Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  “You are a newspaper sneak, sir!”

  I had put down The Hornet as my employer when I had registered at the hotel.

  “Hanging around poking and prying!”

  “That is my job,” I said.

  He folded his arms. He wore a blue flannel shirt buttoned at the neck, beneath his black jacket. He was a big-chested, powerful man, maybe six feet tall in his black boots.

  “I know your ilk! Sniffing scandals. Sniffing and scraping for your kind of cat’s vomit tricks. Sniffing for English!”

  English?

  I said I was interested in the Jack of Spades Mine.

  He gritted his teeth at me. “This camp was poisoned by spying and lies told and bamboozle. Spies and sneaks. I am sick of it!”

  “I’m not spying on you, Major.”

  He snatched from his coat pocket a nickle-plated derringer and pointed it at my forehead, squinting along the little barrel. “What do you think of that, Mister Newspaper Sneak?”

  It was interesting the advantage you felt when the other fellow produced a firearm.

  “I don’t think much of it,” I said.

  He held the little piece aimed at my forehead, shaking it and showing me his lower teeth.

  “There are abandoned mine shafts under our feet, sir!” he said. “Dead men inhabit them, sir!” He pocketed the derringer and lurched out of the room.

  He slammed the door behind him.

  In the night the wind came up. The curtains bellied into the room like ghosts clinging to the sash. I heard cans banging together, panes rattled. I had written up my notes for Bierce. One of the Spades, Albert Gorton, had been murdered, “clubbed” as the letter to Bierce had put it; another was named Macomber, still another was so far unidentified. One of these must have written the letter to Bierce.

  Lady Caroline’s managers had cleared out her interests in the Consolidated-Ohio a year or eighteen months ago. Devers had spoken of her with affection, maybe more than affection‌—‌as “the Miners’ Angel.” That affection didn’t seem to include Nat McNair.

  The Major was worried that I was spying. Spying on what? What did “English” have to do with anything?

  And what did any of this have to do with the murder of two Morton Street whores and a judge’s widow, in San Francisco?

  My waiter at breakfast was the dwarf, Jimmy Fairleigh. The wind whooped along the street in great wallops of dust that battered against the hotel windows like hail. Men came in, cursing and beating their hats against their clothing. I thought that Devers would not be early at the office so I made a leisurely breakfast. Jimmy Fairleigh cleared the table and brought me more coffee. His heavy, anxious face was out of scale to his frame, more old than young, I could see now. He identified the wind as a “Washoe Zephyr.”

  Before he got away, I said, “I shouldn’t imagine Mr. Devers would be early at his office this morning.”

  “He’ll be there,” he said. “Comes in early rain or shine. Up on B Street.”

  “I’m interested in talking to anybody who knew Caroline LaPlante,” I said.

  He cleared the dishes and stacked them on his arm as though he hadn’t heard me.

  The Zephyr scoured B Street. Sheets of newspaper flapped through the air like seabirds, and an empty fruit can rolled and clanked. A brown dog was blown along with it, trotting obliquely with the wind pushing him. I turned up my collar and kept a hand on my hat. The wind was more of an inducement to get out of Virginia City than Major Copley’s threats had been.

  Devers was visible through a window that had VIRGINIA SENTINEL painted on it. He wore a green eyeshade and sat at a rolltop desk with a hand supporting his cheek. He glanced up without enthusiasm as I came in, pushing the door closed against the wind.

  “Does it blow like this a good deal?”

  “It’ll blow like this awhile,” he said, nodding. “Then it will bull up and blow hard for awhile.” He indicated a chair. He looked more sickly than he had last night in the dimness of the saloon.

  I told him that I’d had a visit from Major Copley in the night.

  “Ah!”

  “Ranted about spies and sneaks.”

  Devers kept his eyes fixed on one of the pigeonholes of his desk. “They got pretty skittish about being spied on, there at the Con-Ohio.”

  “What happened?”

  “There was some fuss they’d just as soon didn’t get out and about.”

  “What’s ‘English’ mean?”

  “Well, that’s the English shuffle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Way it was worked, the stock was stuck in low figures so the news got out that a drill hole had run into an orebody. Looked like a bonanza. There was a jump in the stock, and they sold out better off. But when they drifted on in there was nothing doing. It’d been salted. Major Copley took a deal of criticism, but he was as fooled as anybody as far as I can make out.”

  “Why English?” I said. “Because of Lady Caroline?”

  “No, no, no; Carrie wouldn’t have anything to do with truck like that. Fellow that first devised the business was an Englishman. Maybe he was named English. The way he worked it out for McNair had one more hook to it. They leak out the news there’s a strike, then nothing comes of it like it’s a salting trick, but there’s an orebody, all right. So then they buy up the shares on the cheap.”

  It was difficult to sort through the convolutions of the English shuffle.

  “You said you had a tintype of the Spades I could have.”

  He lifted his head as though it was very heavy. “Spades?”

  I reminded him.

  “Oh, it wouldn’t be here,” he said. “All the files are down in Carson, I don’t have them here.”

  “You promised me that tintype,” I said.

  “Have to come back. I’ll be going down there in a week or so, look for it then. You’ll have to come back.”

  “That tintype is worth fifty dollars to me,” I said, hoping I could convince Bierce and Mr. Macgowan that the tintype was worth such a sum. “You send me that tintype and I’ll send you fifty dollars.”

  “Done!”

  “In that tintype are the people I’m interested in. McNair, Caroline LaPlante, a man named Gorton and another named Macomber, and a third man. Who was the third man?”

  He shook his head. A blast of wind peppered the window. “Don’t exactly remember anybody named Macomber either.”

  “That enforcer of McNair’s named Klosters. Might he have enforced Gorton in San Francisco?”

  “You didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Clubbed him why? Something to do with the Jack of Spades? Troublesome to McNair?”

  “I don’t know any of that,” Devers said. He swung full-face toward me for the first time. “Listen, young fellow. You go around asking questions like that and you will get some answers you are not going to like.”

  I rose, dropped my card on his desk and said, “I want that tintype, however.”

  “You’ll have it,” Devers said. “Get out of here and blow away now.”

  I let myself out into a blast of wind filled with grit.

  Back at the hotel I encountered Jimmy Fairleigh in the lobby. He wore a long denim apron and swabbed the tiles with a mop with a flail of soaking cloth at the end, which he slapped from side to side. He set the mop in its pail and beckoned me into the empty dining room.

  “I used to work at the Miner’s Rest,” he said.

  “I will pay for information.”

  He indicated the table where I’d had breakfast, and I sat down. He remained standing before me, his short arms crossed on his chest, his ugly face contorted anxiously.

  “I’d work for Carrie sometimes when I was just a kit, running errands and such. She is a fine woman. I will tell you I have never thought higher of a woman than her.”

  He stared at me with an expression I didn’t understand, maybe defiance.

  I said I was a friend of her son’s, inquiring into some matters that conc
erned him about his mother’s days in Virginia City.

  “After Julia Bulette got murdered there was no keeping her here. Thought it was bound to happen to her.”

  Who was Julia Bulette?

  “Hoor. Sometimes she worked out of Carrie’s place. Frenchy bastard killed her. They strung him up!”

  “How was she killed?”

  “Beat on, strangled, shot. Crime of passion, they called it. She was dead. It was a fright to Carrie. There was no holding her here then. Said she’d marry one of those fellows that was always proposing to her and get out of town and out of the business.”

  “Who was proposing?”

  “Fancy fellows! Sharon was married, but he’d’ve set her up in style. Nat McNair, that she did marry. There was others, just about every Jim, George and Will in town.”

  I asked if he knew of the Spades. “They had to do with the Jack of Spades Mine.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said vaguely. “Dolph Jackson and them. McNair.”

  “Did Carrie have a special gent?”

  “She had her favorites. Dolph; he was a funny one, made her laugh, took her for rides in his buggy. She liked that. And the Englishman. Very high-tone! And there was the piano player at the Miner’s Rest, I forget his name.” He rubbed the back of his neck as though to revive his memory. “She was a woman any man would want to lock up in his house just for himself.”

  I thought he was one who had loved her, though he had said he was just a kit.

  “Macomber?”

  “Sure, Eddie Macomber.”

  “Al Gorton?”

  He nodded his big head. “Bald fellow with a bunged-up eye.”

  “Man named Elza Klosters?”

  After some thought, he shook his head. “Nothing to do with Carrie.”

  I took a breath and said, “Cletus Redmond?”

  “Didn’t know anybody by that name. Just what is it you want, Mister?”

  “So Carrie was frightened when one of her whores was murdered and decided that she had to leave town and make a good marriage.”

  “She was in a family way!” he blurted.

  “She was?”

  He licked his lips. “Now you show me some money, Mister, or I don’t have no more to say.”

  I gave him three dollars, which was all I could afford. He tucked it into a pocket inside his apron. Yes, Carrie had been in a family way. He didn’t know who the father was. Could’ve been any of several. There was nothing more to be got out of Jimmy Fairleigh, either because he knew no more, or he had already told me more than he’d meant to, or because my three dollars had not sufficed him or because his loyalty to Caroline LaPlante prevented any more discussion of her male connections.

  “If you see Carrie you tell her Jimmy Fairleigh will always remember her,” he said.

  In the hotel in Reno where I spent the night, I woke up with names running through my head. English. Englishman. Britain. James M. Brittain, Amelia’s father, had been a mining engineer in the Comstock. Every Jim, George and Will. I didn’t sleep any more, considering withholding this connection from Bierce, because of my attachment to Miss Amelia Brittain.

  10.

  INTIMACY, n. – A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  Bierce had written: “San Francisco will welcome the returning Lady Caroline Stearns, formerly High-grade Carrie of the Washoe and Mrs. Nathaniel McNair of the City.”

  “She is a woman of distinction, whether the bootstraps are stretched or not,” he said to me. “I cannot think of many such. Adah Isaacs Mencken, Ada Claire, Lillie Coit. For the most part the gender has little to recommend it except for its role in the continuation of the species, which is an arguable concept at best. I am unconcerned with her maculate past.”

  He often described whores as the most honest members of their sex. Sometimes he did get tiresome in his fulminations.

  He had spoken with Judge McManigle, who had served with Judge Hamon on the Circuit Court, and had not been much impressed: “Who ne’er took up law, yet lays law down,” he said. “Still, he knew what cock horse Judge Hamon was riding. He was denouncing Senator Jennings for subornation and barratry, never mind that it was rancor over the Railroad choosing Jennings to ordain a state senator rather than himself. He had chapter and verse on Jennings’s purchase in cases that concerned the Southern Pacific in general, and the trials of the Mussel Slough farmers in particular. That was what your arsonist friend disposed of in Santa Cruz.”

  “Did Brown kill Mrs. Hamon then?”

  “Or Jennings himself. In any case Jennings was surely the instigator.” Bierce leaned back in his chair, regarding me with his handsome, high-color, cold face. He wore a blue silk cravat, and his vest buttoned with the gold chain of his watch across it. The chalky skull grimaced at our conversation.

  “How do these matters fit together?” I asked. “Highgrade Carrie. The Spades. The murder of Julia Bulette. The proposals. The pregnancy. The murder of Al Gorton. Beau, who is no longer engaged to Amelia Brittain. The slashed Morton Street whores. And Senator Jennings, Mrs. Hamon and the man called Brown.”

  I did not mention James M. Brittain.

  Bierce handed me another typewritten sheet, with an item for Tattle:

  “The Senator from Southern Pacific has been especially active lately, in Morton Street and Santa Cruz, as well as the Giftcrest palm-greasings.”

  “I will see him hanged,” he said. “And the Giftcrest defeated. And the Railroad powerfully smitten.”

  Tattle also contained an item on a lady poet who had sent a volume of her poems to Bierce: “Miss Frye makes comment that her best inspirations come to her on an empty stomach. The quality of her verse has caused this reader’s stomach to empty as well—”

  And a stab at the Reverend Stottlemyer: “It has been related to me that the Reverend Stottlemyer, renowned for his ability to separate wallets from the bills within, was asked by a fellow Deacon to exercise his powers on the Deacon’s congregation, for which our Stottle would receive one fourth of the monies collected. This was assented to on the proviso that Stottlemyer take up the collection himself. He did so and pocketed the funds, whereupon the Deacon raised an outcry. To this Stottle responded, ‘Nothing is coming to you, Brother, for the Adversary hardened the hearts of your congregation and all they gave was a fourth.’ ”

  “I hope to show the tintype to Captain Pusey, when it comes,” I said.

  “Who perhaps will have a photograph of the bravo Klosters in his archive. I wonder if we will not find that Klosters is your menacing Mr. Brown.”

  “Amelia Brittain told me that Beau McNair explained to her that redheaded Jewesses were the most popular of the parlorhouse women. I wonder if there is a particular one.”

  “I suppose the topics of conversation of the younger generation will always be shocking to the older,” Bierce said. “Yes, that is grounds for investigation.”

  “What do you think of Beau’s alibi?”

  “The young man’s mother’s pet employee? Young McNair is not out of the forest by any means, but I don’t think he is the Morton Street Slasher.”

  I warned myself not to become as obsessed with Beau McNair as Bierce was with the Southern Pacific Railroad.

  “Would you like to come to St. Helena for the weekend?” Bierce asked. “Meet Mrs. Bierce and the children?” He looked grim again. “You will have to meet Mrs. Day as well‌—‌my Mollie’s mother.”

  I said I would be very pleased to come to St. Helena for the weekend.

  I did not know much about Bierce’s family, except that they lived across the Bay to the north. Bierce himself rented an apartment on Broadway, near The Hornet. He kept to himself after work, although I knew he belonged to the Bohemian Club, and he often spent evenings at cards with his literary friends Ina Coolbrith and Charles Warren Stoddard, who were the editors of the Overland Monthly. His drinking friends were Arthur McEwen and Petey Bigelow of the Examin
er, and there were evenings when those three cut a considerable swath at the Baldwin Theater Bar at Kearny and Bush, and the saloon at the Crystal Palace. And I knew he consorted with women who were not Mollie Bierce, in the French restaurants such as the Terrapin Oyster House, or the Old Poodle Dog, which had elevators to the private rooms upstairs and were open all night. I had in fact met one of his women, a Mrs. Barclay, a willowy, wispy dark lady who sparkled with diamonds and fawned on Bierce as though he was in fact Almighty God.

  Bierce had suggested that I try my hand on a side piece on Leland Stanford of the Big Four, who had just been nominated for the senate with more than the usual degree of political shenanigans. I showed him what I had written:

  All the surviving Big Four are big men. Collis B. Huntington weighs 240, Stanford upwards of 260, Charles Crocker downwards from 300. The Nob Hill mansions of these former Sacramento storekeepers are big. Their fortunes are big. It is estimated that when Hopkins died he was worth $19,000,000. Crocker’s fortune is larger than that, Stanford’s still larger, Huntington’s the largest of all.

  Stanford, who was governor of California during the War, is pleased to be referred to as Governor Stanford. He has been likened to Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Napoleon Bonaparte, John Stuart Mill and Judas Iscariot.

  A man of closely considered opinions, he is outspoken against the proposed government regulation of corporations. He considers such regulation contrary to America’s traditional respect for property rights, and against the interests of the small man who needs the cooperation of others of his class, in the form of corporations, to protect him from the greed of the moneyed.

  “It is pleasant to be rich,” he told a reporter. “But the advantages of wealth are greatly exaggerated. I do not clearly see that a man who can buy anything he fancies is any better off than the man who can buy what he actually wants.”

  And he added: “If it rained twenty-dollar gold pieces until noon every day, at night there would be some men begging for their suppers.”