I rose, dropped my card on his desk and said, “I want that tintype, however.”
“You’ll have it,” Devers said. “Get out of here and blow away now.”
I let myself out into a blast of wind filled with grit.
Back at the hotel I encountered Jimmy Fairleigh in the lobby. He wore a long denim apron and swabbed the tiles with a mop with a flail of soaking cloth at the end, which he slapped from side to side. He set the mop in its pail and beckoned me into the empty dining room.
“I used to work at the Miner’s Rest,” he said.
“I will pay for information.”
He indicated the table where I’d had breakfast, and I sat down. He remained standing before me, his short arms crossed on his chest, his ugly face contorted anxiously.
“I’d work for Carrie sometimes when I was just a kit, running errands and such. She is a fine woman. I will tell you I have never thought higher of a woman than her.”
He stared at me with an expression I didn’t understand, maybe defiance.
I said I was a friend of her son’s, inquiring into some matters that concerned him about his mother’s days in Virginia City.
“After Julia Bulette got murdered there was no keeping her here. Thought it was bound to happen to her.”
Who was Julia Bulette?
“Hoor. Sometimes she worked out of Carrie’s place. Frenchy bastard killed her. They strung him up!”
“How was she killed?”
“Beat on, strangled, shot. Crime of passion, they called it. She was dead. It was a fright to Carrie. There was no holding her here then. Said she’d marry one of those fellows that was always proposing to her and get out of town and out of the business.”
“Who was proposing?”
“Fancy fellows! Sharon was married, but he’d’ve set her up in style. Nat McNair, that she did marry. There was others, just about every Jim, George and Will in town.”
I asked if he knew of the Spades. “They had to do with the Jack of Spades Mine.”
“Oh, yes,” he said vaguely. “Dolph Jackson and them. McNair.”
“Did Carrie have a special gent?”
“She had her favorites. Dolph; he was a funny one, made her laugh, took her for rides in his buggy. She liked that. And the Englishman. Very high-tone! And there was the piano player at the Miner’s Rest, I forget his name.” He rubbed the back of his neck as though to revive his memory. “She was a woman any man would want to lock up in his house just for himself.”
I thought he was one who had loved her, though he had said he was just a kit.
“Macomber?”
“Sure, Eddie Macomber.”
“Al Gorton?”
He nodded his big head. “Bald fellow with a bunged-up eye.”
“Man named Elza Klosters?”
After some thought, he shook his head. “Nothing to do with Carrie.”
I took a breath and said, “Cletus Redmond?”
“Didn’t know anybody by that name. Just what is it you want, Mister?”
“So Carrie was frightened when one of her whores was murdered and decided that she had to leave town and make a good marriage.”
“She was in a family way!” he blurted.
“She was?”
He licked his lips. “Now you show me some money, Mister, or I don’t have no more to say.”
I gave him three dollars, which was all I could afford. He tucked it into a pocket inside his apron. Yes, Carrie had been in a family way. He didn’t know who the father was. Could’ve been any of several. There was nothing more to be got out of Jimmy Fairleigh, either because he knew no more, or he had already told me more than he’d meant to, or because my three dollars had not sufficed him or because his loyalty to Caroline LaPlante prevented any more discussion of her male connections.
“If you see Carrie you tell her Jimmy Fairleigh will always remember her,” he said.
In the hotel in Reno where I spent the night, I woke up with names running through my head. English. Englishman. Britain. James M. Brittain, Amelia’s father, had been a mining engineer in the Comstock. Every Jim, George and Will. I didn’t sleep any more, considering withholding this connection from Bierce, because of my attachment to Miss Amelia Brittain.
10.
INTIMACY, n. – A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
Bierce had written: “San Francisco will welcome the returning Lady Caroline Stearns, formerly High-grade Carrie of the Washoe and Mrs. Nathaniel McNair of the City.”
“She is a woman of distinction, whether the bootstraps are stretched or not,” he said to me. “I cannot think of many such. Adah Isaacs Mencken, Ada Claire, Lillie Coit. For the most part the gender has little to recommend it except for its role in the continuation of the species, which is an arguable concept at best. I am unconcerned with her maculate past.”
He often described whores as the most honest members of their sex. Sometimes he did get tiresome in his fulminations.
He had spoken with Judge McManigle, who had served with Judge Hamon on the Circuit Court, and had not been much impressed: “Who ne’er took up law, yet lays law down,” he said. “Still, he knew what cock horse Judge Hamon was riding. He was denouncing Senator Jennings for subornation and barratry, never mind that it was rancor over the Railroad choosing Jennings to ordain a state senator rather than himself. He had chapter and verse on Jennings’s purchase in cases that concerned the Southern Pacific in general, and the trials of the Mussel Slough farmers in particular. That was what your arsonist friend disposed of in Santa Cruz.”
“Did Brown kill Mrs. Hamon then?”
“Or Jennings himself. In any case Jennings was surely the instigator.” Bierce leaned back in his chair, regarding me with his handsome, high-color, cold face. He wore a blue silk cravat, and his vest buttoned with the gold chain of his watch across it. The chalky skull grimaced at our conversation.
“How do these matters fit together?” I asked. “Highgrade Carrie. The Spades. The murder of Julia Bulette. The proposals. The pregnancy. The murder of Al Gorton. Beau, who is no longer engaged to Amelia Brittain. The slashed Morton Street whores. And Senator Jennings, Mrs. Hamon and the man called Brown.”
I did not mention James M. Brittain.
Bierce handed me another typewritten sheet, with an item for Tattle:
“The Senator from Southern Pacific has been especially active lately, in Morton Street and Santa Cruz, as well as the Giftcrest palm-greasings.”
“I will see him hanged,” he said. “And the Giftcrest defeated. And the Railroad powerfully smitten.”
Tattle also contained an item on a lady poet who had sent a volume of her poems to Bierce: “Miss Frye makes comment that her best inspirations come to her on an empty stomach. The quality of her verse has caused this reader’s stomach to empty as well—”
And a stab at the Reverend Stottlemyer: “It has been related to me that the Reverend Stottlemyer, renowned for his ability to separate wallets from the bills within, was asked by a fellow Deacon to exercise his powers on the Deacon’s congregation, for which our Stottle would receive one fourth of the monies collected. This was assented to on the proviso that Stottlemyer take up the collection himself. He did so and pocketed the funds, whereupon the Deacon raised an outcry. To this Stottle responded, ‘Nothing is coming to you, Brother, for the Adversary hardened the hearts of your congregation and all they gave was a fourth.’ ”