At Mrs. Johnson’s establishment in the Upper Tenderloin, I sat in the parlor waiting for Annie Dunker. Mrs. Johnson sat on the far side of the room, stout in shiny black, talking to a gray-haired man in a brown suit, to whom I had nodded politely in response to his nod, without a meeting of eyes. I lounged in an overstuffed chair looking out the window at the traffic of Stockton Street. It was early for callers, but Mrs. Johnson had always been friendly. She had a personal style of accepting dollars, folding them and with a sleight-of-hand slipping the bills inside her black cuff.
Annie tripped down the stairs in her ankle-length shift, which revealed interesting swells and swales, and had a blue ribbon at the neck. She trotted to me, pushed me back as I rose and seated herself in my lap.
“It’s been so long, Tommy!”
She was a kitten-faced, dark-haired girl a couple of years older than I, who had worked in Albany and Chicago before coming to San Francisco. She squirmed in my lap for a moment before springing to her feet. We went upstairs arm in arm. In her room I sat on the bed and said I wanted to talk.
“First or second?” she said.
“Do you know who Beau McNair is?”
“Everybody knows of him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everybody in the better places, I mean.”
“Is there a redheaded Jewess he might spend time with?”
“Rachel, at Mrs. Overton’s. My cousin’s there too.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Just that he is—very attentive, Tommy. The way you used to be with me.” She had a way of making a two-syllable word out of “me.” She giggled, rubbing her hands down her shift.
“Can you find out about how he is with her? How he acts? What he says? Anything interesting?”
“They don’t think he is that terrible—butcher!”
“This is just for me to know. What he’s like.”
“I’ll ask Lucille. I know Rachel is popular.”
“Have you ever had a client who didn’t have a—” I pointed. “You know?”
She covered her mouth as she giggled, shaking her head. “What would be the point, Tommy?”
“Have you heard of anyone like that? He has to use a leather thing he strapped on. A dildo, I guess.”
“Well, there are men that do that, Tommy. Old men that can’t get it up any more.”
“This would be a young man.”
She shook her head some more, looking puzzled.
“Could you ask around about such a fellow? I’ll get some money.”
“I’ll do it for you. Tommy. For you and me-ee.”
“Anything you can find out will be helpful.”
“Now?” she said, and with a swift motion stripped her shift off over her head. She stood there naked and posed like a garden statuette. I thought of her astride a white stallion and my breath caught in my throat.
“You look grand,” I said. Although all I could think of was Amelia Brittain, there was no hitch at all in taking pleasure with Annie Dunker.
11.
MARRIAGE, n. – The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
Aboard the ferry across the Bay, and on the train to St. Helena, Bierce and I discussed the murders.
“Senator Jennings murdered Mrs. Hamon in order to rid himself of a threat of exposure and disposed of her after the manner of the Morton Street murders,” Bierce said. “I believe Captain Pusey knows it, knows more than we do in fact, but he has his own springs of action.”
“His spring of action is how to get a hook into someone with money to fork over,” I said.
“I believe Pusey’s game has less light than shadow.”
I started at the word “shadow.” What did Amelia mean by her “shadow”? Surely she could have no connection with Morton Street. Her father had been on the Comstock, and the connection of his name with a conspiracy called “the English shuffle” fretted me like a pebble in my shoe. The idea of a “shadow” caused chills of anxiety to wash over me. But she wouldn’t have written of it so lightly if it had been serious.
“It is the shame of the Nation that we do not have a Chief of Detectives we can trust,” Bierce said in a bitter voice. “A mayor we can trust. A governor. A president! If our lives must be led in distrust and contempt of all who govern us, it would be well to accept the fact. It is my burden that I cannot. It is an affliction to me that a moth-eaten old malefactor such as Collis B. Huntington keeps a hand in my pocket, and another on my reins. It is unbearable!”
The Bierce two-story cottage faced south among pine trees that had dropped a brown carpet of needles. On a veranda were bicycles, a porch swing and a litter of baseball bats and mitts. Two boys of ten and twelve, in short pants and striped baseball shirts ran out to dance around Bierce, followed by a red-haired child in a blue jumper, who flung herself into her father’s arms. She was received with the first real enthusiasm I had seen Bierce evince toward another person. There was no question from their reddish fair hair and neat countenances that Day and Leigh were his sons, little Helen his daughter.
Mrs. Bierce came out on the veranda, wiping her hands in a frilly apron. She was a dark-haired, smiling woman considerably younger than Bierce, with a classic straight nose, a long face and intense bars of eyebrows. She and Bierce greeted each other coolly. I liked Mollie Bierce immediately, maybe because of Bierce’s cynicism about marriage and women. The older boy, Day, followed Bierce to the veranda with a perfect mimicry of his father’s stiff-backed military gait.
Mollie Bierce’s mother, Mrs. Day, was inches shorter than her daughter, with graying hair and Mollie’s straight nose turned into an aggressive beak, a ram of a chin, and an upper lip wrinkled like pie crimping. She had a way of moving toward a quarry splay-footed, as though in preparation for combat, halting too close for comfort and extending chin and nose like a challenge.
If Bierce and his wife tolerated each other, Bierce and his mother-in-law did not. Mrs. Day demanded to know why Bierce had not brought Mollie down to the City for Senator Sharon’s reception. She complained that Mollie had no piano on which to practice.
This conversation took place on the veranda, Mollie Bierce rolling her eyes apologetically at me. The three of them moved inside the house, where the clamor of Mrs. Day’s accusations continued. I set my bag down, took off my jacket and invited the boys to a game of catch.
We spread out into a broad triangle on the pine needles and flung the ball into each other’s mitts. Leigh was not as strong as his older brother, who powered the ball with a nice acceleration of his wrist. Helen watched from the veranda, seated in the swing which she pushed with her feet against the rail, her red hair a bright stain on green canvas.