Frog Music

  Blanche’s hand clamps his shoulder so hard, he cries out. “You tell me everything,” she says in a voice she doesn’t recognize, “or I’ll drown you like a puppy.”

  But the boy’s face has sealed up.

  She lets go and tries mocking him. “Where’d you have got hold of a shotgun, even?”

  John Jr. jerks his head in the direction of the scattered cabins. “Louis bought our varmint gun off Dadda, didn’t he?”

  The old family weapon, the one the boy learned to kill pests with. Blanche didn’t even know a varmint gun could be a shotgun. Saw this boy hit a can at thirty yards, Jenny told her, proud of her protégé. But this time John Jr. didn’t hold it firmly enough, did he? This time his hands must have been shaking, though not enough to put off his aim, not when the young woman he meant to kill was sprawled against a headboard less than ten feet away. Just enough to let the weapon recoil and punch him in the shoulder.

  “It’s in the pond,” says the boy, jerking his head toward the greenish water. “I threw it in, after, before I ran to … to the necessary.”

  He can kill a woman, Blanche marvels, but he can’t say toilet without faltering.

  The words are spurting out of the boy now. “Louis came around on Thursday morning, asked where Jenny was. I got to cussing her.” He sobs. “He made me swear on Mammy’s life not to tell, then he said he just so happened to have learned that the same individual was pure trouble, and there was a person from the City who’d be uncommon grateful if a stop could be put to her.”

  “What person?” She knows it was Ernest, acting on Arthur’s orders, but she needs to fill in the whole appalling story, put it back together, like broken glass forming a pane.

  John Jr. shrugs.

  “You didn’t care who wanted you to shoot your good friend Jenny? Who promised to be grateful, to the tune of what?”

  The boy’s lower lip protrudes. “I wouldn’t have done it just for the money.”

  The priggish tone! As if by gunning down Jenny for what he saw her do to Blanche, he was following some higher law. “How much?” Blanche shrieks.

  “Two hundred in silver,” mutters John Jr. He roots in the pocket of his baggy overalls and pulls out a drawstring bag.

  She stares at the dangling, puckered mass of it. But why, she’s still wondering, why did Ernest buy only one death with this much cash, not two?

  “You can have every penny of it, for all I care,” he assures her, his voice rusty. “I wish I never—”

  And then Blanche is grabbing his wrist, shaking the bag like a rat whose neck she needs to break: “I don’t want your blood money!”

  The boy pulls away and makes to throw it in the water; he’s got his busted arm bent back for a long pitch—

  Blanche rips the bag out of his fingers.

  Heavy in her palm. Repulsive.

  “It weren’t the way I thought.” John Jr.’s wailing. “All the—” He makes a gesture in the air, and she can see the blood jetting out of Jenny all over again.

  “What did you think spilled out when you shot someone?”

  “I waited till you leaned right over, Miss Blanche. I only meant to save you.”

  “Save me?”

  “From her. I didn’t reckon the glass would fly so far.” He reaches out to touch the tiny mark on her cheek.

  “Get those hands off me!”

  John Jr. looks at his thin fingers as if he’s never seen them before.

  “You’re going to hell,” Blanche tells him.

  He nods.

  She turns on her heel, clutching the moneybag tightly.

  One man passed the buck to another man, who passed it to an almost-man. A flair for substitution, isn’t that what Madame called it? Guilt jumping from one to the next like a flea, a germ, a distorted whisper. Are there no children in the world anymore?

  Step after step, Blanche walks to the depot.

  “You’re here again,” remarks Mrs. Holt at her little window.

  “Here and gone.” Blanche makes her hand go into the drawstring bag. The first coin she pulls out is a silver half-dollar, very shiny. She hands it over so fast it spins on the counter and asks for a first-class ticket to the City.

  A train, puffing out its hot exhaust … but it’s heading the wrong way, toward San Jose. Blanche watches it, dull-eyed. She should have thought to ask Mrs. Holt when the train to San Francisco was due, but she’s not sure she could have summoned that many words.

  She’s not expecting anyone to get off the train, but several do. One of them is Detective Bohen.

  The two of them stare at each other as he erects his black umbrella against the sun. “Miss Beunon,” he says, pronouncing the final nasal with mocking emphasis.

  Now’s her moment. What better chance to explain the whole bizarre story than right here and now at the scene of the crime, where Blanche can lead him straight to the wet-faced boy? But the soot catches in her throat. “What—what are you—”

  “Our investigations are ongoing,” he declares, surveying the hamlet as if he can see right through all these thin shack walls. A few paces away from him, the other City folks don’t seem to know where they’re going. They argue in low voices and consult the newspaper one of them is carrying under his arm, then they set off toward the Eight Mile House.

  Proof. Bohen will insist she provide evidence. Blanche has the bag, at least: payment for murder, wrapped in a drawstring pouch. But what does it prove? Money bears no trace of what it’s bought.

  “We may not yet have been able to pin this crime on any one of those macs, but we mean to root out the whole nest of them.” Bohen’s tone is so expansive now, she wonders if he’s had a few drinks on the train. “Back in the Rush,” he goes on, “Captain Lees tells me San Francisco was packed with your kind, like a can with clams. The scum of the world, putting up their freak show again every time it burned down.”

  Blanche stares at him. Is the detective trying to provoke her?

  “But the City’s growing up. Almost thirty years old now,” Bohen concludes with satisfaction. “And on behalf of her decent citizens, the captain and I mean to clean house.” He’s pulling out his notebook and a mechanical pencil.

  Nobody can skim the scum off San Francisco for good, Blanche thinks. It’ll only come back with the tide.

  No, the detective’s not waiting for an answer from her. It seems he’s forgotten Blanche already as he adds details to what looks like a complicated diagram of San Miguel Station.

  Her head turns the same way as his. John Jr. is still standing by the pond, a lightning-stunted sapling. Should she tell Bohen this minute? Surely they could find the varmint gun if they dragged the pond. Fish sporting along the stock, laying their eggs in the trigger. Chasing through the spokes of the bicycle too. Wouldn’t the weapon and the high-wheeler back up her claims, if not prove them?

  Bohen whistles under his breath as he sketches in a line.

  The visitors from the City are outside the Eight Mile House now, pointing excitedly at the shattered window. It occurs to Blanche that they’re tourists, murder tourists. The first of many? Maybe McNamara’s going to turn a profit, after all. He’ll sell them overpriced rotgut and tall tales of the hoodlum or hatchet man who snuck into San Miguel Station one dark night and blew Jenny Bonnet apart. Having not the least idea of what his own child has done.

  As Blanche’s eyes rest on John Jr. again, she’s winded by an awful sympathy. It doesn’t feel like hers. More like some foreign body lodged in her throat.

  Jenny, out of the corner of her eye.

  The boy shot you in your bed, Blanche growls at her.

  A shrug.

  What’s that supposed to mean? Surely this is one thing you can’t shrug off.

  A hint of a grin.

  They don’t hang juveniles anymore, Blanche adds furiously. The worst they’ll do is send him to a reformatory.

  The Industrial School, just over the brow of the hill. The awful coincidence of it. That’s where a judge woul
d send a murderer of twelve years old. John Jr. might end up lying down in the same cell where Jenny lay a decade ago.

  Yes, then, since you’re asking, Blanche roars in her head, yes, I do want him arrested in front of his whole stupefied clan. Dragged away, whipped, gagged—good enough for young John. I want him damaged worse than you were. Locked away for the rest of his sorry goddamn life.

  “Still here, Miss Beunon? My advice for you would be to head thataway, out of my jurisdiction,” says Bohen, jerking his thumb south toward San Jose.

  It’s at this moment that Blanche decides not to say a word. Let Bohen pontificate and waste his Sunday here, waste any number of days, while the truth slithers away from him like a snake in a woodpile. Blanche is going back to the City to get the evidence she needs, and then she’ll hand it to Cartwright of the Chronicle, because he’s the best of a bad lot, the only one who’s paid attention. And in the end everyone who’s hurt Blanche, everyone who’s scared her or talked down to her, is going to pay.

  “Her name’s Madeleine George,” she says to the pigtailed cigar maker sitting on his mat at the corner of Stockton and Clay.

  “What you say?”

  She shouts over the discordant wheeze of the twenty-note barrel organ parked beside them. “Madeleine George.” The grim-looking parrot has dirtied the grinder’s shoulder, and the tin cup on top of the organ is empty, but the Italian just keeps cranking out the same polka.

  “Girl like you?” the cigar maker wants to know.

  Do all white females look alike to a Chinaman? But Blanche is younger than Madeleine, she wants to tell him, absurdly. No, he must mean a girl dressed to advertise herself. (The first thing Blanche did after getting down at Third and Townsend was find herself a dress shop and spend a considerable amount of the silver from the little bag to get herself fitted out from head to toe in a serious black-and-white stripe. She’s painted high, too, for going on the warpath.) “Yes,” she roars over the organ’s death rattle.

  Suddenly, blessedly, it stops. The Italian, eyeing an approaching Special, scuttles away to avoid arrest.

  “She lodges above a grocery, I believe,” Blanche tells the cigar maker.

  His expression is uncertain, but he points at a skinny four-story building: “Many Frenchie girl in there.”

  It turns out to be the wrong building, but someone there knows the right one.

  A quarter of an hour later, Blanche has tracked her way to Madeleine’s door. She takes a breath and wipes a stray hair out of her eyes. She’s met Ernest’s petite amie only a couple of times, but nothing in the blonde’s wide eyes intimidated her then. Blanche is going to make the woman say where Ernest is if Blanche has to rip her earrings out to do it.

  She taps, softly, so as not to sound like the cops or a rent collector. Waits. Then knocks again.

  Ernest’s talking over his shoulder to someone as he tugs the door open. Looking healthier than when she saw him last though a little less elegant, with some whitish stain on his lapel. He turns his head and sees Blanche.

  Who’s got her lies ready, as well as her truths. “They found the gun,” she raps out.

  Ernest slams the door between them.

  “I’ll go straight to Detective Bohen, then, is that what you’d prefer?” Blanche calls out.

  Voices inside the apartment.

  “Madeleine? Madeleine, are you in there? Enjoying home life with a murderer, are you? Feel quite safe sharing his bed?” Blanche is shouting it loud and clear enough to be heard all over the building. “Did he tell you he was too much of a coward to pull the trigger on Jenny himself—so he hired a chicken farmer, who hired a twelve-year-old?”

  The door’s flung open again. “Ta gueule!” growls Ernest.

  But Blanche won’t shut her trap. Never mind that all she’s got is a child’s story which that child is unlikely ever to repeat. She can bluff as well as any cardsharp. “Louis and John Jr. are both in the lockup,” she announces.

  His rangy body twitches. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Where’s—” To her mortification, her voice breaks. She tries again. “What have you done to P’tit?”

  “He’s perfectly well, no thanks to you.” Ernest’s eyes bulge in outrage. “As if I’d ever hurt Arthur’s son.”

  And for a moment Blanche can’t see, can’t hear. Relief shoots through her veins like sugar, and she realizes that she never did quite give up in the ten days since she’s seen P’tit. Hope was a cut that wouldn’t close over. “Prove it. Why should I believe a word you say? Where is he?”

  A slight hesitation. “I’m afraid I have no—”

  “Yes, you do, you false son of a bitch.”

  “The arrangements are a matter for his father. I expect Arthur will be coming back one of these days, with his bride,” says Ernest, landing the word like a knife.

  And it does stab Blanche, of course it does, for a moment. A long moment. But she’s too much of a veteran performer to show it on her face.

  “I just received a telegraph, you see,” says Ernest, goading her. “Arthur’s in New York, and he’s married a French girl.”

  “I don’t give a damn if he’s married a skunk,” Blanche manages to say, almost lightly. “But how disappointing for you, Ernest.”

  The long face darkens.

  “The minute he’s out of your reach, he gets hitched? Trades in la vie de bohème for bourgeois comforts? It sounds to me like your double act has had its last hurrah.”

  “You understand nothing,” he says gruffly. “Arthur won’t stay away forever. He entrusted his child to me, didn’t he?”

  “Entrusted?” mocks Blanche. “He dumped P’tit on you, you mean. I can’t believe you’re still willing to stand by the fellow who’s made you play second fiddle all these years. Don’t you see? He’s left you behind, his bootlicking lackey, to hang for what he told you to do.”

  “Arthur’s a prince among men.” The words break out of Ernest like sweat.

  She rolls her eyes.

  “Willing to let you get away scot-free,” he marvels. “‘Let her go,’ he told me as he packed his trunk. ‘Women are like trains, there’ll be another along in five minutes.’”

  Blanche stares. Could that really be what Arthur said about losing her?

  “And when I saw you rattling that buggy down the street last Tuesday, all frills and flounces, not a care in the world—” snarls Ernest.

  Oh, how horribly simple: the name of the stables was painted on the buggy. All Ernest had to do was call in at Marshall’s. The boy, the blasted stable boy; of course Blanche had to tell him where she was going, so he could give her directions. When Ernest came inquiring about a Frenchwoman who’d just hired a buggy, the boy would have had no reason not to tell him that she’d been heading for San Miguel Station. “But why only Jenny?” Blanche breaks in. “Why did you tell Louis to spare me? Was it because you knew Arthur would never forgive you?”

  Ernest lets out one scornful cough of laughter.

  A small sound from an inner room. What is it?

  He says it so low that Blanche strains to hear: “It was because you’re the goddamn mother.”

  It comes again, that muffled little sound. Ernest’s head whips around and he’s moving to shut the door but Blanche has got him by the sleeve.

  The door bangs on her arm, forcing a long scream out of her. But she doesn’t let go, she won’t let go, she’ll never let go because she knows whose small wordless voice she’s hearing. “P’tit! P’tit!”

  “Crazy salope—”

  When Ernest opens the door enough to kick her away, Blanche thrusts her whole self through. He grabs her by the skirt and she pulls away hard enough that it rips at the waist. She’s in the apartment and here’s P’tit, wearing only a diaper—

  And walking. Can this really be P’tit?

  Still stubby at wrist and ankle, thick-foreheaded, but less so, somehow. His skin clearer. His eyebrows almost elegant. Up on his own two feet. P’tit,
her P’tit, though he shows no sign of recognizing Blanche. He pats the wallpaper, sways like a drunk.

  The blonde is behind him, in only a limp chemise and petticoat, her hair tangled. Looking her age, for the first time. “Blanche,” says Madeleine, her mouth trembling so she can hardly form the syllable. She reaches down for P’tit’s little shoulders.

  “Hands off,” howls Blanche.

  “I only—”

  “Hands off my baby!”

  And then Ernest does the strangest thing. Drops to his knees, puts his lips to the child’s round skull. “Turning into the spit of your father, aren’t you, P’tit Arthur?” he says, very gently.

  “Just P’tit,” Blanche corrects him under her breath.

  She should have recognized that milky stain on Ernest’s lapel. The man has a knack with the boy, she realizes. Now, there’s a joke. A natural father. When was it, over the past two weeks of harboring Arthur’s child, that Ernest began to fall in love with him? For his absent friend’s sake, at first, but it’s well beyond that now, Blanche can see. His arm hovers in a half circle behind the boy, just in case he wobbles. The tenderness.

  P’tit Arthur Girard, not Deneve, that’s who P’tit could grow up to be if Blanche left him here. Because a killer might make a good parent, after all, a much better parent than the woman who pushed the baby into the world in the first place. Blanche briefly considers the gracious mothering Madeleine would give P’tit. How Ernest would shield him in a way Arthur never managed. And P’tit, well, she supposes he wouldn’t remember anything else.

  No.

  “He’s the price,” she growls at Ernest. “I take him now, this minute. Or I’m going straight to Bohen with what I know, and they’ll keep after you till they prove the rest, and you’ll be on a gallows by Christmas.”

  At first Blanche has no idea if her improvisation’s going to work. Ernest’s face is a wooden mask.

  Madeleine’s tired, delicate features contort as she looks from the man to the child. The woman will do anything to save one of them, thinks Blanche, if she can only decide which one.

  Blanche runs to scoop P’tit up. He wails and flails, but she’s ready for that. She’s out on the landing and thundering down the stairs, pressing her boy to her. She feels that surge of warmth, and this time she remembers what it means: not love but piss. Or the love that’s mixed with piss and can’t be separated from it.