Ill-Fame (A Detective Harm Queen Novel Book 2)

ILL-FAME

A novel

Erik Rivenes

Copyright 2015 by Erik Rivenes. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage and retrieval system – except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews – without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-0-9773471-4-8

Published by

Trampoose Press
 
P.O. Box 587
  
Beaverton, OR 97075

Cover design by James T. Egan, Bookfly Design
 

ILL-FAME

a novel

ERIK RIVENES

CHAPTER 1

May 30, 1901

The rains had come hard in April, and while their showers were meant to bring May flowers, Detective Harm Queen wasn’t in a position to stop and appreciate them. The rough path leading down the bluff was soft and slick, and he concentrated hard on maintaining his balance. His expensive shoes and trouser cuffs were spattered with mud, and he cursed unrepeatable words with deft skill as he half-walked, half-slipped after the boy in front of him. Not actually a boy. A man instead, probably, although he had difficulty seriously considering a hobo as anything other than a boy.
These shiftless bastards
, he thought with disdain. Bouncing through life without a care or responsibility. Spending a Friday, a working day, fishing.

And what had caused all this steam in his boiler? Only that he’d been shaken out of his chair in the midst of a damned busy afternoon. Roused by the kid because of a washed-up body.

Your fits of temper have eased,
he reminded himself. It had been a hell of a lot worse a few months ago. He knew, now, to take a slow breath when he felt the urge to slam his knuckles into whatever wastrel slowed his stride. He wasn’t drinking now, either, a promise he’d made to his betrothed, Karoline Ulland, the calmest, sweetest, most common-sensical woman he’d ever met. He knew he was lucky to have her. It was a high price to pay, ending his decades-old love affair with his whiskey flask, but it had to end. She was too good, too pure, to pollute with his inebriated self. He’d given the flask to his sister, and asked her to dispose of it. That had been difficult, for the flask was a gift from Doc Ames, the mayor of Minneapolis. A gift from their first days together, when the old man had hired him as a detective during his first term, almost twenty years prior. Doc had lost, and won, and lost again, various political seats since then, but they’d always remained close. Now ol’ Doc was mayor again, and Queen was busier than he’d ever been before. So it wasn’t that Queen didn’t find the boy’s claim important. It was only that he didn’t want to go climbing down embankments himself. At age forty, and with bad knees made worse in recent months, he preferred the easy, gentle slope of a city street to a muddy river bank. And despite his being chief of detectives, he didn’t have any detectives to chief today. They were all out on various pieces of business, and that left him to brave this sloppy late spring day alone.

Yankie reached bottom, and looked back up at him eagerly. A weathered old wheel cap perched atop his head to block the mild sun. He strummed the suspenders that covered his thin white shirt, with sleeves rolled to the elbows. Any respectable citizen would be wearing a jacket, at least, Queen thought. A jacket and a proper hat. But a young vagrant such as this could do damn well what he pleased.

“It ain’t more’n ankle deep here, Mr. Queen. T’aint no trouble.” The kid’s pimples disappeared behind his beaming smile. “Want I should pass you a stick for you to hold on to?”

Queen waved his hand and felt his body tighten as he skidded the last two feet to where Yankie stood, almost falling before his stop.

“Ya made it! Good fer you!”

The detective refused to acknowledge the boy’s enthusiasm with a return smile. He didn’t feel he owned the kid a kind word as his shoes were soaked with water and probably ruined. And while recent city business had been generous to his pocket book, spending extra cush just because of this dirty traipse made his brow almost touch his nose.

“Let’s just be done with this,” Queen said. “Where to?”

They were standing on a narrow bank along the swollen Mississippi. About a quarter mile north, the Lake Street Bridge, with its mesh of wrought-iron trestles, lifted and fell in two broad arcs across the water. They were on the Minneapolis side, of course, but the bridge led to enemy territory. Saint Paul. He wanted nothing to do with
that
city, with its rotten Irish mobsters and deceiving whores. Let ’em stay there to stink and quarrel and stab each other in the backs.

“Foller me,” Yankie said. They trudged along the bluff, his shoes sucking and popping in the mud. Yankie had removed his shabby brogans and tied them together with their laces. They hung around his neck, allowing him to move more nimbly than Queen, whose own left shoe had twice been lost and found in the muck. Queen clung to budding saplings and tramped forward carefully, grumbling as mud flecked his tie and even his mustache. He wiped it with his sleeve and then sneezed. Hell, he thought. Have I caught a cold now?

A tall, bald man with a bristly brown beard leaned out from a rock and motioned to them with a dirty finger. Queen recognized him from around town. His name was Slim, and he was one of the hobo elders. Queen gave him a curt nod.

“Hullo, detective,” Slim said, returning the nod with his own. He wore a baggy brown sack coat. A rope cinched up his trousers. “Sorry to drag you down here like this. I know’d you bulls are busier ’an bees on a rotten apple. But there’s somethin’ we figgered you’d wanna see.”

“Let’s make this quick, Slim.” Queen lifted his derby and wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. It wasn’t a scorcher, but the descent to the river had worn him a little. “Where’s the body?”

“Body?” Slim’s eyebrows raised to arcs that almost matched the Lake Street bridge’s trestles. “Well... er... I guess you mean this.” The hobo held out something silver and yellow in both hands. Queen stepped forward and sighed when he saw it. A northern pike, by the looks of it, with its head cut off and opened wide in a messy massacre of a perfectly good fillet.

“It’s a goddamn fish, Slim. Your chum told me there was a body down here.”

“A body?” Slim looked at Yankie disapprovingly. “Ain’t no body, Yank.”

“What’s going on here?” Queen asked, anger rising. If this was some kind of jest or mistake he would march these chuckle-heads down to Central station with the toe of his shoe to mark the time.

The kid looked flummoxed. “I figured we found a finger, Slim. That means there’d be a body somewhere.”

“Aw, Yank. The fish swallered the finger. That’s all we knowed.” Slim bowed, just barely, to Queen in deference. “I told you to tell ’em it was only a finger.”

“You found a finger in a fish?” Queen asked, disbelieving.

“Here, look, see?” Slim held the fish up by the tail, and pushed his own dirty finger inside the white flesh. “I found it when I was gettin’ ready to clean it. Our lunch, as it were.”

“So where is the goddamn finger?” Queen’s voice strained with the question, and he looked from Slim to Yankie and back to Slim in growing irritation.

Slim patted his coat pocket confidently. “Got it wrapped in my hanky.” He pulled a thin, soiled rag from the back pocket of his trousers.

How long has that gone without a wash? Queen wondered in disgust. Slim delicately tugged on the handkerchief’s corners, as if peeling a banana, to reveal his prize. Queen leaned in. It was a finger, all right. He took out his own handkerchief, a silk beauty that he’d gotten as a gift from a saloon keeper who’d appreciated his patronage—and protection. Yankie and Slim let out gasps of wonder at its sight.

“Lovely stitching,” Slim said.

“Just roll it into mine.”

The finger plopped into Queen’s handkerchief, and the detective held it close to examine. A man’s finger, he concluded. Bits of brown stubble were growing from the wrinkly skin. The bone, he noticed, had been broken and the flesh torn. It didn’t appear to have been cut with any knife. Well-groomed too, he decided, from the looks of the trimmed nail. And there was something else, too. Something missing.

Stolen, more likely.

“Give it to me,” he snapped, eying Slim with distaste. Generally speaking, he disliked hobos, especially thieving ones.

“I don’t understand.” Slim ran his hand over his dome of a head. “Give you what, Detective?”

“The ring you snatched.” Queen pinched the top of the finger with the hanky and swung it in Slim’s startled face. “Can’t you see the discoloration? There was a ring on this finger and now it’s gone. A ring of substance, it seems, from the width of the band. Don’t tell me you didn’t find it.” Queen felt his anger begin to boil.
Keep it in,
he told himself.
Keep it goddamn in.

But hell. If he didn’t hate people who tried to do one up on him
.

Slim shook his head and smiled. “Don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Take off your shoes.”

The tramp’s eyes lit, and his smile got wider. “Whatever for?” he asked.

“Because you keep your booty in your shoes. I didn’t fall out of my mother yesterday.”

“Come on, Slim,” Yankie pleaded, with a look of wild concern on his face. “He’s a smart ol’ bull and knowed what we...”

“I’ll put the shoe in yer mouth, Yankie, if you don’t stop yappin’,” Slim said, his voice sinking.

Queen had had enough with this failed little vaudeville act.

He pulled back his coat to reveal a Smith and Wesson revolver in a shoulder holster. “Take them off,” he repeated.

The hobo took one look at the pistol and immediately got to work, tugging off his hole-infested shoe in a clumsy dance. He tried to keep his dangling foot from touching the mud as he tipped the shoe over into his hand. Out came two nickels, three pennies, and a gold ring.

“F-for you, detective,” he stammered, hopping forward to deliver the contents.

Queen snapped up the ring and examined it. It was a handsome piece of jewelry, inscribed “1900.” He recognized it as a class ring, probably from a high school.

It could be from a dead body. Someone might have leaped from the river bridge in some terrible state of melancholia. Or a murder, perhaps? But the ring was solid gold, which meant some level of influence. There had been no reports of a well-to-do young man disappearing or committing suicide, to his knowledge. And of all people in the city, the detective would be privy to that.

He had a hunch, but a calculated one. The University of Minnesota campus was up river, and he suspected he might find a student there who wanted his ring back. A young freshman, whose father could support the tuition, most likely.

But why would he squander his time searching for the owner of a missing finger? Anyone who wanted his ring back could come to the police station himself and ask for it. He was up to his eyebrows in work at the moment. Colonel Ames, the police superintendent and Doc’s brother, had him managing the ten or so detectives on the police force. That was a full time duty, and one of many
legitimate
matters.

The Ames brothers were also taking full advantage of their two year term in power. Other sources of income were flowing in, under the table, and the money was absolutely staggering in volume. Doc was busy having slot machines installed in every saloon and brothel he could arm-twist, with much of the profit swelling his bank account. Brothel owners were shaken down every month, forced to cough up “fines” to stay in business. Instead of the money going to the city, however, it was greasing Doc’s palms.