Chapter 10
LAURIE
Laurie had seen a variety of disturbing things throughout his career. The stockyards, the slaughterhouse. Men and women caught up in machinery, crunched up and bound by iron teeth; severed fingers and limbs discarded on farm fields; chronic frostbite and gangrene from transient living.
By and large, the world of workingmen wasn’t built for safety.
The sight of Chary Wright collapsing in a bloodied, unconscious heap probably wouldn’t be revisited in Laurie’s nightmares.
But for all that, it was damn disturbing.
Chary was there and then not, his humanity wiped out in a blink, gone to someplace unknown and possibly painful.
His eyelids hadn’t even closed on his journey but stayed slit to whites, unmoving as Laurie sank with him to the concrete as best he could.
“Oh, god.”
Laurie patted at him uselessly, cursing at first in quiet hisses, then louder as it became clear Chary wasn’t coming back immediately.
“Chary, oh, shit—wake up.” He found a roundish, egg-sized contusion on Chary’s forehead, hard and swollen and already blood-red, and another smaller lump at the back of his skull, concealed by his hair.
Bad news. He could’ve been dying and Laurie wouldn’t have known until the moment of it, couldn’t do a thing about it but clutch at him and, if he were a religious man, pray.
Chary returned to life abruptly, when the police bells were close and they’d gained a small bystander crowd, who’d all been wondering the same things as Laurie.
He launched up so fast, he almost collided with Laurie’s nose before he crawled two steps, trembling, and was sick again, clutching the wrought-iron fencing.
Laurie scrabbled after him and, lacking anything else in his power, put his sack coat over his bent-over form.
“Hey,” he said gently, “you’re alive.”
Chary coughed. “Am I?”
“What the hell happened in there?”
Chary shook his head and then said, seventy percent rich boy, “I have a splitting head.” He heaved himself into a wobbly stand and wavered in it, arms out to either side.
Laurie drew him away from the fence, coat in hand.
The bystanders clapped like Chary was a victor in the ring—at least until Chary turned at the noise, and the blood showed clear. Then they gasped.
Chary said, “What—? Why are there…people…” And then he was down again, his limbs turned liquid as he crumpled down onto hands and knees. Laurie cursed and went with him a second time, wincing when his own knees cracked in protest.
This time, Chary stayed conscious; he laughed. “…applause? Am I drunk?”
Somebody handed Laurie a canteen. He sniffed it—water—and made Chary drink. “Stay down, goddammit.”
“He’s not drunk, is he.” A deep rumble, belonging to the canteen’s owner. Laurie looked up: a short and muscle-bound bodybuilder, with a neat mustache and carefully tended eyebrows, who must’ve been en route to or from the Y.
“No. How d’you know?” Besides the massive goose egg on Chary’s head and the obvious spray of blood, of course—
“Look.” The bodybuilder jerked a thumb to the red-brick tenement Chary had stumbled from.
Four policemen dragged out a bloodied-sheet-bound body on a stretcher.
“Hell,” Laurie cursed. He looked down to Chary, who was on hands and knees, half in his lap. “What in damnation did you do?”
Chary began to giggle soundlessly into Laurie’s shoulder. Laurie put the coat back over them haphazardly.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, you’re all right. You survived; that’s what you did. You survived.”
The bodybuilder and the rest of the crowd melted away. Laurie couldn’t blame them. Somebody had pointed them out to the cops, and two more were coming this way, looking extremely annoyed. Nobody, especially Bowery queers, wanted to get caught in a mess like this.
Chary paused his giggling and took tight hold of Laurie’s shirt. “Don’t go,” he whispered. “Please.”
“Won’t be the first time I’m arrested,” Laurie reassured him. “I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
Someone had tried to murder again—but this time, they’d failed.
After the police bells, and the bullshit rigmarole at No.
300 Mulberry Street that followed, neither of them was charged with anything, not even degenerate disturbance of the peace, to Laurie’s surprise.
Or not surprise—money solved a lot of things.
Laurie knew a death investigation wasn’t like the detective stories.
Real detectives were blackmailing bastards, not vigilante cops.
And the seventeenth ward’s political steerings, he knew, were less than liberal.
But Chary was a member of New York Society, had acted in defense of his life, and, more importantly, was rich.
For all Laurie knew, he had connections, too.
Most importantly, the police cared less about the death of an “obvious Bowery lowlife” than they would’ve if he and Chary had been caught fucking by the landlady.
Waiting for them in the police-station lobby, however, was a horde of reporters.
Bowler hats bobbed against the double door’s windows, an eager, many-humped pile of beaver felt.
With the daily presses, there were reporters on every corner, before every significant building, every public eatery, lounging in wait for a midnight-printed story.
Police bells drew them quicker than anything else. Violence was hot. It sold copies.
“Oh, balls,” Laurie muttered in Chary’s ear. He had blood smeared there, rust-smelling. “I did warn you. Lower your hat.”
Chary raised his chin. “Why? It will be the same as it was eight months ago, when August died. I will weather it.”
He was so damn fearless. “The hell it will. Eight months ago, you didn’t have me. Don’t forget these are all my kind of assholes.”
Beneath the bruising, Chary looked startled.
“We know you’re in there, Laurie Tulley!” called a voice. “You don’t have dibs on a source!”
“See?”
“You needn’t—”
“Too bad,” Laurie said shortly. “I’m doing it. Stay close.” He wrapped his right arm around Chary’s shoulders and opened the left door. Too late, he realized Chary was still wearing his jacket, nothing beneath but a bare chest over suit trousers.
The reporters converged around them, nudging against Laurie’s outstretched arm.
“Mr. Wright! Did you kill a man today?”
“Mr. Wright, would you like to make a statement about the Bowery? Why you were there? What business did you have on the Lower East Side?”
“Mr. Wright, was it a lovers’ quarrel? Didja murder him? Was it self-defense?”
“Was it your apartment, Mr. Wright?”
Chary was taller, but Laurie could still push back against the press of bodies and keep him tucked close. Slowly they moved forward.
“Richard,” he called, “get the hell out of here. What kind of question is that? You can’t even print it.”
Richard (the Herald) glared but backed off.
“Is this man your lover, Mr. Wright? Can’t print that, either, Tulley!” Cackles across the lobby.
Laurie rolled his eyes.
“C’mon, Barney. He’s a source. Associatin’ ain’t a crime.” He absorbed Chary’s flinch against him and resolved to apologize later. “I heard you, Paul from the Sun! No statements!”
“Photograph of the happy fairy couple?”
Laurie put his cap over his face just in time; Chary was less prepared for the puff of flash-bulb.
Geez. “Lads. Shove off, shove off. Keep it decent and between the lines, will ya? He wasn’t detained. He’s got nothing to say. And I shouldn’t be able to see the whites of your eyes, so fuck off.”
In one corner lounged Hiram, discreetly withdrawn from the crowd, hat cocked jauntily, pencil twirling between his fingers. He saluted as they passed.
They made it to the street. The temperature difference between the press of bodies and suits and hot breath and the bright summer day was extreme. Chary seemed to breathe at last.
“Jesus,” Laurie muttered. “You wanna run for it or get a cab?” Practically a rhetorical question; Chary was paper-white and looked about ready to fall over.
“Cab,” he whispered.
After the cab ride, Laurie couldn’t just leave Chary Wright to his own devices, so he practically stood guard for the man that whole afternoon.
He was a journalist, not a bodyguard, but he could see where after the events of the morning, a man might not want to be alone.
Laurie liked to think he wouldn’t’ve left anyone alone after something like that, rich man or not; it’d shaken him up more than he wanted to admit.
He also never turned down free lunch, and Chary had offered one: a soup and sandwich at a caf outside Grand Central.
“Where’s home?” Laurie asked, putting down his spoon. “Fifth Avenue? Newsmen will follow you there, too, you know.” There were still two reporters who had managed to follow, visible outside the caf through the big plate window, their caps drawn down low.
Chary swallowed his tea. He seemed as aware of the reporters as Laurie. Almost as though he’d been aware of them his whole adult life. “No. Home is… Berryfield.”
Of course Maine. Why was he disappointed to hear it? He already had one gaffer for a source, didn’t he? One that wasn’t a rich man?
“Good idea. It’d might be good to leave the city for a bit, ’til it dies down.”
Besides the press hounds, someone had tried to kill Chary, and might try again.
Retreat did seem wise. Laurie would’ve offered his own 37th Street apartment—they could shake the newsmen if they really tried—but it disallowed visitors entirely, and he did want to keep his spot.
Anyway, he justified, it wasn’t Chary’s home, and after the police-station ordeal, all Chary wanted, he’d said, was home.
He did wonder—again—why Fifth Avenue wasn’t.
The blood-puffed bruise on Chary’s brow looked tight and hard and round in the caf’s electric lights.
Laurie gestured to his face. “Make sure you have someone take care of this, yeah?”
Chary nodded.
“I’ll walk you to your train, just to be sure.”
Chary nodded again. “To the train and no farther. Don’t follow me anymore. Please.”
Laurie, stung, said, “Is that what I’m doing?”
“‘He’s a source,’” Chary quoted.
“Chary, c’mon. You were almost killed. I told you: I don’t out queers. I don’t write that society bullcrap they’re going to plaster everywhere with dashes and Mr. Blanks. I just want the truth.”
And… he couldn’t help but feel somewhat responsible for this morning, too.
Nobody had targeted Chary until Laurie had shown up, asking questions and yanking him around the Bowery.
Unless it was just coincidence—and Chary had always been meant to be attacked, and it had been meant to be this morning—but that was unlikely.
There was plenty of plausible why.
“Why do you think you were targeted this morning? Any ideas?”
Chary looked, suddenly, resigned. Resigned toward his half-full soup bowl, sure, but it was for Laurie. It stung almost as much as the man’s plea to leave him alone—as though all along, he had expected Laurie to use him for further interview. For story.
“I have no obvious common denominator, then, with the others?”
“Beyond posing as a gaffer? I don’t know yet if you do. But: either the culprit doesn’t know you’re the boss—or they do.”
“… It must be one of those,” Chary said slowly, “yes.”
Laurie waved what was left of his sandwich. “I’m saying that it matters how much the culprit knows about you. Informs their motivation.”
“I have read Conan Doyle. My guess is that my name has nothing to do with it, either way.”
“You think they didn’t know who you truly are.”
“I doubt it. The assailant didn’t mention me by name. He didn’t say anything at all.”
“You didn’t know him, either?”
“Lord, no. I barely saw him, to be honest. Before I ran.” Too busy fighting back, Laurie imagined. “But I didn’t recognize him from that little bit, no.”
“He had no race, no accent? No particular bearing? No style of dress?”
Chary shook his head. “He was white, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t think Italian. I don’t remember what he wore. Boots. A workingman’s.” He winced, either in memory or a kind of bizarre apology.
“You’d know the type,” Laurie taunted.
“As I’ve said, nobody on the factory floor should be able to connect me to Charles Edward Wright. I can practically promise it. I wouldn’t have lasted a day if so; it’s been more than a decade.”
So he’d said. Had it really? Laurie wondered if he’d known Irving Sawyer. He should ask Irving when he’d worked for Wright Glass and when he’d been let go by the Wrights for organizing.
“So, that rules ’em all right out. All your gaffers and runner boys.” More interesting was that Chary’s first instinct had been to clear them from guilt.
“It isn’t a job with high turnover. I’ve known all of those men for years. It seems a very long wait for murder, if class resentment was the motive.”
“But if it was another gaffer, or a boy, but he doesn’t know you’re the boss,” Laurie led him, or tried to, “then why want his fellow gaffer dead?” Maybe because you’re attending union meetings, labor spy?
But Chary wouldn’t be led. “If I knew, I’d surely tell you.”
Sure you would.
“The other men went missing at seemingly random intervals,” Chary said. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah. I don’t have a reason for them to have been killed, either. I said that. Do you see anything connecting them?”
“No.”
“Nothing at all?”
Chary stirred with the broad, shallow spoon. “No. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful to you.”
An echo of Tjofabier Raberding, with less smarm. But more lies? Or more truth?
Chary’s soup had to have been cold by now. He hadn’t taken a bite in at least five minutes.
Laurie stood. “Let’s get you on a train, Chary Wright, so you can go home and I can leave you be.”