Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

Her earrings flipped as Mammy Pleasant shook her head.

  “I think you would have made it your business to know,” Bierce said, leaning toward her.

  “I cannot help you further,” she said, rising. She swept out of the room. We heard her say to the butler, “Please show the gentlemen to the door.”

  I admired her dismissal of us.

  As I climbed into the buggy after Bierce, I said, “You got something out of her. I didn’t think you would.”

  “She doesn’t know what information they have recorded at the Hall of Records. I do.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Not much,” he said chuckling. “Beau was born in March 1863. Mr. and Mrs. McNair were married in December of 1862.”

  I couldn’t think what application that information could have. “Who was the father?” I asked.

  “Ah,” Bierce said. “The pleasure of that discovery is still before us.”

  13.

  RECONCILIATION, n. – A suspension of hostilities. An armed truce for the purpose of digging up the dead.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  At supper at the boardinghouse we were eight or nine‌—‌depending on whether or not the drummer was out of town‌—‌including The Hooter, a bank clerk, for his hoot of a laugh; and Fuzzy Bear, a horsecar conductor, both of them named by the youngest Barnacle, Johnny. After Mrs. B.’s repast of meatloaf and gravy, cabbage and mashed potatoes, with bread pudding for dessert, the Hooter, Fuzzy Bear and young Johnny Barnacle departed, leaving me with my coffee, and Jonas, Mrs. B., Belinda and her biggest brother, Colbert, a smelly twelve-year-old with a haystack of fair hair and a way of pointing his face away while his eyes regarded you, which made him resemble an apprentice cardsharp. I understood that I was part of a Barnacle family crisis.

  Belinda sat with her hands in her lap and her tragic face raised like Joan of Arc contemplating the stake.

  “Ain’t you ashamed to have Mr. Redmond know you have done this mean thing?” Mrs. B. said.

  Belinda looked unashamed. Her face was at its prettiest when she was under duress.

  “What she done was,” Jonas Barnacle said to me, over his coffee mug, “she stole the two bits from the jar where it was kept for the paperboy. Didn’t you, Belinda?”

  Belinda rolled her eyes at me. I gathered that my presence was part of the punishment.

  “Then she told me Colbert had took it. What she had did, she had stuck it under the scarf on Colbert’s dresser so I’d find it there. To get him whomped. Isn’t that right, Missy?”

  Belinda set her lips more tightly together, staring straight ahead.

  “That is about as mean a trick as I can think of,” Mrs. B. said. She had her hair done up in a severe bun on top of her head. She squinched her eyes at her daughter. “A mean little snip trying to get her brother in a fix.”

  “I just hope Father Kennedy don’t hear of it,” Jonas Barnacle said, leaning his elbows on the table and pushing his face toward Belinda.

  “Or Sister Claire,” Mrs. B. said. “That thinks little Miss Pet here might have a vocation.”

  The flesh around Belinda’s eyes turned pink. She rose, with dignity, made her way past the empty chairs and out of the room.

  “Get out of here,” Jonas Barnacle said to Colbert, who left with a smug glance at me.

  The parents assumed expressions of severe sadness.

  “Just don’t know what to do with that girl,” Jonas said.

  “She’s going to be a fine young lady one of these days,” I said.

  Mrs. B. sniffed. She had a tired, angular face in which the features were set in uneasy conjunction.

  “Can’t even strop her like she deserves,” Jonas said. “Take a strop to her and she won’t cry, she won’t even flinch, look you straight in the eye and make you feel like a Cossack.”

  “Says she’s too old to be stropped,” the mother said with another sniff. “Why would she do a thing like that? Sneaky!”

  “Let me talk to her,” I said.

  “You talk to her, Tom,” her father said, looking relieved.

  I found Belinda seated outside on the rickety stairs to my top-floor room, with her skirt wrapped around her legs, her feet set primly side by side and her arms folded over her chest. She had been crying.

  I sat down beside her and put my arm around her thin shoulders.

  “They won’t believe me!” she said forcefully. “They just believe him. I said he stole it, and he said I stole it and put it on his dresser. So they believe him.”

  “You shouldn’t have said it.”

  “Oh, I know I shouldn’t have said it,” she mimicked. “But that’s not the point, Tom! It’s that they’d believe him and not me! Do you know why? Because I’m a girl and he’s a boy. Boys are worth something and girls aren’t worth anything. Girls are sneaky, and boys are‌—‌stalwart! Well, he’s not stalwart, he’s a mean little pig and I hate him.”

  “You don’t want to hate your brother,” I said.

  “Yes, I do; I hate him! But I hate her worse.”

  “Your mother!”

  “Because she hates girls. She must’ve been a girl once herself! She doesn’t think girls are worth raising. She thinks girls are sneaky and whining. Well, that’s just what he is!”

  “She just sounds like that when she’s angry with you.”

  “You don’t know! Everything’s for him. Not so much Johnny. Colbert always comes first. He gets the biggest slice of pie, and if there’s only money for one of us to throw the ring-thing at the fairgrounds, Colbert gets to do it. I can throw better than he can! But I’m second, or third, because I’m a girl. I’m no good because I’m a girl. I hate her!”

  “Listen, Belinda,” I said. “You’re a girl and that’s good, and you’re a very pretty girl and that’s even better. One of these days‌—‌before you know it!‌—‌all the boys’re going to be looking at you, and they’ll be trying to talk to you, and they’ll bring you presents at school and share their cookies with you. And then when you are a young woman, the men will ask to be on your dance card and want to take you for rides in their fancy turnouts. And then you will be number one, I can tell you.”

  “No!” she moaned.

  “You just watch. Then, you’ll see, you can have anything you want, anybody you want! Because you are a girl, and good and beautiful. But, see, Colbert doesn’t get anything like that. He has to go out in the world and make a living and try to make something of himself, and maybe he can’t and then he’s a failure and he’ll start drinking and people will call him worthless. Because he’s a boy, because he’s a man, and if you’re a man nobody forgives you anything. So then you’ll have to feel sorry for Colbert.”

  “He’s a rotten little turd!” Belinda sobbed.

  “I know that,” I said. “But you don’t want to be one, too.”

  She leaned against me and sobbed while I patted her shoulder.

  A heavy-set customer in a big hat had stopped at the Barnacles’ gate to regard us with a steady gaze. It was the man who called himself Brown, with his sweat-shiny pocked face, and no doubt his revolver tucked into his belt. He drew something from his vest pocket and flipped it over the gate onto the walk twenty feet away from Belinda and me, a playing card. I had no doubt what suit it was. I felt paralyzed with fury.

  Brown marched on out of sight past the next house as Belinda rose and scampered down to pick up the card.

  “It’s the queen of spades, Tom!”

  I snatched it from her, let myself out the gate and trotted after Brown. He had disappeared. I hadn’t really tried to catch up with him.

  Belinda met me at the gate. She looked frightened. “What does it mean?”

  I said it was just a joke.

  When I brought the queen of spades to Bierce I was angered all over again because I knew that I had been counted on to deliver it to him.

  “I suppose it means we should stop fretting the Railroad about Mussel Slough,” I said.

  “I
t is a clumsy attempt at intimidation,” Bierce said. “The queen of spades was employed because spades have been in the newspapers in connection with murders.” He slipped the card into his desk drawer. “It must be an anticipation of your Jennings piece,” he said.

  “I’ve hardly started it!”

  “It is known you are researching it. Miss Penryn may have communicated the information to Smithers, or Macgowan. Someone who has a Railroad friend. There are not many secrets around a newspaper office.”

  The neat little man said his name was Smith. He shook hands with Bierce, and introduced himself to me. “Clete Redmond’s son?” he said.

  I admitted it.

  He had a diamond pin in his cravat, a gold chain across his vest. Child-sized shoes gleamed beneath the cuffs of his trousers. He had silver hair and a neat triangular silver goatee. His eyes twinkled.

  “We read your recent piece in The Hornet,” he said to Bierce, when he had seated himself, crossed his legs and settled his hat in his lap. “Yours also, Mr. Redmond,” he said to me.

  “May I ask who ‘we’ is?” Bierce said amiably.

  “Certain gentlemen at Fourth and Townsend, who have been regularly insulted by you, sir!” Smith chuckled.

  “Why, I thought I had complimented them!” Bierce said.

  “I have a message for you,” Smith said.

  “I am all ears.”

  “It is very brief,” Smith said. “It is that those who investigate may also be investigated.”

  He rose, clapped his hat on his head, said, “Good day, sir. Good day,” he said to me and was gone, his heels clicking in the corridor.

  The headline in the next morning’s Chronicle that lay on the Barnacles’ breakfast table was: SPADE SLAYING #4, and upper tenderloin SLASHING, and the smaller head: MAYOR OFFERS REWARD. I snatched it up to skim the article:

  Dr. Manship, after a hasty examination of the body, said he thought the terrible deed could have been accomplished in a few moments. The victim had been attacked near the backhouse behind the establishment on Stockton Street presided over by Mrs. Mamie Overton. The victim’s throat had been cut with one stroke of a sharp weapon, and, in the familiar pattern, her torso shockingly slashed. The young woman’s name has not been revealed.

  A reward of one thousand dollars for information that will lead to the apprehension of the knife-wielding maniac has been authorized by Mayor Washington Bartlett.

  I took the horsecar to Dunbar Alley. Captain Pusey was there, with two other policemen. The Morgue stank of old blood, sweat and cigar smoke. The latest victim lay naked, paper white and pathetically thin on her slab, red-haired, a calm face unlike the contorted faces of the three who had been strangled. This one had not been strangled, but her throat was slashed to the bone. There was a gaping wound in her belly, but she had not been opened up like the others.

  “Look at her fingernails,” Captain Pusey said, pointing his cigar at her hand. There were deposits of flesh under her fingernails. This woman had fought her assailant.

  Her name was Rachel LeVigne.

  Rachel LeVigne was Beau McNair’s redheaded Jewess, and Amelia Brittain was his fiancée, or had been anyway. And had a “shadow.”

  When I told Captain Pusey that Miss Brittain was in danger he ordered a constable to 913 Taylor Street immediately.

  14

  WORMS’–MEAT, n. – The finished product of which we are the raw material. The contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and the Grantarium.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  The water closets at Mrs. Overton’s parlorhouse on Stockton Street had been unusable because of a sewer stoppage, and the girls and their clients were forced to use the outhouse behind the building. The area was lighted by a kerosene lamp on a bracket. A girl inside the outhouse had heard Rachel LeVigne’s screams but had been afraid to come out. Two of the clients had rushed outside to find the body and had seen a man in a cloaklike garment and a slouch hat disappear through the gate leading to the adjoining property.

  Earlier, Mr. Beaumont McNair had taken Miss LeVigne to supper at the Fly Trap, and to a piano recital by the Hungarian pianist Pavel Magyar but had returned her to Mrs. Overton’s by ten-thirty. He was observed bidding her good night some time before she was assaulted in front of the outhouse.

  Sgt. Nix had called upon Beau McNair at the McNair mansion. He told Bierce that Beau’s face was unmarked by Rachel LeVigne’s fingernails, and that Rudolph Buckle vouched for his return by ten-thirty the previous evening.

  Now there was terror among the prostitutes of the Upper Tenderloin as well as Morton Street, and scare headlines in the newspapers. I made my third call at 913 Taylor Street.

  The porch that stretched across the front of the house rose high off the ground at the west end because of the steepness of Taylor Street. A file of spindly balusters supported the railing. The facade of the house was decorated with plaster rosettes and jigsaw fretwork in a geometric tangle of light and shadow from the morning sun over Nob Hill. A constable sat in a wicker chair at a table at the end of the porch, raising a hand in greeting to me.

  The butler again took my card and retired within, and this time opened the door for me to enter.

  Amelia and her mother were seated in the parlor, Amelia bright-faced with her halo of curls, rising to greet me. Her mother, formidably bosomed, with a sour expression of disapproval and anxiety, remained seated as I was led to her.

  “How do you do, Mr. Redmond. Do we have you to thank for this police gentleman on our porch?”

  I said they did.

  “Is it because my daughter has been followed?”

  “That is part of it.”

  Mrs. Brittain left the room to call for tea, and I was alone with Amelia.

  “The poor creature!” she said.

  “She was the one Mr. McNair was attached to.”

  “Yes!”

  “He was attached to you also, you see.”

  Her mouth opened, but she did not speak. Her eyebrows climbed her forehead.

  “Was the murdered woman the reason you broke off the engagement?”

  She wet her lips. “My father insisted that the engagement be ended.” She was gripping her arms against her waist as though she was cold, elbows jutting.

  I did not know how to pursue that. I had been assured that Beau McNair was eminently eligible. Lady Caroline’s millions!

  “Miss Brittain, what did you mean in your note, your shadow? Your mother said you had been followed.”

  “A man has followed me on several occasions.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “I was not able to see his features. He wore a hat that concealed his face.”

  “A big man, older?”

  “I think he is young. I would not call him big.”

  “I don’t want to alarm you,” I said. “But you must be very careful not to be alone! Maybe it is best that you are alarmed,” I added.

  “Be assured that I am!”

  “You are aware that Mr. McNair has not been arrested?”

  She nodded, her eyes fixed on my face.

  Mrs. Brittain marched back in, preceding a maid with a tea tray.

  “Cream and sugar, Mr. Redmond?”

  Mr. Brittain joined us for tea, a lanky, limping fellow of about sixty, tailored in black broadcloth, arranging his coattails with a flair as he seated himself. Amelia favored her greyhound father more than her bulldog mother. We sipped tea and discussed the policeman on the porch. Amelia and Mrs. Brittain were nervous, but Mr. Brittain seemed not much concerned. He invited me to his study to view his collection of gold nuggets.

  His limp, like the limps I had observed in Virginia City, reminded me that Mr. Brittain had been a mining engineer on the Washoe, and of the connection of Brittain to English.

  The nuggets were in a glass case, gleaming twisted shapes, a couple of them quite large. I told him I had been in Virginia City last week, and he directed me to a leather chair and offered me a cigar fro
m a humidor.

  “Josey Devers!” he said, puffing smoke. “How was the rascal?”

  I said Devers looked as though a lot of whiskey had been absorbed.

  “It is a dying camp, certainly. It was very lively once!”

  “Devers spouted figures of silver production and stock manipulations.”

  Mr. Brittain snorted. “I don’t think there was a miner in the place who wasn’t speculating. I can tell you who the winners were, Will O’Brien, Jamey Flood, John Mackay, Fair, Sharon, Nat McNair.”

  I asked if he recalled a group of investors called the Society of Spades.

  He had a ritual of movements with his cigar, flourishing it, moistening it, drawing it beneath his nose, holding it up like a signal. This completed, he shook his head.

  “They bought the Jack of Spades Mine.”

  “Oh, the Consolidated-Ohio, yes.”

  “I was told that Lady Caroline Stearns had disposed of her interest in the Consolidated-Ohio.”

  “I know that is true.”

  I hurried on: “It seemed there was some finagling over the discovery of a new orebody, so that she received a better price than may have been warranted. Devers called it an ‘English shuffle.’ ”

  He went through his tobacco ritual again, sniffing his cigar before replacing it between his teeth. He regarded me brightly. “Carrie has always landed on her feet,” he said.

  I couldn’t press him about the English shuffle because I was in love with his daughter.

  “Highgrade Carrie seems to have been highly regarded in Virginia City,” I said.

  Mr. Brittain frowned with reminiscence. “She was an angel in her time.”

  “Devers referred to her as the Miners’ Angel.”

  “She was that, she was indeed that.” Mr. Brittain nodded, his eyes hooded. “I cannot explain, I don’t think, just what a place like Virginia City is like when a camp is at full flood. The frustration, the terrible, dangerous labor in the mines. The fires, the heat, the cave-ins. The hopes; the dashed hopes! The lack of any kind of loyalty or disinterested affection. Dog-eat-dog. With no respite! Carrie was able to furnish respite. Certainly she was a madam, a woman of ill-repute. Well, you had better not call her a woman of ill-repute to anyone who was in Virginia City in her time there! She was the only touch of grace, of human feeling, of beauty‌—‌a reminder that there were, elsewhere, civilized ways of living, civilized occupations, people who intermingled with a civilized code of conduct. She was the reminder of all that. She was the sweet-smelling bouquet flourishing in a sewer! I tell you, when Carrie walked down the boardwalks of C Street, there was not a hat that did not come off a miner’s head!