Belle Cora: A Novel (81 page)

“You shouldn’t have gone with Richardson, Papa. That was stupid.”

He shook his head. “I know every kind of drunk there is. If I told this man I wouldn’t walk with him, he’d have drawn on me in the Blue Wing. I thought—I still think—it was safer to go outside with him. But in the end, nothing was safe.”

I promised him that I would get him out, and the next thing I did was to get Billy Mulligan alone and tell him to name his price. I was not surprised when he refused. Escapes had been common in ’49 and ’50, when there had been no proper jails and no one had cared for anything except instant wealth. The newspapers, to drum up support for a second Vigilance Committee, would soon be pretending that this was still true, but it wasn’t. If there was any escape now, Mulligan would be finished in San Francisco, and he was under the impression that he had a big future here. The best I could do right now was to make Charley more comfortable. In the weeks that followed, I arranged for him to be moved to a larger cell, and to have some furniture from our house taken into it, and his favorite whiskey and cigars. Three times a day, one of my servants brought him hot meals prepared by my cook.

LVI

I KEPT THE NEWSPAPERS THAT CARRIED STORIES
of the trial under my bed, in the cedarwood hope chest that once belonged to the wife of James King of William. Years later, I pasted the articles into a scrapbook. Even today I can’t read them without picturing the men at whose behest they were written, and I still want to hurt them, wherever they are.

The
Alta California
reported the incident in this way: “Gen. William H. Richardson was assassinated in the streets of this city last evening, under circumstances particularly atrocious,” from “no inciting cause but an unnatural thirst for blood.” After a grossly prejudiced account of the incident, a summary of the medical examiner’s report (“The ball entered the body about two and a half inches above the left nipple: it perforated the fourth rib …”), and a short biography of the deceased, the article concluded: “Gen. Richardson was brave and chivalric to a proverb, and withal so gentle and quiet in his demeanor towards all, that none could know him and not love him. He leaves a young wife overwhelmed in grief, and whose situation is such as to call forth the strongest sympathy of every individual.”

James King of William added his voice to the chorus with an editorial in his newspaper, the
San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin
. “Murder & Gambling, etc.” was the headline. “The cowardly-like assassination on Saturday of a U.S. Marshal, General Richardson, on one of our public thoroughfares and within a few yards of Montgomery Street, calls for some expression of opinion from us. We are told by those who knew the deceased, that he was a good citizen and an efficient officer, ever diligent in the discharge of his duties. Cora was an Italian assassin and a gambler …”

Like the
Alta California
, King mentioned the vigilantes right away, using his favorite technique of strenuous insinuation—it would be a shame if government corruption left the People no choice but to form another Vigilance Committee. It was his custom to put his most reckless libels into fictitious letters to the editor from imaginary irate citizens. Then, as himself, he would comment on the understandable frustration that inspired those intemperate words. Give the courts a chance,
give them a chance, and if justice was not served (meaning, if Charley didn’t hang), why, then, it would be no surprise if a Vigilance Committee again arose to punish malefactors as it had in the heroic early days of San Francisco.

It was a conspiracy from the start. But though I had been warned that it was, and sometimes I said it was, I didn’t really believe it. More often I told people—my girls, my servants, storekeepers, gamblers, gentlemen at my house—that James King of William had the penis of a four-year-old boy, that Sam Brannan’s was just a little bigger, and they both hated me because I knew it. People liked hearing this; it was the kind of thing they expected a parlor-house madam to say. For that very reason, it did not make much of an impression, and after a while I stopped saying it.

LVII

ON THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING
, I had a messenger deliver letters to Ned McGowan, Herbert Owen, and two or three other men who knew about courts and lawyers. McGowan came to see me. We talked for several hours about the shooting, and he bedded down in an empty room upstairs.

I had the kind of long night that Charley used to help me through, in our early days in Sacramento City and San Francisco, when Jeptha had left me and I felt as if I were someone else, some innocent soul deposited into the body of this wicked woman who dared not even use her real name. Charley had been my anchor. He had saved my life.

Then, last year, I had begun to betray him, on a regular basis, with Jeptha.

I thought a lot about that now, in our big half-empty bed. I tried to sleep. I reminded myself that I must be wide awake tomorrow, when I would have many decisions to make. Of course, that did no good at all. I got up. I lit a lantern and went to the room where I had put Ned McGowan
and looked in on him. He was sleeping soundly. I thought about shaking him awake. I almost did—he would be company at least. But, after all, he wasn’t Charley, and he would be of better use to me tomorrow with a clear head. I grabbed a book—
The Count of Monte Cristo
, which I had sent a servant to purchase for me the morning after our encounter with Mr. and Mrs. Richardson at the American Theatre—and I went downstairs to the kitchen and fixed myself a hot toddy with plenty of whiskey and began to read it. Edmond Dantès (I remembered this from the excerpt) was imprisoned for fourteen years in the Château d’If. He languished in the Stygian shadows, deprived of sunlight, for so long that even after he escaped, for the rest of his life, he had the unnatural pallor of a prisoner: it was too late for the sun to darken his skin. I wondered if such a thing could be, if skin could lose its ability to absorb sunlight. I made myself another hot toddy.

Early in the morning, I became drowsy and drank coffee to stay awake. A couple of hours later, I went with McGowan and Lewis to the place in City Hall where the inquest was to be held.

There were three factions present among the spectators: curious neutrals; sporting men (Charley’s friends); friends of Richardson.

Mrs. Richardson was there in black bombazine, more becoming than the dress she had worn at the theater, and such a perfect fit that I could not help thinking of it hanging impatiently in her closet, awaiting this day. When she saw me, her right arm rose in a slow, unbending gesture learned from melodramas. “That’s her. Dear Lord, she dares to come here, she’s here to gloat! How dare you!” Everyone looked. “Get her out of here! Get her out of here!” A burly fellow, one of Richardson’s friends, patted her hand and spoke to her softly. She jerked the hand away. “I don’t need your help, I need a
man’s
help. They say there are more men in San Francisco than women, but I haven’t met one here except my Billy, and this woman has had him killed!” The last part was spoken in a crybaby whine, eyes on the ceiling, head wagging.

“You ridiculous woman,” I said. “You know damned well it was you who killed your husband, by calling him a coward and egging him on into a fight.”

McGowan tugged my arm. “You can’t win against her now.”

“Get her out of here!” wailed Mrs. Richardson like an infant.

“It was you,” I said, unable to stop. “You told your Bill to prove he was a man. So he filled himself with Dutch courage and wagged his stupid pistol at my Charley.”

“Oh!” she cried as if stabbed. “Oh, help me, someone!”

After murmuring to each other in low tones, several men approached the sheriff’s deputies. “Are you going to let a common prostitute talk that way to the general’s wife?”

As the deputies turned toward me, my eyes sought Ned. “Judge McGowan,” I said, using his title to remind everyone that he was a man of importance, “would you speak for me?”

Ned called the sheriff’s deputies each by name, and said, “I know you’re not going to let these fellows bully you. Charles Cora is her man. She has as much right to be here as Mrs. Richardson.”

“Well, okay,” one of them replied. “But keep her away from the widow.”

Except that the dead brute had rejoiced in the plum of a lucrative federal appointment, the incident was not unlike many a whiskey-soaked affray of the type San Francisco newspapers dispensed with in two paragraphs: a drunk had drawn a weapon, forcing another man to kill him. That would come out. Charley would be released. The
Bulletin
and the
Alta California
would cry foul, but it would happen, because facts were facts.

But when the eight-man inquest jury was impaneled, McGowan became serious. “What is it?” I asked. “They’re all Know-Nothings,” he said. “Every last one.”

There was much smoking and chewing and spitting. The judge called repeatedly for order. Three guns and a knife were laid out on a table. When the witnesses were called, a court stenographer and three newspaper stenographers scratched furiously away in their notebooks.

I knew from reading the papers that one of the chief witnesses to the shooting was to be Abner Mosely, who had lost everything to Charley in a card game only a few days ago. When he was sworn in, I rose from my seat, ready to tell the jury that they couldn’t trust a word this man had to say—he hated Charley. But McGowan warned me that I could be kicked out if I said anything.

When I heard Mosely’s testimony, I thought it would be clear to everyone that this man, standing where his own account placed him—twenty
yards away, on a dimly lit street at dusk—could not possibly have seen what he claimed to have seen or heard what he claimed to have heard. He said that he saw Charley push Richardson into the door. He said he had heard Richardson plead, “You’re not going to shoot me, are you? I’m unarmed.” He said that Charley had Richardson pinned by both his arms while he pulled the trigger, which would seem to require that Charley have three arms of his own, as I remarked to McGowan, who said, “Good point.” But the jury, though it asked other questions, said nothing about this.

The remaining witnesses told conflicting stories. Three men said they had found a derringer—no doubt, Richardson’s gun—near the body when they moved it. One witness had found a knife lying on the ground.
See?
I thought. He
was
armed. But then another man said that when Richardson’s body was moved he saw no gun at all; the gun appeared later. And a couple of subsequent witnesses told stories implying that someone had rushed to the scene and planted the gun and the knife. (The someone, I learned later, was generally supposed to have been sent to the spot by me.)