Always a Cold Deck (A Harry Reese Mystery Book 1) Read online

  It certainly sounded like a plausible way to smuggle something—like furs, for instance—from Canada. They put the furs in some sealed chests and place them in the bottom of the hold of a grain carrier, then fill it up with grain at a Canadian elevator. The ship comes down through the lakes and docks at the Eastern. The grain is unloaded, or most of it, and that night the chests are lifted out and stored in the vault.

  Later, a canal boat docks at the Eastern to load grain for New York. The chests are placed in the hold and the grain loaded on top. In New York, customs men don’t look at canal boats and the cargo can be delivered to the buyer. That’s the type of activity that nullifies an insurance policy.

  Danny Sullivan’s saloon was just a few blocks from where Old Mike had left me. Inside, there were a couple men at the bar and another one behind it. I asked for Sullivan and was directed to a fellow at a table in the rear. He was younger than I expected, not even forty, and oddly well-dressed for the owner of a waterfront saloon. I introduced myself and apologized for interrupting his breakfast. But he didn’t really let me interrupt. He was friendly enough and spoke freely about his time at the Eastern. He’d been there from the time it was built, in 1893, until a year ago, just as Old Mike said. As to the vault, he insisted it was just a storeroom where spare machine parts were kept. It made little sense, but he wasn’t going to elaborate. When I mentioned the possibility of smuggling, he just laughed and said smuggling went on all along the waterfront, but nothing you’d need a room to store it in. I didn’t see any point in asking him how he came to own the saloon. If it was as Old Mike implied, that he’d been bought off, he certainly wasn’t going to give me the details. Finally, we shook hands and I left.

  The only chance of getting any information out of Danny Sullivan was to pay for it, and from the way he dressed, I felt sure my current cash reserves were inadequate to the task.

  3

  I took a car up to Main Street and located the Customs Service in the Post Office building. I was taken to the inspectors’ office, a large room with a dozen desks, three of them occupied. I walked up to the most friendly-looking of the bunch and introduced myself as a New York newspaperman. I didn’t want to initiate an official investigation, just get some facts.

  “We’ve heard rumors about a smuggling ring using canal boats to bring goods down into New York. I’m trying to find out what they’re smuggling and how.”

  “You think the canal boats originate here?”

  “Well, it’s close to the border. But I wasn’t sure what they’d be smuggling from Canada.”

  “Most of what we deal with here is misidentification—someone importing finished steel but calling it pig iron. Or trying to get $3,000 worth of goods in, but only paying duty on $2,000 worth. What sort of thing might they be smuggling?”

  “Someone suggested furs,” I said.

  “Furs come over all the time, usually on some woman’s back. Then it’s a matter of: Did she have it when she crossed north, or just on the way back? But we find them sometimes.”

  “When you do see them smuggled, how are they brought in?” I asked.

  “In crates, mixed with a lot of other crates.”

  “In a steamer’s hold?”

  “No, no, in freight cars. Finished furs usually come from Montreal or somewhere in the East. Most of the steamers come from out West.”

  “What about unfinished furs?”

  “Well, there’s no tariff on raw furs, so why smuggle them?”

  “What would be the most valuable contraband?” I asked.

  “Chinamen!” a second inspector chimed in. We all laughed.

  “He’s serious, though,” the first fellow said. “We just had a case a few months ago. They brought them across the river in a rowboat.”

  “Well, how about things that don’t need to breathe?”

  “The most money we ever got at an auction was for a chest of opium. Remember that, Gus? Back in ’95, I think.”

  “Yeah, Chinamen came from all over the East to bid on that.”

  “You auctioned it?” I asked.

  “Well, sure. Goods that are seized for nonpayment of duty are always auctioned.”

  “What’s a chest of opium weigh?”

  “Well, this one was only about three feet by two feet, maybe another two feet deep. It was damned heavy. It took two men to move it.”

  “How much did the winner pay?”

  “It was over a thousand dollars. This was the prepared stuff, for smoking.”

  “And it gets smuggled in often?”

  “I suspect small amounts get smuggled in by men on the lake. There’s no way to stop that. And out West, it’s always coming across the border. But we don’t see it here much.”

  “What’s the tariff on opium?”

  “Let’s see….” He reached over for a book on another desk and quickly located what he was looking for. “Six dollars a pound since 1895, twelve dollars before that.”

  I thanked the boys and then found a telegraph office. I sent a long wire to a fellow I knew who worked as a Treasury Department agent back in New York. He was the only person I could think of who’d be likely to know about opium smuggling. I marked it urgent.

  After availing myself of the free lunch at a saloon, I walked up to Lafayette Square, where the Eastern Elevator Company had its offices in the Mooney-Brisbane Building. Why an elevator company that had lost its elevator to foreclosure two months earlier still needed an office I couldn’t say, but Ed had assured me he’d visited it the day before.

  The girl inside seemed annoyed at my bothering her. She’d only been with the company since January, she told me, and was now its sole employee. Her name was Emily McGinnis. She was young, reasonably good-looking, and dressed casually for an office girl. I asked her for a list of the current officers of the corporation. Rather than look for a document, she simply told me from memory.

  The president was General Chester Osgood, a lawyer with an office in the Erie County Bank Building. The vice president and superintendent was Harold Trumble, the only one of the officers who had worked there daily, but who’d recently taken a position with a firm in Philadelphia. The secretary was Charles Elwell, another lawyer, and the man who had gone missing a month earlier. The treasurer was a local banker named James Clayton.

  “Do you know how long Mr. Trumble was with the company?”

  “I believe he started when Mr. Mason left, about three or four years ago.”

  Robert Mason was the original superintendent, the one who’d been on the run since the share manipulation in ’97. I already knew that he’d helped found the firm in 1892 and would have been involved in the construction of the elevator. Also that his name was tied to a dozen different schemes and lawsuits both during and before his time in Buffalo. So he had had both the opportunity and the disposition to run a smuggling operation at the Eastern. But where he was now, no one knew.

  “I don’t suppose you spent much time at the elevator?”

  “Actually, I only ever saw it from across the river.”

  I asked to see a copy of the original fire policy. She insisted she couldn’t provide it without General Osgood’s permission. She gave me the General’s telephone number and led me into an inner office where the only telephone was located and left me there. When I reached the General I introduced myself and gave a vague explanation of my mission. He said he would need to think about giving me access to any files. As he’d be busy the rest of the afternoon, he suggested I stop by his house that evening and we could discuss the matter then. He gave me directions and we agreed on a time.

  While I was alone, I spent some time snooping about the office. There wasn’t much to be found here, just a desk—which had been pretty thoroughly emptied—and a couple shelves of books. The books were mostly treatises on subjects like the storing of grain, the shipping of grain, and the drying of grain—and, of course, controlling rodents. But there were also several novels of the large and substantial type that could do double
duty as doorstops. There was Trollope’s Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now, Thackeray’s The Virginians, and Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. The first three were inscribed by Robert Mason, and the last was ex libris David Mason, perhaps his father. The only other thing of a personal nature in the room was a framed diploma on the wall. It would seem Robert Mason was a Princeton man. It was hard to imagine a graduate of Princeton being content as the superintendent of a grain elevator. Maybe he took the job with the smuggling operation already in mind. And I suppose Trumble left the diploma up to impress people who didn’t look too closely at the details.

  I went out and thanked the girl and said good-bye. The news that I was leaving seemed just the thing to cheer her up. She even looked up from her book and smiled.

  Then I found my way to police headquarters, where I asked to speak to a detective who covered the river and might know about smuggling. I was sent from office to office but eventually wound up with Detective James Donahy.

  “We don’t look much for smugglers—that’s for the customs boys,” he told me.

  I described what I had seen at the Eastern, and what Old Mike had said.

  “An old ferryman? Why would he be on the river at night? They’ve all gone home by dark.”

  I related Old Mike’s story about sleeping on a tug.

  “Sleeping on a tug? That just happened to dock across from the Eastern?” Detective Donahy made his skepticism clear with a wide smile. “Who mentioned smuggling first, you or him?”

  “Well, I did….”

  “Did you give him money?”

  “Not much….”

  “Give one of those fellas two bits and he’d confess to the smuggling himself.”

  Detective Donahy’s view on the matter—that I was a foolish ass—offered what many would see as a more plausible explanation than that the operators of a grain elevator were smuggling opium by way of a ship shaped like a whale. But I persevered. I told him about Danny Sullivan.

  “You think Danny Sullivan was bought off with a saloon?” Donahy found this downright comical. “You want to know why he got the saloon?”

  I nodded, but I could tell I wasn’t going to like it.

  “Up until a year ago the saloonkeepers on the waterfront had a racket where they controlled the grain scoopers. They contracted with the elevator operators to supply the scoopers, then paid the men doing the work some small part of what the contract paid them. But only after they deducted whatever they had advanced the men in beer and food, which never left much. Finally, the scoopers had had enough, so they went on strike. The saloon bosses called in the thugs, but this time the little guys won. The bishop backed the scoopers, the dockworkers backed them, the temperance union and every politician’s wife backed them, and even the elevator owners backed them.”

  “That’s an inspiring story, but—”

  “Hold on. That saloon Danny Sullivan has was one of Fingy Conners’ places. Under the racket, it made a nice profit. Without it, it’s just another waterfront hole.”

  “How’d he get the name Fingy?”

  “William Conners, properly. They call him Fingy because he’s missing a finger. He’s a local boss. He started on the waterfront, but now he has his fingers in all sorts of things—steamships, newspapers, politics.”

  “Well, all his fingers but one,” I pointed out. “Is there a patrolman we could talk to? Maybe a man on the beat saw what the ferryman says he saw at night?”

  “Let me think.” He tapped his chin. “That would be Officer O’Reilly. Too bad he died just last week in a horrible fire. You see, he heard a child crying in a burning building and ran to its rescue. But the roof caved in on him. Turns out it wasn’t a child, but a cat. The cat made it out and paid for the wake in gratitude.”

  I supposed the sad tale was Donahy’s way of telling me that the subject was now closed, so I moved on to the absentee officers of the Eastern.

  “Don’t know anything about Trumble,” Donahy said. “Never even heard the name. Mason was the clever type, always looking for a new sure-fire proposition. But a lot better at losing other people’s money than making it for himself.”

  “When did he leave town?”

  “Just after his stock scheme a few years ago. I don’t really know much about it. But by the time the people in New York asked us to hold him, he was gone.”

  “And no one knows where he is now?”

  He shrugged. “We aren’t looking for him.”

  “But if you were looking for him, who would you ask?”

  “I might know someone who could help you.”

  Then he just waited, staring at me and bobbing back and forth in his chair. I handed him five dollars and it disappeared in an instant.

  “Mason used to pal around with a gal named Sadie. She goes by Parker now, but when she worked a panel house in the Hooks, her name was Collins. Sadie’s a girl who’s always advancing herself. She started in that panel house, then got a place in a parlor house, then hitched up with Mason. When he left, she latched on to Elwell.”

  “Charles Elwell? The fellow who disappeared recently?”

  “That’s right. That was a big step up for Sadie. Elwell was a lawyer. Of course, now she’ll need to find someone new. Maybe that General.” Donahy found that idea very amusing.

  “How is it you know so much about her?”

  “I’m from the Hooks, too. It’s the far side of the canal. Mostly Sicilians now.”

  “What about Elwell’s disappearance?”

  “He was a big sailor, used to race a small yacht. It looks like he went out on it alone. Then a storm came up. A couple days later it was found adrift, with the mast broken in two. Elwell must have tried to swim for it, but never made it to shore.”

  “What can you tell me about General Osgood?”

  “The sort of name that people like Mason and Elwell need to have on the letterhead. He’s a show general, in the state guard, never seen a battle. But he knows all the right people, and if you wanted to borrow money to build a grain elevator, he could get it. And, if there were things going on, like a stock scheme, he probably wouldn’t suspect a thing.”

  “How about Elwell—do you think he would have been in on the scheme with Mason?”

  “I’d say so, but it’d only be a guess. He’d get his share if it went over, but he wouldn’t be the one needing to leave town if it fell apart.”

  “Do you know where I can find Sadie Parker now?”

  “Last I knew, Elwell had her in the Tifft House, up on Main Street.”

  I thanked him and he told me to let him know if I actually found any evidence of smuggling.

  It was a short walk back to McLeod’s. At the desk, I was handed a wire inviting me to the Iroquois Hotel for dinner that evening with two New York men who would be coming in that afternoon. A preliminary meeting of all the various insurers was to be held the next morning where they would be ascertaining how much each company was potentially on the hook for. How much they actually paid out was a different matter.

  I sat down in the taproom and waited for a reply from my friend at the Treasury Department in New York. A boy from the telegraph office brought it just before six. I took it up to my cell.

  I had definitely asked the right person. I only wish he hadn’t sent the reply collect. First, opium was often smuggled into the U.S. from Canada. There were opium factories in Victoria, British Columbia, and they sold it for as little as five or six dollars a pound, whereas a domestic factory would need to sell it for at least fifteen dollars a pound because of the ten-dollar-a-pound excise tax. Second, opium was usually shipped in a chest two to three feet on a side and two feet deep, which weighed 100-150 pounds. Third, opium was in high demand in New York and sold for fifteen to eighteen dollars per pound wholesale. Fourth, smuggling into New York in a canal boat was plausible, but he hadn’t ever heard of it before.

  If the opium had been manufactured in Victoria, it could have been easily, and legally, brought to Fort William by rail
. It would only have needed a couple of men in Fort William to take delivery and get it on a boat, then a couple in Buffalo to get it off. The captain of the steamer would probably have needed to be in on it, and definitely the canal boatman. But each chest would cost just $800 or so in Canada and sell for up to $1,800 in New York. If each man in the chain were paid $100 per chest, there would still be about a $400 profit per chest for Mason, or whoever was running the show. And they probably did several chests at a time. This all fit together nicely. I was beginning to have faith in my own theory again.

  4

  I arrived at the Iroquois Hotel early for my dinner appointment and was just killing time watching the crowds when a boy approached me with a handbill for a Dr. Linn’s Museum of Anatomy. There weren’t many of these places still around and a pang of nostalgia drew me down to the entrance, where I gave up my fifteen cents.

  Like the rest, Dr. Linn’s museum presented itself as a scientific exploration of humanity. It began with a room of jars holding specimens of animals and organs. In amongst them were wax versions of the same type of things, but in more lifelike poses. In the next room were the typical grotesques—jars of malformed fetuses, images of facial and skin afflictions, and more serious maladies shown in wax. The latter included the torso and head of a young woman whose carefree expression gave no hint of concern that her breasts had been removed to reveal a large internal tumor.

  Pride of place was given to depictions of the advanced stages of syphilis, and other diseases of that nature. Scattered about these displays were tactful hints that the proprietor, a doctor of medicine, specialized in the treatment of such cases. Only when I made it to the third floor did I get to the part I remembered so fondly from my youth: Female Beauty. There they were, the shapely wax figures lying fetchingly on their pillowed couches, and all as naked as Eve. Just about exactly what any sixteen-year-old is looking for in the way of enlightenment. Some exhibited horrific growths, and others had large chunks of their flesh removed to reveal internal organs. But neither was enough to cool the ardor of adolescence.