EIGHTEEN

 

 

Friday Harbor's fish cannery sat on a broad pier held up by dozens of creosoted pilings, most of which were leaning to some extent, making the whole structure look as if it might collapse and fall into the water at any moment. The building itself was a giant windowless block of weathered tin and wood siding, featuring numerous gaping service entrances for taking in netloads of whole salmon and halibut and turning out crates of canned fish. As Miles and Floyd approached, a handful of Chinese men in filthy work clothes who were smoking out front made themselves scarce.

"What a smell," Floyd said as they got close.

"At least the cannery is usually downwind of town. When we get a rare east wind, the restaurants all close down because nobody can eat with that stench hanging in the air."

The smell was twice as bad once they stepped through the front door, the fishy air thick and damp. The building was filled with men, machinery, and equipment—chutes, conveyer belts, can fabricators, vats, and steam kettles—humming, squeaking, clanking, and hissing in a symphony of industrial noise. At a steel table running the length of the far wall, a dozen Chinese laborers wearing bloody, slime-smeared aprons and holding long steel knives were gutting hundreds of salmon that had just been offloaded from a fishing boat tied up on the harbor side of the building. Many of the fish were still alive, their mouths opening and closing as they seemed to gasp for air even as the laborers sliced their bellies open from anus to gills, ripped out their living guts, and tossed them into a waste sluice that ran under the table and out of the building. The sluice, in turn, led to a crusty pipe that discharged a steady stream of guts, fins, heads, and bloody water out the back of the cannery and into the harbor below where half a dozen bald eagles perched on pilings waiting to scavenge the best bits.

"You alright?" Miles shouted at Floyd over the noise. "You look a bit pale."

"It's an ugly business."

"Just thank your lucky stars you're at the top of the food chain."

"Amen."

In the middle of the cannery floor, halfway down a conveyor belt-fed processing line, stood a monstrous, new-looking machine of moving gears, levers, and pistons. Whole salmon were going in one end of the machine and coming out the other end gutted with heads and fins removed.

"Impressive, isn't it?" a white man shouted over the noise from just behind them. It was the foreman, Clyde Crieff, one of only two non-Chinese in the building. "It's the Smith Butchering Machine, better known as the Iron Chink. Guts salmon as fast as my ten best Chinese put together. You're looking at the future, boys."

"Can we talk somewhere?" Miles shouted back.

"Office," Crieff said, pointing at a door in the south wall of the cannery. He led them across the busy floor. As they made their way, it struck Miles as odd that none of the Chinese men in the building made eye contact with him. But it was clear they were keeping tabs on the officers with their peripheral vision, because they invariably drew away whenever the white men approached.

"What can I do for you, Miles?" Crieff asked once the door was shut, cutting off most of the noise. Crieff had employed Miles as a part-time truck driver for a couple of seasons shortly before the war. They liked each other.

"Looking for a couple of Chinese," Miles said.

"You came to the right place."

"Cantonese men. Names of Wong Chun Ting and Kwan Ping. Arrived last weekend."

"Oh. I haven't brought on any new guys since June. In fact, with the Iron Chink up and running, I'm having to lay men off. They keep coming back each morning, asking, More work? More work? I’ve been telling them no more work. They just keep coming back. Probably hoping the machine breaks down. Feel kind of bad for them, truth be told. They're good workers."

"Can we ask your men if they've seen or heard of these guys?"

"Be my guest. Incidentally, have you fellas seen Angus Cooper around?"

"Cooper," Miles repeated. "Captain of a workboat, right? The Dahlia or the Daisy or whatever?"

"The Daisy. Yes. That's the fella. Widower. Lives out Bailer Hill Road. Has a young daughter who's a lunatic. He was supposed to bring me a shipment of tin blanks for the canning machine day before yesterday. I paid him in advance, and off he went to Bellingham. Now I can't find him anywhere. And I'm about to run out of tin."

"We'll ask around. In the meantime . . ."

"Of course, of course. Wu?" he shouted. A Chinese man in clean clothes appeared in the doorway to an adjoining room. "Mr. Wu here is my bookkeeper and liaison with the other Chinese employees. He can interpret for you if you like."

After explaining, in halting English, that he and all the cannery workers were Mandarin speakers, Wu led the officers through the cannery, going from man to man, asking the same series of questions. Did anyone know the mysterious Cantonese men? Had they seen them? Heard anything about them? Did they have any idea as to their whereabouts? Once again avoiding eye contact with Miles, even as they answered his questions, they all pled utter ignorance. But they also looked scared. Every last one of them.

 

*****

"So, what was going on there?" Floyd asked as they walked back to the station.

"You mean with the reticence over speaking with us?" Miles said.

"With the terror over speaking with us, I'd call it. Are they that afraid of the law? Of white men?"

"They shouldn't be. I don't think anyone messes with them up here. And they basically keep to themselves. Never cause any trouble. And come to think of it, they never seemed particularly fearful back when I drove a truck for the cannery."

"Maybe they fear retribution."

"Nobody likes a rat," Miles said.

"But retribution from their fellow laborers, or from someone else?"

"You mean our recent Cantonese arrivals?"

"Well, as I mentioned, the tongs are largely made up of Cantonese. And the tongs each have contingents of hard men they call boo how doy, or highbinders. They're the soldiers. The dreaded enforcers."

"Hatchet men."

"If you like. They've certainly been known to plant hatchets in their enemies' skulls now and then. Hatchets, ice axes, meat cleavers. You name it."

"Are you suggesting that the Cantonese men who arrived on the Bangor may be two of these tong highbinders, as you call them?" Miles asked.

"It would explain the uncharacteristic fear on the faces of the cannery workers."

"And it might substantiate the theory that a tong was involved in the hijacking of the Lucky Lena. Like maybe the highbinders were the perpetrators."

"Or maybe it was their tong's shipment that was hijacked, so they're here trying to figure out what happened. Trying to figure out who to exact their revenge on."

The men froze in their tracks as a black-tailed doe and her two downy, speckled fawns emerged from an alleyway and crossed the street a few dozen yards ahead of them before disappearing into a thicket of blackberry bushes.

"So, Floyd."

"So, Miles."

"There's a social event this evening."

"Social event?"

"A dance, strictly speaking," Miles said with a smirk. "At the Odd Fellows Hall. The annual summer knees-up."

"Sounds like the event of the season."

"It's a big thing for the islands. A lot of young people come in on the inter-island steamer."

"Like young people from Deer Harbor? Friends of Leif Jensen, maybe?"

"Exactly. Might be a good chance to find out if anyone has heard anything. It's a small county, in some ways. Insular and gossipy. Word travels quickly. Anyway, it's after work hours. But if you're interested, you're welcome to come along. We'll get you back to your hotel before bedtime. Your mother will never be the wiser."

"Ha-ha. What are you going to wear?"

"What am I going to wear? I'm pretty sure you're the first man to ever ask me a question like that."

"I mean what's the dress code?"

"Have you never been to a dance hall?"

"Sheriff," Bill shouted, trotting down the street from the opposite direction.

"What is it?" Miles asked as they converged.

"Jake Wolfram said he saw the two Chinks."

"Jake Wolfram?"

"Driver for the Roche Harbor lime works."

"Oh, right."

"Jake was waiting for a scheduled pickup down by the docks last Tuesday when he saw two unusually well-dressed Chinks come out of the terminal as the Bangor was unloading. Saw them hop into Rupert Hawkins's car, quick, and drive away."

"Rupert Hawkins, huh?"

"Yes, sir."

"Quick, like the Chinese wanted to keep a low profile? Like they didn't want to be seen?"

"That's how it sounded."

"Who's Rupert Hawkins?" Floyd asked.

"Remember my story of Reverend McCaskill horsewhipping a drunk in the street?"

"How could I forget?"

"Hawkins was the drunk. He's an on-again, off-again deckhand for any captain desperate or fool enough to hire him on for a day or two. And sometimes he makes a little extra hooch money by working as an unofficial taxi, picking people up from arriving steamships in his rusty old Crow-Elkhart."

"Let's go talk to him."

"Tomorrow. He'll be three sheets to the wind by this hour. Won't remember his own name."

 

*****

Miles and Floyd spent a tedious couple of hours examining duplicate sets of the fingerprints Floyd had lifted off the Lucky Lena, comparing them to samples they'd obtained from the various objects they'd seized. To Miles's disappointment, none of the prints taken off the boat matched any taken from Reverend McCaskill's chisel—though McCaskill would likely have been wearing gloves if he were the hijacker. And aside from the expected matches to the objects taken from the Jensens' homes, the one notable discovery was that a print Floyd took off of the severed finger matched the print of Hans Jensen's index finger taken off his wooden game board.

"Well," Miles said, sounding down, "if Hans Jensen is still alive, which I tend to doubt, then he's probably very unhappy."

Yearning to stretch their stiff legs, Miles and Floyd walked down to the docks to ask if anyone had seen Angus Cooper, his boat the Daisy, or two unusually well-dressed Chinese men. No one had. All Miles and Floyd got for their trouble were frantic questions from wide-eyed fishermen and deckhands. Had the police caught the killers yet? Had they at least found the Jensens' bodies? Did they have any promising leads? Did the sheriff think any of them were in danger? Nobody had anything helpful to say.