Curt Colbert - Seattle Noir

I’ve tried the newspapers, TV, and radio-I even tried 48 Hours and 60 Minutes-but nobody would listen to me. That’s why I have written this like it’s a mystery story. I figured maybe it would be good enough to publish in your magazine. I sure do hope so. My appeal was turned down. You’re my last chance. I think a lot of people will understand this story and like it and buy your magazine. It could do you and me both a lot of good.

I have enclosed a SASE like it said to do in the Writer’s Market.

Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

Conrad Sinclair

Inmate #SN/IR-4569

Build. C

c/o Twin Rivers Correctional Facility

Monroe, WA 98057

Chinatown

The grizzled morgue attendant manhandled the makeshift plank table to the center of the hot, small, noisome viewing chamber. James Robbins Jewell took an involuntary step back as he watched. Not since attending the funeral of an uncle who had stepped off a curb on New York City’s Canal Street and directly into the path of a beer wagon had Jewell seen someone who had met a violent end. He had been twelve that summer.

Now twenty-four, he put a handkerchief to his nose and mouth, then willed his stomach not to betray him and add to the charnel house smell of Seattle’s Cherry Street morgue. Hardly a predicament in which I expected to find myself , he thought. Jewell had been an Immigrant Inspector with the Treasury Department for all of four months.

As if reading his mind, the attendant, a squat, copper-haired fellow with the map of Ulster stamped all over his brogue, said, “First time with a corpse, hey?”

Jewell shook his head. “No, but it’s been years.” He didn’t mention the fact that this was his first opportunity to do anything besides sit behind a desk and copy forms in the regional office since he’d been posted to Seattle three months earlier.

“And why, pray tell,” the attendant continued, “comes a Treasury man to claim this Chink?”

“Ask your cousins among the bulls about that one,” Jewell replied drily. It was 1889, and Washington Territory stood on the cusp of statehood. The Irish, among the first non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants to the region, had set about doing in Seattle what they had done in such large Eastern cities as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston: filling the ranks of the local constabulary. Seattle’s tiny police force numbered right around twenty men; split almost evenly between Sons of Erin and Norwegian immigrants.

The attendant reached beneath his filthy apron and retrieved a pipe and tobacco pouch. “Wouldn’t touch a Chink, hey?”

Jewell shrugged. “Where did they find him, again?”

The little Irishman struck a match, touched it to his pipe, and puffed a couple of times while pulling back the sheet where it covered the corpse’s lower half. Squinting at the tag attached to one big toe, he read haltingly, “South shore… Mercer Island… half-mile west of Clark Beach.” Straightening up, the man said, “No wonder our city fellas wanted nothin’ to do wi’ this one. Mercer Island’s unincorporated county, not city turf.”

“The King County Sheriff disagrees. Says the currents running through south Lake Washington pass right by the city proper, and that’s most likely the place where the corpse originated. Says he’s too busy and hasn’t enough deputies to put on the case of-”

“A dead Chink,” the Irishman finished for him. “McGraw’s no Chink hater. Gave a fair account of himself a couple of years back, during the Queen business.” He said it as if he expected the younger man would be familiar with the reference. He wasn’t.

But Jewell nodded as if he was, thinking it must have something to do with the Chinese troubles with the local Knights of Labor back in ’86. “So, since this fellow is obviously a foreigner, the city and the county decided that this becomes a federal matter, and they contacted my office. My superior in turn fetched me and sent me down here to take possession of the poor unfortunate.” Steeling himself not to vomit, he motioned for the attendant to pull back the sailcloth tarpaulin covering the body.

The dead man had obviously spent a lot of time in the water. His eyes were gone, and his features so bloated that it was difficult to tell whether he was Chinese, Indian, even white. Jewell stepped closer to get a good look at the cold, quiet lump of mortality laid out on the plank slab like a feast on a trencher.

The Chinamen Jewell had seen before, both back home in New York and during the three months he had spent in Seattle, had all worn their hair in the same manner. They completely shaved the front, sides, and back of the skull, leaving only a circular topknot along the crown of the head: grown long and braided down the back.

The naked corpse before him sported a similarly shaven head. There was, however, no topknot to speak of. This man’s hair was far shorter, and lay in a loose halo about his head, as if to draw attention to the deep, jagged cut that ran from ear to ear along his throat. The only other injury that Jewell could find on the body was a missing right pinky finger. Bloating caused by the corpse’s watery sojourn made it impossible to discern how long its owner had gone without the finger. Old wound or new, Jewell had no idea.

Lake Washington had done equal damage to the corpse’s remaining fingers, expanding them to the size of sausages. These appendages sported long fingernails, blackened by what Jewell had come to recognize as prolonged opium use.

“Poor devil,” he muttered. “How do we even know he was Chinese? See?” he pointed at the corpse’s head. “No pigtail.”

“Likely cut off,” the Irishman said. “Big insult to the Chinks, cuttin’ their hair. Did ye mark how the rest of his hair is cut like a slant’s, though? And,” he said, pulling a canvas bag from one of the shelves that lined the walls of the gruesome little room, “he was wearin’ these when they found him.”

Jewell inspected the contents: heavily wrinkled black trousers and an equally bedraggled red tunic, both of Oriental design and obviously made of silk.

“No shoes, no hat, no other possessions?”

“He’d washed around in the lake for a while, captain.”

“These clothes are not much to advance upon. Aside from arranging for a burial up on Capitol Hill, I’m uncertain as to what other service I or my office can be of in this matter.”

“Lovely fabric, silk,” the little man said.

“I hardly think-” Jewell began.

“Strong,” the morgue attendant went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Holds a design or a dye better than most other fibers. Oh, I’ll allow that it shrivels right up and looks an ungodly mess if it’s gotten too wet, just as this Chink’s togs have. But look.” He held up the red silk of the dead man’s shirt for Jewell’s inspection. “It’s even got the poor soul’s laundry mark right here inside the collar.”

“A pauper’s grave over in Lake View is the only place this is headed.” H.M. Porter looked at his new gold watch, wound it, then returned it to the pocket of a vest so expansive, ten dead Chinamen might easily have hidden within it.

H.M. (short for “Hamilton Menander”) Porter, a Treasury Department agent of countless years’ service, and for exactly two more days head of the territory’s Immigrant Inspection Division, stretched his considerable bulk backward in the chair he’d had shipped west by Sears, Roebuck, and Co. the previous year.