Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  “Which one did you like the most?”

  “I did like Amelia Brittain the most. She is engaged to marry a very wealthy fellow, however.”

  Maybe a murderer, however.

  “What’s his name?” Belinda asked.

  “Beaumont McNair. Isn’t that a high-tone name?”

  “I like Tom Redmond for a name.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She reminded me that we were engaged to be married on her eighteenth birthday, and we stopped at a stand in the shade of an oak tree. I bought her a bottle of sarsaparilla. Belinda sipped liquid through her straw as we walked on. A trio of horsemen clopped past us, high-stepping horses with gleaming haunches. Belinda told me about the nun who was mean to her and the nun who thought she might have a vocation. I heard my name called.

  In a fancy buggy gleaming with varnish were Amelia and Beau McNair, Amelia waving a handkerchief, Beau wearing a fuzzy plug hat. Halted, the chestnut horse, with blue ribbons knotted in his mane and a high curve of tail, pitched his head and pawed a hoof. I had a comprehensive sensation of low station.

  Amelia beckoned. Belinda moved reluctantly at my side, and I had the further revelation of her awareness not only of station but of youth, not to speak of the sarsaparilla bottle with its straw, which she held down in the folds of her skirt.

  Amelia looked splendid in a complicated white dress, a bonnet busy with ribbons and her long white gloves, which semaphored enthusiasm. “Mr. Redmond, how nice to see you! Here’s my Mr. McNair certified innocent!”

  Beau raised a finger from the reins in greeting.

  I introduced Belinda Barnacle, whose curtsy, with her dipping parasol and concealed sarsaparilla bottle, was prettily managed.

  Beau McNair’s striped jacket fit him like paint.

  “I’ve told Mr. McNair how helpful you’ve been, Mr. Redmond,” Amelia said. “I suppose I can’t thank you for the disposition of these misapprehensions, but your support was important to an anxious young woman.”

  I bowed and said I was always at her disposal.

  Though his expression was sullen, her fiancé had such a gilded aura, with his clipped fair beard and mustache, that it was a mental effort to conceive of him as the kind of rakehell who believed his station in life gave him license for insult and injury to lesser beings, not to speak of slaughtering whores for sport.

  Drawing on a whore’s belly with an acid pen was so stupid and juvenile that I could hardly believe it of this sartorial paragon seated at his ease beside Amelia Brittain. He simply did not look the part.

  “Mr. McNair’s mother will be arriving within a fortnight,” Amelia said, with a brilliant smile, leaving me to wonder whether this was for the wedding, or because her fiancé had got himself into another pickle.

  I managed to summon up an amiable expression at the information.

  Beau’s whip tickled the back of the beautiful horse. He tipped his hat in farewell, not having spoken a word, and the varnish-shiny rig rolled away, with Amelia’s gloved hand waving back at us.

  “That was Miss Brittain that you liked the most,” Belinda said, as we started on

  “That one, yes.”

  Belinda looked thoughtful. “Mr. McNair doesn’t like you much.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “What did she mean, you’d been so helpful?”

  “He was in jail, and she asked me to see if I could do anything to help.”

  “He’s not in jail any more.”

  “No,” I said.

  It appears a shade too neat, Bierce had said.

  As we walked on I found a receptacle in which Belinda could rid herself of the sarsaparilla bottle. She managed to juggle her parasol while dusting her hands together.

  “She’s very pretty,” she said.

  When I brought Belinda home, Mr. Barnacle was leaning on the fence. In the little yard behind him young Johnny Barnacle kicked a kerosene can with resounding metal thumps. Belinda slipped inside the gate and trotted into the house.

  “Henry George!” Mr. Barnacle said, jutting his unshaven chin at me.

  “Henry George?”

  “That writing fellow was correct. The Railroad has been the ruin of us out here.”

  “How is that, Mr. Barnacle?”

  “Just what he said would be. For awhile everybody’s put to work, then the job is finished and everybody’s out of work. Depression, Tom. They said San Francisco would be another Venice if we didn’t connect to the east with a railroad, but we have did it and now we are up the spout.”

  Mr. Barnacle had not worked for some years, which his wife attributed to his weakness for whiskey. He attributed his difficulties to the Railroad, and probably Bierce would agree with him, as Henry George did.

  “One rich man makes a hundred poor men,” he went on, nodding sagely at the Georgian wisdom. “The fine carriages roll past the starving children!”

  “Well, your children are not starving, Mr. Barnacle,” I said.

  “Tell me, Tom, are you still a member of the Democracy Club?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Down with the SP and the Monopoly, I say! Shooting those poor farmers down at Mussel Slough!”

  “Bad business!”

  “Buying up legislatures like them fellows is no better than Chinese slave girls,” he ranted on. “The Girtcrest Corridor Bill! Bad cess to them, I say, Tom!”

  The Girtcrest Corridor Bill, which Bierce called “the Giftcrest,” was being ushered through the State legislature by Senator Aaron Jennings, “the Senator from Southern Pacific,” and was a giveaway of thousands of acres of San Joaquin Valley land to the Railroad. Anti-Railroad sentiment was noisiest in the Democratic Clubs in San Francisco.

  “Down with the Monopoly, Mr. Barnacle!” I said, and passed through the gate and up my creaking stairs.

  I had showed a piece I wrote to Bierce, and “The Monopoly” must have impressed him enough to consider me as having some promise as a journalist, also that I possessed the proper Antimonopoly fire and facts:

  For the 737 miles of line from Sacramento to Promontory, Utah, Charles Crocker, Collis B. Huntington, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins, the Big Four, received $38,500,000 in land grants and government bonds. They employed themselves as the Contract and Finance Corporation to build the Central Pacific line, and when the stock they turned over to this corporation was distributed, each of the partners was richer by $13,000,000.

  As the Central Pacific Railroad inched its way over the Sierra to join the Union Pacific and connect the two coasts of the Nation, the Big Four was already planning the Monopoly of transportation in the State of California. The first step was the acquisition of the existing local railroads, and then the construction of new interior lines. These roads were to become the Big Four’s most valuable property, the Southern Pacific Railroad. Terminal facilities in Oakland and San Francisco were acquired for the same purpose.

  By the early ‘70s the SP had succeeded in controlling the movement of freight to and from California and within the borders of the state. The roads it did not own in California numbered five, with a total of fifty-nine miles of track.

  The Southern Pacific’s rate-schedules are dictated by “all the traffic will bear. “Rates are set to the maximum that shippers can afford, those on agricultural products based on current market prices. Rates are low where there is competing water transport, higher where there is no competition, and freight is cheaper across the country than between San Francisco and Reno.

  By the time the people of California realized that they were trapped in the arms of the Octopus, the railroad had come to control the legislature, the governor, the state regulatory agencies, city and county governments, often the courts, and wields power in the National Congress.

  Anti-railroad candidates are voted into office, bills empowering the State to fix railroad rates are passed into law, but they are never enforced. Always the Southern Pacific manages to frustrate legislation‌—‌by the governor’s veto, by chall
enging the laws in the courts, and by controlling the agencies responsible for putting the measures into effect.

  Railroad gangs break up Antimonopoly meetings. Railroad opponents are punished, public officials bribed, newspapermen intimidated, protesting farmers, whose claims on Railroad agricultural lands were not honored, are shot down by hired gunmen. Although Californians raise a continual wail of complaint and vituperation against the Octopus, Mark Hopkins‌—‌the only member of the Big Four of whom it was said, a man might cross the street to wish him a good day‌—‌having gone to his reward in 1878, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford take their ease in their magnificent mansions atop Nob Hill, overlooking San Francisco beneath a cloudless sky.

  Bierce did point out that he, for one, had not been intimidated by the Railroad.

  6.

  OPPORTUNITY, n. – A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  The third Morton Street murder took place that night. The victim this time was no whore but a middle-aged well dressed woman who was strangled but not slashed, although her skirts were flung up over her head as though the murderer had been interrupted in his processes.

  The body was found in a pile of rubbish in a stub of alley off the street, and the three of spades marked the victim, although it was not deposited in the open mouth this time.

  I observed this third body on the slab at the Morgue in Dunbar Alley, the swollen, agonized features, gaping mouth and bruised throat. She was a woman of about fifty, stout and graying, a mole on her chin. Her skirt and jacket were black, her hands well kempt, uncalloused, neat nails. She wore a gold wedding band and a large ruby circled by tiny red stones. There was nothing to identify her, no witnesses this time.

  Bierce and I met Sgt. Nix at Dinkins’s. Dick Dinkins called from behind the bar, “Hear he got him another one, Mr. Bierce. This yob’ll scare all the hoors back to Cincinnati!”

  Bierce saluted but did not reply. Men at the bar observed us in the mirrors or peered over their shoulders in the pleasant sour stink of beer. Sgt. Nix sat with his boots spread out and his helmet in his lap.

  “Our suspect was at a dinner party at some Nob Hill folks named Brittain,” he said.

  “His fiancée, whom you know,” Bierce said to me. He sipped his beer and swabbed at his mustache with a forefinger.

  I felt a queer mix of relief and disappointment.

  “A different strangler?” Bierce said.

  “A copycat getting an advantage out of a trey of spades. She weren’t slashed, no innards spilled. It is possible.”

  “A ditto-maniac,” Bierce said. “No idea who the victim is?”

  Nix shook his head. “We’re checking hotels in case she’s out-of-town. The Captain thinks she is.”

  “Because he didn’t recognize her? He is supposed to be infallible.”

  “What he likes to claim,” Nix said. Dinkins brought him a beer.

  “She was wearing black,” Bierce said. “Mourning?”

  A deduction! “Maybe so!” I said.

  Nix looked interested. “We’ll find out who she is,” he said. “One thing she’s not is some Morton Street dove. That is one spooked pack of women, over there.”

  We were still at the table when a policeman came in and handed Nix a folded slip of paper. He stood beside the table until Nix had perused the note and signaled for him to depart. Nix put the paper down on the table between us.

  “She was staying at the Grand. Mrs. Hiram Hamon. That’s Judge Hamon. He died about a month ago. She was up from Santa Cruz. Judge Hamon retired down there from the Circuit Court.”

  Bierce had straightened. “Mrs. Hamon had made an appointment to see me this afternoon,” he announced grimly.

  Nix and I stared at him.

  “What about?” I asked.

  “Her letter only advised me that she had information that was important and I would be interested.”

  “Well, now, that is something, ain’t it?” Nix said.

  “Allow me to extrapolate,” Bierce said. His face was keen as a hawk’s. “If she wanted to see me, it was probably something to do with the Railroad. My feelings about the Railroad are well known. Judge Hamon and Judge Jennings‌—‌before he got elected to the State Senate‌—‌sat on the Circuit Court. Aaron Jennings presided over the trials of the Mussel Slough farmers, if you will remember, and his every decision went against them and for the Railroad. At the time there was talk that Judge Hamon was very disturbed, and he retired soon after. And Jennings went straight into the State Senate with the Railroad blessing.”

  “The Railroad at last,” I said, grinning at him. “The Senator from Southern Pacific.”

  “Girtcrest,” Nix said.

  “How would you like to make a trip to Santa Cruz, Tom?” Bierce said. “To see if Mrs. Hamon had a son or daughter, or a neighbor she confided in.”

  The train looped down to Watsonville and back up a ledge along the coast. From the car the Pacific looked deep blue with sparkles of white and gold, the bay bounded by the Monterey Peninsula to the south. A ship with stacked white sails sat motionless in the middle distance. Further out a steamer trailed black smoke. Opposite me a stout, big-hatted gent in a black suit and a face hard and pocked as granite sat gazing out my window at the maritime vistas that had opened. His eyes caught mine once, as blank as glass. In front of me a young lady in a poke bonnet perused a novel, whose title I had not managed to spy out. Two drummers had a card game going, slapping cards down on the seat between them. The tracks wound toward Santa Cruz through tan fields.

  I descended at the station and took a room at the Liddell House, before strolling around the plaza to familiarize myself with the place. A soft breath of salt air came off the Bay. The post office was in the general store on the corner opposite the plaza. The gray-haired postmistress, with pencils protruding from her coif like a cannibal headdress, gave me the Hamon address, down toward the water, second right, third house on the left, a brick chimney and a covered porch with ferns in pots. Mrs. Hamon’s right-hand neighbor was a Mrs. Bettis.

  When I started toward the waterfront I could see smoke rising, a thin pencil of it fattening into a boa. The bell of an engine company shrilled. In minutes the engine rolled past me behind a fine team of heavy-hammed horses, three helmeted firemen hanging off the back. The smoke was flattening and spreading out. I knew it was the Hamon house before I turned the corner.

  Smoke had settled into a low-lying billow in the street. Firemen were visible in the smoke, hustling around the engine. Flames climbed in bright twisting shapes. A frieze of people watched from the other side of the street, close enough to be troublesome. Always at a fire you had to deal with rubberneckers. More than once the Engine Company 13 Chief had turned a hose on them.

  I joined the group on the sidewalk. Two trees behind the house were flaring like a torchlight parade. It was the Hamon house, all right. “Started in the back,” a man with a bandanna tied over his head told me. “One of these fellows said you could smell the stink of kerosene all over the back of the house.”

  Through the smoke I saw the Chief pointing. The crystal arcs of water changed direction. They had given up on the Hamon ruin and concentrated on wetting down the neighbor houses. The engine puffed smoke into the general pall. Mrs. Bettis’s bungalow sported a little porch on which a fat woman hovered, with her hands clasped together. A fireman yelled at her to move.

  The second floor of the Hamon house caved in with a wrenching crash, and the mess of blazes climbed and subsided as the walls fell in.

  More spectators had arrived to line the street. Among them was a man in a big hat.

  The next time I looked, he was gone.

  After the fire was out I sat in Mrs. Bettis’s parlor in an easy chair with antimacassars on the arms and behind my head. Mrs. Bettis occupied the sofa opposite me in her flowered dress and gray felt slippers, sipping from a glass of water. She seemed stunned by the fire next door and t
he news that her neighbor had been murdered. I asked her if she had seen anyone in the alley behind the houses.

  She had observed the top of a buggy stopped there. Outbuildings blocked her view and she hadn’t seen anything but the buggy top and the smoke. She sipped her water, gazing at me with her gray lips drooping.

  “Whoever it was wanted to dispose of something in the house that had to do with the murder of Mrs. Hamon. What could that be?”

  She thought. “Judge Hamon’s papers?”

  What did she know about them?

  “He was working on them when he died. Evelyn was sorting through them afterwards. There were scandals. He was very Anti-monopoly.”

  The Railroad.

  “Do you have any idea of what the scandals were?”

  She peered at me as though she had to translate my words into a more familiar language before responding. “I know Evelyn was exercised.”

  When I pursued the thought, Mrs. Bettis said, “She was a close-mouthed woman when it came to the Judge’s affairs.”

  Mrs. Hamon had been ten or twelve years younger than the Judge. He was a cranky old fellow who sat on his veranda with a glass of whiskey and waved his cane and shouted at the buggies and carriages that passed by too fast to suit him.

  “The dust is bad when it’s breezy,” Mrs. Bettis explained. The Judge had retired from the Circuit Court several years ago and he and his wife moved to Santa Cruz, where he worked on the book he intended to publish.

  “She was a close-mouthed woman,” she said again, to forestall my asking again about the Judge’s papers.

  I asked about the Judge’s death.

  “A stroke took him like that.” Mrs. Bettis snapped her fingers.

  “Right there on the veranda. Evelyn went out to call him in for supper and he was gone.”

  The Judge had a son by his first wife back east, maybe in Philadelphia. He and Mrs. Hamon had a daughter downstate in San Diego. They had not had many acquaintances in Santa Cruz. Mrs. Bettis thought she had been Mrs. Hamon’s closest friend. She sighed.