Stars don’t put away groceries.
“Henry Chow’s getting the part.” The broken shadow spoke bitterly. “That’s what Lana thinks. Like she was Henry’s agent exclusively. Like she didn’t even represent me. Talk about a two-faced, double-dealing opportunistic…”
When Mel didn’t comment, Skippy limped into the breakfast nook and slid onto a sunstruck bench. Warm sunshine cut through a windowpane, washed the fine stubble on his baby-face cheeks, refracting into tiny dots that danced along the wall. Skippy tried batting the dots away. When that failed, he flung his golf cap at them. It landed squarely on Mel’s fresh orchid centerpiece. Mel’s signature, Mel’s pride. Skippy gazed disgustedly out the window.
