“I just saw Beau with Lawyer Curtis at the jail,” I said.
Pusey nodded amiably. “McNair’ll be out by now,” he said.
“I was speculating as to how Captain Pusey happened on that particular photograph,” Bierce said. “And chose to show it to Edith Pruitt.”
“Showed her half a dozen photographs,” Pusey said. “You don’t want to confuse a witness with too many, you know. Just good luck one of them took.”
“Quite remarkable luck,” Bierce said. “I can’t help speculating further. For instance, did you run across Beau’s photograph in the Scotland Yard archives when you were in London? Or did a friend at the Yard send it to you when Beau returned to San Francisco?”
Captain Pusey did not look pleased at Bierce’s speculation.
“Guesswork,” he said. “A good deal of detective work is pure guesswork, Mr. Bierce. Sometimes it proves out.”
“Educated guesswork,” Bierce said, nodding. “It is evident that Beau has a criminal record of some kind, or you would not possess his photograph. I believe that could be put in the form of a syllogism. Captain Pusey keeps a store of photographs of criminals. In his collection is a photograph of young McNair. Therefore young McNair has been arrested sometime in the past.”
Pusey drew a fat railroad watch from his pocket to consult it, thus impressing us with the value of his time.
“Let me make an educated guess,” Bierce said. “The photograph and attendant information were sent from England. They pertained to criminal activity in London. London is famous for its prostitutes. Beau McNair was involved in a criminal activity that concerned prostitutes.”
Pusey bent forward to ring the spittoon.
Bierce waited.
“Well, you are just about right, Mr. Bierce,” Pusey said finally. He had a hint of the stuffed-nose Australian accent that reminded you of how many ticket-of-leave convicts had settled in San Francisco in the early days.
“What did Beau McNair do?” Bierce said.
“Collegeboy scrape,” Pusey said with a sigh. “Three flash young fellows with more money than is good for them. A club of them. The Diamonds, they called themselves. Had little diamond pins they wore. Some kind of initiation business.”
“And what did they do?” Bierce persisted.
“Hired a couple of Whitechapel women for the night and beat them instead of the usual. Stripped them naked and drew on their bellies.”
“Drew what on their bellies?”
Pusey considered for a moment. “Like a cunt all the way up to their neck. Hairs running off it. Some kind of indelible ink with acid stuff in it that burned them. Not dangerous, but painful. Now there’s a stunt that would get anybody’s pecker up,” he said sarcastically. “Drawing cunts on whore’s bellies.”
It sounded like what had been done to Marie Gar, but with a knife rather than a pen. And this fellow was Amelia Brittain’s fiancé!
“The entertainments of young British Futilitarians,” Bierce said.
“Bit of a scandal,” Pusey went on. “They thought money would buy it off, but it got out and about. Beau was the one that was forgiven a bit, being younger than the rest. And a fine-looking young fellow like he is. Probably led astray by his pals.”
“Ashamed not to be shameless,” Bierce said. “Embarrassing for his mother, considering her past profession.”
The rumor, or more than a rumor, was that Lady Caroline had been a madam in Virginia City, on the Comstock, when she had married Nat McNair.
“What happened?” Bierce inquired.
“There was money paid out, and a judge gave them Diamonds a good talking-to. Beau’s mother sent him packing back here.”
“Diamonds and spades,” I said.
They both gazed at me as though I was a child who had spoken his first intelligible word.
“On the evidence, it looks like you have your man. Captain Pusey,” Bierce said.
Pusey produced a chuffing laugh. He pushed himself ponderously out of his chair. “Time to get back to me duties.” He shook hands with Bierce, nodded to me and strode out of the office settling his cap on his head. His shiny boots resounded after he had passed from sight.
Bierce stood still gazing at the chair the Chief of Detectives had vacated. “Captain Pusey does not seem much disturbed that young McNair will have been snatched from his clutches. I would like to know just what is his game.”
“Boodle,” I said. “That’s what he is famous for.”
“Blackmail,” Bierce said. “The McNair fortune. The son of the widow McNair, Lady Caroline as she now is.”
I was trying to balance the young dandy I had seen in the City Jail, to whom Amelia Brittain was engaged, with the arrogant and lickerish Diamond who had drawn on whores’ bodies with acid ink. And with the monster who had slashed Marie Car to death.
I told Bierce about Beau McNair’s remark of slashings from giggle to snatch. He narrowed his eyes at me and patted the skull on his desk.
“It does not immediately appear that the Southern Pacific is involved,” was all he said.
“But Beau McNair is the murderer!”
Bierce shook his head. “It appears a shade too neat, and too dependent on what Captain Pusey wants us to think.”
I was dismissed and returned to my desk, still appalled at what I had learned of Beaumont McNair.
“A whale of peccability has swum into our ken,” Bierce remarked behind me.
In the morning papers it was noted that Beaumont McNair had been discharged from City Jail. One Rudolph Buckle had sworn that the young man had been in his company on the nights of both the playing card murders.
This week’s Hornet featured a full-page Fats Chubb cartoon of a hairy, evil-looking assassin with a huge knife. Bierce had written: “What is one to make of our San Francisco slasher, whose affection for the soiled doves of Morton Street is so great that he must slice them open to rejoice in the beauties of their vitals? What is one to make of his deposit on his victims of the spade suit of playing cards, first an ace, next a deuce? That a trey is to follow is powerfully implied. Do the playing cards indicate a gambler, a sachem of the Faro layout suddenly overcome with recollections of female outrages? What is the message boded by those infernal black swords?”
Further along the column got on the subject of the Hawaii annexation: “The drums beat on for the damnable rape of those mid-Pacific isles whose royalty this nation has pretended to befriend, for the chief benefit of the missionaries who have invaded those paradisiacal shores, imprisoning the Kanaka on the sugarcane plantations and his women in Mother Hubbards.”
I was surprised to read, in the same issue, Mr. Macgowan’s editorial proclaiming the rightness of the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands before they were absorbed into the British Empire or fell prey to a German coup d’état. As though Mr. Macgowan did not read his editor and columnist, nor Bierce his publisher.
5.
HABEAS CORPUS n. – A writ by which a man may be taken out of jail when confined for the wrong crime.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
On Sunday, her fourteenth birthday, I took my friend Belinda Barnacle for an excursion to the park, where we strolled through the trees, among the bicyclists, the carriages, calèches, landaus; a Clarence with two ladies in the rear seat, their veils floating out from their hats, two cigar-smoking men facing them; a four-in-hand guided by a plump gent in a plug hat and brass-buttoned vest. The Sunday turnouts were more impressive every month, horsemen and -women among them, mounted on expensive horseflesh.
The fog hung offshore, and the day glistened with sunlight. Belinda flourished a parasol. She wore a lacy little hat decorated with silk rosebuds, and her shoes were polished to gleam like stars where they slipped in and out beneath her skirts. Sometimes she held my arm, sometimes she walked a little apart to establish her independence.