Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

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 the 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.

“She had made an appointment with Ambrose Bierce,” I said.

Mrs. Bettis squinted at me. She seemed to have recovered herself. “That mean writing fellow?”

“He’s my boss.”

She squinted at the calling card I had given her, which she held cupped in her hand. “Your name’s Thomas Redmond,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I knew a Cletus Redmond once.” Her wrinkled, soft-cheeked old face took on an unmistakable coyness. “I often wonder what happened to Cletus Redmond.”

“He married my mother,” I said.

“For heaven’s sake! You are Cletus Redmond’s son!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And where is your dear father now?”

“He’s in Sacramento working for the SP except when he’s run off after the latest bonanza. Where did you know him?”

“On the Washoe.”

I felt a little electric shock of connection. The Washoe was the Comstock, Virginia City, and I didn’t know my father had been there, though it stood to reason. He had visited Austin, Eureka and Tonopah for varying periods of time. My father’s involvements with minerals had been borrascas rather than bonanzas, but he had never given up hope of the ultimate fortune awaiting his faith and patience.

The Gent had spent his life since coming to California in ‘49, at the age of seventeen, chasing bonanzas and women. It seemed that Mrs. Bettis had been one who had responded to that Irish charm. On the Washoe.

Judge Hamon had been working on a memoir that would show the Railroad in general, and Senator Jennings in particular, in a bad light, revealing payoffs and corruption in the trial of the Mussel Slough farmers. Mrs. Hamon had in turn been exercised and had made an appointment with Bierce. The murderer had intercepted her before she could see him and had burned the Hamon house with Judge Hamon’s papers.

The livery stable was Just around the corner from the Plaza, and I inquired if anyone had hired a buggy that early afternoon. A man with a big hat, for instance?

The lame hostler spat tobacco into the dust. “Took out a rig and was back in about an hour.”

“Did he give a name?”

“Name of Brown.” The hostler scratched his neck, squinting into the sun. “Carried a piece. Saw it inside his coat when he climbed into my rig.”

I took another turn around the plaza and dropped into Buchanan’s Saloon next door to the Liddell House for a beer.

Passing through the bat-wing doors of the saloon was like coming from full day to dark of night, with a gleam of mirrors behind the bar, a moving white shirt. When my eyes were more accustomed to the dark I saw Brown hulked at the far end of the bar. He had his hat on the stool beside him, a glass of whiskey before him. There was no one else in the place but the barkeep, who approached as I selected my own stool. Brown’s pale pocked face turned toward me. I could almost feel the probe of his eyes on my face.

In Sacramento our next-door neighbors had a red, cat-killing dog named Rufus. Our black and white cat loved to tease him, sitting on a fence post with her tail flicking just out of his range while Rufus gazed up at her. He was an old dog, with bloodshot eyes and an intensity of malevolence in his glare that was uncomfortable to watch. I could not see whether Brown’s eyes were bloodshot or not, but I felt that same intensity in his gaze.

When he got off his stool, I retreated out the door. A boy in a vest and knickers was passing.

“Where can I find a police officer?”

“Sheriff,” he said. “Next corner toward the bay.”

I persuaded a deputy that a stranger named Brown had something to do with the fire at the Hamon house and the murder of Mrs. Hamon in San Francisco. But when we got back to the saloon, Brown was gone.

“Asked who you was, and I said I didn’t know,” the barkeep said to us, rubbing his hands together in his apron. “Used some rank language and lit out the back.”

Brown hadn’t been found by the time I retired to my room after supper at the hotel. I didn’t think he would be found. I thought he was a professional.

I sat at the little desk, beneath the hiss and heat of the gaslamp, making notes on hotel stationery. I was aware of no sound, but for some reason I glanced at the door. The doorknob was slowly turning. It turned half a circuit, halted, then turned the half circuit back again.

There was still no sound as I rose and stood staring at the door, which I had locked. Out the window behind me I heard carriage wheels passing in the plaza. The doorknob did not turn again. I listened for the sound of retreating footsteps but heard nothing.

I did not sleep much that night and took the train back to San Francisco in the morning.