“Was there money involved, Mrs. Pleasant?”
“They were given two thousand dollars,” Mammy Pleasant said.
Lady Caroline had removed both gloves and was smoothing a cream-colored liquid from a small silver bottle onto her hands.
It was as though Bierce was a schoolmaster calling on her. He did not look at her directly but raised a finger inclined toward her.
“McNair would allow me to keep one baby but not two,” she said. “It was a punishment.”
“You chose to keep the better-looking or the stronger of the twins?” Bierce said. “Or was there some defect?”
“I do not intend to discuss that, Mr. Bierce.”
“I will point out that the hatred would be intensified if there was a defect. Hatred against his perfect brother as well as his mother.”
Lady Caroline wrung the liquid into her hands.
“I believe there was some flaw, a deformation,” Bierce said. “I believe the deformation was genital.”
He paused to glance at Lady Caroline. Color had mounted in her cheeks, but she did not respond.
Bierce continued, speaking very carefully: “As Beaumont McNair’s scrape with London prostitutes seems to show a discomfort with his mother’s history, so does the other twin’s particular viciousness.
“The twin’s object was to see his brother punished for these murders, but it was primarily to punish his mother. The incrimination of Beau was to serve the purpose of bringing his mother to San Francisco. There he would punish her as he had punished the other prostitutes. Certainly it was a mad scheme. It was a madman’s scheme.”
Lady Caroline now sat motionless with her beautiful head erect, watching Bierce with the smile that was no longer a smile.
“What is this young man’s name, Senator?” Bierce asked suddenly.
His name must be Payne.
Heads turned toward Jennings, who glared back at Bierce with his lips pressed together like a scar.
Mammy Pleasant enunciated the name softly: “George Payne.”
Bierce pointed a finger at Senator Jennings. “You believed you were the father of Caroline LaPlante’s offspring, the father of George Payne. The pregnant mother told you that you were, as she had also told another. She had decided that she wanted to be married, and you were her second choice, but you were a four-flusher as well. Nat McNair was her third choice. Perhaps you were, in fact, the father. The mother claims to be uncertain.”
Jennings snarled at him.
I wondered suddenly who else had been informed of his paternity. Was this the connection with Sharon that everyone denied?
“I don’t pretend to know how you came to know George Payne or his identity,” Bierce went on. “But encounter him you did. He worked as a barkeep in your saloon on Battery Street. Adolphus Jackson’s saloon, actually. It was George Payne who carried away from the fire the painting of Caroline LaPlante as Lady Godiva—it once hung in a saloon in Virginia City, and then in your office in Sacramento. And later still in the Washoe Angel saloon. It was the twin who carried off the famous painting of his mother, wasn’t it, Tom?”
Heads turned toward me. “Yes,” I said.
“The young man’s hatred was fed,” Bierce said, turning toward Lady Caroline. “Captain Pusey had conveyed the information about Beaumont McNair’s London transgression and arrest to Senator Jennings. They were well acquainted. Pusey knew Jennings was a convicted arsonist named Adolphus Jackson and had been blackmailing him for years. Jennings passed along Pusey’s information to his employee. There had to be a starting time for these vicious murders. The starting time was Beaumont McNair’s return to San Francisco.
“George Payne’s hatred was fed by Senator Jennings,” Bierce said.
“One moment!” Jennings’s lawyer said, rising, hand and finger rising also.
“You have no proof of any of this!” Jennings shouted. He shoved his chair noisily back as he lurched to his feet. “You damned calumniator! I am getting out of this shithole, Ted!”
Shoulders hunched and head forward as though ducking beneath rifle fire, he plunged toward the double doors Marvins had closed behind Bierce and me. He flung them open and disappeared with a hurrying crack of footfalls on the parquet. Neither Pusey nor Sgt. Nix made any move after him. His lawyer, grimacing at Lady Caroline, followed more sedately, closing the doors behind him.
“May we call this murderer an extrapolation, or merely hypothetical?” Curtis said in a stifled voice.
“Bos,” Lady Caroline said.
“Are you saying that Senator Jennings was the intellectual author of these murders?” Buckle said.
“At least the impulse to them.”
“Can the police find this twin?”
“We will find him,” Pusey said calmly.
“You will find a man who has been mistaken for Beaumont McNair many times,” Bierce said. He paced before the window. Lady Caroline’s eyes never left him.
“The hatred these two shared was very powerful,” Bierce said. “They complemented each other. The twin might not have turned murderous without Jennings. Jennings might have forgotten his old grudge without George Payne, whom he considered his wronged son.”
He had broken through to the Railroad at last. He had connected the SP with the Slasher.
“So Lady Caroline is in danger,” Pusey said, still with his arms and legs entwined.
“George Payne has been gaining access to this mansion for years,” Bierce said. “He believed it should have been his house. The servants knew of him as the ghost. It may be that Mr. Buckle has actually encountered him.”
Heads turned to Buckle, who was still standing. His lips moved, but he did not speak. He was breathing heavily.
“Is this true, Rudy?” Beau demanded.
“I believe this meeting can be concluded,” Lady Caroline said, before Buckle could respond. She rose to her feet. “Thank you, Mr. Bierce. I am very impressed by your conclusions. We have certainly been forewarned.”
Curtis rose. Others shifted in their chairs, rising. Mammy Pleasant elbowed and switched herself around. Her posture, and her first steps as she turned toward the door, were those of an old woman.
I heard the clatter of heels on the parquet of the hallway outside. The door burst open. Beau McNair, in a slouch hat and a gray muffler, panting, pale-faced, took two steps inside, his face aimed at Lady Caroline like a weapon. But it was not Beau.
It was the young man I had seen in the barroom at the Bella Union, and whom I had seen appear out of the shrubbery here, night before last.
A shot convulsed the room. The hat on Elza Klosters’s lap exploded into the air, where it flopped and fell like a shot duck. George Payne toppled straight forward, arms extended, dropped with a crash and did not move again. Klosters rose, his smoking pistol in his hand. There was an acrid whiff of gunsmoke. I snatched Bierce’s revolver from my pocket.
I slammed it down on Klosters’s hand. He yelped and dropped his own weapon. He yelped again as I jammed the muzzle into his ribs.
“Tom!” Bierce called, as though I was a puppy who had misbehaved. “Tom!” Klosters stared at me with his catkiller eyes and his mouth open in a circle of pain, his right hand gripped in the other. I kicked his smoking gun under the chairs.
Lady Caroline had risen to stand looking down at her dead son. Beau moved to embrace her. She raised her chin, pointed her face to the ceiling, white as Bierce’s skull but so very beautiful. Marvins, holding a Navy .44, filled the doorway. Mammy Pleasant backed away from the body, crossing herself.
I could see the cheek of the Morton Street Slasher, furred with a short fair beard like Beau’s. The muffler had fallen open to reveal the two parallel scabs from Rachel LeVigne’s fingernails. His blue eye was open, staring into infinity; the unchosen boy, the abandoned child crazed by it; the son of James Brittain or Aaron Jennings or someone else, and of Caroline LaPlante. A tongue of dark blood seeped from beneath his side.