Frog Music (33 page)

Laughter wafting up now.

“We’re simple people,” McNamara says with a groan. “How were we to know the class of carry-on we were dealing with?”

Hoots of mirth now.

McNamara’s disowning Jenny, Blanche realizes. Irrationally afraid his grubby saloon will be tarred by the association, he’s trying to deny any friendship with the cross-dressing hellion who got herself killed there.

“What was the name you knew this, ah, putative male by?”

McNamara licks his flaking lips. “Bonnet.”

“No Christian name?”

“Nothing very Christian about the person.”

That raises another laugh.

Blanche is stiff with rage. Jenny’s not a harlot now but a heathen?

It’s some slight relief to her that Swan clearly doesn’t believe a word. “You never connected this beardless, light-voiced Bonnet working as a frog-catcher,” he summarizes dryly, “with Jenny Bonnet the frog-catching girl, notorious as a pants-wearer in all the City papers?”

McNamara mumbles something about not reading the papers.

Swan moves on to the events of Wednesday, the thirteenth, the night before the murder.

Blanche remembers riding back from Sweeney Ridge as vividly as if she were there now: the scalding pink of the setting sun. When she and Jenny reached the Eight Mile House, tired out, the two of them had a fancy for cocktails, but McNamara had no bitters, so they settled on a Martinez of sweet red vermouth, gin, and a couple of cherries from a sticky old bottle. Jenny fizzed like soda pop, singing at the top of her voice and drumming on the bar.

Swan is leading McNamara through the sudden arrival of stableman Charles St. Clair to retrieve the buggy Blanche had forgotten to return to Marshall’s.

That quarrel was Blanche’s fault, she’d be the first to admit. She had just about enough left over from what Lamantia paid her, so she could have settled up with the stableman. But how dared St. Clair track them down in San Miguel Station that way, barge in on their jollification and address them as if they were lowlifes? All Blanche did was point out that his boss would make more money the longer Blanche kept the buggy, so why cause her aggravation over it? At that point, in her reckoning, the row became St. Clair’s fault, because he was the one who grabbed Blanche by the sleeve and mentioned the revolver in his pocket …

Shifting of the crowd now; St. Clair is pushing through, scowling, his muttonchop side-whiskers even bushier than Blanche remembered them.

“Is that the man in question?” asks Swan.

McNamara looks sideways at St. Clair. “I wouldn’t care to say that it is or it isn’t.” He’s clearly so rattled by the male-or-female business that he’s afraid to state anything for a fact.

St. Clair lets out a laugh. “Why, that mick was so top-heavy Wednesday night, I’d be surprised if he could tell me from the side of a house!”

“You’ll get your chance to testify, sir,” says Swan coldly, “unless your interruptions oblige me to bar you from this court of inquest.”

St. Clair, subdued, folds his arms.

“Now.” Coroner Swan reaches into a wooden cube labeled
Evidence
. “Do you recognize this, Mr. McNamara?”

He peers at it. “It’s her—it’s Bonnet’s Colt, isn’t it?”

Another disturbance: a youngish man with a long double-pointed beard stands up. “As a point of information,” he says in a distinctly Prussian accent, “the revolver is mine.”

“And who are you, may I ask?” Swan sighs.

“Julius Funkenstein, sir, a dealer in real estate and movables.”

“By which you mean a pawnbroker?”

“I have a variety of business dealings throughout the City …”

Won that off a California infantryman
, Jenny crows in Blanche’s memory.

“Then you may make application to the City treasurer in due course for the retrieval of your property, if such it is.” Swan puts the gun back in the box.

“Humbly, sir,” says Funkenstein, “she still owed me some nineteen dollars on it …”

That strikes Blanche as the saddest thing, somehow, that Jenny hadn’t even paid off her gun. How many of her grand claims were hogwash?

John McNamara is creeping crabwise into the crowd but the coroner calls him back. “You, sir, are still under oath. Now, the following night, Thursday, the fourteenth. Did anything of note happen before the shooting?”

“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.