Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  He looked pleased. He pointed a finger at me. “Tommy, you remember what I say. You will come to feel the chill from that damned-righteous jobationing preacher of yours. You just mark my words.”

  Dishes were cleared away. Spumoni was brought, and port and cigars. I turned down the cigar, but the Gent lit up and blew blue smoke.

  I said, “What time does the Evening Express get in?”

  “Supposed to get in at nine-thirty, I think it is. But it was powerful late. We didn’t arrive until about eleven.”

  So much for Rudolph Buckle’s alibi for Beaumont McNair! Every time Beau became a suspect again I felt the familiar check in my breath.

  I said, “As Bierce says, passengers on the SP are often exposed to the hazards of senility.”

  “That’s a good joke,” the Gent said, as though he meant it. He flourished his cigar, enjoying the cigar, the flourish, the poker game that had paid for this dinner and everything but his son.

  “Do you remember, Pa, when you and I used to go fishing on the River by the big snag there?”

  “I do, boy; I do remember. Better days!”

  “Do you remember who it was brought me the books to start me reading?”

  “By George, you were a reader, weren’t you?” He gave me a naked, grateful look. There were some things I could thank him for.

  “Pa, there is something I am going to have to bring up, that I have found out.”

  “What is that, Son?”

  “We were talking about Senator Jennings just now. I remember you told me a lot of people on the Washoe used false names. He was Adolphus Jackson there.”

  “Long time ago, Son.”

  “And you were E. O. Macomber.”

  “Why, that’s right,” he said, jutting his chin. The slashes of white in his whiskers gave him a theatrical, actorish air. “How do you know this, Tom?”

  “That’s what I went to Virginia City for. To find out about the Society of Spades. There’s a picture of you all. Highgrade Carrie, McNair, Gorton, Jackson and you.”

  “Society of foxes and sheep,” he said, with a grunt of amusement. “Sheep got fleeced, foxes got the grapes.”

  “Euchred,” I said.

  “Why would you be interested in that?”

  “The Morton Street Slasher has something to do with the Society of Spades.” I could feel the tickle of sweat beneath my arms.

  “You are going to have to explain that, Son.”

  I tried to explain. Someone was murdering whores and leaving spade cards on their slashed bodies, and it had to do with the fact that Lady Caroline Stearns had been a madam in Virginia City, and because she and Nat McNair had combined with Al Gorton to swindle Adolphus Jackson and E. O. Macomber.

  My father was as Railroad as Senator Jennings.

  “My goodness,” he said mildly. “It do look bad for Aaron and me!”

  All at once I was frantic to get away from him, from here, to try to think things through. “Will you come and meet with Bierce and me tomorrow?” I said.

  He gazed at me steadily for a long moment. “Son, I don’t think I will. I can see through Bierce, you see. What he wants is to embarrass the Railroad. And he has got his eye on me and Aaron Jennings through this Spades business, which seems like hocus-pocus to me. I work for the Railroad, and Aaron has his Railroad connections. It won’t do, you see. It is another sheep and fox game, and Bierce is a fox I would just as soon not get tangled with. So, no, Son, I am sorry, no.”

  “Tell me one thing,” I said.

  “If I can.”

  “Who was the father of Caroline LaPlante’s child?”

  “Is that what you were after in Virginia City, Son?”

  I said that was what Bierce wanted to know.

  “Well,” my father said, laughing. “Everybody knew it wasn’t Nat.”

  When we had parted and I was making my way back down Montgomery Street, I felt as though I had been run through a stamp mill, and I was left with trying to decide whether or not to tell Bierce my father had been E. O. Macomber.

  And just then I discovered in my jacket pocket the heavy little disc of a gold eagle that the Gent had slipped there.

  17

  INDISCRETION, n. – The guilt of woman.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  On Sunday I calculated that the Brittains would be attending Trinity Episcopalian Church at Post and Powell and would be back at 913 Taylor about 12:30. So at noon I rented a shiny rig with a sleek brown gelding at the Brown and Willis Livery Stables and headed up Nob Hill. Solid fog had settled into San Francisco, as though my father had put a Sacramento blight on the City weather. I shivered in my buggy, feeling depressed and inadequate, smothering in secrets.

  On the porch of the Brittain house a lanky policeman sat in the wicker chair with a cup and saucer before him. I explained that I would be Amelia’s guardian for the day, citing Sgt. Nix as authority. He waved a hand, looking relieved.

  Amelia was waiting in the hall, wearing a tan jacket over her dress, which fitted her torso like eelskin, her bright surprised face with its fringe of curls enclosed by her bonnet. She took my arm, whispering, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting all morning!”

  “I thought you’d be at church.”

  “Momma and Poppa went but I didn’t.”

  When I helped her into the buggy the sun was glaring through thinning patches of fog. It was going to be a blessed good day! Amelia shed her jacket, peering back over her shoulder as we turned out of Taylor Street.

  I asked if she was looking for her shadow.

  “Oh, I haven’t seen him for days. I’m sure he was bored ambling along after me, and scared off by police uniforms. Where are we going?”

  “Cliff House.”

  “Oh, Cliff House! That’s lovely!”

  We headed west through the greenery and sand dunes of Golden Gate Park in a traffic of buggies and carriages filled with well-dressed people. Streams of bicyclists pedaled along the margins of the road, and pedestrians saluted each other. I was feeling a member of the quality in my suit and vest, my polished boots and soft hat, and my hired rig, very proud to be seen with Amelia Brittain at my side. Sometimes she leaned against me, and always she exclaimed excitedly about the sights or called out to friends in other buggies, so that I was reminded of the class of life-livers that my father had extolled at Malvolio’s.

  It was two o’clock when the great square tower and the lesser towers of Cliff House reared up ahead of us down a curving slant of roadway. In the vast dining room with the fog bank hovering just off Seal Rocks and the sea lions posturing there, we dined on turtle steaks and spring duck, with Veuve Clicquot to wash it down. The other tables were occupied by fashionable gents and ladies. By its reputation, the Cliff House was patronized by bankers, rich merchants, and political bosses and their lady friends. There was a fine feeling of opulence and naughtiness in the air, with Amelia exclaiming over her duck and the champagne and the views. The waiter as attentive to me as the fellow at Malvolio’s had been to my father. We became Amelia and Tom.

  I knew, however, even before our bill was presented, that I was not going to be able to afford to bring Amelia in a rented rig out to the Cliff House every Sunday, without considerable help, such as my father’s poker facility and goodwill.

  There was a stir of attention and glances as two people entered the dining room, a woman encased in folds and gatherings of blue material with a mass of reddish hair and a doll face of small features and red lips. Her escort was a huge old man who towered over her by more than a head. He had an impressive fall of gray beard and a ponderous way of walking so that he seemed to half surround his lady friend as the head-waiter showed them to a table behind me. I realized who they were.

  “Who is that, Tom?” Amelia asked.

  “That is the notorious Miss Hill and her new lawyer, who are in court against Senator Sharon. I understand they have become romantically friendly.”

  Amelia gazed at them with round eyes. �
��She is a fallen woman!” she whispered.

  “That is true.”

  “What a fine complexion!”

  I couldn’t see the pair without awkwardly turning. Amelia continued to gaze at them between sips of champagne.

  “But that gentleman is old enough to be her father!” she said.

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Should I know?”

  “He is Judge Terry. He was once a justice of the California Supreme Court. He fought a duel with Senator Broderick back before the War.”

  She nodded vigorously. “He was a southerner, and they wanted California to be a slave state!”

  “Killing Senator Broderick made certain that California would be Free Soil,” I said. “Terry was almost lynched. He lit out for the Comstock, where he lawyered mining claims. Now he is back in California lawyering divorce cases.

  “I hope she is successful in her suit,” I added, with more intensity than I had intended.

  “Poppa knew Senator Sharon on the Comstock,” Amelia said. “Poppa doesn’t like him.”

  “He’s a crooked, greedy, debauched old Croesus,” I said.

  “I wonder if her hair is really that color,” Amelia whispered.

  When we rose from our table I had another glimpse of Sarah Althea Hill, the Rose of Sharon, past Judge Terry’s broad back, her pretty face alive with motion as she talked, one hand with a finger extended making accompanying signs. No one considered her chances against Senator Sharon’s millions very good, even with Judge Terry at her side.

  In the late afternoon we started back along the carriage route through the Presidio. We parked in the growing darkness above the little beach at the end of Larkin Street, where the gelding bent his neck to tug at some weeds. Amelia and I watched the lights on the Marin shore past Alcatraz.

  “You may kiss me if you like,” she whispered, presenting her cheek.

  I kissed her cheek. She smelled of flowers. Her lips were presented and I kissed them also and was suddenly short of breath.

  “I have wanted you to do that,” Amelia said.

  I did that some more, although I could spoil the moment thinking of Amelia’s degree of intimacy with Beau McNair, which Bierce had mentioned.

  Amelia rested in my arms. “You must not put your hands there,” she said, twisting slightly away. “I don’t want to feel funny.”

  I considered dying for her.

  “Do you love me, Tom?”

  “Yes!” I said.

  “I’m very fond of you, but I don’t know if I love you yet. You are very different from the other young men I know.”

  “How?” I said.

  “Well, I don’t know any other journalists. I read what you wrote about the Mussel Slough Tragedy. My father thinks the Railroad was perfectly right in evicting those men, and putting them in jail when there was shooting.”

  “So does my father.”

  “My father doesn’t read novels,” Amelia said, snuggling further into my arms.

  “Pardon me?”

  “If you read novels you sympathize with people who are different kinds of people than you are.”

  “Do you sympathize with Allie Hill?” I asked.

  “Yes! That poor woman has only done what was forced upon her by cruel circumstance!”

  “You don’t believe she should have sacrificed her life rather than her honor?”

  “I certainly do not!” Amelia said. “And please kiss me and stop talking about these distressful matters.”

  There was a good deal more kissing before I turned the rig back along Polk Street.

  On Taylor Street the upstairs windows of 913 were alight, and a lamp burned in a window off the porch. Amelia started up the steps while I wrapped the reins around the iron hitching post.

  Amelia screamed.

  I mounted the steps in four jumps. Amelia’s screams ripped the silence. In the darkness I could see two figures down the porch, and I hurled myself toward them. Amelia had got behind the table. The man swung toward me. I hit him as hard as I could drive my fist, hit him with a left and a right while he staggered away from me. He fell against the veranda railing, which smashed under his weight. He fell through the rail and was gone in the darkness below.

  The Slasher!

  I sprinted down the stairs and into the shadows beneath the veranda, beating my way through the undergrowth there. He was not to be found.

  Down the street I heard a police whistle.

  “Tom!” Amelia leaned over the porch railing above me. Illumination burned behind her. Her face was an oval of shadow, her bare head bright with light.

  “Did he hurt you?” I called back.

  “No!”

  “Was it Beau?”

  “No!”

  I ran up the stairs into her embrace.

  “Amelia!” her father shouted behind us. “What is this?”

  “Tom saved my life!” she cried at him.

  Then we were all inside in the light: Amelia, her father in a velvet jacket, her mother in a robe, hair covered by a scarf, the butler with his shirtsleeves gartered, a woman in a cook’s apron holding up a kerosene lamp.

  “He had some kind of bandage on his face,” Amelia murmured. “His chin—”

  Then they all stared at me, as though I was the Morton Street Slasher myself. Their eyes were fixed on my chest.

  My vest had been severed neatly.

  “He hurt you!” Amelia cried at me.

  In my hero’s pride I was not pleased to seem to have been the Slasher’s victim. I denied that I was hurt but sat down while the cook and butler fussed over me, removing my coat and vest and investigating my intact shirt front. Amelia stood with her hands pressed together, elbows out, eyebrows elevated, mouth pursed into an inch-long line. She was shivering in long spasms.

  Mr. Brittain had gone to find a policeman. Where had the constable been?

  Police appeared, one, then two more, in their double-breasted tunics like John Daniel Pusey’s, that somehow made them look overburdened and disadvantaged, helmets underarm, stern faces. There were questions to answer, a constable moistening the point of his pencil with his tongue and scribbling in his notebook. Sgt. Nix came and stood with his arms folded, scowling at me.

  “Where was the man who was supposed to be on duty here?” I demanded.

  “He was down the street.” The fellow was the first policeman who had showed up, red-faced now as Nix flipped a thumb at him.

  “So she was in danger,” I said.

  “It’s not McNair. We’d pulled him in. His alibi for the last one was no good.”

  “I think it’s terrible the way you try to blame that young man for everything!” Mrs. Brittain burst out.

  “Well, he couldn’t’ve been this one, could he?” Sgt. Nix said. “He was in the pokey.”

  I saw the gleam of relief on Amelia’s tear-stained face, for she had also thought the Slasher was Beaumont McNair.

  18

  LITIGATION, n. – A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  At this time, in Superior Court in City Hall, what was to become the sideshow of the decade was in progress: the Rose of Sharon. In Sharon v. Sharon, Sarah Althea Hill, claiming to be Mrs. Sharon, was suing the Senator and former King of the Comstock for divorce and a settlement, with the accusation of adultery because Sharon had admitted paternity to a child delivered of one Gertrude Dietz.

  Miss Hill’s supporters in the case were an Australian journalist of a shadowy past, William N. Neilson, her lawyer, George Washington Tyler and Mammy Pleasant. Judge David S. Terry was her new legal adviser.

  Allie Hill had been one of Mammy Pleasant’s young women.

  Central to the case were several letters in which Sharon had addressed Miss Hill as “My Dear Wife,” and a marriage contract written by the lady and signed by William Sharon. Allie Hill had been Sharon’s mistress for some years. She lived in the Grand Hotel, across New Montgomery Street from
the Palace, where Sharon kept a suite, and visited her aging lover or husband by means of the “Bridge of Sighs” passageway over the street.

  “It is interesting,” Bierce said, “that a gentleman can have had any number of adulterous affairs and still be considered an honest and upright man, while one lover will turn a lady disreputable in all her concerns.”

  “It is unfair,” I said.

  “What seems crucial in this case is the marriage contract, composed and written by the lady, and signed by Sharon. Oddly his signature appears at the top of the reverse of the page. Any idiot knows not to sign a blank sheet of paper at the bottom.”

  Miss Hill claimed that Senator Sharon had desired that their marriage be kept secret because Gertie Dietz would make trouble if he and Miss Hill were openly married. The scandal might interfere with his reelection.

  A striking Fats Chubb cartoon in The Hornet showed the auburn-haired Sarah Althea Hill, her male supporters and a skinny black Mammy Pleasant jauntily carrying a basket filled with babies. This was a reference to Mammy Pleasant’s reputation as a baby-farmer.

  Mammy Pleasant had admitted to having furnished the “sinews of war” for the suit, its financing, and daily accompanied Miss Hill to City Hall in a fancy hired barouche.

  “What we have here,” Bierce went on, “is a confounding of the theory of oppositions. Because Senator Sharon is a bloodsucking, debauched monster does not mean that his enemy is not a perjurious harlot. The devil’s horns on one side of an equation does not guarantee a halo on the opposite.”

  A very different Mammy Pleasant from the one we had encountered in the Bell mansion arrived at Bierce’s office. She wore a handsome green cloak and a deep poke bonnet and greeted Bierce and me with a seemingly genuine smile on her dark face. Bierce proceeded in his courtly way to see her seated and settled. When she noticed the skull, she crossed herself. Bierce sat down facing her.

  “I have been thinking of the matter with which you are concerned, Mr. Bierce,” she said.

  Bierce laid the palms of his hands together and propped his chin on the fingers.