Bones of the Barbary Coast (30 page)

38

THE HEAD OF JOAQUIN MURIETA
& HAND OF THREE-FINGERED JACK
TO BE SEEN AT KING'S,
CORNER OF HALLECK & SANSOME STREETS.
ADMISSION FIFTY CENTS.

T
HE HANDBILL HAD nothing to do with the wolfman but, like so many other items in the Oddities files, Cree couldn't resist looking at it more closely. The advertisement was accompanied by a collection of newspaper clippings, other handbills, even a grainy photo of something indeterminate in a glass jar. One poster featured a drawing of the head suspended in a cannister of fluid, its grimacing face surrounded by swirls of black hair, and gave more details:

THE SEVERED HEAD
OF THE MURDEROUS OUTLAW JOAQUIN
THE ACTUAL & ONLY VERIFIED HEAD OF THE
INFAMOUS OUTLAW & MURDERER,
PRESERVED IN CLEAR SPIRITS FOR ALL TO SEE.
LOOK UPON THE FACE OF THE BLOOD-THIRSTY VILLAIN WHO KILLED
80 MEN IN HOT-BLOODED REVENGE, THE TERROR OF THE SIERRAS.'
ITS HAIR CONTINUES TO GROW & IS A WONDER OF NATURE.
ON DISPLAY ONLY AT
DR. JORDON'S MUSEUM OF HORRORS.'

Along with the poster was a clipping about Murieta, a Mexican who had come to stake a claim in gold country only to have his land taken, his wife raped, and his brother murdered by American miners. With the help of Three-Fingered Jack, Murieta went on a three-year rampage of revenge and became so famous that after he was shot to death his pickled head was used to draw custom to various saloons and dives. Among the materials was a statement by a doctor, certifying that by actual measurement the hair on the head had grown several inches since Murieta's death. The head ended up in the Museum of Horrors, where it was destroyed along with most of the city in 1906.

Cree put the file back and made a note to look further into Dr. Jor-don's Museum. She straightened her stiffening back and looked across the room to where Ray was working through another box.

Asking Ray to help had been the right move, she decided again, for more reasons than one. His face had its uses: When Gerald Payson had opened the door and seen Ray with her, his mouth had dropped open and he'd stepped reflexively back from the door. She introduced Ray as her associate, then whisked past Payson and into the front parlor.

"Did you dig out the boxes I requested?"

"Frankly, no." Payson went to stand behind the desk and sullenly pushed the register across to her. "We had other pressing obligations." Before Cree could respond, Payson turned and called chidingly, "Sir! Sir! You're supposed to sign the register. And a donation to the foundation is customary."

Ray was across the room and had pulled open the doors to the rear parlor. When Payson called, Ray sauntered back to the desk. He stared hard at Payson as he snapped a crisp twenty out of his shirt pocket. Still not saying a word, he reached across and tucked it deep under the waistband of Payson's pleated trousers.

It was more than enough to keep Payson out of their hair today.

They'd gone back to the library to start where Cree had left off. You had to give Ray credit for the performance, Cree thought. Also for being a companionable research partner who didn't chatter all the time. He was as into this as she was, intent on the work.

Another saloon attraction: the display of two corpses of outlaws shot by a posse of angry citizens. Attached to the poster was a photo of the coffins, propped upright against a clapboard wall below a sign that read THE BIG NUGGET. The bodies were roped in, wrists tied across their stomachs, rifles wedged at their sides. Four bartenders posed smiling and proud next to the coffins, invigorated by their proximity to infamous death. Ray had that right.

A few minutes later she unfolded a poster that gave her a hard tick in her chest, the charge of excitement that always came with a possible breakthrough.

THE WILD MAN

RECENTLY CAPTURED IN THE JUNGLES OF BORNEO!.

HALF MAN & HALF BEAST,

HE IS ENTIRELY COVERED IN HAIR & EATS ONLY RAW MEAT!

SPECTATORS ARE REQUESTED TO STAND WELL CLEAR OF HIS CAGE

AS HE IS SAVAGE & HIGHLY DANGEROUS IF PROVOKED.

THE SEVEN WONDERS FREAK SHOW, MARKET STREET

ONLY 25
ADMISSION!

She fanned through the materials and snatched up another poster that featured a drawing of a furry, apelike thing hunkered over a beef joint. But reading the attached clippings, she saw it was just Oofty Goofty, a well-known eccentric of the period whom she'd encountered in her history books. The oddball entrepreneur and would-be actor had covered himself with tar stuck full of horsehair. His brief stint at the freak show had ended when he got so sick that he was taken to a hospital, where doctors went to great lengths to remove the suffocating coating. Later, he made his living in the streets and saloons as a professional masochist: For a dime, men could punch and kick him as hard as they liked, for a quarter beat him with their canes, or for fifty cents use the baseball bat Oofty Goofty carried for the purpose. He took pride in displaying no discomfort and made a living that way for years. Finally the famous boxer John L. Sullivan hit him too hard with a pool cue, after which Oofty Goofty retired with a damaged spine.

She went on to the next file, troubled by Oofty Goofty. Why would someone choose such a career, and why would so many people be willing to pay to inflict pain on such a pitiful creature? There were aspects of human nature she could not manage to empathize with.

"I don't mean to be discouraging," Ray said. "But if he was the child of Hans and Lydia Schweitzer, we won't find him in this kind of material."

Earlier, they had discussed the photo in the rolltop desk and brainstormed on ways Lydia Jackson's connection to Hans and the house could guide them.

"Why not?"

"Typical wealthy or at least up-and-coming Victorians would've hidden him away from public view. It was pretty common with deformed or psychologically troubled kids. Another of the paradoxes of the Victorian mind-set—half of society laboring to conceal things they considered 'unsavory,' half laboring to exploit and sensationalize them. It would explain why he was found in the basement."

Cree could easily envision the scenario: Hans and Lydia married and had a badly deformed baby that miraculously survived into adulthood. Maybe he was severely retarded or behaviorally impaired, prone to hurting himself or others, so Hans built a room in the basement where the child could be kept both safe and out of sight. After the quake, still wanting to hide their secret shame, Hans personally repaired the house, sealed up the brickwork chamber, and tried to forget. Later, they sold the house and moved away, and no one ever knew until Hernandez and his crew knocked down that well-built wall and started finding bones.

Ray was right: If the wolfman was their child, he wouldn't have shown up as a Barbary Coast entertainment. On the other hand, Cree decided, it increased the likelihood that he'd appear in medical records or family papers that she might eventually track down.

Ray finished the box he'd been working on, shoved it aside, stood scratching the back of his neck as he pored over the master catalog. "I want to follow up on my ideas for a different tack here. You up for finishing Oddities on your own?"

"Sure. Only two more boxes."

Ray wrestled several new cartons from the back of the room, while Cree plugged away at Oddities.

Last night, putting her hand to Ray's face had changed the energy between them. Her spontaneous touch had surprised him and spun him suddenly out of his rage and frustration. It was clearly something he needed. Of course it was. She had helped him clean up the kitchen and figure out a temporary way to lock the outer door for the night. Afterward, they had sat for a long time in the living room, Cree on the couch, Ray in the big chair, sipping fizzy water, talking. She had pleaded with him not to retaliate against Bert, if that was who had broken in, and had promised she would confront him. Later still, their talk had drifted on to other things as they'd both wearied, with the odd intimacy of relative strangers alone together in the early morning hours. She had stirred from a near-drowse on his couch at almost three in the morning. Ray had fallen asleep in his chair, and she'd had to wake him to see her out.

Today it was a lot easier to be around Ray. He was proving to be a smart researcher, quick to see possibilities and connections, and his presence made her more hopeful they'd find something useful. They shared a familiarity, some slight trust of the other's words or thoughts that came of having talked about things that matter. Even his body language had changed: He made no effort to keep the bad side of his face from view, and the immediate result of his lack of self-consciousness was that Cree stopped noticing the scarring. She wondered if they'd ever attain the level of trust where she could mention that.

The Medical files were easily as strange as the Oddities. Like everywhere else in the Victorian era, San Francisco was enthralled by an explosion of "scientific" potions and cures, quack diets and exercise regimens, bizarre technologies that promised cures for gout, consumption, alcoholism, chronic masturbation. Sanitoriums abounded where people could receive the latest treatments, often with the aid of fantastic machines. New "facts" about human anatomy and behavior were discovered daily and promised remedies for every disease, discomfort, and character failing. It was the era of laudanum, paregoric and cocaine, arsenic and leeches, water cures and electric shocks and magnetic stimulation. Cree's pulse picked up when she came across a collection of doctors' case studies of abnormalities and medical curiosities, including a meticulously illustrated tract on the dissection of a pair of stillborn Siamese twins.

By two o'clock, they had found nothing on a wolflike man, an ape-man, wildman, or werewolf, and Cree had started to think ahead to the meeting she'd arranged with Uncle Bert, a confrontation that promised to be difficult. She straightened and was about to tell Ray she'd had it for the day, but he spoke first.

"I've got something."

"Oh?"

Ray toed one of the boxes at his feet. "It's from the Religion files. Which are not much—obviously, it wasn't a priority for our fun-loving ancestral Payson. What there is mainly relates to mission work in the Barbary Coast. This is from May 1906, about a month after the quake—a program for a joint memorial service they gave for church members who died in the quake."

He was studying a black-bordered page with a flowery cross at the top. It started with some somber religious text and ended with a list of seven names. Cree followed his finger to an entry near the bottom:

Lydia Jackson Schweitzer,
beloved wife of Hans Heinrich Schweitzer,
faithful member of the congregation of Good Savior Church,
and devoted servant of Our Lord at Merciful Shepherd Mission.
B. June 6,1860, Oakland, California.

Cree was surprised at her reaction. Her first emotion was one of loss or sorrow, the knowledge that the beguiling, familiar woman in the photo was dead. But of course she would have to be by now.

"How in the world did you spot
that?"
she asked.

"Pure luck. I was thinking of the different responses people might have had. Um, the compassion thing." His eyes met hers, momentarily shy as a deer's. "So I thought I'd try the Religion category for a while. The name just . . . jumped out at me."

They quickly searched the rest of the Religion files together, but found nothing else even remotely relevant. They straightened their aching backs and thought about it.

"Does this tell us anything useful?" Cree wondered aloud. "The name of the church, the mission—we might chase those down. Could Lydia have encountered the wolfman in her charitable work?"

Ray was nodding, frowning. "Maybe. But it tells us one thing for sure. The wolfman wasn't Lydia's child. She didn't have any children."

Disappointed, Cree had to admit he was right. Lydia wasn't listed as anybody's beloved mother, as some of the other women on the list were. More important was her birth date: Lydia had been born in 1860, and despite the paradoxical teeth and palate, Skobold insisted the wolfman had been born around 1866. Meaning she'd have been only six, give or take a couple of years, when the wolfman was born.

One possible connection gained, another lost, Cree thought. It seemed less likely that Lydia would provide the link they needed. How long would it take to find the line, the strand, that would lead them to the wolfman?