“Never solved.” He grinned at me with his too-perfect teeth. “Somebody that didn’t like him, probably. Unless they bashed the wrong fellow.”
“Could it have been Elza Klosters doing a job for Nat McNair because Gorton was trying to blackmail McNair?”
“There’s other possibilities.”
“The tall man must be Adolphus Jackson.” And the one partially in shadow, E. O. Macomber, was Cletus Redmond. I was in a sweat that Pusey would recognize my father, although surely his face did not appear in the Criminal Photographic Archive.
They had cheated my father out of a fortune! I would have been the son of a Nob Hill millionaire.
“What’s that, Poppy?” John Daniel asked.
“Tintype of some fellows in Virginia City,” Pusey said. He had never taken his eyes off the images. He shook his head slightly, as though recognition did not come, or to make me think it did not.
“Jackson spent some time in jail here.”
“Probably before my time,” Pusey said. “I’ll study on it. Who’s the other one?”
“Macomber.”
He shook his head.
“Do you have a photograph of Elza Klosters?”
He rose, a bulky figure in his uniform, his belly squeezed into two fat bulges by his belt. He stamped out of the office. Outside the window a policeman had dispersed the bottle bums.
I pocketed the tintype from Pusey’s desk. Bierce had paid two hundred dollars for it, after all. I wished I had never heard of it.
John Daniel watched me suspiciously.
Pusey returned laden with a heavy, leather-bound album, which he opened on his desk, and slapped through the pages. There was Brown, whom Bierce had correctly guessed to be Klosters. He was without his hat, his surly features gazing out at me. In this likeness he possessed considerably more hair. On the opposite page was a typed list that I assumed to be of offenses, but when I rose to take a look, Pusey closed the album.
“Where’s the tintype?”
I patted my pocket.
“I want it.”
“It belongs to Ambrose Bierce.”
“It is evidence,” Pusey said. He stretched his lips to show me his fine teeth. His eyes were set in his head in a disorienting irregularity. They stared at me as though to mesmerize me.
“Evidence of what?” I asked.
His face darkened. “I want that tintype. I’ve got to have some time with those faces.”
“I’ll ask Mr. Bierce,” I said.
He was not content with that, but he did not pursue it further.
When I left, Pusey told John Daniel to shake hands with Mr. Redmond again, which the boy did with another abrupt motion. Outside in the areaway, when I looked back up, Captain Pusey was watching me from his window, a looming figure capped by the topknot of white hair. Beside him was his son’s head, visible above the sill, peering down.
I stopped in a saloon around the corner for a beer for my dry throat. I had been in such a sweat with Pusey looking at the Gent’s image in the tintype that I hadn’t concentrated on Pusey, but I had the sense that he employed his cunning even when there was no need. I patted the hard shape of the tintype in my pocket uneasily. Surely Pusey could have invoked his authority to relieve me of it if it had seemed important to him.
My breath came hard when I contemplated how close my father had come to the Big Bonanza. I turned down Clay Street, striding through the pedestrians on the busy sidewalk.
I did not identify the whiff of sound as a slung shot until my head burst.
16
A man is known by the company that he organizes.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
I came to my senses in a dark alleyway between buildings, my back against rough bricks. My head throbbed. My stocking feet were stretched out on paving stones. Where were my shoes? My hat was missing. My jacket was gone also, with it any money I’d had with me and the tintype of the Society of Spades.
No doubt Captain Pusey had got the tintype. I touched the lump on the side of my head. Probably a bum had made off with my shoes and hat.
My banging the buggy seat in the Barnacles’ cellar had not helped with the defense of the realm. I had been coshed by a professional. I felt relief that the tintype was gone.
It required some scrabbling to get to my knees. I rested there. It was another long way to my feet. The little alley stank of urine. I stood looking down at my stocking feet, willing them to move.
No one paid me any attention as I limped around the corner, and around another. I stood in the paved areaway beneath Pusey’s high window, waiting for him to look out. A policeman strolled up to me, tapping his nightstick against the palm of his left hand. He had a mustache that looked painted on his face. He made moving-along gestures.
I pointed to the lump on my head, but I tender-footed on away.
I found myself in Chinatown. No one noticed my stocking feet, men in blue cotton maneuvering double loads on poles through the crowds and a woman hobbling on bound feet that probably felt like mine. Brown sun-dried ducks hung on gibbets in shop windows, trays displayed unfamiliar vegetables. Slave girls called out from their upholstered window boxes:
“Fuckee, suckee!”
My feet were on fire when I finally got home, climbed the splintery stairs, shed my worn-out stockings and flopped onto my bed. I couldn’t rest the bruised side of my head against the pillow. I lay shivering with fantasies of vengeance chasing through my brain and chills of anxiety about Amelia. I couldn’t let myself think about my father’s connection to the Jack of Spades Mine.
Moving slowly, I dressed and headed for The Hornet, bareheaded because I couldn’t get a hat on my head. Bierce was not in the office, so he was probably at Dinkins’s. I made my way there, to find him sitting with Sgt. Nix at his usual table. Nix had spread himself over the chair seat and chair back with a long leg stretched out.
I pointed to my lump and pulled a chair up. Bierce looked as alarmed as he ever looked, which was not very. When I had told my story, not leaving out my suspicions of Captain Pusey for Sgt. Nix’s benefit, Bierce said, “The tintype is gone, then.”
I entertained the irritating probability that Bierce considered me at fault for losing the tintype, for which he had paid two hundred dollars. Good riddance! Nix’s hatchet face was set in a scowl.
“That’s a pretty good lump you’ve got there, Tommy.”
“I’d like to find out who put it there.”
“I can make a guess,” Nix said but didn’t.
“Captain Pusey wanted that tintype,” I said, hand to my head. “He said it was evidence.”
“Evidence of what?” Bierce asked me.
“He didn’t say.”
“Did he recognize Jackson?”
“He said he didn’t.”
“Let me point out,” Nix said. “He is famous for collecting photographs, and he didn’t have to get you bashed on the head to take that tintype away from you. If it was evidence.”
“What kind of legal compulsion would that be?” Bierce inquired.
“It’s a writ of I-want-what-you-have-got,” Nix said, with a sour smile.
“I’m sorry about your head,” Bierce said to me.
I nodded, still a little aggrieved. Nix patted his helmet on the table. I asked if there was a constable at the Brittain house.
“He’s there,” Nix said.
“Sgt. Nix has discovered the owner of the Washoe Angel saloon from the tax appraiser,” Bierce said. “His name is Adolphus Jackson, and tax bills are sent to him at 307 Battery Street.”
The painting of Highgrade Carrie was privileged information insofar as it concerned Amelia Brittain.
“Captain Pusey showed me a photograph of Klosters from his archive,” I said. “He was the man in Santa Cruz, all right. The man who tossed the queen of spades at me.”