Emperor Norton's Ghost

by Dianne Day

  Unfortunately, the documents themselves did not include information as to the extent of the dead women’s individual assets. Well, I was not a banker’s daughter for nothing; perhaps I could find that out myself.

  Ingrid Swann had left nothing to her husband, but she had not excluded him by name, either—which could present a problem at some time down the road for her principal heir, Ngaio, the supposed brother.

  I sighed, told Edna I’d be taking the papers back to my desk, and accepted several little note slips with her telephone messages. In a rather unhappy daze I went into the conference room. I was thinking that by finding Conrad Higgins I might have caused a significant problem for Ngaio, whom I had not yet met (he or she seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth or at any rate off the streets of San Francisco), but was predisposed to like. I found myself quite partial to the idea of Ngaio Swann as a woman. The problem was, since Ingrid aka Myra Higgins had never divorced Conrad, as husband and therefore legal next of kin, he had an excellent case for breaking the will, particularly if Ngaio were not only not really a brother but not even a male. And even if Conrad was in too drunken a stupor himself to do it, he could always hire someone, some sharp lawyer probably, to accomplish that very thing for him. Which would put poor Ngaio out in the cold.

  Of course, he—Conrad—would have to think of it first, and to tell the truth, the thinking department had not seemed to be his forte.

  How to track down Ngaio Swann? What would he or she know? Was it a good idea to try? Or would I be going down yet another false trail, taking precious time, getting nowhere?

  “Fremont!” Edna yelled out.

  I did not reply; I had asked her many times not to yell between the rooms, but to no avail. I knew my lack of reply would not deter her as long as her son was not at his desk. If Wish were in the room, all he had to do was look at his mother with the tiniest of frowns and she would stop whatever it was that she happened to be doing that bothered him. Then as soon as his back was turned, or he had left the house, she would be back at it. Edna Stephenson was quite incorrigible.

  “Wish is coming back here at noon, said he’d bring lunch. Should be here any minute,” she said at the top of her big voice. “Thought you’d want to know.”

  “Thank you!” I called back. I did indeed want to know that.

  There was something I had been thinking about ever since Wish told me about his guest status at the various men’s clubs around town and, by God, I was going to do it.

  “Strike while the iron is hot,” I muttered; then winced as it came out sounding such a bland platitude. However at the moment I couldn’t think of one more original that was also apt.

  And then, because Edna was such a champion overreactor that I never, ever wanted to take her by surprise, I went and told her what I intended to do.

  I’d felt uncertain how Edna would react. She was, after all, an older woman and somebody’s mother. But I needn’t have worried. As she had declared on her very first day at J&K, Edna Stephenson was a modern woman—with the added fillip of a delightful sense of mischief.

  “Oooh, Fremont, I think that’s just dandy. I can’t wait to see the look on my son’s face. You run along upstairs and change. He could show up at any minute, so you go on now, you scoot, and we’ll see you after a little while back in the kitchen for our noon meal.”

  “You’re a dear,” I said, bending down and giving her a quick hug.

  Then I went upstairs and began the process of turning myself, once again, into a young man: Trousers, shirt, stiff high collar, suspenders, vest, socks and shoes. And then, a new addition to the outfit: a wig, bought at the same theatrical shop where I’d obtained the mustache, because after all a man cannot keep his hat on at all times.

  “Thank heavens I thought of that,” I said to my reflection in the mirror as I began to wind my long hair around and around the crown of my head, pinning it down tightly as I’d been shown. The wig was a good one, of human hair (one did not like to think whence it might have come, but at least it did look natural) in a reddish brown quite close to the shade of my own. Rather than attempt to approximate today’s predominantly sleek male hairstyle, the shop’s makeup artist (whom I had taken into my confidence, explaining that I was in the private investigation business) had suggested that I play up the impression of myself as a youth, with the wig’s hair being a little longer, slightly unruly, to more readily accommodate the bulk of my own hair underneath.

  It did take a bit of pulling and tugging, and was none too comfortable, especially considering I did not even like to wear hats; but eventually I had the wig in place and was sufficiently pleased with the results that I decided I could forgo the mustache. And that would be a blessing, because the latter was far less comfortable than the wig; also probably more likely to be detectable should anyone subject me to serious scrutiny.

  As I was tying my tie, from downstairs I heard the front door open. Wish called out a tentative “Ma?” and Edna returned an effusive, cackling greeting. True to her word, by the time I was donning shoes and socks I heard the sound of their footsteps as she shepherded her son back to the kitchen. Minutes later I joined them there.

  Wish’s face underwent several transmogrifications in succession, before his voice at last issued from the round, gaping hole that had previously been his mouth: “It can’t be! But it is. It is you, isn’t it, Fremont?”

  “The very same,” I allowed with a small bow. Then I took my place at the table and calmly began to fill my plate. The food was Chinese today, but it could have come from anywhere for all I tasted of it. With the donning of my disguise, a more fundamental change had come over me: I was out to catch a killer, and I wanted to do it in the worst possible way—with a vengeance.

  ———

  Wish’s guest passes carried the name Aloysius Bell. I became Timothy Bell, another cousin. I gathered that the man Wish had been paid to track must be yet another Bell … and if so, then so must be the wife. All these Bells. I wanted to make a joke of it, whisper Ding-dong in Wish’s ear or some such, but I refrained.

  “You’ll do just fine,” Wish reassured me as we boarded the California Street cable car. “The disguise is good enough. Just watch how you walk, and try not to talk. Leave the talking to me. You can be a country cousin, a young man just at that awkward stage of leaving adolescence. Boys that age always act goofy and gawk, so do a little of both. And at that age there isn’t necessarily much facial hair. All right?”

  “I shall make every effort,” I assured him acerbically, rolling my eyes. I had no intention whatever of acting goofy or gawky; I should not be any good at it, I would just have to be a quiet, polite young man. With somewhat unruly hair.

  We went to three clubs in succession that afternoon: the Pacific Union, the Parnassus, and the Native Sons. This last turned out to have nothing whatever to do with natives that I could see, being unaccountably the stuffiest of them all; whereas I had thought the Pacific Union, from its august reputation, would fill that bill.

  Our game plan in each club was simple. Wish presented his credentials; he was recognized and quietly welcomed, on account of his patron having called ahead; he in turn introduced me as his guest, and we proceeded inside. Now of course I had long been exceedingly curious as to what really went on in such places, as they do not allow women except on the occasional ladies’ night, when one assumes the members are on their best behavior. (Father had assured me this was not so when I had pestered him into taking me to his club on several occasions; only I’d discovered to my disappointment that it was all rather boring, and the food was nowhere near as good as Locke-Ober’s.)

  What really went on in San Francisco’s bastions of masculinity turned out to be about what one would expect: A lot of smoking, some drinking, much reading of newspapers and magazines, and as we surmised, in some rooms where Wish and I were not invited to go, some gentlemanly gambling at cards.

  I did look the part of the country cousin in my secondhand suit, wh
ereas Wish played the debonair with a flair I hadn’t known he possessed. And indeed, I did not think he had possessed it two years earlier.

  He has learned a lot from Michael, I thought, watching and listening to Wish at the Pacific Union Club from behind the pages of an open issue of San Francisco magazine. There was in this magazine an article so fascinating I was hard put to keep my mind on my job; it told of plans on the part of the city fathers to have San Francisco designated a host city for one of the World’s Fairs sometime in the next decade. This would, the article claimed, bring more money flowing into the City’s rebuilding coffers. And, not coincidentally, would encourage visitors to come to our fairest of cities again by showing how thoroughly we had recovered from the earthquake and that we had no fear—no siree—of another coming along to demolish us again. At least, not any time soon.

  That had been, as I said, at the Pacific Union Club. Wish had obtained there some information about the Bell he was ringing, er, tracking; but I had overheard nothing about Jeremy McFadden, nor had Wish been able to elicit any conversation on the topic of McFadden even when he had specifically asked. Wish’s story was that he had money to invest in some scheme McFadden was backing anonymously.

  “They stick together,” said Wish with some discomfort as we were walking to our second stop, the Parnassus Club—McFadden’s own club, where we were much more likely to have the kind of results I wanted.

  At the door, as we were being admitted in the usual routine, Wish quietly inquired if Mr. Jeremy McFadden might happen to be in and was told that he was, indeed, having a late lunch with another member in the dining room. “Shall I announce you, sir?” the employee at the door asked Wish, who shook his head.

  “No need, I don’t want to interrupt them. I’ll catch him later. Come on, Tim,” he then said to me, giving me a comradely shove between the shoulder blades. “First time in the City,” he confided to the man at the door in a stage whisper as I staggered on in.

  “Thanks a lot, cousin,” I muttered. Glancing at him out of the corner of my eye, I decided that Wish Stephenson was having the time of his life.

  The interior of the Parnassus Club was more opulent than the Pacific Union. As it, too, was located on Nob Hill, the building was new and managed to smell that way even through the ubiquitous cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke. I rather liked the place, especially the plush carpet in a shade of deep forest green. I even gawked a little at the windows of stained glass all across the back wall of the large, high-ceilinged main clubroom.

  “Go on, lad,” Wish said, poking me in the ribs playfully when he saw where I was focused, “take a closer look. Bet they don’t have anything like that back where you come from.”

  I was too fascinated even to give my colleague the evil look that his remark required. I walked on over to those windows and stood up close, staring. I had of course removed my fedora, but declined to turn it over at the door, and so I carried the hat in one hand politely up against my chest. And a good thing, too, for a few moments later I was able to raise the brim up to my face to hide an unavoidable blush.

  The stained-glass windows, which from across the room appeared to be simply lovely patterns and colors in the sort of style they are calling in England now pre-Raphael-ite, actually depicted nude women twined about with various vines and flowers, though not in the strategic places one is accustomed to seeing such flowers. Women of quite voluptuous proportions. Nipples in stained glass, who would’ve thought; oh my. I screwed up my mouth and, sticking tongue in cheek as I imagined an awkward adolescent male might do to deal with some embarrassment, turned my back on those windows and strolled with an exaggeratedly long, slow gait back to where Wish had taken an overstuffed leather chair on one side of a drum table, leaving its identical twin on the other side of the table for me. Amusement danced in his eyes and played about his lips, but he did not tease me, for which I was grateful.

  Instead, Wish leaned across the table and said in a tone clearly meant for me alone to hear, “We should have something to drink. The Parnassus is a hard-drinking club where men are expected to imbibe and to hold their liquor—or so I’ve been told—and I think it will look better if we at least have drinks in front of us.”

  I nodded. Heads turned our way, one at a time; one man in my peripheral vision had summoned the discreetly circulating waiter and whispered something, glancing once in our direction as he did so, and then the waiter disappeared.

  “What do you think you can handle, Timothy?” Wish asked in a slightly louder tone of voice.

  “Whiskey, with seltzer,” I replied, dropping my voice into the huskiest register I could manage. I had, of course, practiced this; and as my natural voice is more in the alto register than the soprano—that is, if language were sung instead of spoken—I did passably well in sounding like a young man.

  Wish appeared pleasantly surprised. “Say something more,” he urged, whispering.

  I said crossly, and loudly enough to be overheard, “I don’t see why we couldn’t have gone to the races, cuz.”

  “Your mother would have my head,” he replied, laughing.

  The waiter discreetly circled himself around our way, we ordered our drinks, which came with gratifying rapidity, and I sat sipping mine while Wish began to circulate and do the male version of gossiping, whatever that might consist of. I watched him closely, having decided that it would not be out of character for a beardless young man to hero-worship his older cousin.

  He was good, no two ways about that. He had done his homework, learned things about the Bell family, and began every conversation by introducing himself as one of them. Of course his ruse would soon be known, because it would get back to the miscreant Mr. Bell that young cousin had seemed a fine young man, or some such, and Mr. Bell would ask, What cousin? and that would be that. But we needed only today and tomorrow, by then we would have found out all there was to be found out, and of course we would go to each club only once. This was working. Finally, because of Wish Stephenson, I felt we were doing something constructive about the case against Jeremy McFadden.

  Then the man himself walked into my line of vision even as I’d thought his name. He proceeded in that ponderous way of his across the vast expanse of deep green carpet from a direction in which, I presume, lay the dining room. I picked up the nearest magazine from the drum table and buried my face in it. Unfortunately this magazine turned out to have photographs of women in various stages of removing their underwear; nevertheless I made a good show of devoting myself to its perusal with eyes and mouth gaping—the latter not being at all difficult to arrange.

  Keeping one eye, as it were, on Jeremy, and the other on this disgusting yet oddly fascinating reading material, I suddenly realized that I had done something awful. Something absolutely appalling, without ever meaning to do it. And to top it all off, just as if he knew what I had done, here was McFadden headed right at me.

  20

  ———

  Blind Justice

  How could I have done that? I wondered, feeling slightly panicky. Indeed, it was so unlike me that I could not help feeling a little disoriented, as if I’d lost a piece of my own identity, and with it my equilibrium.

  What was this awful thing I’d done? Why, I had set out to prove Jeremy McFadden’s guilt, which was going about the process entirely backward, for in our legal system people (even persons who beat their wives, more’s the pity) are presumed innocent until proven guilty. This was very bad of me, but as I watched from the corner of my downcast eye his heavy, graceless feet in their incongruously well-made leather shoes stop not two feet from where I sat bent over the magazine; and as I felt his probing, rude, staring eyes move over my hunched form; and finally as I could hear perfectly well in my mind what he was in all likelihood thinking: What is this ill-clad probably ill-bred person doing in my club? I could not help but reflect that, although Justice might be blind, I myself was not. Not blind at all to Jeremy McFadden’s defects, though he apparently hid them so well from mos
t of the world.

  At least, that was the case if the reports Wish Stephenson and I had been hearing from most of his clubmates continued along the lines they had so far.

  Speaking of Wish—he had seen McFadden bearing down on me and now came to the rescue. “Say, aren’t you Jeremy McFadden?” Wish asked in a most persuasive tone, one indeed that I had never heard from him, that of the disingenuous young businessman. He continued speaking, while in my line of vision I could see his feet (in old policeman’s shoes, the heavy leather soles rendering footgear of that sort not the thing to throw away) and McFadden’s elegantly clad ones almost toe to toe: “I ask because if you are he, sir,” Wish said, “then I have some information you absolutely cannot afford to miss. Got it straight off the Chicago Stock Exchange day before yesterday. Been traveling, you see.”

  Oh certainly! I thought, hunching harder. I also looked harder at that magazine open on my knees. Really, the pictures of these women were enough to make one stop wearing underwear altogether, as anyway the underwear did not seem to be able to contain the parts assigned without bits of flesh spilling over or popping out here and there.

  “And you’d be who, exactly?” That was McFadden’s gruff voice.

  “Aloysius Bell, distant cousin of your illustrious Mr. Bell here. Somewhat a favorite of his charming wife, you know her, of course?”

  “I believe so,” McFadden acknowledged. “Stock tip, you say? In the market, are you?”

  Wish had hooked his fish already. I turned a page in the magazine; fortunately what was on the next one was not very racy by comparison—I was able to read word for word the liquor advertisements and thus appear well occupied. In a minute, though, Wish was probing my shinbone with the toe of his clodhoppers and saying, “Hey, you stay put. Me and Mr. McFadden are headed into the bar for a couple drinks. Business talk, nothing you’d be interested in.”