“Never heard so many lies told quite so fast in all my life,” Pusey said.
Bierce clicked his tongue. He wore the expression of extreme politeness that he assumed when there was a danger his feelings would show. He did not like Captain Pusey.
“Whose lies, Captain?”
“That Hill woman is one fast-talker. And temper! She’s telling lies and she’s got another young lady telling lies, and a young fellow, and two colored girls, all telling lies. I hear the Senator is paying a thousand dollars a day defending himself against those lies.”
“No lies on his side?” Bierce said.
“Too busy brushing them off himself to tell any lies.”
“Seems to me there was a young fellow that got caught in some lies saying he had had a relation with Miss Hill.”
Pusey clucked and patted his white mane. “The Senator is paying out good money trying to nail down those lies that woman’s suborned those people to tell about him.”
“Paying money, is he?” Bierce said.
Pusey nodded. “He’s got his lines out, he has. He didn’t make himself twenty millions laying down and letting people walk over him.”
I thought Pusey might be one of the lines Senator Sharon had out.
“He don’t like people calling him names the way some have done,” he said.
“As I have done?” Bierce said.
“That’s right,” Pusey said, displaying his splendid teeth. “Mr. Bierce, you get so many people stamping mad at you I can’t be responsible for what happens.”
“I understand that Miss Hill has charged him with adultery with nine women,” Bierce said.
“Now, you know that is lies. He is a little old chap, he is sixty-four years old!”
“Five or six would be more accurate, you mean.”
Pusey blew his breath out in irritation.
“Mr. Bierce, she is going to lose this case and end up in the hoosegow for perjury. The Senator is going to win it, and he is going to remember who was a help to him and who wasn’t.”
“Memory like an elephant, I understand,” Bierce said.
Pusey scowled at him.
“Now, Captain Pusey,” Bierce said. “Don’t I recollect that Senator Sharon has been one of the most active adulterers in this sinful city?”
“Where it comes to nookie, I always say all bets are off,” Pusey said. He showed his teeth again. “You have done pretty well along those lines yourself, Mr. Bierce.”
Bierce composed his face.
“Now what do you know about the senator in Virginia City, Captain?” he said. “Wasn’t he scampering after loose women there also?”
“Not my jurisdiction, Mr. Bierce, if you know what I mean.” Pusey brought his fat watch out of his pocket and scowled at it.
“I understand Mammy Pleasant has been to call,” he said, switching the subject.
“That is correct,” Bierce said.
“You know this is all her put in. She has laid out the money, she has furnished her lawyer to represent the young woman. George Washington Tyler, that old shyster! And Judge Terry too! Senator Sharon is not going to forget that.”
“He had better be careful.”
“Now why is that, Mr. Bierce?”
“I understand Mrs. Pleasant is a voodoo person. Charms, potions, sticking needles in dolls, tricks like that.”
Pusey harrumphed at that, not knowing whether Bierce was serious or not.
“You have been employed by the Senator, is that so?” Bierce asked.
“I’m an employee of the City of San Francisco!” Pusey said indignantly.
When he had gone, Bierce said, “That is a pair I would not like to give aid and comfort to.”
“Senator Sharon and Captain Pusey.”
“We may still gain some information from Mammy Pleasant,” he said. “But we can be certain we will have nothing from Pusey.”
“What will we do about finding out if there is a connection between Sharon and Carrie LaPlante?”
“We will just have to ask her,” Bierce said.
19
REPORTER, n. – A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
My stock had risen at 913 Taylor Street. Amelia insisted that I had saved her life from the Morton Street Slasher, or whoever her attacker had been, and she conducted herself with me with some familiarity before her parents.
The broken railing of the veranda had been patched with pale pine boards, and the policeman on duty there was treated with more hospitality, the cook furnishing him lemonade and shortbread cookies.
I escorted Amelia to the Roller Palace. Roller-skating was a sport with which she was unfamiliar. On the gleaming hardwood floor with the racket of metal wheels on wood, under the balloon ceiling with its central boss of jewel-flashing mirrors, I held an arm around her waist while she took her first rolling steps, her left hand clutching mine, giggling, high-colored, her voice rising an octave in her nervousness. But soon she was swooping along with the best, waving long arms for balance, graceful in her lanky awkwardness with her skirts sweeping in thick folds around her legs, her tight bodice with the two lovely symmetrical mounds of her bosom, her pretty head crowned in a velvet hat with a rolled brim, laughing and laughing in her pleasure. The roller-skating seemed to help her get over her fright at the Slasher’s attentions, though still I would see her eyes fill and she would become very quiet, as if the fact that someone would want to hurt her had swept over her again.
In the steamy little tearoom over cups of Oolong she prattled about marriages of San Francisco young women to European aristocrats. Clara Huntington and Eva Mackay had married titles, Flora Sharon a baronet, Mary Ellen Donahue a baron, Mary Parrott a count, Virginia Bonynge a viscount and her sister Lord John Maxwell. The Holladay sisters had plighted troth with the Baron de Boussiere and the Comte de Pourtales.
And the widow of the multimillionaire Nathaniel McNair had married Lord Hastings Stearns.
“It is so charming!” she said. “The fathers of these women with brilliant careers were Irish saloonkeepers or hairy prospectors with their donkeys, and these European aristocrats are the descendants of crusty old warriors who chose the winning side in some war of succession. Their titles are for sale to charming females with great expectations!”
I wondered if she was regretting her own failed engagement to the son of Lady Caroline, which had been nixed by her father.
I said I didn’t think any of the heiresses of the brilliant careers were as good roller-skaters as she had proved to be.
She laughed and said, “As to my own brilliant career, I’m afraid Poppa’s investments are failing him just now.”
I digested that.
“It is a comic spectacle, Tom,” she went on. “One must learn to view it as a spectator instead of a participant.”
“But you are a participant!”
“A spectator also. I insist on that!” She flattened the palms of her hands together with her chin balanced on her fingers, her eyes fixed on me.
I said I thought the whole shameless business was an affront to a democratic nation.
“It may be an affront to a Democrat, but it is fine comedy. Have you witnessed the Saturday afternoon procession on ‘the line’?”
“The line” was the five blocks along Market from Powell to Kearny and up Kearny to Sutter. Saturday afternoons beautiful young women paraded along the line, for the delectation of the knots of young men watching from the open-front cigar stores on their route.