Free Port Hazard by Loren D. Estleman Page B

learned that the Commodore, whose given name was Cornelius, had not spent a day at sea, but had profited in Chinatown through the opium smuggled in by way of the pockets of common seamen so far as to have developed an affection for the briny breed. The policeman who had recommended the place had been mistaken about how it got its name. The Sailor’s Rest, as the combination saloon and rooming house had originally been christened, had been rebaptized shortly before the Commodore’s death, and without his consent, when the leader of a press gang who was variously known as Shanghai Mike, Mike the Crimp, and St. Michael the Persuader (after the effective methods by which he recruited reluctant hands for sea duty) smashed a bottle of green rum over the skull of an opponent in a game of Rouge et Noir and proclaimed that he had thus “launched” a new vessel he called the Slop Chest . No one dared oppose his fancy until his corpse was found in a Chinatown alley with its face caved in, ostensibly by a tong hatchet-man, but by then a couple of generations of patrons had come to know the establishment by no other name. It stuck, although in respect to her deceased husband Nan had stubbornly refused to take down the much-defaced sign the Commodore had commissioned. After the first structure was burned to the ground for nonpayment of the penny tax and replaced by the current building, there was no need to hang any sign at all, since the patrons themselves had contributed most of the construction work in return for free grog.
    I noticed she still referred to the place as The Rest, and never without lifting her glass to the Commodore’s bilious likeness. He had taken her off the line at a place called the House of Blazes to make her his wife, and whatever the old man may have wanted in the way of romantic attraction, he had made a lady of her (“swell mollisher” was the phrase she used), and she observed the ceremony of buying a round for the house every year on the anniversary of his birth. The fact that he’d been a solemn teetotaler all his life failed to strike her as ironic. Nan was a woman of contrasts, as well as handy with the portable Gatling she carried in her reticule. She got up once and turned back a corner of the threadbare Oriental rug to show the stain where she’d shot an old acquaintance who’d failed to grasp the significance of her retirement from the horizontal trade.
    â€œKill him?” I asked.
    â€œHe took his own sweet time, but infection done for him in the end.”
    â€œWhere was Hodge?”
    â€œTobing lushies in Brisbane would be my guess. Axel wandered in here a year ago Independence Day, dragging that slag and thimble off his flapper, cute as cows and kisses. You wanted to palm him like a pennyweight. The Commodore was gone to Grim ten years and then some, rest him. Axel ain’t a patch on his articles, but an old ewe like me can’t be too particular. Any old dwarf in a storm, I say.
    â€œThat scrub I put to bed with a shovel was a square citizen,” she went on, refilling her dainty glass from the decanter. Some of the contents slopped over, seasoning further the blot on the floorboards at her feet. “I’d of scragged for it sure as blunt if Cap’n Dan himself didn’t stand in with me at the inquest. That hedged the sink he played me on the other, where I’m concerned.”
    I actually understood most of that. It was like border Spanish; it made sense if you didn’t think too hard or try to speak it yourself. I couldn’t tell where Beecher stood. He was enjoying his cigar.
    â€œWhy do you think Wheelock spoke up for you?” I asked.
    â€œWho knows what goes through a nob’s knolly? I put on this neckweed every day so as not to disremember how near I come to mounting the ladder.” She touched the ribbon at her throat. “I don’t mind saying it takes the sting out when the ponce comes for his