“When did the connection end?”
She blinks at Swan. “Ah, a week—ten days ago, perhaps—” How to pick one moment and say that’s when love ended, or when it was found to never have been there at all? “He formed a vicious grudge against Jenny.” Against me, really, she wants to say. Because it was Blanche who shamed him by refusing to service the American he brought home, and before that, because she wouldn’t go near him during his smallpox, and before that, because she carried the baby home from Folsom Street, and because, because—there’s always another layer to the onion. But saying any of that will lead to Blanche having to explain her conviction that it was her, not Jenny, the gun was aimed at, and that strikes her as an unnecessary complication for a jury whose members are looking more than a little bewildered already.
“A grudge of what nature?”
“He—” Blanche fumbles for words. How to simplify enough that the jurors get the main point, which is that Arthur’s the murderer? “He was furious with Jenny because—I was going about with her a bit this summer, and he thought it was she who put it into my head to break with him.”
“Was it?”
“No! I left him because—I couldn’t bring myself to—” No, Blanche mustn’t tell the story of the micheton Arthur and Ernest brought back to the apartment, because that’ll just fix her in every listener’s mind as a harlot.
“Miss Beunon?” Wearily.
“He took my baby!” It comes out of her in a wail.
“There’s no reference here to any baby,” says Swan, flicking through his notes.
“Our little boy, one year old,” Blanche adds. Does she sound sad enough? Her sorrow is real, Christ knows, but it’s hard to display it on demand. “He—Arthur and Ernest, they stole him away from me.”
“This would be …” The coroner scans the pages. “Ernest Girard. Where is this child now?”
“I don’t—” Her voice is shaking too much for her to finish.
Swan asks no more. Makes a note.
Blanche closes her eyes. If P’tit is dead already, then she’s doing the right thing by denouncing the bastards who did it. And if by any chance he isn’t—
She sees herself visiting Ernest in jail tonight and crisply demanding to know her child’s whereabouts. If P’tit’s alive, why wouldn’t Ernest give him back to her at this point? She might even be able to make him fork over some of her stolen money. Anything’s possible, now Ernest’s under lock and key.
So she spills out more and more, eager to make the jury understand before Swan can interrupt her. “The two men stayed in my apartment—the building I owned, the whole building, number eight fifteen Sacramento Street—and then, I learned just yesterday that they sold it out from under me for eighteen hundred dollars. Arthur stole two or three hundred more in cash from me besides that, and took it all away overseas. Left me with only the clothes I have on.” Does all this sound too mercenary? “But my child,” she cries, “all that matters is—”
Swan interrupts with a question. “Did this Deneve make actual threats against the deceased?”
Blanche hesitates. “Yes.” Ernest did, on Waverly Place, and he must have had Arthur’s approval, because Arthur was the master in that pair. “He and Girard … They tried to have Jenny arrested.” That’s a mistake; why bring up Jenny’s criminal record? Hurry on. “They said they’d fix her, throw vitriol in her face.” Blanche is embellishing, but only a little. “Oh, and another time, I forgot to say, Arthur begged me to return to him, he went down on his knees—” If she’s going to beef this up she might as well make it a good full-blooded scene, and after all, she’s not lying, exactly, just filling in the gaps, the times when she wasn’t there. For all Arthur’s bravado, there must have been moments when the scarred man wept for the loss of Blanche, mustn’t there? “And Ernest cried out, ‘Don’t fret, Arthur, I’ll avenge you, I’ll blow out the brains of these two infernal whores!’”
That last expression raises a satisfied hiss from the crowd.
There. It’s done. Blanche takes a long breath.
Swan’s expression is dubious.
Blanche is barely paying attention as he takes her through the events at San Miguel Station (which sound so petty—rides and meals, as if she and Jenny were on a pleasure jaunt to a seaside resort). But when he asks about the black eyes, she blinks. “Yes, Jenny fell off a horse against a tree.” Plausible? But if you fell off a horse, surely what you’d hit would be the ground. “I mean, she rode smack into a low-hanging branch, and then she fell down,” Blanche adds. Chut, don’t overcomplicate it.
“Was she drunk?” asks Swan.
Blanche doesn’t want the jurymen to think of Jenny as a no-account dipso, because then they won’t care who killed her, but she must make the accident credible. “She … had some taken.”
“Mr. McNamara has testified that Bonnet drank all Thursday evening,” says Swan, “and that you prevented her from going back to the City.”
“I reasoned with her,” Blanche corrects him, “for her own safety.” Safety? Dead an hour later. Guilt turns Blanche’s tongue to stone in her mouth.
“Now, the deceased got into bed before you, yes?”
Blanche nods. “I sat—I was sitting on the edge.”
“What were her last words?”
She won’t cry, not here in front of all these gaping strangers. As if a person’s last words matter so much more than all the others. “She didn’t say anything.”
“Nothing?”
Qu’est-ce, that’s all Blanche remembers hearing after the gunfire, which could have been the start of Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça? or Qu’est-ce qui m’est arrivé? But maybe it was an English word after all, it occurs to her now, that choking guttural, then a final hiss in the dark: kiss, is that what she heard? Could Jenny have been asking for a kiss before all the life spurted out of her? But Jenny had never asked Blanche for any favors—not a shirt, not a dollar, and certainly not a kiss.
“One final point that troubles me, Miss Beunon,” says Coroner Swan. “You told Detective Bohen that you were crouched down, untying a gaiter, just when, outside the window, the murderer was aiming the gun?”
She bristles; crouched down, that sounds deliberate, surreptitious. Could he be implying that she was in on the plot? “I didn’t know, did I?” As if Blanche’s body could have been expected to feel the danger coming. People have no idea of the things that don’t happen to them—the lives they’re not living, the deaths stalking them—and thank Christ for that. Hard enough to get through each day without glimpsing all the hovering possibilities, like insects thickening the air.
“Does it not strike you as more than a little coincidental?”
Blanche shrugs rudely. Coincidences happen all the time. Fate touches one fingertip to the spinning top and knocks it over. What was it but fate, that hot night on Kearny Street, that made Jenny crash her high-wheeler into Blanche out of all the hundreds of thousands of people in San Francisco?
But Swan’s still brooding. “Let’s consider the statistical probability of your just so happening to bend over at the very moment the assassin pulled the trigger. You dipped out of the line of fire, with the consequence that the eight bullets went right over you, within inches of your body.”
What does he want Blanche to say? That she’s sorry she’s alive?
“It strains credulity,” mutters Swan. “That’s all.”
She waits. Oh, he means she can get down?
“No more witnesses,” declares the clerk as Blanche steps into the crowd.
That’s it? But nobody’s jumped up with the missing pieces of the puzzle, Blanche thinks, bereft.
The waiting’s hard to bear. The audience members shuffle, chat, eat nuts, sip from little flasks.
Then a surge as the jury files back into the airless room. Do these men’s faces bear the righteous expression of Americans who’ve determined to send a pair of Frogs to the gallows? Blanche can’t read them at all.
The forema
n is hoarse with nerves but still seems to relish his moment in the limelight. “We find that the deceased came to her death by violence, by gunshot wounds specifically—” He clears his throat.
She wishes he’d get on with it.
“—at the hands of persons unknown to the jury.”
Blanche almost groans. Is that old news all this rigmarole of an inquest has come up with?
“But we further find that, in the opinion of this jury, the evidence strongly points to Arthur Deneve and Ernest Girard as principals or accessories to the crime of murder.”
Murmurs of excitement in court.
Ah, now, this is more like it, this might do the trick. Principals or accessories: that has a serious ring to it. Is that enough to drag Arthur back from wherever he’s run to? France, even? And Ernest, locked up in a police cell. They’ll hold him now till they’ve squeezed enough evidence out of him. Surely he’ll pay in some measure for those eight bullets?
“Thank you, gentlemen,” says Swan. If he’s disappointed that the jury didn’t reach any more definite conclusion, he clearly believes it would be improper to show it. “Funeral to follow at two p.m. sharp.”
Blanche stumbles out with the crowd.
Her stomach growls, startling her. She hasn’t eaten today. Strange, how the petty needs continue to clamor in the middle of serious ones.
Detective Bohen stands on the sidewalk outside Gray’s, holding forth to newspapermen. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say the rate of bloodshed has doubled during this unseasonable heat, although—”
He’s interrupted. “What does it cost to hire a killer in this City, sir?”
“From two hundred up to a thousand dollars, according to our sources,” says Bohen.
“Have you received offers of aid of a clairvoyant nature?”
“Unsolicited offers, yes, as usual, but—”
“Mr. Bohen?” Blanche calls.
He glances at her.
She needs to know. “Principals or accessories: Is that enough?”
He frowns.
The newsmen scribble in their notebooks and smirk at Blanche.
Bohen draws her aside, barely touching her elbow. “Miss Beunon—” The reporters float a little closer. “Gentlemen,” he barks over his shoulder at them, then leads Blanche a few steps away.
“Is the verdict enough to hang Girard, at least?” she hisses.
“Persons unknown is the pertinent phrase.”
“But the jury—”
“Only a coroner’s jury, and all they have is a hunch. It may be a hunch on which I look with some sympathy, but it’s no more than that.”
“But the evidence says—it points to the two of them, that’s what the foreman said,” says Blanche, hearing herself whine.
“A criminal case requires more than pointing, Miss Beunon,” he snaps. “I’ve heard no proof of either Deneve or Girard traveling to San Miguel Station on Thursday or inducing someone else to do so.”
Her mind is spinning with frustration. “Well, can’t you interrogate Ernest—tell him it’ll be him or Arthur who’ll pay for this, come down on him hard—”
“I can only imagine what kind of methods are used in Parisian police stations,” says Bohen coldly, “and occasionally I do envy your gendarmes the free rein they’re given. It is highly inconvenient that our citizens have the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty.”
She grits her teeth. These smug Americans and their rights. “I just mean, shouldn’t a prisoner be made to tell all he knows?”
“This morning, Girard told all he needed to tell, which was that he spent Thursday evening in the lodgings he shares with one Madeleine George. A fact that Miss George promptly confirmed, leaving us with no further justification to hold him.”
Blanche blinks. Madeleine? That salope! “But a woman would always lie for her man.”
“There were other witnesses, acquaintances who visited the pair that evening.”
She almost snarls. “Well, even if that’s true, Ernest could have hired some hoodlum—”
“So could anyone, Miss Beunon—so could you, for that matter—but there’s no proof.”
She might take offense at that, but something’s stuck in her head, something the man said a minute ago. No further justification to hold him. “You ain’t going to let Ernest go yet?”
“As a matter of fact, he was released some hours ago.”
The cry that comes out of her mouth sounds like it’s made by some small animal seized by a hawk.
The detective’s face creases with annoyance. “These things take time. Slowly but surely, with a rigorous application of logic—”
Blanche stumbles away from him without another word.
“Miss Beunon?” Now it’s Cartwright of the Chronicle at her elbow.
She shakes the reporter off. “You told me half an hour ago that Ernest was in jail, but they’ve already let him out!”
“Is that so?” He grimaces. “Look, miss, I’m doing my best.”
“Doing your best to sell fish wrap.”
“I hope boosting sales of the Chronicle’s not incompatible with striving for justice—”
“You’re all bull,” she cuts in. “Inventing Jenny’s last words! ‘Adieu, I follow my sister …’”
“If I leave anything out, the editor fills it in,” says Cartwright, sheepish. “I’m afraid what we term the news is something of a crazy quilt of fact and fiction.”
But Blanche has turned away, quickly leaving the newsman behind.
There’s that monstrosity of an organ at the corner, the automata still ducking and waving to “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Blanche goes the other way to escape its din.
What has she done?
P’tit’s slipped through her fingers one last time.
She decided to be clever today, didn’t she, to put on a dazzling turn, defy Ernest’s warnings, laugh him to scorn while he was in the lockup. When all morning he’s been walking the streets, a free man. Standing in the crowd at Gray’s, perhaps, face obscured under a tilted hat, listening to every rash word escaping from Blanche’s mouth? Whether Ernest heard her in person or whether he’s going to read it in the papers later, he’ll come to the same conclusion: that bitch has played her last card.
VII
BANG AWAY
Her first morning in San Miguel Station, Wednesday, the thirteenth of September, Blanche wakes to the sight of Jenny in a pair of blue overalls riveted together with what look like beads of brass. “What in the world have you got on?”
“Only cost me two bucks,” says Jenny, grinning over her shoulder as she adjusts her belt, “and the fellow swore they’ll outlive me.”
“Just don’t ever wear them into the City or you’ll start a riot.”
Jenny slides her Colt out from under her side of the mattress.
“I thought you were going frogging at the pond,” says Blanche.
“It’s gone green in the heat. Frogs turn up their noses at scum.”
“I didn’t know they had noses.”
Jenny grins, pulling a box of cartridges out of her satchel.
“So what are you planning to hunt instead?” Blanche asks.
A guffaw. “Who goes hunting with a revolver?”
“I never claimed to know or care about guns,” snaps Blanche.
“Thought I’d give the kids some target practice,” Jenny explains.
When Blanche finally crawls out of bed, half an hour later, and emerges from the Eight Mile House in a wrapper, she finds the three younger McNamaras in a knot around Jenny.
“You’re aiming high,” Jenny’s telling John Jr.
“Am not.” The boy fires again and misses the bale of straw.
“You ain’t flinching, at least.”
Another bang; straw puffs at the very corner of the bale. “Dang it!”
Blanche is charmed by the childish euphemism that the twelve-year-old mumbles as if it’s a serious cuss.
“Accuracy’s a sigh
t harder with a handgun,” Jenny comforts him. “Care to show Miss Blanche what you can do with your old varmint gun instead? I once saw this boy hit a can at thirty yards,” she tells Blanche.
Blanche widens her eyes. “I don’t believe it.”
John Jr. blushes as red as he might if Blanche rubbed up against him. She didn’t mean to flirt, exactly; it’s just her stock-in-trade.
“Go get it,” Jenny tells the boy.
“Dadda sold the varmint gun, a month back,” he mutters, squinting at the target as he lifts the revolver again. This time, the bale thuds and sends up a cough of dust.
“Now that’s the ticket,” murmurs Blanche.
John Jr. doesn’t look at her, but he’s flushed to the tips of his ears, and she can’t help enjoying this little exercise of her powers.
Jeremiah’s whining about it being his turn.
“I’ll hold it with you,” says his sister Kate.
“No.”
“Otherwise you’ll shoot your foot off, you know you will.”
“All by self!”
Blanche thinks of P’tit. Of all the dangers he could be getting into wherever he may be.
The squabbling brings Ellen McNamara out and breaks up the lesson. With a few martyred sighs—“Breakfast’s cleared away hours ago”—she agrees to toast a couple pieces of bread while Blanche is dressing.
Looking out through the dust-caked window of the saloon a quarter of an hour later, Blanche spots Jenny unhitching the horse from the buggy that has Marshall’s stenciled on the side. She runs out, still chewing her toast. “Where are you off to?” It comes out more shrill than she meant it to.
“There’s a creek up on Sweeney Ridge where I always catch a sackful,” says Jenny, nodding toward the hills to the south. “Care to come along?”
Blanche hesitates, looks down at her polka-dot skirt. She doesn’t want to be stuck at the Eight Mile House on her own all day, but …
“Don’t let all your froufrou prevent you. John Jr. can lend you a pair of overalls.”
“Not on your life.”
But Blanche goes back to the bedroom and removes her bustle, at least, and swaps her white mules for a pair of flattish boots. She borrows the boy’s golden-brown pony. Offers to rent her, that is, but John Jr. stammers something about any friend of Jenny’s being a friend of his. Blanche rewards him with her silkiest smile.
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