A Race to Splendor

by Ciji Ware

  In the middle of the uproar, J.D. leaned down and retrieved the five playing cards from the floor and then stood to his full height. Addressing the wide-eyed circle of dignitaries and wedding guests, he declared in stentorian tones.

  “It’s quite all right, everybody! No harm done. Fortunately, Miss Bradshaw here is a tad nearsighted and therefore a terrible shot, so no one got hurt.” He gently seized Amelia’s weapon from her trembling hand and stuck the small pistol into a pocket of his dress jacket. “In case anyone was wondering, though, this wedding is canceled. But, by all means, let the party continue!”

  Stunned silence greeted this announcement. Meanwhile, J.D. smiled warmly at Matilda, who beamed back, an unmistakable expression of relief written across her angular features. Next to her, Emma Stivers whirled around and the two women embraced. He turned to reassure his mother, who appeared shaken but calm.

  “Please, Mayor Taylor… everybody,” J.D. loudly addressed the crowd, “stay and drink the champagne, eat the marvelous food prepared by our chefs, dance the night away. And do enjoy the view of the bay on the lovely moonlight this evening. The genuine fireworks should commence at around nine o’clock.”

  He nodded briskly at a couple of doormen who had rushed to the ballroom at the sound of gunshots. “Will the members of my staff please show Mr. Kemp to his room?” he requested, pointing to Ezra’s prone, unconscious figure.

  He paused, and the ballroom grew deathly silent. With a grin spreading across his features he declared in stentorian tones, “Amelia Hunter Bradshaw and James Diaz Thayer hereby declare the Bay View Hotel officially open for business!”

  A rousing cheer went up as J.D. leaned toward the head bellman and said under his breath, “Tony, take Miss Bradshaw’s weapon, along with the Winton, and get the other bellmen to help you. Escort Mr. Kemp to the next Sausalito ferry and see that he boards it. Remain on the wharf until the boat is at least halfway across the bay. Understood?”

  Kemp was speedily conveyed from the ballroom and J.D. signaled for the musicians to take up their stringed instruments and attack Mozart once again. A low murmur among the astonished throng soon swelled into a cacophony of explosive chattering. Waiters began circulating with more champagne and hors’ d’oeuvres, and within minutes, the party was once again in full swing. Meanwhile, Hopper and London stood to one side, scribbling furiously into their reporters’ notebooks.

  Amelia winced when J.D. grabbed her hand in an iron grip. “Come with me,” he said. “I have a few things left to say to you.”

  “As do I!” Amelia retorted.

  ***

  J.D. and Amelia didn’t exchange a word as they rode the elevator to the basement floor. Once inside J.D.’s office, he locked the door and gestured for her to take a seat. Amelia chose to remain standing, though, while J.D. sat in his leather chair.

  “On the morning of the quake,” he said, “here’s what I saw. Your father began to put down a series of cards on the table, face up. I certainly was aware that he was on his way to a royal flush.”

  Amelia inhaled a deep breath and slowly took her seat. “What else did you see?”

  “As you know, we were playing five-card stud. Drawing a royal flush is a one-in-a-million thing.”

  “But it happens.”

  “In all my years of gambling, I’ve seen only one.”

  “My father’s.”

  “No. One other. I was barely eighteen.”

  She pointed to the five cards J.D. had put on the desk. “Well, now you’ve seen your second.”

  Without agreeing, he said, “As I told you, I saw your father begin to turn over the fifth card just as the first shock hit. I heard him shout ‘Hot damn!’ but I never clearly saw that last card.” Amelia narrowed her gaze. “At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself for fifteen months.”

  She sank into the chair opposite J.D., silenced by the effect this equivocal revelation had on her. Finally, she replied, “Although what you’ve just said bolsters my case, I cannot tell you how disappointing it is that you knew much more about that night than you ever had the decency to tell me.”

  “I know,” he said quietly. “And you have every right to feel betrayed. Why would your father have shouted ‘Hot damn!’ if his luck hadn’t changed?”

  “Exactly! Yet, the night you and I made love, J.D., I asked you if you’d seen the five cards. You said, ‘I didn’t see much of anything at that moment.’” She regarded him steadily across his desk. “You simply lied to me, J.D.”

  “You asked if I’d seen what your father held in his hand—and I hadn’t. Not all five cards. Not clearly. I had only a second’s glimpse of the four before he laid the last one on the table at the moment the rumbling began. As I said, the quake hit just as I heard him shout.”

  “That’s splitting hairs, J.D. You gave no details of any of this on the night you shared my bed.”

  “It was my bed, if you’ll recall. Sears and Roebuck’s finest.” When Amelia didn’t smile, he continued somberly, “I know it sounds a very lame excuse at this juncture, but the night you and I became lovers, Amelia, I’d have said or done almost anything to keep you next to me.”

  Amelia pounded her gloved fist on his desk. “You prevaricated to get what you wanted! How will I ever know now, if you lied about this because you wanted me… or just my body… or you simply wanted to keep the hotel under your thumb?”

  He paused. “I am an imperfect man, Amelia, as well as a man who loves you very much. Before I knew you, I fought and schemed and put up with your father’s drinking and recklessness and Kemp’s double-dealing for months. And when I survived that earthquake and escaped that fire and recovered from a punctured lung, I swore I would bring this hotel back to life one day. Your father’s possible winning hand stood in the way in those chaotic days following the quake. Back then I wasn’t really sure he’d actually drawn it and there was no proof of it anymore, so I pushed it out of my mind.”

  “You lied,” she repeated softly. “You lied by omission. To me.”

  “I had just begun to fall in love with you and I didn’t want the issue of who owned the hotel to stand between us. I was a very confused hombre the morning after we were together, believe me.”

  Amelia was torn between wanting to believe him and thinking about leopards never changing their spots. “But the hotel wasn’t yours or my father’s to play cards with in the first place,” she reminded him. “It’s always belonged to my mother and me. My lawsuit—which I lost because you secured a crooked judge to hear the case—made that very clear!”

  “In the last months, I began to see all this from your point of view, but by then I’d invested every cent I had in this place. Fifteen months ago, though, I just didn’t think of it in that light. And I didn’t really know on the night we made love what I know now. I didn’t really know you. I made love, but I didn’t know love. Not like now.”

  “Oh please, J.D.!” she scoffed. “If I hadn’t arrived toting a pistol just now, you’d be a married man. So much for loving me.”

  “We will get to that in a minute, but first I want to be clear on the ownership of the Bay View.”

  “Nothing will satisfy me but your admission that the hotel belonged to my mother and me when you played cards for it.”

  J.D. laughed harshly. “I admit that.”

  “You do?” she asked, the wind of fury taken out of her sails.

  “Yes, I do. I see many things differently now.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the importance of having at least one person in the world to whom I tell the unvarnished truth, as you call it.”

  It was Amelia’s turn to laugh bitterly. “And now that you have—rather late in the game, I might add—it has not particularly endeared you to me, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, I’ve discovered that it will endear me to myself.”

  “Then tell me the truth about this. Why in the world did you and Kemp and my father ever go into business together to build the ga
mbling club?”

  J.D. clasped his hands on the desk and leaned toward her as if imparting a secret. Under his neatly trimmed black mustache his lips had a faint curve of amusement.

  “I might as well confess that I’ve always lusted after this address.”

  Amelia set her lips in a hard line. He was obviously attempting to manipulate her with his charm.

  “Why does that not surprise me?” Amelia said, but J.D. ignored her aside.

  “When your grandfather became so ill, your father, for all intents and purposes, controlled the hotel. You were in Paris, and then your mother also decamped for France. Henry, of course, had no notion how to run the place successfully and was gambling away and drinking up his meager profits. I had limited funds, but the know-how to make the enterprise work. And I figured I could raise the needed funds through the kind of venture I knew best and save the place from complete ruination.”

  “By building a gambling club?”

  “Yes, gambling. It had become my profession, like architecture is yours. Kemp could handily supply the lumber to build the annex at below cost. For about a half minute I thought, ‘It’s a match made in heaven.’”

  “And then you three started goading each other into all those winner-take-all contests,” Amelia said with disgust. “The first day I met you, you’d been playing cards for hours with the hotel as collateral.”

  “The trouble was,” J.D. explained, “practically from the first, each of us wanted to get rid of the other two and control the Bay View without partners. We were forever trying to snare each other in ridiculous all-night poker marathons.”

  “Did you, Kemp, or my father feel no remorse whatsoever for stealing the property you knew belonged to my mother and me?” she demanded.

  J.D. paused and faintly shook his head. “Before I met you? No. I barely recalled I’d ever even known you, nor did I know about your close relationship with your grandfather. During his illness, your father stepped in to run the place, as tradition allowed. He challenged me to a game, betting the hotel in lieu of cash, and I won it. I’m ashamed to say, not one of us gave you or your mother a moment’s thought.”

  “That’s outrageous!”

  J.D. nodded. “You’ve asked for the unvarnished truth, remember. But that was before I knew you, Amelia! Or thought about such inequities to women.”

  Ignoring this concession she demanded, “And what about the inequity of selling the sexual services of unwilling women in your club? How did you justify that?”

  “We didn’t sell their services.”

  “Oh please, J.D.!”

  “We employed no prostitutes,” he replied, his expression hardening.

  “So much for telling one person the unvarnished truth,” she snapped.

  Just as she had, he slammed his fist on the desk. “But it’s true! First of all, the women all worked for me, not for your father or Kemp. They were paid wages as housemaids and barmaids and nothing else.”

  “Well, what about Ling Lee?” she accused. “You never paid her—indirectly perhaps—for her ‘services’?”

  J.D. regarded her silently for a moment. Then he said, “You may consider me prejudiced against the women in your class, Amelia, but I think you should examine your own biases. I was Ling Lee’s protector.” For the next several minutes, he described Ling Lee’s life as a woman kidnapped as a young girl in China and forced into prostitution. Amelia couldn’t help but be skeptical.

  “How did you even know her in the first place?”

  “She came to me for help after she escaped the highbinders in China Alley, and I provided it.”

  “What about her little daughter? Isn’t she yours?”

  “No.”

  “No? Well, whose is she then?”

  “Wing Lee is my father’s child.”

  Amelia’s mouth fell slightly ajar. “Your father’s? But Wing Lee’s mother was your lover!” Amelia scooped up the playing cards and her velvet purse from the desk. “Dear God, J.D., what else is there left to say?”

  J.D.’s eyes narrowed and Amelia felt a pinprick of guilt, even though she believed she was clearly the injured party.

  “Despite your prejudiced assumptions, Amelia, Ling Lee was not my lover,” he said, “she was my friend. And the mother of my half sister. She was also the victim of my father’s lust and the highbinders’ greed. The only way I could protect her was to make the world think the worst of both of us.”

  “You were never…?”

  “No. We were not intimate. Lovely as she was, it would have felt like incest to take my father’s unwilling concubine to bed, especially when she had been dealt such great injustice by him.”

  Amelia felt like running from the room in shame and self-recrimination, but the sad, bitter expression on J.D.’s features kept her frozen in her seat. Fragments of past conversations flitted through her mind, statements by J.D. that carefully skirted the question of his purported romantic involvement with Ling Lee.

  “Oh, J.D.,” she murmured. “I am so, so sorry. Please forgive me. Why didn’t I simply ask you outright about her, instead of imagining phantoms?”

  “We both made some inaccurate assumptions, I think we could say,” J.D. allowed.

  “Poor, poor woman, to have been subjected to such a life. But then why did your mother join mine in supporting Miss Cameron’s efforts to combat prostitution in Chinatown? Didn’t she know her husband was one of the main perpetrators of those crimes against women?”

  “No, she did not. My poor mother joined Donaldina Cameron’s crusade solely at the insistence of my father. Big Jim figured her charitable work with Miss Cameron was the perfect foil while he invested behind-the-scenes in several lucrative brothels. He and Kemp earned much of their fortunes as silent partners in a number of bawdy houses in Chinatown. They did it quietly and anonymously while running other legitimate businesses. In the case of my father, his aboveboard enterprises, including his law firm, garnered him respect and admiration from the entire community.”

  “A member of the Committee of Fifty…” mused Amelia. “One of our revered City Fathers.”

  “As you may have deduced from your visit to China Alley that night, that brothel that he co-owned with a few fellow ‘civic leaders’ specializes in providing virgins and young boys to a certain clientele. It provided a lucrative opportunity, and my father—canny businessman that he is—seized it.”

  Amelia shook her head in amazement. “Who could possibly dream that your father would be party to such a despicable thing?” Amelia wondered aloud. “My mother was always holding him up to Father as an example of a ‘decent husband who provides for his family.’”

  “In his younger years,” J.D. continued, “this purportedly decent man had a certain, unquenchable taste for nubile, innocent girls, and how better to indulge in these proclivities than to secretly invest with their procurers? When Ling Lee realized she was going to have my father’s baby, she begged Loy Chen, who was from her village in Canton, to help her escape from China Alley. Ling Lee’s only hope was that I, as his son and with some small influence around San Francisco, would take pity on her—and I did. Loy and I took her to Donaldina Cameron’s mission before her confinement.”

  “Then why did she come to live with you after she had her baby?”

  “Because of religion.”

  “What? Unless I missed something, you’re not a member of the faithful, J.D.”

  “Ling Lee had refused to become a Christian. She suddenly appeared at my door, extremely distraught. She felt she couldn’t stay at Miss Cameron’s Mission Home any longer and forsake her religion. She pleaded with me to take her in again. She said she wished to live as a Buddhist, in accordance with the teachings of her family, and respectably earn her way in the world.”

  “But why didn’t she want her own child to live with her?”

  “She had left Wing Lee at the Mission Home when she came to live under my protection because she knew it was the safest way to provide her some small
education and to shield her from the slave merchants who might kidnap the little girl to recoup their investment in her escaped mother.”

  “Ah. Well, I can see why Miss Cameron might not completely understand the arrangement you two had.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t. From then on, wherever I lived became Ling Lee’s ‘safe house,’ a place where James Thayer and the Chinese brothel owners—whose property she was—couldn’t get to her because they knew I wouldn’t let them. My father guessed Ling Lee had told me the entire story of his raping her, so he simply shunned me as his wayward son.”

  “Didn’t Kemp object to this charitable enterprise of yours?”

  “Kemp never knew Ling Lee by sight during her China Alley days, so he assumed she was my concubine and never surmised the true situation between us. When he got drunk enough, he’d come in a secret door at the brothel, preferring to be entertained by young men rather than the women who worked there, so he never harassed Ling Lee, thank God. At the Bay View, all the Chinese workers dressed alike and looked alike to him.”

  “This is unbelievable!” Amelia exclaimed. “Did your father ever acknowledge Wing Lee as his child?”

  “No. Even now, he tries to deny she’s his daughter and says she’s mine. He claims he couldn’t identify the child’s mother if she’d stood in front of him, and I believe him.”

  Amelia closed her eyes. “This is so ghastly. Poor little Wing.”

  “Wing’s mother was a month shy of her seventeenth birthday by the time I took her in permanently,” J.D. mused, as if to himself. “She taught me her skill on the abacus. She proposed that she earn her keep as my accountant.” He gazed out the window with a faraway look. “Ling Lee had been abused by my father. I could only think of her and her daughter as my kin, and that’s the way we lived.”

  “And so Wing Lee is your half sister by blood,” repeated Amelia as the full impact of J.D.’s story began to sink in.

  He pulled his gaze back from the window. “Ling visited her child often at the Mission Home. Until recently, Miss Cameron was deeply disappointed that her charge refused to convert to Christianity and held me somewhat responsible.” J.D. laughed shortly. “Even more damning, Ling Lee lived under my roof without a chaperone.”