“I am not Beau McNair’s father,” Buckle said. He licked his lips with a swipe of gray tongue. “Nor can I see the pertinence of this.”
“Who was the father?”
“Mr. Bierce, it was twenty-odd years ago. It was another time, and it is, in fact, none of anyone’s affair. I’m sorry I cannot be helpful.”
“In fact, it is everyone’s affair,” Bierce said. “Four women have been hideously murdered by someone connected with the Society of Spades in Virginia City, which was convened in order to purchase the Jack of Spades Mine. Of the five Spades, Caroline LaPlante and Nat McNair, with the assistance of one Albert Gorton, conspired to cheat the other two out of their shares. These others were E. O. Macomber and Adolphus Jackson. Gorton was later murdered, perhaps by a hired assassin named Klosters. I am sure that you are acquainted with all these men, Mr. Buckle. Macomber, or Jackson or someone else connected with the Society of Spades is responsible for these murders or is very closely involved in them. If you will not assist us, I will have to bring what persuasions I have at my disposal to bear on you, and on Beaumont McNair.”
Buckle folded his hands together. “I can give you no information without consulting with Mr. Curtis and Lady Caroline.”
“Then we will continue our voyage of discovery without your counsel. I must tell you that anyone who was associated with Lady Caroline in her Virginia City past will be investigated.”
Buckle looked as though he would faint.
“Where can we find E. O. Macomber, Mr. Buckle?” Bierce said, leaning toward him.
“I have no idea what has become of him.”
“What has become of Adolphus Jackson?”
Buckle moistened his lips again. “Adolphus Jackson is Senator Aaron Jennings,” he said.
“The initials should have so informed me,” Bierce said, leaning back.
There it was, the connection he had been searching for.
Bierce rose. “Good day to you, Mr. Buckle,” he said. Buckle rose also, looking exhausted. He did not accompany us to the door but summoned the butler to see us out.
On the way back down California Street, Bierce said, “We should have inquired into the flower-loving ghost of the McNair mansion.”
More ghosts than one, I thought.
15
INK, n. – A villainous compound of tanno-gallate of iron, gum-arabic and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
I was not yet allowed to think of myself as a full-fledged journalist, for I was summoned to assist Dutch John and Frank Grief printing the week’s Hornet in the basement with the dependable-in-its-undependability Chandler & Price press, whose revolving leather belt periodically snapped off its spindles in a flailing flight around the basement, and that acid stink of ink that required much soap and hot water at the Pine Street Baths to wash away.
After supper the Barnacle children often put on a show for the assembled boarders: Fuzzy Bear, The Hooter, Jimmy McGurn and Tom Redmond. We sat with our empty cake plates and coffee cups before us and watched the young Barnacles in performance. Tonight it was charades, in which Belinda was always the principal. She appeared swathed in white, wearing a white cap, dark lines denoting age drawn on her cheeks. Colbert, in his knickers, white shirt and a necktie, stood before her. Between them was a mysterious construction of crumpled newspapers painted white, with unlighted birthday candles stuck in it. Belinda carried a kind of wand, so that at first I thought she was a fairy princess.
But she tapped Colbert on the shoulder and in a quavery voice commanded, “Play, boy!”
“Great Expectations!” I said. There was applause. Belinda curtseyed. The paper construction was of course the decayed wedding cake.
Later she appeared in her Sunday dress, revealing the beginnings of a bosom, hair in neat pigtails, to stand before us and declaim:
“Blow, winds, come wrack! Knit up the ravell’d sleeve of care! There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. And all the clouds that lowered around our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried. There is a willow grows aslant a brook!”
She gestured dramatically.
“Out, damned spot! Wherefore art thou Romeo? At least we’ll die with harness on our back!
“The rest is silence!”
She curtseyed to thunderous applause, her parents joining in. I slapped my hands together with enthusiasm. Belinda’s cheeks were pink with pleasure as she curtseyed again.
My bride-to-be enjoyed applause very much.
When at last a brown envelope arrived from Virginia City, Bierce and I examined the faces of the Spades on the tin plate. They were grouped in front of a building that might have been the Miners’ Rest, with an overhanging balcony that shaded some of the faces. They were young! All smiling. Caroline LaPlante was at the center, very respectable and rather ordinary-looking in her black skirt and white shirtwaist, with a large dark saucer of a hat shading her face. On one side of her was a man not as young as the others whom I recognized as Nat McNair, on the other a large young man, clean-shaven and grinning, derby-hatted. Beside McNair was a monkey-faced little fellow and, beside him, another derby-hatted chap whose face was partially concealed by the shade of the balcony. The three young men must be Al Gorton, E. O. Macomber and Adolphus Jackson, who was Senator Jennings. Bierce had met Jennings but could not identify him as a young man.
“Take this to Pusey,” he said. “We will test his memory for faces and the vaunted Criminal Photographic Archive.”
Brushing at his mustache, he said, “It will be interesting to see if Pusey identifies Jackson as Jennings. Jennings may be paying generously for not being identified.”
He had obtained a magnifying glass to see if he could recognize Jennings. When he passed it to me I bent over the tintype.
The man whose face was partially in shadow was surely my father.
I was in a state when I got to Captain Pusey’s office at Old City Hall with the tintype like a block of lead in my pocket, and, when I entered, it seemed that Pusey had shrunk to only three feet tall in his blue uniform tunic, standing across the room scowling at me. I thought the shock of recognizing my father’s face had been too much for me, until Pusey moved sideways to put a hand on the back of a chair and I saw he was a boy dressed up in a child’s-size policeman’s uniform.
Pusey himself came in through a side door.
“This’s my boy, John Daniel,” he said. “John Daniel, come and shake Mr. Redmond’s hand.”
The boy approached to give my hand an energetic tug and retreated again. Pusey did not proffer his own hand. “Got something for me?” he said.
I handed him the tintype, which he laid on his desk. He bent over it, resembling a heavy-bellied candle, with his shock of hair like a white flame. He poked at the images on the tintype with a blunt forefinger. “These are Bierce’s Spades then. There is Nat McNair and the grand lady herself!”
John Daniel stood silently watching. The office window looked out on an area paved with stones, where a group of bummers were in conversation, passing a bottle among them. A beer wagon rolled past with a rattle of wheels.
“That’s Albert Gorton,” Pusey said. “Got battered on the head in February ‘76. Died without coming out of it.”
“Who bashed him?”