Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

3.

CYNIC, n. – A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

On Bierce’s desk was a skull, polished white as chalk, with outsize eyeholes and a grinning undershot jaw. His office was on the second floor of The Hornet’s premises on California Street, with a view out a window at the traffic in the street. Miss Penryn, the typewriter, rattled away on her machine in the next cubicle. Downstairs were the reporters’ and Mr. Macgowan’s offices. The press was in the basement. Bierce kept a neat desk, with albums of old Tattle columns on a shelf, and two of Fats Chubb’s caricatures framed on the wall. One was the opera singer Adelina Patti in the shape of a plump, upright trout, mouth open singing. The other showed the Railroad as an octopus with suckers on the tentacles that were miniaturized faces of the Big Four.

Bierce and Mr. Macgowan listened to me relate what I had seen at the Morgue. Bierce stroked at the sparrow-wings of his mustache, frowning, and Mr. Macgowan leaned his big belly forward in his chair, so, with the skull, it was like having three grim faces watching me.

The stench had been terrible. The knife had opened up her bowels, the man in the leather apron had told me. “They said the two of spades was stuck in her mouth,” I said.

“Was she French too?” Bierce wanted to know.

“Irish. Esther Mooney.”

“And the fellow was seen?” Mr. Macgowan asked. He was a beefy gent of about Bierce’s age, with a walrus mustache framing a set of chins.

“One of the other girls might’ve seen him. Young chap with fair whiskers coming out of the room. I have this from Sgt. Nix.”

“Esther Mooney and Marie Gar. Any connection?”

“Just Morton Street, as far as I can see.”

“A series is certainly implied,” Mr. Macgowan said. “An ace and a two. The Morton Street women must be in a fright.”

I said I’d seen Captain Pusey at the Morgue.

“The photographic nonesuch,” Mr. Macgowan said.

Isaiah Pusey was Chief of Detectives, Sgt. Nix’s superior. He had assembled a criminal identification system of which he was very proud, albums of photographs of every criminal who had appeared in the San Francisco courts and a collection of national and international photographs as well. He bragged that he could identify any criminal whose likeness he had seen. He had made trips to London to confer on the British Crime Index, and to Paris to investigate the Bertillon system. It was considered that San Francisco criminals were sufficiently identified so long as Captain Pusey was on hand with his elephant memory and his photographic archive.

His chair creaked as Mr. Macgowan leaned forward again. “A weekly is at a disadvantage, of course,” he said. “The Chronicle and the Alta can cover this day by day. Mike De Young will go the sensational route.” Mike De Young was the Chronicle.

“Smithers can cover Central Station. That’s what he’s good at.”

Bierce said, “I want something different than what Smithers or Gould would give us. Tom has seen the bodies. I’m going to ask him to work up supplemental material to run opposite Tattle.

“Tom and Sgt. Nix are baseball chums,” he added.

Mr. Macgowan squinted at me.

“If Pusey is involved, he must have had a sniff of money,” Bierce went on, with a flare of his nostrils that indicated his opinion of the Chief of Detectives. Most of the police, like the Supervisors, were on the boodle from the cribs, cowyards and parlorhouses, the gambling joints and saloons. Elmer Nix was probably relatively honest, but it was difficult to follow the straight and narrow in wide-open San Francisco. The Fire Department was proud of its rectitude.

Bierce had announced that the corruption stemmed from the State Railroad Monopoly, but it did not seem that simple to me.

“Maybe they’ve already got their man,” I said.

“That would be the culm and crown of wonder,” Bierce said.

Under the headline SECOND MORTON STREET SLASHING, the Alta California had printed:

This morning the City was startled by the news that a second murder in Morton Street had been added to the terrible crime committed on Monday. The murder took place during the evening hours in an establishment presided over by Mrs. Cornford, in an upstairs room. The victim was a woman of 29 years, Esther Mooney. The same process had been followed as in Monday’s case. She had been seized by the throat and her cries choked until she was strangled. Her torso was then slashed open. The murder was discovered when blood seeped beneath the door of her room.

Chief of Detectives Isaiah Pusey has announced that the murderer will soon be apprehended, but no arrest has been made at this time. The tenants of Morton Street are dismayed by these crimes. Dr. Manship, who was called to view the remains of this victim, gave it as his opinion that the same man, evidently a maniac, had committed both murders. The inquest will be held at 11 o’clock Thursday morning.

There was no mention of the spades, or their progression.

Tattle, that week, made no reference to the murders, which had occurred after The Hornet had gone to press, but Bierce had taken shots at his usual targets:

“The worst railroads on the Pacific Coast are those operated by the Southern Pacific Company. It owes the government more millions of dollars than £eland $tanford has vanities; it will pay fewer cents than Collis B. Huntington has virtues.”

He reiterated the fact that the cost of the transcontinental line had been kited to twice the maximum estimates. “Collis B. Huntington and his associates have made enormous fortunes by letting contracts to themselves‌—‌a felony under our state laws‌—‌dividing the profits and burning the books.”

Of the Spring Valley Water Company he had written that it “flowed with bilk and honey,” and “Included in the cost of the water is the price of nine Supervisors.”

His usual theological butt was the Reverend Stottlemyer: “His latest announcements from Washington Street intimate that the praise for the propagation of the Lord’s only begotten son could perhaps more fairly be shared. Certainly in the realm of plucking pigeons the proprietor of the Washington Street Church reigns supreme.”

In Mrs. Cornford’s establishment on Morton Street, I was taken upstairs to inspect the scene of the murder. Off a narrow corridor that bisected the second story were doors at regular intervals, tin numbers over the doors. Number 7 was a room about eight by ten feet, stinking of carbolic. It contained a bed stripped of its mattress, a straight chair, and a stand that held a white crockery bowl and pitcher. The floor had been scrubbed until the pine boards looked soft as chamois.

I interviewed Edith Pruitt in the parlor, under Mrs. Cornford’s surveillance. Edith had heard some sounds in the crib next to hers and had seen the man depart. I sat in a wooden rocker with my pencil and pad, Edith on the window seat and Mrs. Cornford planted in the middle of the settee. The room was redolent of orris root, furniture polish, sweat and, faintly, an odor like rotting flowers with a medicinal tinge to it.

“He was a young man, you told Sgt. Nix.”

“Maybe about as old as you, mister.”

“With a beard.”

“With a fair beard, yes.” Edith Pruitt was a farm girl with a pleasingly plump bosom in her chaste gingham check, and a pretty piglike expression of fat cheeks and narrow eyes.

“Anything else about his appearance?”

Edith glanced at Mrs. Cornford, who smiled at her reassuringly. Edith shook her head.

“Did you see the knife?”

“She didn’t see no knife,” Mrs. Cornford said.

Edith showed her teeth in her nervousness. I tried to think of questions an experienced reporter like Jack Smithers would ask.

“What were the sounds like, that you heard?”

“Like somebody fell heavy on the bed. And some scraping. I didn’t think what it might be. Sometimes a mister will pay extra for extra business.”

“Esther would do that,” Mrs. Cornford said, nodding.

“How long after the racket before you saw the man?”

“She told the copper maybe five minutes,” Mrs. Cornford said.

“You kind of know how far along you are with a mister, you see,” Edith Pruitt offered.

Mrs. Cornford smiled at me. She had a tapestry bag in her lap, from which she had taken a wad of blue yarn and two ivory needles.

When I returned to the subject of the man Edith had seen, Mrs. Cornford said, “The big copper had a photygraph. The higher-up one.”

“Captain Pusey?”

“Older fellow with a shock of white hair. He had this photygraph.”

“And was it the man?” I asked Edith.

“I told him it were him, all right,” Edith said. “I told him I’d heard there was a mister, maybe it was this chap, that didn’t have no dingle.” She colored prettily. “Had to use a kind of leather thing strapped on. Might’ve been this one.”

She hadn’t seen this mister, only heard about him from Esther. Mrs. Cornford looked disapproving, whether of the lack of the dingle or the information proffered, I couldn’t tell. No, none of the other girls had mentioned such a client.

The murder of Marie Gar had taken place at Mrs. Rose Ellen Green’s place, but Mrs. Green was tired of sightseers and reporters and turned me away at the door. I inquired of other madams up and down Morton Street if there had been any reports of a mister with no dingle.

No luck.

Bierce’s office was L-shaped, and I’d been promoted to a desk, a chair and a spittoon in the foot of the L.

I was writing up my notes when Miss Penryn put her head in the door to announce Miss Amelia Brittain. I jarred the desk jumping to my feet. Amelia wore a white dress with shingled lace on the bosom. Beneath a shadow of bonnet her face was stiff with anxiety. She swept the skirt of her dress past the doorjamb, her eyes fixed on me.

“Please sit down, Miss Brittain!” I dragged a chair around the corner.

She tucked her skirt under her and sat, daubing at her eyes with a handkerchief from her reticule.

“They’ve arrested Beau!”

I gaped at her. “For the Morton Street murders?”

“Yes! It is simply‌—‌monstrous!” She daubed at her lips. “They took him to jail. Mr. Redmond, I must again ask your assistance!”

“Anything.”

“They say they have his photograph that one of the women in the premises where the murder took place has identified.”

Captain Pusey’s photograph!

“Mr. Redmond, I must believe it is a plot! Certainly Beau has enemies, any wealthy man has enemies. His mother must have enemies!”

I said it had seemed curious to me that her fiancé had not accompanied her to the Firemen’s Ball and immediately wished I had not said it.

She flung herself up from the chair, her eyes blazing with indignation, then sank back.

“He had to work with Mr. Buckle on some of his mother’s affairs,” she said, in a controlled voice. “His mother has enormous business in the City.”

“Who is Mr. Buckle?”

“He is Lady Caroline’s manager here.”

“Who are these enemies of Mr. McNair?”

“I don’t know!”

Amelia’s fiancé out strangling and slashing Esther Mooney while Amelia and I were waltzing at the Firemen’s Ball seemed an improbable coincidence.

“I have a friend who is a police detective,” I said. “I will try to find out from him what they have against Mr. McNair. Will Mr. McNair talk to me if I go to see him in jail?”

“You must tell him that I sent you!”

“Miss Brittain, I only know of Mr. McNair as the son of a very rich woman. Will you tell me something about him?”

She relaxed visibly in the chair.

“When Mr. McNair’s father was still alive, they lived not far from my father’s house. Beau and I attended Miss Sinclair’s Seminary. He was eleven and I was ten.”

A blush climbed her face, like a pink shadow sweeping upward from her throat. It was charming. “We were sweethearts. Then the elder Mr. McNair died, and Mrs. McNair‌—‌Lady Caroline‌—‌left San Francisco for England, taking Beau and Gwendolyn with her.”

“Gwendolyn is Mr. McNair’s younger sister?”

“Who is very beautiful,” Amelia said, nodding. “A month ago Beau returned to help Mr. Buckle with his mother’s affairs, and we met again. We discovered that our affection for each other is still strong. Of course our lives since we were children have been very different.”

Like hers and mine, I thought. My antipathy for Beau McNair had steadily grown. I hesitated to ask Amelia if her fiancé regularly frequented the low women in the Morton Street bordellos, or the fancier ones in the parlorhouses of the Upper Tenderloin.

“He is a very eligible young man,” Amelia continued. “And my mother approves of the match.”

I wondered what sorts of amusements very eligible young men and women of high station engaged in. No doubt Beau McNair had a fancy turnout, and they would take trips out to Cliff House, or through the park, or down the Peninsula, where some of the instant aristocrats of the Comstock Lode, the Railroad and the banks had built their mansions. I wanted to know how much she and Beau saw of each other, and I managed to put the question so as not to seem to be prying.

“Well, of course not as much as either of us would prefer,” she said. “He has been occupied with his mother’s business, as he was on the night of the Firemen’s Ball.”

“And was Mr. McNair occupied with his mother’s business the night before the Firemen’s Ball?”

Her hands tightened on her handkerchief‌—‌such smooth, long-fingered, pretty hands that my heart turned over in my chest to see them.

“Mr. Redmond, you must trust me or you cannot help me!”

“I will help you any way I can,” I said, in capitulation.