Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

“Very much so. Molly and I have a fine twelve-year-old son named George.”

“After Washington.”

“Of course. We were married at West Point and Washington attended the ceremony. How about you?”

“Roland is a master tanner. He sells leather to shoemakers in the city. I help with his bookkeeping. We entertain at dinner and keep quite busy.” A thought occurred to her. “I’d like you to meet him. Would you be free for dinner tonight, Alex?”

He smiled. “Roland might not appreciate meeting your former husband. Besides, I have an engagement tonight, in the Five Points neighborhood.”

“That place is a slum, infested with Irish immigrants!”

“It’s business. I’m certain no harm will come to me.”

“Alex—”

“Next time. Perhaps Molly and I can dine with you next time. It was good seeing you, Amanda.” He turned and left her in the shop.

The Men’s Sporting Parlor was in the rear of Patsy Hearn’s grogshop, and Alex found a place to sit on the pine planks that ran around a sunken pit some fifteen feet square. Admission was a mere twenty-five cents, and the man next to him explained that it had cost more before the opposition to bearbaiting had ended that practice in many places. Now there were only the cocks to fight, and an occasional battle between rats and trained terriers. All the events were good for wagering, and Alex joined in by betting a dollar on a ruffled rooster that looked as if it had survived a few previous battles.

He didn’t notice Prester Gamecock until the end of the first match. Alex’s cock had triumphed and a one-eyed sailor brought him his winnings. As he looked up he saw the large man with the blue bandanna seated across the arena from him, along with Meg Wycliff and another man. There were five matches scheduled that night, and when the last of them ended with an explosion of blood and feathers, Alex made his way around the pit to join Gamecock’s party.

“Did you have some winners, Mr. Swift?” the woman asked.

“I won on the first match and quit while I was ahead. How often are these fights held?”

“Whenever we have enough cocks,” the large man answered. “Once a week, sometimes twice.”

The crowd around them had cleared out, and a black man was spreading sawdust over the bloodstained pit. Alex’s gaze had drifted to the third member of their party and Meg Wycliff announced, “This is Pierre Facon, the man you’ve been looking for.”

“Mr. Facon?” Alex asked, extending his hand.

“Yes, that is me,” the man agreed. He spoke English with only a trace of a French accent. He was fairly tall, but seemed a bit young to have been working on shipboard eighteen years earlier.

“Did you work as a barber aboard the frigate Boston in seventeen seventy-eight?”

“I did, sir. Those were proud days, fighting alongside the Americans.”

Alex glanced at the others and decided the rest of the conversation should be between Facon and himself. He thanked Gamecock and the woman for their help and went off with the Frenchman to the front of the grogshop. Once they were seated he ordered two tankards of ale and told the man, “I’ve been sent here by Vice President Adams.”

“I assumed as much.”

“You wrote him about the events on board the Boston.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“Your letter could be seen as a threat against the Vice President.”

“I didn’t mean it as a threat,” he replied, suddenly ill at ease. “I just felt I should get some money for what happened.”

“You must realize the Vice President was not responsible for your injury.”

“He owes me something,” Facon insisted. “He might be the next President.”

“As a Frenchman, that should please you. Adams opposes a war with France over the maritime incidents.”

“Aye, he is not a bad man.”

“Are you working? I spoke with Matthew, the barber down on Greenwich Street. He said he could use you for a few days.”

Facon smiled and shook his head. “I made some money tonight on the cocks and I expect some more from Mr. Adams. I don’t need his job, though he has been kind to a fellow countryman.”

“You’d better tell him you won’t be in.”

“I’ll leave a note on his door tonight. What about the money?”

“Meet me for breakfast tomorrow at Mrs. Ring’s boardinghouse. Perhaps I can help you out, if you promise to cease annoying the Vice President.”

“Mrs. Ring’s,” he repeated with a smile. “I’ll be there. About eight?”

“Fine.”

Back in his room at the boardinghouse, Alex considered how much he could reasonably offer the man the following morning. Adams had given him a free rein, but he did not want the exchange of money to seem like any sort of payoff or bribe to keep quiet. The Vice President had done nothing wrong, and any payment must be of a compassionate nature only.

In the morning he decided on an appropriate sum and went downstairs a little before eight to await the arrival of Pierre Facon. But it was Meg Wycliff who appeared at the boardinghouse door, her face twisted with grief. “You must come,” she told him. “Pierre has been murdered!”

Alex quickly followed her down Greenwich almost as far as Liberty Street. “What happened?” he asked as they walked. “Who killed him?”

“We don’t know. He spent the night at a bawdy house.”

She led him to a two-story frame dwelling with shuttered windows. They went up the front steps to the door where a stout older woman waited.

“No police!” she told Meg. “I told you no police.”

“He’s not police. He’s from the government. Alex, this is Mrs. Blithe. She owns this place.”

“Where is Facon?” he asked.

“This way.” The stout woman led them to a second-floor hallway. Girls in nightdresses, barely past school age, clustered by an open doorway until she shooed them away. Facon’s body lay inside and blood from a head wound had turned the rug crimson. He was wearing one-piece underwear and his feet were bare. He had ten toes.

“What happened to him?” Alex asked.

Mrs. Blithe shook her head. “I don’t know. He was in here with one of my girls and she went down the hall to wash up. She swears he wasn’t alone for more than five minutes. She heard a thump and came back to find him like this.”

“His skull was crushed by a hard blow,” Alex said, glancing around for any possible weapon. Nothing likely was visible. “You must know who was up here at the time, Mrs. Blithe.”

“This early in the morning most of the girls are asleep. Anyone could walk in the front door.”

He motioned toward the body. “Is it common for customers to spend the night?”

“Sometimes, if they come late. This man had no wife.”

“Pierre Facon? Was that his name?”

Mrs. Blithe shrugged. “It was the name he used. Down on the docks nobody asks many questions.”

“Where’s the girl he was with?” Alex asked.

She glanced around, finally summoning one of them. “Estelle, come here! Tell this man what happened.”

Estelle was a bit older than the others, with squinty eyes and a hard mouth. “He came in after midnight,” she told them. “After a while he just fell asleep, so I let him be.”

“Was he a regular customer of yours?”

“I guess you could say that,” she admitted. “He always came to me if I wasn’t busy.”

“Then someone looking for him might have come to your room.”

“Maybe,” she admitted with some reluctance.

“Did he ever talk about his past, about his days at sea?”

Estelle’s eyes squinted even more. “He was a barber, not a sailor. What would he be doing at sea?”

“How about enemies? Did he seem fearful of anyone?”