“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.
4
ARREST, v. – Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
I took the South End-North Beach Railway out to Broadway. It was a bright day with sun gleaming on the tracks and the facades of the buildings. As we passed Kearny Street the shrill voices of the slave girls in their Chinatown cribs were audible.
I walked along Broadway to Dupont. The City Jail was a brick building with a high cornice and iron bars installed in the windows where they looked like bared teeth. A sergeant at a counter waved me down a bare-boards hallway. The third cell was the gentry cell, bigger than the others, with the same cot but with three chairs and, facing the window, a clumsy patent rocker in which Beau McNair sat with a book. I stood watching him through the bars of the door.
When I spoke his name he sprang out of the chair, setting it rocking. He came to face me through the bars. He was a handsome young fellow, no doubt about it, maybe my height but of a stringier build in his fawn-colored suit and a bow necktie. He had a fair beard, close-set blue eyes and fair hair swept over his brow. He hadn’t shaved.
“Who are you?” he wanted to know.
I said I was Tom Redmond, from The Hornet. Miss Brittain had asked me to come to see him.
“You are a friend of Miss Brittain’s?” he said.
“An acquaintance.”
“A newspaper fellow,” he said, with a twist of his lips.
I said I was that.
“You may tell her I won’t be here long. Mr. Curtis has been sent for. The governor has been appealed to. This ridiculous—” He paced across the cell, slapping the back of the rocker with his hand to set it rocking again. He returned to stand scowling at me.
“What do you make of this woman identifying your photograph?”
“She is lying, of course! For reasons I cannot imagine.”
“Miss Brittain is certain it is a conspiracy against you or your mother.”
“Confounded idiocy, is what it is!”
“Not a conspiracy?”
“Yes, of course a conspiracy!”
“Do you have any idea—”
“No I don’t have any idea, and I am sick and tired of answering foolish questions.” He glared at me with his lower lip protruding. “If you have anything of interest to say to me, will you please say it, fellow?”
I reminded myself that he was a very frightened young man. He stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, stretching the material like a Dutch boy’s trousers. He filled and relaxed his cheeks as though he had a nervous problem with his breathing.
I said, “Captain Pusey has fifty albums of photographs of criminals. How would he happen to have your photograph?”
He showed his teeth like a wildcat in a trap. “I expect I have had a hundred likenesses taken,” he said. “Your Captain Pusey happens to have one.”
“I wonder why he would have chosen to show your photograph to the woman who saw the murderer at the scene of the murder.”
He snorted.
“Do you think Captain Pusey is a part of a conspiracy?”
He seemed to regain control of himself. “See here,” he said. “There are dissatisfied people. There are demented people. There are envious people. There are people who would like to threaten any sort of eminence.”
“And that is what is going on here?”
“That is no doubt what is going on here, yes.”
“I’m very interested in the idea of a conspiracy,” I said. “There is the matter of the playing cards—”
“It is infuriating to me,” he said, “that anyone would think I would have an interest in slashing these low women from their giggle to their snatch.”
I said I wondered how he knew just how they had been slashed.
“I read it in the newspapers, of course.”
“It was not revealed in the newspapers.”
He gave me a haughty look and turned to greet two gentlemen who had appeared.
“I advise you not to confer with journalists, Beau,” a small, white-haired man said. The other was taller, graying. The fat turnkey with his hoop of keys followed them.
“What paper are you from?” the little man demanded. He had a truculent expression on a taut-skinned, shiny countenance, which looked as though his face had been scarred in a fire.
“He’s from The Hornet,” Beau said.
“I advise you especially not to confer with journalists from trash newspapers,” the little man said.
“Here we are, Mr. Curtis,” the turnkey said and turned a key in the lock. Beau pulled the door in toward him.
The little man was Bosworth Curtis, the bear-trap lawyer who often represented the SP, and the tall, graying man in his fine black broadcloth suit must be Mr. Buckle, Lady Caroline’s manager, of whom Amelia had spoken. I did not take offense at The Hornet being called a trash paper for, except for Bierce’s Tattle, that opinion was a familiar one.
“Get rid of this fellow,” Mr. Curtis said to the turnkey.
The turnkey shrugged at me, and I followed him along. Behind us Bean McNair, Curtis and Buckle stood looking at each other like three actors waiting for the curtain to rise on their play.
Outside on Broadway I squinted up into the sun, and considered taking on a beer before returning to The Hornet.
The headline on the Examiner on the newsstand was NOB HILL ELITE ARREST.
In Bierce’s office I was introduced to Captain Pusey, who rose from his chair for a perfunctory handshake but with a trace of pause to assure me that he was aware I was not of much account. He was in uniform, fine pressed Mission blue wool, pips on the sleeves of his long tunic to show he was a captain. His cap rested on Bierce’s desk beside the skull. He was a high-nosed, false-teeth smiling fellow, maybe sixty, with pink cheeks, a Greek helmet of white hair and a belly cinched by the leather belt around his tunic waist. He smelled of hair oil and talcum, as though he’d just come out of a barber’s chair.
I was informed that he had had business with Mr. Macgowan and had dropped in to see Bierce at Sgt. Nix’s suggestion.
Bierce was standing intent, his arms folded on his chest as though he was learning something watching Captain Pusey greet me.
“Captain Pusey and I were discussing the great good fortune of his having a photograph of Beau McNair in his albums.”
Pusey set his jaw in his perfect-teeth smile.