Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  I said it had seemed curious to me that her fiancé had not accompanied her to the Firemen’s Ball and immediately wished I had not said it.

  She flung herself up from the chair, her eyes blazing with indignation, then sank back.

  “He had to work with Mr. Buckle on some of his mother’s affairs,” she said, in a controlled voice. “His mother has enormous business in the City.”

  “Who is Mr. Buckle?”

  “He is Lady Caroline’s manager here.”

  “Who are these enemies of Mr. McNair?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Amelia’s fiancé out strangling and slashing Esther Mooney while Amelia and I were waltzing at the Firemen’s Ball seemed an improbable coincidence.

  “I have a friend who is a police detective,” I said. “I will try to find out from him what they have against Mr. McNair. Will Mr. McNair talk to me if I go to see him in jail?”

  “You must tell him that I sent you!”

  “Miss Brittain, I only know of Mr. McNair as the son of a very rich woman. Will you tell me something about him?”

  She relaxed visibly in the chair.

  “When Mr. McNair’s father was still alive, they lived not far from my father’s house. Beau and I attended Miss Sinclair’s Seminary. He was eleven and I was ten.”

  A blush climbed her face, like a pink shadow sweeping upward from her throat. It was charming. “We were sweethearts. Then the elder Mr. McNair died, and Mrs. McNair‌—‌Lady Caroline‌—‌left San Francisco for England, taking Beau and Gwendolyn with her.”

  “Gwendolyn is Mr. McNair’s younger sister?”

  “Who is very beautiful,” Amelia said, nodding. “A month ago Beau returned to help Mr. Buckle with his mother’s affairs, and we met again. We discovered that our affection for each other is still strong. Of course our lives since we were children have been very different.”

  Like hers and mine, I thought. My antipathy for Beau McNair had steadily grown. I hesitated to ask Amelia if her fiancé regularly frequented the low women in the Morton Street bordellos, or the fancier ones in the parlorhouses of the Upper Tenderloin.

  “He is a very eligible young man,” Amelia continued. “And my mother approves of the match.”

  I wondered what sorts of amusements very eligible young men and women of high station engaged in. No doubt Beau McNair had a fancy turnout, and they would take trips out to Cliff House, or through the park, or down the Peninsula, where some of the instant aristocrats of the Comstock Lode, the Railroad and the banks had built their mansions. I wanted to know how much she and Beau saw of each other, and I managed to put the question so as not to seem to be prying.

  “Well, of course not as much as either of us would prefer,” she said. “He has been occupied with his mother’s business, as he was on the night of the Firemen’s Ball.”

  “And was Mr. McNair occupied with his mother’s business the night before the Firemen’s Ball?”

  Her hands tightened on her handkerchief‌—‌such smooth, long-fingered, pretty hands that my heart turned over in my chest to see them.

  “Mr. Redmond, you must trust me or you cannot help me!”

  “I will help you any way I can,” I said, in capitulation.

  4

  ARREST, v. – Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  I took the South End-North Beach Railway out to Broadway. It was a bright day with sun gleaming on the tracks and the facades of the buildings. As we passed Kearny Street the shrill voices of the slave girls in their Chinatown cribs were audible.

  I walked along Broadway to Dupont. The City Jail was a brick building with a high cornice and iron bars installed in the windows where they looked like bared teeth. A sergeant at a counter waved me down a bare-boards hallway. The third cell was the gentry cell, bigger than the others, with the same cot but with three chairs and, facing the window, a clumsy patent rocker in which Beau McNair sat with a book. I stood watching him through the bars of the door.

  When I spoke his name he sprang out of the chair, setting it rocking. He came to face me through the bars. He was a handsome young fellow, no doubt about it, maybe my height but of a stringier build in his fawn-colored suit and a bow necktie. He had a fair beard, close-set blue eyes and fair hair swept over his brow. He hadn’t shaved.

  “Who are you?” he wanted to know.

  I said I was Tom Redmond, from The Hornet. Miss Brittain had asked me to come to see him.

  “You are a friend of Miss Brittain’s?” he said.

  “An acquaintance.”

  “A newspaper fellow,” he said, with a twist of his lips.

  I said I was that.

  “You may tell her I won’t be here long. Mr. Curtis has been sent for. The governor has been appealed to. This ridiculous—” He paced across the cell, slapping the back of the rocker with his hand to set it rocking again. He returned to stand scowling at me.

  “What do you make of this woman identifying your photograph?”

  “She is lying, of course! For reasons I cannot imagine.”

  “Miss Brittain is certain it is a conspiracy against you or your mother.”

  “Confounded idiocy, is what it is!”

  “Not a conspiracy?”

  “Yes, of course a conspiracy!”

  “Do you have any idea—”

  “No I don’t have any idea, and I am sick and tired of answering foolish questions.” He glared at me with his lower lip protruding. “If you have anything of interest to say to me, will you please say it, fellow?”

  I reminded myself that he was a very frightened young man. He stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, stretching the material like a Dutch boy’s trousers. He filled and relaxed his cheeks as though he had a nervous problem with his breathing.

  I said, “Captain Pusey has fifty albums of photographs of criminals. How would he happen to have your photograph?”

  He showed his teeth like a wildcat in a trap. “I expect I have had a hundred likenesses taken,” he said. “Your Captain Pusey happens to have one.”

  “I wonder why he would have chosen to show your photograph to the woman who saw the murderer at the scene of the murder.”

  He snorted.

  “Do you think Captain Pusey is a part of a conspiracy?”

  He seemed to regain control of himself. “See here,” he said. “There are dissatisfied people. There are demented people. There are envious people. There are people who would like to threaten any sort of eminence.”

  “And that is what is going on here?”

  “That is no doubt what is going on here, yes.”

  “I’m very interested in the idea of a conspiracy,” I said. “There is the matter of the playing cards—”

  “It is infuriating to me,” he said, “that anyone would think I would have an interest in slashing these low women from their giggle to their snatch.”

  I said I wondered how he knew just how they had been slashed.

  “I read it in the newspapers, of course.”

  “It was not revealed in the newspapers.”

  He gave me a haughty look and turned to greet two gentlemen who had appeared.

  “I advise you not to confer with journalists, Beau,” a small, white-haired man said. The other was taller, graying. The fat turnkey with his hoop of keys followed them.

  “What paper are you from?” the little man demanded. He had a truculent expression on a taut-skinned, shiny countenance, which looked as though his face had been scarred in a fire.

  “He’s from The Hornet,” Beau said.

  “I advise you especially not to confer with journalists from trash newspapers,” the little man said.

  “Here we are, Mr. Curtis,” the turnkey said and turned a key in the lock. Beau pulled the door in toward him.

  The little man was Bosworth Curtis, the bear-trap lawyer who often represented the SP, and the tall, graying man in his fine black broadcloth suit must be Mr.
Buckle, Lady Caroline’s manager, of whom Amelia had spoken. I did not take offense at The Hornet being called a trash paper for, except for Bierce’s Tattle, that opinion was a familiar one.

  “Get rid of this fellow,” Mr. Curtis said to the turnkey.

  The turnkey shrugged at me, and I followed him along. Behind us Bean McNair, Curtis and Buckle stood looking at each other like three actors waiting for the curtain to rise on their play.

  Outside on Broadway I squinted up into the sun, and considered taking on a beer before returning to The Hornet.

  The headline on the Examiner on the newsstand was NOB HILL ELITE ARREST.

  In Bierce’s office I was introduced to Captain Pusey, who rose from his chair for a perfunctory handshake but with a trace of pause to assure me that he was aware I was not of much account. He was in uniform, fine pressed Mission blue wool, pips on the sleeves of his long tunic to show he was a captain. His cap rested on Bierce’s desk beside the skull. He was a high-nosed, false-teeth smiling fellow, maybe sixty, with pink cheeks, a Greek helmet of white hair and a belly cinched by the leather belt around his tunic waist. He smelled of hair oil and talcum, as though he’d just come out of a barber’s chair.

  I was informed that he had had business with Mr. Macgowan and had dropped in to see Bierce at Sgt. Nix’s suggestion.

  Bierce was standing intent, his arms folded on his chest as though he was learning something watching Captain Pusey greet me.

  “Captain Pusey and I were discussing the great good fortune of his having a photograph of Beau McNair in his albums.”

  Pusey set his jaw in his perfect-teeth smile.

  “I just saw Beau with Lawyer Curtis at the jail,” I said.

  Pusey nodded amiably. “McNair’ll be out by now,” he said.

  “I was speculating as to how Captain Pusey happened on that particular photograph,” Bierce said. “And chose to show it to Edith Pruitt.”

  “Showed her half a dozen photographs,” Pusey said. “You don’t want to confuse a witness with too many, you know. Just good luck one of them took.”

  “Quite remarkable luck,” Bierce said. “I can’t help speculating further. For instance, did you run across Beau’s photograph in the Scotland Yard archives when you were in London? Or did a friend at the Yard send it to you when Beau returned to San Francisco?”

  Captain Pusey did not look pleased at Bierce’s speculation.

  “Guesswork,” he said. “A good deal of detective work is pure guesswork, Mr. Bierce. Sometimes it proves out.”

  “Educated guesswork,” Bierce said, nodding. “It is evident that Beau has a criminal record of some kind, or you would not possess his photograph. I believe that could be put in the form of a syllogism. Captain Pusey keeps a store of photographs of criminals. In his collection is a photograph of young McNair. Therefore young McNair has been arrested sometime in the past.”

  Pusey drew a fat railroad watch from his pocket to consult it, thus impressing us with the value of his time.

  “Let me make an educated guess,” Bierce said. “The photograph and attendant information were sent from England. They pertained to criminal activity in London. London is famous for its prostitutes. Beau McNair was involved in a criminal activity that concerned prostitutes.”

  Pusey bent forward to ring the spittoon.

  Bierce waited.

  “Well, you are just about right, Mr. Bierce,” Pusey said finally. He had a hint of the stuffed-nose Australian accent that reminded you of how many ticket-of-leave convicts had settled in San Francisco in the early days.

  “What did Beau McNair do?” Bierce said.

  “Collegeboy scrape,” Pusey said with a sigh. “Three flash young fellows with more money than is good for them. A club of them. The Diamonds, they called themselves. Had little diamond pins they wore. Some kind of initiation business.”

  “And what did they do?” Bierce persisted.

  “Hired a couple of Whitechapel women for the night and beat them instead of the usual. Stripped them naked and drew on their bellies.”

  “Drew what on their bellies?”

  Pusey considered for a moment. “Like a cunt all the way up to their neck. Hairs running off it. Some kind of indelible ink with acid stuff in it that burned them. Not dangerous, but painful. Now there’s a stunt that would get anybody’s pecker up,” he said sarcastically. “Drawing cunts on whore’s bellies.”

  It sounded like what had been done to Marie Gar, but with a knife rather than a pen. And this fellow was Amelia Brittain’s fiancé!

  “The entertainments of young British Futilitarians,” Bierce said.

  “Bit of a scandal,” Pusey went on. “They thought money would buy it off, but it got out and about. Beau was the one that was forgiven a bit, being younger than the rest. And a fine-looking young fellow like he is. Probably led astray by his pals.”

  “Ashamed not to be shameless,” Bierce said. “Embarrassing for his mother, considering her past profession.”

  The rumor, or more than a rumor, was that Lady Caroline had been a madam in Virginia City, on the Comstock, when she had married Nat McNair.

  “What happened?” Bierce inquired.

  “There was money paid out, and a judge gave them Diamonds a good talking-to. Beau’s mother sent him packing back here.”

  “Diamonds and spades,” I said.

  They both gazed at me as though I was a child who had spoken his first intelligible word.

  “On the evidence, it looks like you have your man. Captain Pusey,” Bierce said.

  Pusey produced a chuffing laugh. He pushed himself ponderously out of his chair. “Time to get back to me duties.” He shook hands with Bierce, nodded to me and strode out of the office settling his cap on his head. His shiny boots resounded after he had passed from sight.

  Bierce stood still gazing at the chair the Chief of Detectives had vacated. “Captain Pusey does not seem much disturbed that young McNair will have been snatched from his clutches. I would like to know just what is his game.”

  “Boodle,” I said. “That’s what he is famous for.”

  “Blackmail,” Bierce said. “The McNair fortune. The son of the widow McNair, Lady Caroline as she now is.”

  I was trying to balance the young dandy I had seen in the City Jail, to whom Amelia Brittain was engaged, with the arrogant and lickerish Diamond who had drawn on whores’ bodies with acid ink. And with the monster who had slashed Marie Car to death.

  I told Bierce about Beau McNair’s remark of slashings from giggle to snatch. He narrowed his eyes at me and patted the skull on his desk.

  “It does not immediately appear that the Southern Pacific is involved,” was all he said.

  “But Beau McNair is the murderer!”

  Bierce shook his head. “It appears a shade too neat, and too dependent on what Captain Pusey wants us to think.”

  I was dismissed and returned to my desk, still appalled at what I had learned of Beaumont McNair.

  “A whale of peccability has swum into our ken,” Bierce remarked behind me.

  In the morning papers it was noted that Beaumont McNair had been discharged from City Jail. One Rudolph Buckle had sworn that the young man had been in his company on the nights of both the playing card murders.

  This week’s Hornet featured a full-page Fats Chubb cartoon of a hairy, evil-looking assassin with a huge knife. Bierce had written: “What is one to make of our San Francisco slasher, whose affection for the soiled doves of Morton Street is so great that he must slice them open to rejoice in the beauties of their vitals? What is one to make of his deposit on his victims of the spade suit of playing cards, first an ace, next a deuce? That a trey is to follow is powerfully implied. Do the playing cards indicate a gambler, a sachem of the Faro layout suddenly overcome with recollections of female outrages? What is the message boded by those infernal black swords?”

  Further along the column got on the subject of the Hawaii annexation: “The drums beat on for the damnable rape
of those mid-Pacific isles whose royalty this nation has pretended to befriend, for the chief benefit of the missionaries who have invaded those paradisiacal shores, imprisoning the Kanaka on the sugarcane plantations and his women in Mother Hubbards.”

  I was surprised to read, in the same issue, Mr. Macgowan’s editorial proclaiming the rightness of the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands before they were absorbed into the British Empire or fell prey to a German coup d’état. As though Mr. Macgowan did not read his editor and columnist, nor Bierce his publisher.

  5.

  HABEAS CORPUS n. – A writ by which a man may be taken out of jail when confined for the wrong crime.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  On Sunday, her fourteenth birthday, I took my friend Belinda Barnacle for an excursion to the park, where we strolled through the trees, among the bicyclists, the carriages, calèches, landaus; a Clarence with two ladies in the rear seat, their veils floating out from their hats, two cigar-smoking men facing them; a four-in-hand guided by a plump gent in a plug hat and brass-buttoned vest. The Sunday turnouts were more impressive every month, horsemen and -women among them, mounted on expensive horseflesh.

  The fog hung offshore, and the day glistened with sunlight. Belinda flourished a parasol. She wore a lacy little hat decorated with silk rosebuds, and her shoes were polished to gleam like stars where they slipped in and out beneath her skirts. Sometimes she held my arm, sometimes she walked a little apart to establish her independence.

  A band of music was playing in the bandstand a quarter mile away so that the beat reached us raggedly. Belinda smiled up at me from the little shade of her parasol and wanted to know how many ladies I had danced with at the Firemen’s Ball.

  I held up my fingers with the thumb tucked into the palm.

  “Were they pretty?”

  “Some were pretty.”

  “What were their names?”

  “One was Martha. I don’t remember her surname. And there was Patricia Henderson, Mary Beddoes Mathews, and Amelia Brittain.”