“Listen, Belinda,” I said. “You’re a girl and that’s good, and you’re a very pretty girl and that’s even better. One of these days—before you know it!—all the boys’re going to be looking at you, and they’ll be trying to talk to you, and they’ll bring you presents at school and share their cookies with you. And then when you are a young woman, the men will ask to be on your dance card and want to take you for rides in their fancy turnouts. And then you will be number one, I can tell you.”
“No!” she moaned.
“You just watch. Then, you’ll see, you can have anything you want, anybody you want! Because you are a girl, and good and beautiful. But, see, Colbert doesn’t get anything like that. He has to go out in the world and make a living and try to make something of himself, and maybe he can’t and then he’s a failure and he’ll start drinking and people will call him worthless. Because he’s a boy, because he’s a man, and if you’re a man nobody forgives you anything. So then you’ll have to feel sorry for Colbert.”
“He’s a rotten little turd!” Belinda sobbed.
“I know that,” I said. “But you don’t want to be one, too.”
She leaned against me and sobbed while I patted her shoulder.
A heavy-set customer in a big hat had stopped at the Barnacles’ gate to regard us with a steady gaze. It was the man who called himself Brown, with his sweat-shiny pocked face, and no doubt his revolver tucked into his belt. He drew something from his vest pocket and flipped it over the gate onto the walk twenty feet away from Belinda and me, a playing card. I had no doubt what suit it was. I felt paralyzed with fury.
Brown marched on out of sight past the next house as Belinda rose and scampered down to pick up the card.
“It’s the queen of spades, Tom!”
I snatched it from her, let myself out the gate and trotted after Brown. He had disappeared. I hadn’t really tried to catch up with him.
Belinda met me at the gate. She looked frightened. “What does it mean?”
I said it was just a joke.
When I brought the queen of spades to Bierce I was angered all over again because I knew that I had been counted on to deliver it to him.
“I suppose it means we should stop fretting the Railroad about Mussel Slough,” I said.
“It is a clumsy attempt at intimidation,” Bierce said. “The queen of spades was employed because spades have been in the newspapers in connection with murders.” He slipped the card into his desk drawer. “It must be an anticipation of your Jennings piece,” he said.
“I’ve hardly started it!”
“It is known you are researching it. Miss Penryn may have communicated the information to Smithers, or Macgowan. Someone who has a Railroad friend. There are not many secrets around a newspaper office.”
The neat little man said his name was Smith. He shook hands with Bierce, and introduced himself to me. “Clete Redmond’s son?” he said.
I admitted it.
He had a diamond pin in his cravat, a gold chain across his vest. Child-sized shoes gleamed beneath the cuffs of his trousers. He had silver hair and a neat triangular silver goatee. His eyes twinkled.
“We read your recent piece in The Hornet,” he said to Bierce, when he had seated himself, crossed his legs and settled his hat in his lap. “Yours also, Mr. Redmond,” he said to me.
“May I ask who ‘we’ is?” Bierce said amiably.
“Certain gentlemen at Fourth and Townsend, who have been regularly insulted by you, sir!” Smith chuckled.
“Why, I thought I had complimented them!” Bierce said.
“I have a message for you,” Smith said.
“I am all ears.”
“It is very brief,” Smith said. “It is that those who investigate may also be investigated.”
He rose, clapped his hat on his head, said, “Good day, sir. Good day,” he said to me and was gone, his heels clicking in the corridor.
The headline in the next morning’s Chronicle that lay on the Barnacles’ breakfast table was: SPADE SLAYING #4, and upper tenderloin SLASHING, and the smaller head: MAYOR OFFERS REWARD. I snatched it up to skim the article:
Dr. Manship, after a hasty examination of the body, said he thought the terrible deed could have been accomplished in a few moments. The victim had been attacked near the backhouse behind the establishment on Stockton Street presided over by Mrs. Mamie Overton. The victim’s throat had been cut with one stroke of a sharp weapon, and, in the familiar pattern, her torso shockingly slashed. The young woman’s name has not been revealed.
A reward of one thousand dollars for information that will lead to the apprehension of the knife-wielding maniac has been authorized by Mayor Washington Bartlett.
I took the horsecar to Dunbar Alley. Captain Pusey was there, with two other policemen. The Morgue stank of old blood, sweat and cigar smoke. The latest victim lay naked, paper white and pathetically thin on her slab, red-haired, a calm face unlike the contorted faces of the three who had been strangled. This one had not been strangled, but her throat was slashed to the bone. There was a gaping wound in her belly, but she had not been opened up like the others.
“Look at her fingernails,” Captain Pusey said, pointing his cigar at her hand. There were deposits of flesh under her fingernails. This woman had fought her assailant.
Her name was Rachel LeVigne.
Rachel LeVigne was Beau McNair’s redheaded Jewess, and Amelia Brittain was his fiancée, or had been anyway. And had a “shadow.”
When I told Captain Pusey that Miss Brittain was in danger he ordered a constable to 913 Taylor Street immediately.
14
WORMS’–MEAT, n. – The finished product of which we are the raw material. The contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and the Grantarium.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
The water closets at Mrs. Overton’s parlorhouse on Stockton Street had been unusable because of a sewer stoppage, and the girls and their clients were forced to use the outhouse behind the building. The area was lighted by a kerosene lamp on a bracket. A girl inside the outhouse had heard Rachel LeVigne’s screams but had been afraid to come out. Two of the clients had rushed outside to find the body and had seen a man in a cloaklike garment and a slouch hat disappear through the gate leading to the adjoining property.
Earlier, Mr. Beaumont McNair had taken Miss LeVigne to supper at the Fly Trap, and to a piano recital by the Hungarian pianist Pavel Magyar but had returned her to Mrs. Overton’s by ten-thirty. He was observed bidding her good night some time before she was assaulted in front of the outhouse.
Sgt. Nix had called upon Beau McNair at the McNair mansion. He told Bierce that Beau’s face was unmarked by Rachel LeVigne’s fingernails, and that Rudolph Buckle vouched for his return by ten-thirty the previous evening.
Now there was terror among the prostitutes of the Upper Tenderloin as well as Morton Street, and scare headlines in the newspapers. I made my third call at 913 Taylor Street.
The porch that stretched across the front of the house rose high off the ground at the west end because of the steepness of Taylor Street. A file of spindly balusters supported the railing. The facade of the house was decorated with plaster rosettes and jigsaw fretwork in a geometric tangle of light and shadow from the morning sun over Nob Hill. A constable sat in a wicker chair at a table at the end of the porch, raising a hand in greeting to me.