Frog Music Page 7

  Strange: the bicycle isn’t where she saw it last, tucked behind some dried-up bushes at the side of the building. What would have made Jenny move her high-wheeler yesterday? Blanche’s eyes interrogate the desiccated leaves. The porch has a gnawed-looking patch just under the shattered front, she notices. Was that always there? The window’s not a window anymore; it’s a ragged eye socket.

  It occurs to Blanche only now that Arthur might have had Ernest with him. Must have had, in fact; what does Arthur ever embark on without the help of his familiar, his boon companion, his comrade in pleasure and trouble?

  What would they have said to each other, these two men, creeping into San Miguel Station in the dark? She pictures Arthur as he was a week ago, elegant and snide at a faro table. Would he have ranted, abused Blanche, justified his bloody plan in a whisper as he and Ernest edged along the side of the Eight Mile House? No, Arthur wouldn’t have needed to say a word. Ernest, his longtime catcher on the high trapeze, would follow his old flier—his old master—anywhere.

  Looking back down the years, Blanche glimpses the tiny seedling of resentment Ernest must have been nursing from the moment he laid eyes on her. At the stage door of the Cirque d’Hiver, he was only a knock-kneed trapeze apprentice and she was the milky-skinned girl who caught and held the gaze of his beloved mentor. When Ernest shot up into a muscular young man, long-limbed enough to replace Arthur’s old partner in the catch trap—because the catcher has to be tall—the two friends and Blanche carried on living in one another’s pockets. And really, over the nearly ten years they’ve spent together, knocking about in Paris and then in San Francisco, has Ernest ever thought Blanche good enough for Arthur? Hasn’t there always been a jagged edge to his joking? And this summer, hasn’t he come to hate her just as much as Arthur has, on his own behalf as much as Arthur’s? Four days ago on Waverly Place, Ernest seized her by the jaw and called her an infernal whore. No, Blanche decides, he wouldn’t have needed any persuasion to help Arthur pay back every slight, to rid the world of Blanche Beunon once and for all.

  There’s a wagon outside the Eight Mile House, she notices with a jolt. Too clean to belong to a local.

  Don’t be ridiculous, Blanche scolds herself, why would the macs come back to shoot her in broad daylight, and with a wagon?

  She walks back into the saloon and has to stop her eyes from turning to the left, toward the front bedroom. A coffin sits on the exploded remains of the mattress. A plain wooden box, all angles, no handles, no ornaments. Two strangers in rubber aprons are draping a muslin sheet in it. The floor and walls are still dark with blood and pocked with the occasional hole. The baize blind hanging off its nail in the window has a missing corner with blackened edges. Jenny’s body must still be there, hidden by the bed.

  “No, twelve hours is worse than six any day,” the thick-chested man is insisting. “Stiff as the proverbial.”

  “Daresay you’re right,” murmurs the older one, who has soft white sideburns.

  “Of course I am. Going to take any amount of massaging to—”

  “Miss,” says the elder, loud enough to alert his colleague.

  The barrel-chested one, not discomfited at Blanche overhearing them, nods at her. “You’ll be the other party?” He waits. “Travel companion of the deceased?”

  She manages to nod and concentrates on shutting her parasol so the green silk pleats smoothly.

  “Coroner’s deputy,” the man says, introducing himself, “and assistant”—nodding at the older man. “The dieners will need to know what to put her in.”

  “The—the who?”

  “Attendants in the deadhouse, don’t you know.”

  Blanche stares at the coffin. But what’s that for, if not for putting Jenny in?

  “What the deceased will wear,” he spells out, “when formalities are complete.”

  She’s troubled by a vision of a ball with everyone in formal dress. “What do the, the dieners usually …”

  The coroner’s deputy rubs his hands on his smeared apron. “Well, there’s day wear, or night.”

  “For a trip, see, or a long sleep, depending how you look at it,” murmurs the assistant.

  “She came in this getup?” the deputy asks Blanche, pointing in a gingerly way at the pile of clothes on the bureau with the Colt resting on top.

  She gathers her strength to say yes, to tell them to put Jenny back in the clothes she chose for herself. The worn gray jacket, the baggy trousers tide-marked with the mud of Sweeney Ridge … what could possibly be criminal about them now? Rags, but they must have been some kind of treasure to Jenny for her to have gone through so much for them and still keep pulling them back on every morning, year after year.

  Then Blanche’s eye focuses on a fold of fabric: Jenny’s shirt. Not quite unrecognizably dirty; the vine pattern flickers through the pall of dust. The shirt of Arthur’s that Blanche picked out to lend to the crazy bicyclist that early morning in the middle of August. “No.”

  “She came in something else?” asks the deputy.

  Blanche shakes her head. “I mean no, she can’t wear those.” Can’t be buried in her killer’s shirt.

  “Wouldn’t be proper,” he agrees with a prim sigh. “No luggage other than the satchel …”

  “No shoes neither,” frets the assistant.

  “Her boots are under the bed, right at the back,” says Blanche.

  They all look at the wine-dark floor. Neither man gets down on his knees.

  “We’ll have them lay her out in a nightshirt, then,” says the coroner’s deputy.

  “But—” Blanche tries not to picture the punctured, soaked rag still on Jenny. McNamara’s spare nightshirt, which his wife lent Jenny their first night here. Just three days ago.

  “He means a special one for burial,” the man with the sideburns murmurs, “furnished out of the autopsy budget.”

  Blanche knows he’s being kind, but she thinks she may be sick. She stumbles out of the room, lets the door slam behind her.

  The clock’s been reset and wound again, she notices. She watches the seconds go by.

  No sign of the cops yet. Not that Blanche has any love for the authorities, but this is murder, goddamn it. San Miguel Station only feels like the back of beyond. It’s no more than twenty minutes by train from the downtown terminus of the Southern Pacific at Third and Townsend. Pretty quick by road too; Jenny whizzed out here on her bicycle on Tuesday, swerving around the ruts. (Where can that wretched bicycle have got to?) And the City detectives must have their own carriage, it occurs to Blanche. What could possibly be taking them this long? She rests her head on the sticky pine of the bar.

  “Miss Buneau?”

  She jerks, suddenly aware that she’s been dozing. Buneau? Does this American mean her?

  “My condolences. Vous comprenez?” He can’t be police: slight, even paler than her, with glasses tinted dark blue. His straw hair stays damply behind his ears as he lifts off his vast brimmed hat. “Cartwright’s my name, Cartwright of the Chronicle.”

  “And my name is Beunon.” Pronouncing it as crisply as some Parisian matron.

  “Pardon me, I was told Buneau,” says Cartwright, lifting his notebook almost to his face as he jots down the correction. “I’m getting up a piece about Jenny for the afternoon edition.”

  Blanche balks at the forename. “You two were acquainted?”

  “Not in person,” admits Cartwright. “But the Chronicle’s been covering her for a few years now. She was twenty-four or thereabouts, am I right?”

  “She’s—” Blanche swallows hard to steady her voice. “She was twenty-seven.” In three more years, Blanche will be twenty-seven, too, but Jenny won’t be a day older; Jenny won’t be anything.

  “She was mighty popular with our readers.”

  “She’s not a character out of a serial,” spits Blanche. She gets to her feet and the room spins around her.

  Cartwright puts a damp hand on her arm. She flicks it off. “You could help me get
the facts right, at least,” he suggests.

  “Help you? Who’s helping me?” Blanche’s voice swoops up, way up. “My friend gets blown to pieces last night and the police don’t even bother showing up this morning—”

  “That’s disgraceful.” Another pencil mark in the little notebook.

  The creak of a hinge from the bedroom. The coroner’s men carry the coffin out. Jenny’s old satchel riding on the lid, the long nose of her equalizer sticking out of it.

  Anyone can load and fire it, easy, remarks Jenny in her head.

  If ever Blanche needed protection … “Could I keep the Colt?” she asks them.

  They halt. “‘All personal property to be collected, recorded, and transferred to the City treasurer until the estate is settled,’” quotes the deputy. “Was she intestate?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Did she fail to leave a valid will?”

  Blanche’s mouth twists. She’d be surprised if Jenny had even let herself be counted in the census.

  “We’ll be searching her lodging, miss, if you can provide an address,” says his assistant.

  “She doesn’t—she didn’t have one.”

  Cartwright scribbles that down.

  The men exchange a resigned look and shuffle toward the door like a pair of footsore dancers.

  Blanche is left in the saloon with the reporter. The heat, she groans silently. Jenny will be ripe by the time they reach the City. Have they ice in the wagon, at least?

  “The City detectives do seem a little slow off the mark this morning, but they’re the nation’s finest, I assure you. Captain Lees is a genuine genius,” Cartwright says soothingly.

  She forces her eyes back to the pale newsman’s.

  “Mug books of every suspicious character in California, a laboratory for scrutinizing clues … I’ve known him to make a case on the tip of a boot print!”

  Blanche nods, to shut him up.

  “Another scorcher,” he remarks, glancing toward the azure sky framed in the dirty window. He disappears behind the bar, comes back after a minute with a brown jug.

  She remembers the song: “Little brown jug,” don’t I love thee. “Don’t assume I’m a dipso,” snaps Blanche.

  “It’s water,” he assures her, filling two glasses and sitting down.

  She sips at the stale stuff and wishes she’d asked for cognac. The fellow’s spectacles are distracting her, the heavy blue double Ds and side lenses boxing his eyes in. “Can you take those things off?”

  Cartwright removes the glasses and folds the straight arms with a click. His eyes blink at her, watery blue, an unguarded quiver to the sparse lashes.

  “You’re—in France, we say albino?”

  The man rubs between his blond eyebrows as if he’s got a headache. “From your excellent English I deduce you’ve been here long enough to remark on the general relish for the strange?”

  Blanche shrugs.

  “Take the craze for collecting postcards of rarities, or laughing right in the unfortunates’ faces at the dime museum,” he comments drily. “So you’ll understand if I’d rather not hang any particular label around my neck.” He fits his glasses on again. The skin of his ear is fine-veined, pink where the sun shines through.

  Against her will, Blanche remembers P’tit: his small ears ablaze with light. Her voice comes out in a snarl. “I understand that you’d rather be the barker of the freaks than one of them. ‘Roll up, roll up, come see the trouser-wearing miss lying in her gore!’”

  “Your anger does you credit, Miss Beunon,” says Cartwright, “except that I ain’t the proper target. You want a noose for the man who shot your friend? Somebody out there knows his name, and—”

  “I know his goddamn name!”

  The translucent eyebrows shoot up.

  It feels as if a pit has opened up at her feet. Danger, pungent on the air. But Arthur wants to kill her, has already tried to kill her; what’s there to lose?

  P’tit. That’s all that keeps Blanche from speaking up. The awful uncertainty. The ghostly blur that’s all she can see when she tries to picture P’tit this morning, somewhere in the City. The thought that her son—if he’s still alive—might be with these appalling men, his survival dependent on their whim. If she names them as Jenny’s killers, is it P’tit who’ll suffer?

  And yet P’tit’s most likely to be saved if the authorities hunt down his father right away. So what the hell is Blanche waiting for?

  None of this makes any sense.

  “Deneve,” she says very fast, before she can change her mind. “Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve.”

  Cartwright writes it down. “You actually saw him last night?”

  She shakes her head. “He’s my—” Hard to choose a word. The terms in English all sound dirty. Working folk in Paris generally don’t bother with weddings, and Arthur always sneered at marriage anyhow, calling it disinfected love. “He used to be my man.”

  “When did he leave you?”

  Her eyes narrow.

  “Beg pardon,” says Cartwright smoothly, “I mean vice versa.”

  “He and his friend Ernest Girard, they’ve been making murderous threats—”

  That’s when boots thump on the porch, and detectives file through the door. In plain clothes, but with that thick-necked police look about them that makes Blanche’s hackles rise.

  “Cartwright,” says the leader, “are you trying to do my job again?”

  “Ah, Mr. Bohen. I’m just preparing the way, like John the Baptist for Our Lord. This weather must be keeping you busy,” remarks the journalist, jumping up and putting his notebook away.

  “We’re always busy,” Bohen corrects him. “Guns mean corpses, and since the war, every fool in America seems to own a firearm. But these hot nights do make matters worse.”

  The celebrated Captain Lees is on vacation, it turns out. Bohen is his second in command. He insists on referring to Jenny as Jeanne Bonnet because that’s the name of record. He mangles Blanche’s surname, of course.

  “Beunon, with an n,” she tells him frostily. “Two n’s,” she corrects herself, “the second one said in the nose.”

  “Point taken, Miss Beunon,” honks Bohen with a hint of satire.

  He sets his men to taking measurements. Cartwright hovers helpfully. “This entire case has been botched from the first,” Bohen complains to him. “No proper search of the settlement last night—the porch was stampeded over, the windowsill pawed to a high polish, bullets clawed out of walls! The landlord seems to have wasted several hours drowning his sorrows before bothering to inform us—”

  “And then you took even longer to turn up,” says Blanche under her breath.

  “There seemed no urgency in a case of presumed suicide,” Bohen snaps back.

  She gapes at him. Jenny Bonnet shot dead. That curt wording was Blanche’s suggestion, she remembers now; she can see how the detectives jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  “San Franciscans kill themselves all the time,” he points out, “and this notorious individual—”

  “Notorious for wearing pants,” Blanche objects, “not for trying to kill herself.”

  “Well, for your information, there’s a previous attempt on file.”

  Cartwright’s notebook is up near his eyes again as he jots that down.

  On file in the police station where Jenny was dragged in and charged for wearing pants over and over? A libel set down by her persecutors? Blanche doesn’t believe a word of it.

  Detective Bohen is peering out through the dingy window now. “These isolated roadhouses … a creeping fungus around the edge of the City.”

  “It’s from the City that Arthur came last night and shot her,” Blanche cuts in.

  The detective stares.

  Cartwright flips back a page in his notes. “‘Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve,’” he reads crisply, “‘cast-off paramour.’”

  “Of Bonnet’s?” Bohen asks.

  “Of mine,” says Blanche.

 
; “Your mac?”

  Her mouth hardens. What if Blanche is a dove—does that mean her testimony doesn’t count? “I don’t care what you call it. Arthur took—” A baby, she wants to say. His baby. Our baby. He took away my baby and I don’t know where or even if—But the story’s too complicated, too incongruous, too mortifying to speak out loud.

  “This Deneve took something of yours?” Cartwright prompts her. “Valuables?”

  The thread of Bohen’s patience snaps. “Good day, Mr. Cartwright.”

  The journalist nods civilly, goes out onto the porch, and shuts the door behind him.

  Bohen turns to Blanche, sits down next to her, and makes a peremptory gesture. “He took what?”

  The fact is, she doesn’t know how to tell him about P’tit without making herself sound like a coldhearted bitch who deserved all she got. So she’ll stick to the point, which is murder. Blanche decides, all at once, not to muddy the waters by telling the detective that it would have been her who’d gotten shot if Arthur’s aim had been better. That’s not important, and she can’t prove it; all that matters is who killed Jenny. She must focus all her efforts on convincing Bohen that it was Arthur. “He took … he took offense at my breaking with him,” she says through her teeth, “and he thought Jenny an undesirable influence.”

  It sounds feeble, unconvincing. An undesirable influence. Like the complaint of a schoolmistress.

  The detective hasn’t written any of this down. He consults a little diagram. “The bullets must have passed very close to you.”

  “They’d have killed me too if I hadn’t been bent over undoing my gaiter,” says Blanche, eager to release that much of the truth.

  “According to Mrs. Holt,” murmurs Bohen as if to himself, “nobody got on or off any train at San Miguel Station last night. None of the residents heard horses either.”

  She waves that aside. The macs must have slipped in somehow, maybe on foot. “He—Arthur and his friend Ernest, Ernest Girard—they’ve made the most bloodthirsty threats against us, against me and Jenny both—”

  “Does Deneve own a shotgun?”