Frog Music (32 page)

The old woman shrugs. “Laudanum, probably—isn’t that our usual poison? Topping ourselves, it’s an epidemic these days—a teaspoon can do it if you ain’t habituated. Adrien wasn’t the worst, as they go, but not the best neither.”

Who’s this Adrien who drove Jenny to try to kill herself? She never mentioned any Adrien.
Ever had your heart broken?
Blanche asked, when they were waiting outside 815 Sacramento last week, but Jenny claimed to be a slippery fish. Not so uncatchable, it seems now. Her heart not unbreakable at all.

“He wasn’t the type to ever lay a hand on her,” Maria rattles on as they step into the building, “but he might as well have beaten her, since he gambled away every
satané
cent she had—”

Blanche almost collides with a man in uniform just inside the door. “This Adrien lost her money?” she asks, just to be clear. “He was Jenny’s man?”

Maria stares. “Her
mac
, you mean.”

No.

But yes.

Frail, isn’t that what Cartwright called Jenny in his article? And Blanche thought he was plucking the accusation out of the air.
That’s how she earned her crust, folks say, back when she wore skirts
, Arthur sneered that night at the faro saloon, and again Blanche assumed he was just throwing any kind of mud that might stick. She’s been deaf to everything that hasn’t matched her own idea of Jenny.

Maria’s one awful eye peers at her. “My dear. Didn’t you know her at all?”

Fury, like a knot of gristle in Blanche’s throat. But what can she say in her own defense? Jenny was easy to enjoy but hard to know.

The lobby’s thick with chattering people. Which part is the deadhouse, where they’ll have laid out what used to be Jenny? Please let them not have prettified her … It must be in the cellars, surely; that’d be coolest. But the crowd is moving up the graciously curved staircase, and Blanche mustn’t be late, so she lets the press of bodies take her that way, carrying her away from Maria.

Her head’s whirling from the old dove’s casual revelation.
You’ve got the wrong Jenny Bonnet there
, Jenny told Arthur at the faro table, so lightly that Blanche never thought not to take her word for it. But all these weeks, is it Blanche who’s had the wrong Jenny Bonnet?

Is it a fact that just about every female ends up selling herself at some point? Blanche wonders grimly. Even Jenny turns out to have been a soiled dove whose
mac
broke her heart when he wasted all her money, driving her to try to end it all. What a hackneyed plot! Behind Blanche’s irritation at being lied to and made a fool of, there’s crushing disappointment. Every misstep Blanche has made in her own life, it seems, Jenny made before her. The hypocrite! How dare Jenny have posed as a great eccentric, a dazzling original, the exception to all the rules of womanhood?

The upper room’s stifling. Chairs behind several long tables, for the important folks, but little furniture otherwise. The standing audience has sucked up all the air already.

“… of Jeanne Bonnet, supposed to have died by violence,” a man with long white sideburns is announcing with exaggerated articulation.

Supposed?
thinks Blanche. What, is there some reason to suspect that Jenny may have burst apart spontaneously? She swallows down a terrible giggle. Jenny would understand. Jenny would have been the first to find the hilarity in all of this.

The man with sideburns seems to be in charge so he must be … Swan, Coroner Swan, she remembers with an effort. He’s addressing a group of awkward-looking men behind the table on the left—this must be the jury. Blanche bobs from side to side, wishing she were taller. She considers what she can see of the jurors’ jackets, their faces, though she has no idea how to decode their expressions. Will they be able to understand the first thing about this case? They never knew Jenny, not even in the partial way Blanche did.

You’ve got the wrong Jenny Bonnet
, her friend says lightly, obstinately in Blanche’s head. The Jenny Bonnet who was frail was a girl in skirts, long hair, paint. A girl who took an overdose five years ago and never woke up.
That’s not me
.

In the crowd, a luminous white head stands out: Cartwright of the
Chronicle
. Blanche also recognizes Durand’s greasy mustache. His mournful cook stands beside him.

Blanche is already rehearsing her lines under her breath. She means to do exactly what Ernest ordered her to in the empty apartment yesterday: clear Arthur’s name. She’ll swear she has no idea who fired a shotgun through the McNamaras’ window on Thursday night, knows only that it certainly wasn’t the upstanding stockbroker Arthur Deneve, who’s been out of town for the best part of a week—she’s learned since—and whom she must now confess to having slandered out of petty malice while half out of her mind with shock.

The script is bunkum, but who cares? Blanche doesn’t know what’ll come of this performance, except that neither Arthur nor Ernest will spend a day in jail. That’s all right, she tells herself. What does the truth matter in the middle of all this misery? What goddamn good would justice do Jenny now that she’s dead as a herring? P’tit: he’s all that matters. P’tit, and Blanche’s slim chance of seeing him again. So all she can do is what Ernest told her to. Put one foot after another, stepping blindfolded across the abyss.

So many eyes on her, as if she’s spotlit. Whispers. Blanche realizes she’s the main attraction, the survivor. “The murdered woman’s companion.” How like, but also weirdly unlike, her leg shows at the House of Mirrors.

Her throat locks. Could Ernest be watching in the crowd, making sure she’s going to obey his commands? Surely that would be too risky, because the patrolmen might recognize him as one of the
macs
Blanche urged Bohen to arrest. No, Ernest won’t show his face anywhere until this afternoon’s papers report that the murdered woman’s companion has changed her story, cleared him and his absent friend of all suspicion.

Swan takes off his glasses and swabs them and the bridge of his nose with a white handkerchief. “While thanking Mr. Gray—a distinguished former coroner, may I add—for his continued hospitality on these premises,” he says, sighing, “I wish to put on record my grave displeasure that the coroner’s office has
still
not been provided with its own mortuary designed on modern scientific principles.”

As Swan drones on about hygienic sprays, slabs, and asphaltum flooring, Blanche shuts him out. She focuses on the man sitting below the coroner, listens to the woodpecker tap of his little black machine. He must be setting down every word everyone says. Jenny would have been intrigued by that, would have gone up afterward to ask him how he could possibly keep up with the speed of human chatter.

A dry little doctor called Crook stands up on a platform now and solemnly swears that he’ll tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God.

Blanche realizes that all witnesses will be obliged to swear on the Bible. It gives her a slight tremble. What Jenny would call pure dumb superstition.

“The deceased was a female of normal physiology,” he recites from his papers, “adequately nourished and developed, with no appearance of disease.” Jargon swims by—
nullagravida, rigor mortis, pallor attributable to exsanguination
—and Blanche tries not to take in the words. “The brain was medium in size, and firm in substance,” says Crook. “No serum in the ventricles. The lungs crepitant.” Is the language of autopsies meant to be veiled, Blanche wonders, so that folks won’t have to recognize what’s being said about their loved ones? “The stomach greatly distended, containing about two ounces of grumous fluid with a strongly alcoholic odor …”

The delicious cognac they drank on the bed at the McNamaras’, now soured to
grumous fluid
.

“Eight wounds on the left side.” Crook shows the jury the little box of bullets he dug out of what he calls the
cadaver
. “Hemorrhage from the wound in the neck, which alone would in my opinion have been fatal, even in the absence of the others …”

Blanche blinks, trying to follow. Nothing she could have done, then, once that bullet went through Jenny’s neck? No way Blanche could have stanched the flow even if she’d been quick enough or clever enough to try instead of lurching around the room in the darkest confusion?

Crook anchors his gaze to his notes with one fingertip. “Also swelling and discoloration around both eyes, consistent with a blow of some kind.”

Blanche’s cheeks scorch. Why is he talking about that? What can it matter compared with what killed her?

“This bruising was incurred when?” asks Swan.

“Less than twelve hours antemortem, I would say, Coroner. I also noted considerable scarring on the—”

Swan interrupts. “This scarring, too, of recent date?”

Scarring?
Now Blanche is bewildered.

“No, sir.”

“Let’s confine our inquiry to matters relevant to the death, Doctor.”

Flustered, Crook edges his fingers down the page. “I found recent abrasions of the feet and hands, with embedded mud—but would judge them to be irrelevant,” he concedes.

Their tramp on Sweeney Ridge, on Wednesday.
Irrelevant
, how Jenny spent the day before she died. But not to Blanche. She finds it oddly consoling to think of Jenny always in motion, spinning along on her high-wheeler or striding up a hill or crouching over a pond, all her energies focused on the hunt.

Coroner Swan is thanking Crook now for putting himself in danger to do his job. “Not many years ago,” he informs the court in a sepulchral voice, “an assistant almost lost his life as a consequence of sepsis in a laceration received during a postmortem examination …”

Blanche has stopped listening, because a fellow in uniform is leading John McNamara through the crowd, passing not five feet from her, using his elbows to make room for the Irishman—who looks smaller here, somehow. Unmoored. Like some vagrant in a stolen Sunday suit, with reddened cheeks but skin chalk-white inside his collar.

“Calling next witness, John McNamara Sr.”

Blanche has no idea when she’s going to be asked to recite her lies, she realizes. As the only one who was in the bedroom when the bullets flew in the window, shouldn’t she be first after the autopsy report? She’d rather get it over with, frankly—paint herself a fool, a typically irrational female, and get out of this airless chamber.

Coroner Swan keeps his inquiries focused strictly on the events immediately before the death. There’s nothing about Jenny’s history or her character. “Who was in the settlement on Thursday night, to your knowledge?”

“The what?” McNamara’s got the eyes of a stunned steer.

“The hamlet, the village, if you will, of San Miguel Station,” explains the coroner, as if to a child.

“Right, s-sir, right you are.” McNamara’s stammering. “Mrs. Holt the station keeper, now, for one, but I doubt she’d know one end of a gun from—”

“Confine yourself to the facts,” Swan interrupts. “Nobody is expecting you to solve the crime—if indeed a crime has been committed,” he adds, scrupulous.

If?
As if someone stalking partridge by moonlight might have accidentally fired at the Eight Mile House!

There’s Ellen in the crowd, tight-lipped with nerves, and Mary Jane. John Jr. must be minding the small ones at home, Blanche deduces.

“Mrs. Holt, Jordan,” says McNamara, counting on his thick fingers, “Mrs. Louis—but her husband’s away to San Jose at the moment—”

“This would be the Canadian, Louis de Frammant?” asks Swan, peering at what must be a list of names. “Or is that Dufranaut? The detective’s writing is far from clear.”

McNamara shrugs. “We just know them as Mr. and Mrs. Louis.”

“Carry on.”

“Miss Blanche—Miss Beunon, I should say—she drove herself down in a buggy. Tuesday, it was.”

“And Miss Bonnet?” asks Swan.

No answer from McNamara.

“How did Miss Bonnet arrive?”

Does the Irishman want to avoid mentioning the bicycle? Blanche wonders. She broods again over what she dismissed as a cracked theory yesterday, that the McNamaras planned the murder as an elaborate way of stealing the expensive machine.

“By—by a high-wheeler,” says McNamara, with an odd formality, “is how the person came down.”

“Was it your understanding that these women were in flight from some enemy? Some persons in the City, perhaps?”

Blanche groans inwardly and pulls her straw hat so the veil hangs a little farther over her face. Despite his air of neutrality, of course Coroner Swan has read the papers and talked to the detectives. He must be trying to lead McNamara’s testimony in the direction of the violent
macs
Blanche spoke of.

“I—my understanding was that the two—the individuals in question were just after a spree.”

“Their intention being to indulge in hard drinking in your saloon?”

Blanche’s mouth tightens. What else is there to do at San Miguel Station?

“In my hotel,” McNamara corrects him pompously. “And in the liquor shop next door.”

“This would be …” Swan consults his papers. “Philip Jordan’s grocery and general store?”

“That’s what he calls it, I suppose.”

“Returning to your
hotel
, Mr. McNamara. Would it be incorrect to say that you make the greatest part of your profits from the sale of alcoholic beverages?”

McNamara grimaces. “There wouldn’t be much profit in any of it.”

Blanche can believe that.

“Did the women drink at your bar during the three nights of their stay?”

McNamara is shifting from foot to foot. “Everyone took their fill, anyhow.”

“Everyone, meaning the two women?”

The Irishman’s shaking his head desperately.

“They didn’t drink?”

McNamara takes a great rattling breath. “What you have to understand, Your Honor, is that I’d no notion they were women.”

Every eye in the room locks on him.

“Not that the both of them were, I mean.”

Coroner Swan is squinting down his nose at the Irishman. “You believed the deceased to be male, despite being on record as having furnished her with occasional lodging over the past half dozen years?”