“Only that they had a bit of a barney, the women—I mean—” McNamara stumbles to correct himself.
“Bonnet and Beunon, yes. What was the nature of the dispute?”
“Bonnet was heading back to the City but Beunon wouldn’t stand for it. Said she—Bonnet—was so stewed she’d ride into the ditch. Then they retired to, ah, our guest chamber. Bonnet went out on the porch for a pipe,” he adds.
And Blanche can see Jenny, as clear as day. Don’t smoke that thing in here, Blanche told her, so Jenny strolled out onto the moonlit porch, glowing like a ghost.
“In your nightshirt, correct?”
“Ah, my best one, that my wife lent her, yes.”
That’s how Jenny operated: Wandered through the world without the things everyone else called necessities. Rustled them up as required.
“They called me in to fix the blind,” McNamara hurries on, “and to give them a drop of cognac.”
“What was wrong with the blind?” asks Coroner Swan.
“It was slipping down, you know, skew-ways.”
Like everything else in the Eight Mile House, thinks Blanche.
“Have you brought a piece, as instructed?”
“I have, sir, a bit that a bullet went right through,” says McNamara, rooting in his trouser pocket until he finds the green scrap and holds it up.
Coroner Swan hands it to the jurymen, who pass it around as if it’s a treasure map and confabulate in mutters.
“In your view, Mr. McNamara, would a person standing outside the window have been able to see through this blind, into the room, given that there was a candle burning?”
The Irishman blinks warily. “He might or he might not, sir, depending on his eyes.”
“Perhaps we can take it as a given that his sight was good, judging by his subsequent success in shooting a woman dead?” Swan’s getting tired; you can hear it in the occasional flash of sarcasm.
But the killer didn’t need to see through the blind, thinks Blanche, because right after their shiftless bum of a landlord stuck it back up on its nail and left, the nail fell right out of the plaster. The green cloth was left hanging sideways with a gap down the side the width of a sword. Was it Arthur who somehow managed to sneak into San Miguel Station, pacify the dogs, get onto the rickety porch without a sound, and look in at Blanche and Jenny getting ready for bed? Or had he left the country already, having asked his faithful ape to see to Blanche, fix her for good and all? Was it Ernest alone who climbed up for his final trick, shotgun on his shoulder, with Arthur’s orders burning like a brand on his heart?
McNamara’s describing the gunfire now: the havoc, the gore. Blanche refuses to listen.
Next to be called up is not Blanche nor McNamara’s wife, but his daughter, even though she’s only fifteen. Mary Jane’s done her best, ironed her frock (though from where Blanche stands, about five people behind her, she can see a stain near the hem).
She begins by repeating, as if by rote, what her father said about none of them having any idea that Bonnet was female.
Blanche can’t stop herself from letting out a snort, which makes heads turn.
Mary Jane blinks several times.
“On Wednesday, the thirteenth, were you in the saloon when the stableman turned up?”
The girl nods eagerly. “He—Mr. St. Clair—said he’d spill Miss Blanche’s blood if she didn’t pay up right away.”
Blanche doesn’t remember anything as colorful as that.
“But Jenny—the person,” Mary Jane corrects herself, “the person said she’d spill every drop of his.”
“Did St. Clair produce a firearm?”
“Well, he had a revolver in his pocket and he kept fooling with it.”
“And Bonnet?”
Care to receive a bullet through your brains, Jenny quipped to St. Clair, or have you got plans for this evening?
“She told my brother to fetch—”
Swan interrupts. “This would be John McNamara Jr.? Is he in court today?”
“Sure he’s only twelve,” calls out Ellen McNamara, histrionic, from the crowd.
“She sent John to go get her Colt,” Mary Jane says, struggling on.
Blanche remembers being irritated by that. All those times Jenny walked around with the thing in her pocket and now, just when it would be handy to brandish, she’d left it under the mattress! St. Clair called Jenny a half-size boaster, Blanche remembers, and Jenny quoted something back at him about it not being the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.
“I believed St. Clair might pull his piece out and gun us all down,” Mary Jane goes on in a rush, “so I stopped him.”
“How did you manage that?”
The girl stands a little straighter, smiles hesitantly.
Making up her next lie, thinks Blanche.
“I caught hold of his arm and asked him to please leave off, for my sake, and he said he would.”
The vain little shammer!
What Blanche is remembering about Wednesday evening now is John Jr. slipping through the saloon with Jenny’s revolver in his hands like some ingenious toy and putting it into her lap. Jenny grinned down at him, and said, That’s a boy!
It could have got serious then, Blanche knew, except that the stableman funked it, which was what Jenny had been counting on. St. Clair announced that he wouldn’t stoop to fighting a woman—but that was just his bluster. Magnanimous, Blanche reassured him that she’d pay in full for two days of buggy hire as soon as she returned to the City. The stableman stood a round for the whole house, no hard feelings, and then headed off with his buggy, quite cowed.
“Afterward,” asks Swan, “did the visitors make any comment on the incident?”
For the first time, the girl seems flustered.
“Well, Miss McNamara?”
“She boasted she’d made him … take water.”
The phrase puzzles Blanche.
“This is Miss Beunon you’re quoting?”
“Bonnet,” says Mary Jane in a small voice.
“Bonnet said she’d make him—”
“I heard her say to Miss Blanche, ‘Reckon we made that fellow take water.’”
“Take on water, the way a leaking boat might?” Swan wonders.
The girl shrugs unhappily.
And suddenly Blanche gets it: not take but make. Reckon we made him piss his pants, yes, that’s what Jenny said. Blanche almost laughs aloud.
Swan sighs over his papers. Then taps a phrase on one page. “Dr. Crook observed a pair of black eyes on the deceased—an injury of very recent date. Did you see anyone hit Bonnet that night?”
Mary Jane hesitates, and her eyes slide to her parents.
Blanche stiffens. Have they coached her on this point?
“That night or the following day,” Swan prods, “any blow which could have occasioned bruising?”
“No blow that I saw, sir,” says Mary Jane scrupulously.
Blanche’s pulse is hammering with relief. Though she guesses that the McNamaras are leaving out this particular incident to avoid giving the impression that their so-called hotel is the kind of dive where fistfights break out every five minutes.
“The next evening, Thursday, the fourteenth,” Swan says, moving on. “When did you last see the deceased?”
“A few minutes before it—before the shooting. I’d been lying on their bed. It’s my room when we don’t have lodgers,” adds Mary Jane awkwardly, “mine and my little sister’s and brother’s.”
“Are you in the habit of such familiarities with a guest whom you believe to be of the opposite sex, Miss McNamara?”
The coroner’s punishing the family for their lies, Blanche realizes.
The girl flushes to the eyes. “I was only being friendly.”
“Let me put this delicately. Are you friendly with men who visit your father’s saloon?”
“I am not!” A sob escapes her. “I don’t know how you—”
“That’s
all at present. You may step down.”
Such power men have, thinks Blanche, when one of them merely hinting that a girl’s on the town sends her racing as if from a rattlesnake.
The funny thing is that nobody on the witness stand has mentioned Jenny’s criminal past. From reading the papers, everybody’s aware of the drunkenness and whoring and scrapes with the law; that knowing judgment lies behind every word they all say.
Blanche needs the lavatory. If she isn’t called up to give her testimony soon, she doesn’t know how she’s going to last …
“Next witness, Charles St. Clair.”
This is ridiculous. Don’t they want to hear from Blanche, the one person who was there, right there in the room?
She pushes her way to the rear while St. Clair is answering a question about the correct address of Marshall’s stables.
A knot of newsmen at the back, taking notes. She averts her face.
“Miss Blanche?”
Cartwright; she hurries through the double doors to get out of range. Blanche can’t bear his sympathetic gaze now. Not when she’s about to change her tune and contradict every honest word she told him yesterday. In what terms will he denounce her in the Chronicle tomorrow?
The toilets are rather grand: mahogany seats and marble basins. Blanche realizes why she’s feeling so sick, and it’s not just the lack of breakfast. All morning she’s been expecting Detective Bohen to stand up and lay out the whole situation in his authoritative tone: the sinister Frenchmen who attacked Blanche and Jenny last week, and threatened worse … Then, even if Blanche denies everything, there’ll still be a good chance that the jury will lay the blame where they should, at Arthur and Ernest’s door. But instead, everything that’s been said so far amounts to a dull recounting of Jenny’s last few days. As if she brought the shower of bullets down on herself!
Which means that if Blanche doesn’t point a finger at the macs, nobody will.
What does she mean, if? She won’t point any finger. Blanche made up her mind in the apartment yesterday the moment Ernest mentioned P’tit.
She swigs a palmful of water from the tap. I was out of my right mind yesterday, she rehearses. I was in such a state of hysteria when I spoke to Mr. Cartwright and Mr. Bohen, I’m afraid I plucked two names out of the air. There’s been some bad blood between myself and my compatriots Messieurs Deneve and Girard … Blanche shudders. Will she have to tell the court about her lost baby to explain the bad blood? But the story reflects poorly on Blanche, as if she’s the kind of crib girl who, cockeyed with laudanum, squats in an alley to give birth and then staggers away, so addled that she doesn’t know dream from real …
No, she must keep silent about P’tit, hold him in her mind like a candle on the verge of being snuffed out. His life—if he’s alive, Blanche reminds herself, if she read Ernest’s tone right, if this is not some elaborate trick—his life may be in her hands as much as it was when she snatched him out of the weeklies room on Folsom Street less than a month ago.
I admit I bore a grudge against Monsieur Deneve, she practices. I realize now that he could have had no way of knowing that the deceased—that Jenny and I were in San Miguel Station. Unbeknownst to me, he had already gone abroad, besides. I wish to express my deepest regret for having accused him falsely. The formal lines ring hollow. If Blanche is going to do this—betray Jenny for the merest possibility of seeing P’tit—then she should at least deliver a convincing performance.
Ernest ought to have told her exactly what to say when he barked out his orders in the empty apartment yesterday, should have set her lines to learn by heart. It occurs to Blanche now, bending over the sink, that perhaps he’s expecting her to make up some brilliant new theory that’ll send the detectives off in another direction. Should she mention the stolen bicycle and cast aspersions on the McNamaras? Or posit a madman roaming through the City’s hinterlands? Blanche would be more than willing if only she could think of a halfway plausible story.
She needs the toilet again. Runs for it.
Elbows on her knees, Blanche feels a cold worm of doubt. You’ll never see the kid again, Ernest threatened yesterday, and somehow she’s puffed that up into a promise that if she does this right, she’ll get P’tit back. What, does she really believe that Ernest, having tried to kill Blanche and ended up blowing Jenny to pieces, will read the report on the inquest in this evening’s papers and decide that Blanche is a good girl after all? Will he wander Chinatown with P’tit on his fashionable hip, carrying a stack of clean diapers, until he finds her and hands her baby over?
It’s flimflam, the notion that she’s entered into some kind of unspoken contract with a murderer! Ernest has more than a few reasons to hate Blanche, and she has no basis for trusting him. What if she goes into that courtroom now, swears on the Good Book and clears Arthur’s name, walks out onto Dupont Street—and never hears from either of the men again? Ernest will leave town tonight, she guesses. Blanche will have betrayed her friend’s cause for nothing. And she’ll never know what’s become of her baby. Blanche was aware of all this already, but she’s been trying not to think about it. Whatever she tells the coroner, whichever way she twists, one thing’s pretty much sure: she’s lost P’tit.
Weak-legged, Blanche emerges from the lavatory. She reels in the sunlight as she walks out of the undertaker’s. City Health Officer Orders Fumigation of Every Building in Chinatown, a headline thunders.
Yeah, yeah, she remembers Jenny kidding, when the next quake comes they’ll probably blame that on the Chinese too.
A busker with a sweat-soaked shirt and the staring eyes of the blind is chirping away merrily, accompanying himself on two pairs of bones:
Some folks get gray hairs,
Some folks do, some folks do;
Brooding o’er their cares—
But that’s not me nor you.
Jenny would have stopped to listen to him, swapped a verse or two. Jenny would have told Ernest where he could shove his threats. Jenny was sometimes blue, maybe, but never scared.
And it’s as if the ripples have cleared from Blanche’s mind. She sees that she has nothing to gain by lying. No matter what she says in court today, no matter how eloquently she blames the McNamaras or some mysterious hoodlum, Ernest is not going to hand P’tit back to her. It’s such an obvious bluff, a halfwit could have seen through it. In all likelihood, her baby’s stashed someplace worse than Folsom Street, all paid up. Or floating in a sewage tank.
Blanche presses her hand over her mouth, hard.
What do you reckon, Jenny? Should I march in there and tell the truth, never mind the consequences?
Then her mind changes back again, with a sickening lurch of gears. If there’s the slimmest chance … Whether this works or not, in years to come Blanche has to be able to tell herself that she tried, bet everything, for P’tit’s sake. This is what mothers do for their babies: they bite their tongues and let the world ride them into the ground. So Blanche is going to walk back into that inquest and make a liar of herself for the merest hope in hell that P’tit will be spared—just as she was so strangely spared two nights ago, when the bullets whizzed over her head instead of through it.
“Miss Beunon!”
She spins around.
It’s Cartwright, lifting his blue glasses to wipe his shiny nose. “Didn’t you hear them call your name? Better hustle before Swan finds you in contempt.”
She doesn’t know what that means but it sounds bad. Putain, all this fretting over what to say, and she may miss her chance to say anything!
Cartwright trots along beside her, into the building. “Did you hear Girard was arrested?”
Blanche wheels around, stares at him.
“Last night,” he adds.
She hurries on in confusion, heels clickety-clacking down the corridor.
This changes everything. If Ernest is in jail being interrogated right this minute, then surely the detectives will crack the truth out of him? They’ll find some fragment of
evidence that he went out to San Miguel Station on Thursday and shot Jenny. In which case, this inquest is Blanche’s best—her only—chance to speak up loud and clear, with the world listening, and nail the sons of bitches.
“Miss Beunon, I presume?” asks Swan sourly as she scuttles up the aisle formed by the crowd.
Blanche is too breathless to speak, almost. And suddenly wonders if she’s committing a crime by not using her paper name. (That equestrienne, Adèle Beunon, whose idea of danger was slipping off a horse—how far away she seems to Blanche, how ignorant.)
She steps up on the little platform. From this position she can see the crowd so much better. She slaps her hand on the Bible and says “I do” almost before the clerk has finished the question. Like a wedding, she thinks. Then: Concentrate. No more faltering. Arthur’s left town and Ernest is locked up. The tide of power has turned.
“How long have you known the deceased?”
“A month. Not quite,” Blanche admits. That sounds bad, somehow, shallow.
“At what point did you become aware that she was a female like yourself?”
A female, but not like myself, Blanche corrects him in her head. “I was never under that misapprehension,” she says coldly. “When the occasional fool read her wrong at twenty yards, that wasn’t Jenny’s lookout, was it? If somebody takes me for the queen of England, am I to be had up for impersonation?”
Gales of laughter—and Blanche wasn’t even trying to be entertaining.
Swan casts a repressive look in all directions, like a circling whip. “Was it you or she who suggested meeting at San Miguel Station on Tuesday last?”
“No, but—” The story’s racing too far ahead, and Blanche has to get a grip on it. “I’d left Arthur, you see, and he was eaten up with spite—”
“This would be Arthur Deneve?” Swan fingers his notes. “Your, your mac, I believe your compatriots say?”
“My lover,” she says flatly. But why is she calling Arthur that, Arthur who’s destroyed everything? Lover? Blanche could laugh, she could puke with the absurdity of it all. At the very moment when she stands up to testify against him and Ernest, she’s invoking love?