No one else seemed to understand that we had witnessed an ambush and an execution, or maybe they all did.
30
COGITO COGITO ERGO COGITO SUM – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”; as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
The headline in the Chronicle the morning I cleared out of my room at the Barnacles’ was SENATOR JENNINGS INDICTED. In the text he was referred to as the “Senator from Southern Pacific.” Bierce had struck his blow at the Railroad.
Jennings was indicted for the death of Mrs. Hamon.
The Slasher murders remained unsolved.
Jonas Barnacle helped me tote bags, boxes, books and a bottle of cucumber arnica down the rickety stairs. I glimpsed Belinda through a window and detached a hand from my load to wave to her, but she did not wave in return.
In my last mail on Pine Street was an announcement of the wedding, in the Trinity Episcopalian Church at Post and Powell, of Miss Amelia Brittain to Mr. Marshall Sloat. The reception would be held at the Palace Hotel.
Sloat was a childless widower, more than twice the age of his bride-to-be. I remembered Amelia commenting on Judge Terry’s age compared to Sarah Althea Hill’s. A fallen woman, she had called Miss Hill.
I left my buggy seat nailed to the wall in the Barnacle cellar.
In the editor’s office at The Hornet Bierce sat with Bosworth Curtis. He beckoned me to a chair, although I saw that Curtis disapproved.
“Lady Caroline is anxious that George Payne not be identified as her son,” Bierce said. “She has made an arrangement with Captain Pusey.”
“So Pusey got what he was after,” I said. I was having difficulty controlling my feelings, which Bierce thought not worth having. The chalky skull gaped at Curtis.
“Her daughter is engaged to a member of the British aristocracy,” Curtis said. “She is anxious to avoid scandal.”
I wondered if Curtis disliked favors done for the aristocracy as much as I did. I considered Bierce a sitting duck for a grand female like Lady Caroline Stearns.
Curtis unfolded a sheet of creamy paper.
“Lady Caroline thought it appropriate to show you this,” he said.
He handed the paper to Bierce, who studied it before passing it on to me. It was a list of Lady Caroline’s philanthropies.
Nathaniel McNair had conspired, cheated, swindled, strong-armed and bribed to control his mining properties and fleece the fools who gambled in mining shares to make his pile. Now his widow redistributed it with interest to the needy.
The item caught my eye: Washoe Miners’ Fund, $10,000. A miners’ fund in Wales was listed as well. There were funds for neglected children and for wayward girls. The Frances Castleman Home for Indigent Women in San Francisco had received $7,000. There were some twenty items, ranging from $20,000 to $500. About half were in England, half in San Francisco and Nevada, two in New York. The $20,000 was for the Sanctuary for Homeless Young Women in Cleveland. The total was a magnificent sum of money.
“Her secret is safe with us,” Bierce said.
“She will be grateful,” Curtis said, standing and refolding the paper. The shiny skin of his face gleamed pinkly.
“Her man Klosters may think he and I have uncompleted business,” I said. “Perhaps she would curb him.”
“It shall be done,” Curtis said. He clicked his heels and pitched his head at Bierce, with a little bow. He made a lesser bob at me and departed.
“So you let her off,” I said.
“You saw the list.”
“Fancy paper,” I said.
“She is well known for her generosity,” Bierce said.
It was true. “That was a murder,” I said stubbornly. “A door was left open, or the same window he got in before. It was a trap. He wasn’t even armed. How was it that he arrived there at just that moment? It was planned.”
“Tom, we have been over this too many times.” His forehead was creased with irritation as he gazed at me with his cold eyes. “Yes, perhaps Lady Caroline conspired to take the life of the madman who had conspired to take hers. She did not know he was her son.”
“She must have suspected it. Buckle certainly knew something.”
He sighed and said, “She told me that she did not.”
“You believed her because she is a grand lady.”
“Why this sympathy for Payne? He ripped the intestines out of three women. He would have killed Amelia Brittain if you had not stopped him. He had planned to murder Lady Caroline Stearns. He had effected her return to San Francisco, he had access to the McNair mansion. She was in danger.
“As I have said before,” he continued. “My concern was the murder committed by Senator Jennings. The Slashings were the proper province of the police. I only concerned myself with them to insure the indictment of Jennings.”
I turned back to my desk. I was at work on an article on the Chinese slave girls but, because of Mr. Macgowan’s anti-Chinese policy. The Hornet would probably not publish it.
Chubb had produced as a cover for The Hornet, a vast squid with its tentacles spread over California. Its eyes were medallions of the faces of Huntington and Stanford, so labeled. An enormous shining hatchet had chopped off one of the tentacles, labeled “Senator Jennings,” with an anguished medallion face of the Senator attached. The blade of the hatchet was labeled “Crime and Punishment.” The paper was full of the Jennings arrest, a long news piece by Smithers, replete with adverbs, my own sidepiece on the spite-fence. Tattle was loaded with self-congratulation and a lambasting of the Railroad so smug that if Bierce’s definition of self-esteem as “an erroneous appraisement” did not occur to me, it should have.
Bierce and I were summoned to Captain Pusey’s office to view the painting of Lady Godiva, which detectives had discovered in a warehouse on Sansome Street. It had been concealed by gunny-sacking until Pusey tracked it down. John Daniel was present, dressed in a neat blue suit with a white boiled shirt and four-in-hand necktie. He watched the proceedings from the corner. He didn’t seem much interested.
Bierce would not speak to Captain Pusey, but he was greatly affected by the painting. “What a lovely woman,” he said, mooning over Lady Caroline as a young woman like a tenor in a romantic aria. She was indeed a lovely piece, Virginia City’s own grande horizontale. Her gardenia flesh illuminated Pusey’s office, her hair hung in golden ringlets, parting over her breasts, her expression of pride and modesty was perfectly depicted. The veins on the neck of the white horse had been graven with artistic perfection. Sgt. Nix regarded the painting disapprovingly.
“She is Senator Jennings’s property,” I said.
“He will have hard times getting this beauty back,” Captain Pusey said smugly. It was the writ of I-want-what-you-have-got that Nix had enunciated, and moreover Captain Pusey had the painting in his possession.
“Shake hands with the gentlemen, John Daniel,” Pusey said, when it was time for us to depart, and John Daniel complied.
“How I would be gratified to puncture that gelid old efflation,” Bierce said when we left police headquarters at Old City Hall, meaning Captain Isaiah Pusey.
I was working on the slave-girl piece when the natty little Railroad representative, Smith, called on Bierce again. He had a daisy in his buttonhole.