Oakley Hall - Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

He glared at me down his nose. “I demand satisfaction!”

I laughed at him. “Manhole covers at twenty feet?”

“Damned fortune hunter!”

“Bare knuckles in the basement,” I said.

I led him downstairs into the basement and through the door into the cellar next door, where there was an empty storeroom lighted by dusty clerestory windows that gave onto California Street.

Beau stripped out of the beautiful jacket. He’d had some boxing instruction. He danced around me, feinting lefts and rights while I took off my coat. I felt heavy, lumpish and poisoned.

He danced toward me. I knocked him down. It is easeful to your inner furies when you have bashed someone on the jaw, but the demands and responsibilities of the Brittain family were not Beau’s fault.

He bounced up again. The second time I knocked him down he managed to pop me on the nose, and I felt the claret starting.

Sprawled on the floor he gazed up at me as I mopped at my nose with my handkerchief. He pronounced himself satisfied.

He climbed to his feet, massaging his jaw and moving his shoulders in a manner distasteful to me.

“You know what the Morton Street whore who identified your photograph said?” I said.

“What is that?”

“She said there was a client of Esther Mooney’s who didn’t have a dingle. He used some kind of leather dildo. He might have been the one that killed Esther. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”

“ Certainly not! The police—”

“Did they ask to see your dingle?”

“I don’t know what you are getting at, Redmond!”

Glaring, he stood poised with his elbows folded back and his chin out, as though he was going to assault me again or take flight. Suddenly he ripped at his placket and exhibited himself for my inspection.

“What about balls?” I said.

He cursed me in an unaristocratic manner.

“Listen,” I said, holding my handkerchief to my nose. “I apologize for my childish behavior. Don’t you know we are trying to save your bacon?”

“Yes, I do know that, Redmond.”

In the end we shook hands.

“Here’s another communication from our Comstock correspondent,” Bierce said, passing me a handwritten note when I returned to the office with my nosebleed stanched.

Dear Mr. Bierce,

If you are worried about who fathered Highgrade Carrie’s get, worry no more. Everybody knew Dolph Jackson was her beau.

A Former Spade

“He has no occasion for a ‘momento’ in this missive,” I said. “It is the connection between the murderers!” Bierce said. “The ‘Former Spade’ is my benefactor!”

Who was the Gent.

29

TRUTH, n. – An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

Bierce and I arrived at the McNair mansion fifteen minutes later than the six o’clock appointed hour. Marvins let us in, and we followed his stately guidance down an expanse of gleaming parquet past the piano octagon to a large room with windows looking south over the City. Chairs had been set facing a presiding table, as for a ceremony. Lady Caroline was seated at the table, flanked by Beau and Lawyer Curtis. In the chairs, craning their necks as Bierce and I entered, were Senator Jennings and a balding man with Yankee chin whiskers who had a lawyer look to him; Rudolph Buckle; Captain Pusey; and Mammy Pleasant in her black bonnet. I had been halfway afraid the Gent would be on hand, summoned behind my back; or Senator Sharon.

Sgt. Nix stood straddle-legged, hands clasped behind him, against the walnut paneling. Elza Klosters sat with his broad-brimmed hat in his lap in a chair beside the door. His pale scalp gleamed with sweat.

Marvins closed the double doors behind us with a slap of sound.

I slipped into an empty chair while Bierce remained standing, his cold face glancing around at the company that had been summoned at his request.

Senator Jennings heaved himself to his feet. “What the devil is all this, Bierce?”

“Sit down, sir,” Bierce said. He moved at his stiff gait over to the broad window, where he could face the three at the table and the rest of us as well. His expression was that of having the Railroad where he wanted it. Jennings remained standing, big-bellied.

“I have asked Mr. Bierce to conduct these proceedings,” Lady Caroline said in her soft, British-accented voice, smiling a kind of general smile out of her porcelain mask. The fingers of her white gloves were tented together as she spoke. She wore a dress of black velvet trimmed with lace, with a high neck. Her pale hair flowed in waves to a high French knot stabbed with a diamond-headed pin. Diamond dewdrops glistened from her earlobes. She turned her smile to Bierce.

Jennings sat down. His cheeks were the color of raw beef. He leaned his head sideways to something his lawyer whispered.

Bierce said, “We are concerned with two murderers here. We will dispose of the obvious one first. I have already warned Senator Jennings that I will prove he murdered the widow of Judge Hamon.”

“One moment, if you please,” Jennings’s lawyer said, rising, a hand and a finger raised as though to a point of order.

“I do not please,” Bierce said. “Mr. Klosters, did Senator Jennings offer you money to murder Mrs. Hamon?”

There was a moment of silence, the lawyer still standing. Lady Caroline turned her fixed smile on Klosters. Jennings rose again, to hulk beside his lawyer, glaring at the enforcer.

“Offered me three hundred dollars,” Klosters said in his heavy voice. He remained seated, his hands holding his hat on his lap. “Told him I wouldn’t do it, so he offered me five hundred. Told him I was not in that game any more.”

“The Society of Spades,” Bierce said. “was formed to purchase control of the Jack of Spades Mine in Virginia City. There were five members. Two of them married, Caroline LaPlante and Nathaniel McNair. They enlisted a third, Albert Gorton, to form a majority to cheat the other two out of their shares of what was to become an incalculable profit. One of these others was an E. O. Macomber, who has disappeared or changed his name, the fifth person was Adolphus Jackson, who became Aaron Jennings and was elected a State Senator.

He let that settle, pacing, before he continued: “Jackson and probably Macomber were rightfully infuriated at the swindle that had been perpetrated upon them. Gorton was brained out of revenge, or because he had become a liability to McNair. That murder does not concern us, although Mr. Klosters may be able to clear it up.”

“It is not necessary that you respond to that, Elza,” Lady Caroline said. Her voice was drowned by Senator Jennings’s bellow:

“I do not intend to listen to this twaddle!”

“Then why are you here, sir?” Bierce said. “Captain Pusey, will you arrest Senator Jennings for murder?”

“I do not take my orders from journalists, Mr. Bierce,” Pusey said calmly. He was sitting with his arms folded on his uniformed chest, his legs crossed; he looked as though he had been trussed.

“Very well,” Bierce said. “I will have more to say of Senator Jennings as we proceed.”

He strutted before the window, a little showily I thought. He held up a finger before his chin.

“Some things have been clear from the outset. Captain Pusey knew from his connections with the London police that young Mr. McNair had been involved in a scrape in which he and some companions abused low women in ways that were to be transformed into butchery in the murders of the Morton Street prostitutes. It is clear that Captain Pusey knew of this from the fact that he showed Mr. McNair’s photograph, from his archive, to a prostitute who had had a glimpse of the murderer.