by Ann Parker
Through Inez and Flo’s exchange and Inez’s final comments, de Bruijn’s face had grown increasingly troubled. He finally removed his napkin, folded it neatly, and placed it beneath his plate. “Our investigation is ended, Mrs. Stannert. Mr. Donato’s business in stolen antiquities alone would have made him many dangerous enemies, men who are as invisible as they are violent. I doubt the perpetrator will ever be found.”
She met his straightforward gaze. His dark brown eyes were noncommittal, yet Inez could swear he was concealing something with his studied neutrality, just as his plate now concealed his napkin.
He knows something about this, but he will not tell.
If that was the case, Inez thought, perhaps it was for the best. For if she knew the whys and wherefores of Nico’s murder, would she have to keep that from Carmella as well, storing it away with all her other secrets?
Meanwhile, Flo’s attention had wandered off and away, roaming around the dining room. She brightened. “There is Mr. Poole! He promised to take me on a drive to the Cliff House before we leave San Francisco.” She rose, bestowing a brilliant smile on de Bruijn and Inez. “The bill for luncheon goes to Mr. Gallagher, correct? Tell him thank you. Well, no, tell him to go to hell, what with all he put me through. The three of us, we shall all meet again, I hope? Under better circumstances?” She retrieved her parasol and beaded bag. After fluttering her fingers at them with a “Toodle-oo,” she threaded her way to the dining room entrance where Inez espied the stocky figure of Poole, waiting.
De Bruijn, who had risen when Flo did, sat back down. “Well, Mrs. Stannert, now that we can count this particular episode as closed. I have one other matter I would like to discuss with you. If it is possible and not an intrusion, I hope you might consider allowing me to call on you and Antonia now and again. Informally.”
Inez hesitated. “I shall need to speak to Antonia before I can give you an answer.”
“Of course.”
Inez thought it was very likely that if de Bruijn hadn’t offered to keep in touch, Antonia would have insisted they visit him. She gathered her purse. “Will you be staying on in the hotel?”
“For now. They have any number of full-time residents. It seems like a reasonable location for me to set up my business.”
“Hmmm.” Inez inspected the detective, his somber dress, his somber mood. She reflected on how, once he had somehow managed to put it all together from his sickbed, he had dragged himself out to try and right a situation that he suspected was about to go terribly wrong. “You said you are taking on clients. Of all kinds?”
He settled his hat gingerly atop his head, picked up his cane—not as fine a one as was stolen, but fine enough. “Of all kinds. Finding what is lost continues to be my specialty. Disappeared spouses, stolen inheritances, reputations unjustly ruined, as well as the mundane misplaced family jewelry and purloined accounts.”
Inez considered the women she knew through her business dealings. All hard-working, without exception. She thought how some, through their own ignorance or blind emotions, were taken sad advantage of. They came to her, sobbing, tricked by slick sellers of goods and services never delivered, wronged by previous business associates, stolen from by loved ones including husbands, brothers, grown children—familial perfidy knew no bounds when it came to money.
She smiled. “Mr. de Bruijn, I daresay we shall find ourselves working together again soon.”
Author’s Note
Warning: spoilers lurk in these final ruminations, so beware.
In A Dying Note, my Silver Rush protagonist Inez Stannert and I make our first foray into 1881 San Francisco, after five previous books set in 1880 Colorado. New venue, new times, new almost everything for us both.
First, a quick look at what is “real” and what is the result of my fervid imagination. The D&S House of Music and Curiosities, Henderson’s Three Sheets, and the Mays’ laundry are all fictional, for instance. The Palace Hotel (with its millions of bricks) is real, as is Lotta’s Fountain, the Lincoln public school, and other landmarks. The waterfront along the Mission Creek channel and into China Basin/Mission Bay is real. However, depending what you read, the name of this shallow, busy waterway between Berry Street and Hooper Street varied in the 1880s: Mission Creek, Mission Creek canal (or channel), Channel Street canal, China Basin canal, and, more colloquially, Shit Creek. As I rumbled and wrote my way around this area, I found Nancy Olmsted’s book on the subject especially useful: Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay.
Chinatown and the Barbary Coast existed, although some of the streets have changed names or spelling over time (for instance, Dupont Street is now Grant Street, and Kearney Street is now Kearny). In those cases, I elected to use the names and spellings of the times. There are some wonderful maps of San Francisco to peruse and play with on the internet, including the David Rumsey Map Collection and OldSF.org. The latter site ties the San Francisco city map to images from the San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection. Maps of the times always end up teaching me things I didn’t know before and setting me straight on things I thought I knew. For instance, in nineteenth-century accounts of San Francisco, I read about folks going to Point Lobos for an afternoon picnic and so on. As a native Californian, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that the only Point Lobos I knew was the one outside of Monterey, California. Definitely not close enough to San Francisco for an afternoon’s jaunt in a buggy! The 1880s maps helped me realize that San Francisco’s Point Lobos is essentially the area now called “Lands End.”
The initial impetus for this book—the “spark,” if you will—was the labor activities and formation of unions in San Francisco. From what I’ve gleaned, 1881 was a fairly quiet time for the labor movement, which gave me room to maneuver my characters and their fictional shenanigans. Information was sparse about pre-1885 labor efforts in the San Francisco musical world. In 1850, San Francisco’s musicians demanded a wage increase, which was ignored. In 1869, they attempted to organize a union, which failed, and again in 1874, which again failed. Finally in 1885, they succeeded in forming the Musician’s Mutual Protective Union, Local 10, which was chartered by the National League of Musicians. Eventually this organization would become the current day Musicians Local 6.
According to the paper A History of the Musicians Union Local 6, American Federation of Musicians, by Steven Meicke, when the 1874 union disbanded, “[its] failure was attributed to political competition among the potential leaders of a would-be musicians union. It was believed that the ‘abortive efforts of various rival organizations’ thwarted the formation of a legitimate union, and that some of the leaders sought to ‘obtain control for the furtherance of private and selfish ends.’” (In this quote, Meicke references an April 29, 1917, article in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Musicians’ Local, No. 6, Has Had Years of Activity Advance Cause of Good Music; Beginnings in 1885.”)
Hmmmm… intriguing!
Meicke also noted that when the union disbanded, the money in the treasury went back to its members. This is where fact and fiction parted ways and my musings took over: suppose those fund didn’t make it back to the members?
If you are curious about the labor movement in San Francisco, there are many resources and books out there—an avalanche, actually. One of my favorites for an overview is A History of the Labor Movement in California by Ira B. Cross. It has a very nice discussion (and photograph) of Frank Roney, a union organizer who makes a cameo appearance in the story. Roney was deeply involved in the Seamen’s Protective Union and was a leader in the early days of the Workingmen’s Party of California. As Cross notes, “Night after night found him under the light of some friendly street-lamp along the water front talking to small groups of seamen… [W]hen the steamship sailors and firemen gathered to discuss their grievances, he was among the first to advocate the organization of a union.” In September 1880, Roney helped
form the Seamen’s Protective Union, which survived until early 1882. In July 1881, Roney became president of the Representative Assembly of Trades and Labor Unions of the Pacific Coast.
For those who are wondering, Susan B. Anthony really did say, “Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.” However, she said it about a decade later, in the early 1890s. It is such a great quote, I simply could not resist including it in my story.
The inclusion of women in unions and the organization of “women’s work” was still a long way off in 1881. For insights into what women were up to, I recommend Like a Machine or an Animal: Working Women of the Late Nineteenth-Century Urban Far West, in San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles by Mary Lou Locke, Ph.D. thesis, 1982 (Locke writes the Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series under the name M. Louisa Locke); and Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920, by Edith Sparks.
For an eye-opening journey into San Francisco in this general timeframe, you can find and download this 1876 book from the internet: Lights and Shades in San Francisco, by B. E. Lloyd. A sizeable section of the book—100 pages—delves into Chinatown and its occupants, providing a fascinating but cringeworthy window into the perspectives of the day. Chinatown and the Barbary Coast are also the subjects of The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld, by Herbert Asbury, published in 1933.
A couple of great websites to find out more about almost any San Francisco-related topic or luminary are “FoundSF” and “The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco.” “Calisphere,” a project of the University of California Libraries, provides “free access to unique and historically important artifacts for research, teaching, and curious explorations.” Well, that just about covers everything, doesn’t it! I can attest that one can easily lose track of time exploring the photographs and other materials on this site. Finally, I’m going to throw open the metaphorical trunk and yank out some other books I found particularly useful. Note: these are all over the (San Francisco) map:
• The San Francisco Irish 1848–1880, by R. A. Burchell
• Bonanza Inn: America’s First Luxury Hotel, by Oscar Lewis and Carroll D. Hall (This is all about San Francisco’s Palace Hotel)
• Shanghaied in San Francisco, by Bill Pickelhaupt
• More San Francisco Memoirs, 1852-1899: The ripening years, complied and introduced by Malcolm E. Barker
• Methods of Teaching, by John Sweet, Principal of the San Francisco Girls’ High School and Normal Class (copyright 1880)
• Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906, by Barbara Berglund
There are many more, but I’ll save them for another story.
For those who are new to the series and might be wondering “What the heck is Leadville?” my early books also include author’s notes with plenty of references. Enjoy!
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