“Ah,” he said. “I am sorry I missed that lady. There was a lady last night I wish I had missed.” It was all he was to say about the quarrel at the Overland Monthly salon.
The Palace Hotel breakfast specialty was served from a sideboard in a mahogany-paneled room illuminated by skylights. Bierce and I sat at a marble-topped table with our yellow mix of oysters and scrambled eggs that I was not sure my bruised stomach was equal to. Bierce pitched right in. I had a sense that he did consider me a friend, as though being coshed, threatened and beaten up by a Railroad gang had proved my value to him. But not a friend who could advise him on the conduct of his life.
I told him of my bargain with Klosters, and the reasons for it.
“I told you once that I had never been intimidated by the Railroad,” he said coldly.
It would be easy to find a pretext to quarrel with him, as Mrs. Coit had told me.
“I think your researches into Senator Jennings’s past may have served their purpose,” he said, relenting.
“Maybe so.”
“So Klosters understood that you would not shoot him,” he said. “His advantage is that one does not know whether he would or would not shoot.”
I had Bierce’s revolver in my pocket, as though it had attached itself to me, and I was presently to have employment for it.
Revolvers had played their part in San Francisco hard feelings. A man named Kalloch who was running for mayor on the Workingman’s Party ticket was the target of Charles De Young’s invective in the Chronicle. In a fracas with De Young, Kalloch was wounded. Later on his son shot De Young dead. And Bierce had acquired his own weapon when the husband of an actress he devastated in Tattle threatened him with violence.
All this crossed my mind when I recognized Senator Jennings from Fats Chubb’s caricatures in The Hornet. He marched across the room toward us, a round-faced man with a cropped reddish-graying beard and a sweat-gleaming bald head. He was preceded by a belly so large he appeared to be carrying a bass drum under his vest. Trotting anxiously behind him, in a frock coat, was a hotel functionary.
Jennings had a booming senatorial voice and he halted ten feet away from our table to shout, “You are a liar and a calumniator, Bierce!”
I rose with my napkin in my hand, but Bierce remained seated behind his plate of oysters and eggs, his napkin tucked into his collar and a nettled frown on his face.
“You are a Goddamned liar and calumniator!” Jennings boomed.
Bierce said calmly, “And you, sir, are a footboy of rogues, a menial of thieves, a lackey and lickspittle, a knave, a blackguard, a sneak, a coward. And a murderer!”
“Now, Senator,” the hotelman said. “Now, Mr. Bierce.”
“Damned liar!” the Senator shouted.
Bierce shoveled in eggs and chewed. He said to the hotelman, “This murderer’s adiposity is casting a shadow on my eggs that I fear will turn them rancid. Will you remove him?”
“Oh, Mr. Bierce,” the hotelman said.
Senator Jennings produced a derringer from his pocket and leveled it at Bierce.
“Oh, Senator Jennings,” the hotelman said. “Please, not in here, sir.”
I took Bierce’s revolver from my pocket, where its presence had asserted itself.
Bierce pushed his plate aside as though it had indeed been fouled. “You have produced a firearm. Senator Jennings. Is that the argument with which you presume to assert your innocence?”
I made sure that Senator Jennings saw the revolver pointed at his big belly. “Are you aware of the Concealed Weapon Ordinance, sir?” I said.
His hot eyes fixed on mine. “And who are you, my man?”
“My name is Redmond.”
“You are Clete Redmond’s son, who has written a scurrilous piece about me.”
“Yes, sir.” I did not see any reason to tell him that I had been intimidated by Klosters. Perhaps he already knew of it.
The hotelman interposed himself between Jennings and Bierce. He pushed Jennings’s hand holding the pistol down, muttering soothing exclamations. I returned Bierce’s revolver to my pocket.
“Bierce, I have the means to make your life miserable, and short,” Jennings said calmly. “And I intend to use them.”
He lumbered off. Bierce motioned to the waiter to remove his plate as I seated myself again.
“We will send these away as they are quite cold,” Bierce said. He rose to stride to the sideboard and load another plate with eggs and oysters from the gleaming steamer there.
I had a sense of layers of menace laid over us like blankets on a bed.
“Apparently he is not yet aware of your capitulation to Klosters,” Bierce said.
When we had left the Palace after our repast, he said grimly, “I would give the devil his dues if he would provide me with the evidence I need to bring that podgy homicide to the bench of justice.”
24
ROMANCE, n. – Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
Sgt. Nix propped his helmet on the desk beside the skull, shaking his head as Bierce told him about the encounter with Jennings at the Palace Hotel.
“He’s too big for the captain to go after,” Nix said. “You’d have to have a squad of ministers swearing on a carload of Bibles that they saw him strangle Judge Hamon’s widow.”
“Any word from the daughter in San Diego?” Bierce asked.
“She and Hamon didn’t get along. She doesn’t know anything.”
“Tom’s been nosing into Mammy Pleasant’s past history,” Bierce said.
“Those’re tolerable high-power Nobs that used to play those games out at Geneva Cottage,” Nix said, shaking his head again. “Course we always knew what Mammy was. Do you know how many abortions a month it takes to keep a crib going? Cowyards and parlorhouses? They’ve got some kind of pessary thing soaked in quinine and some herbs that makes them barren for awhile, but it is still abortions mostly. And was back when Mammy Pleasant was in the business. There’s always midwifes around, but she was the only one for the Nobs. Abortions and baby-furnishing. No one ever went after her for any of that. This is San Francisco. There has been funny business at the Bell house too. But they say she and Allan Pinkerton was pals from the days when she had to do with the Underground Railroad. Captain Pusey is tolerable careful with her. I’ve noticed.
“They say she’s in court every day. Right in the middle of things too. Sarah Althea and her lawyers having a confab at their table, she’ll stick her black head right in the middle of it. Of course she is paying the bills. Miss Hill and her new lawyer’s a couple of turtledoves, I hear. I expect some of that’s for Sharon’s benefit.”
There was some discussion of Sharon v. Sharon, which seemed to be going Sarah Althea Hill’s way at the moment.
Bierce asked if Beau McNair was in custody or out.
“Out,” Nix said. “His mother’s on hand. Got in last night.”
“Now Captain Pusey will spring his trap,” Bierce said.
“Let’s see what you have on Mammy Pleasant,” Bierce said, when Nix had gone. I brought him the typescript:
Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in San Francisco in 1853, a passenger on the SS Oregon. Also aboard was a young Scotsman named Thomas Bell, and a long-standing connection was formed. Mrs. Pleasant was a quadroon who could pass for white and did so in a San Francisco that was more interested in handsome women than in distinctions of color. It may be that she knew of some crime or aberration in Thomas Bell’s past, because she has kept a rein on him as his fortunes flourished in San Francisco. She was renowned as a chef and was passed from kitchen to kitchen among the aristocracy of Rincon Hill and Nob Hill. It was said that she could command a cook’s wage of $500 a month, with the stipulation that she wash no dishes.