by Ace Atkins
Glennon arrived and the old Greek went back to the kitchen.
Sam offered him a cigarette from his pack of Fatimas.
“I wasn’t trying to muscle you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Glennon said. “The only thing Mr. Boyle knows about detective work is what he reads in the funny papers.”
Sam pulled out his wallet and Glennon shook his head. He tugged it back into his jacket.
“We got a call that afternoon about some girl who’d drunk herself stupid at the Arbuckle party.”
“Everyone knew about the party?”
“Who’d you think arranged to bring in the booze? They had cases of the stuff that Arbuckle had driven up in that rolling steamer of his. Have you seen it? A custom Pierce-Arrow, with a bar and a toilet. Can you imagine driving down the highway and waving to a fella who’s on the crapper? I mean, what does he do? Wave back?”
“Did you see the girl?”
“Sure.”
“And what did you think?”
“I thought she’d gotten stupid and drunk.”
“And everyone else?”
“They was stupid and drunk, too. Arbuckle, his two buddies. Some fella who sold women’s drawers, and then the Delmont woman.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Wow,” he said, “how much time you got?”
Glennon leaned in and turned to look in Sam’s coffee cup. Sam looked back to the Greek and signaled for another round of special coffee.
“Listen to this, I ended up screwin’ that broad that night. I know that’s not professional, but what would you do? She’s crying and putting her tits in my face, and we ended up sitting there in the very room where we moved the girl, 1227. That girl was out stone-cold, and Mrs. Delmont had heisted two bottles of the sweetest Kentucky bourbon from old Fatty. We got drunk in the a.m. and told stories, and she’s telling me how her old man is a creep and all that. And I’m saying how sorry I am, only I’m not that sorry, only looking at her tits. And finally she grabs me by my ears and plants one on me, and we ended up fucking against the wall. You can say what you want about Mrs. Maude Delmont, but I’ll tell you she ain’t no frail.”
“She say how she knew the girl?”
Glennon stopped as the Greek laid down the coffee cup and he thanked him. “I think they knew each other in L.A. through some guy named Al. I think I saw that Al guy at the party, but I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. He was one of those movie types, too. I got the feeling that Delmont had come with him and he’d split and she was drinking and screwing me out of revenge.”
“You look like a wounded bird.”
“I couldn’t walk straight the next day.”
“How long did the girl stay?”
“They moved her out Wednesday.”
“And took her to Wakefield?”
Glennon nodded.
“And Maude Delmont is still a guest of the hotel.”
“A guest? More like a parasite. She’s bought all kinds of stuff, hats and dresses and crap, and charged it to the hotel. She’s hung up on Mr. Boyle at least six times. He had to sic the police on her. They’re getting ready to throw her ass on the street.”
“You two still friendly?”
“She’s ice, brother.”
“My condolences.”
“I wasn’t looking to make pen pals.”
“So what happened in that room?”
“That’s the question. You got two people go into 1219 and one of ’em ends up dying four days later.”
“You trust what Delmont says?”
“I wouldn’t trust that bitch if she said the earth was round and the sky was blue.”
“What did she tell you?”
“I only know what I read in the papers about the dead girl’s confession.
She never said a word of that to me.”
Glennon slugged back some whiskey, lit another cigarette, and stretched his legs out on the black-and-white honeycombed floor. The afternoon light had faded. Some more folks strolled into John’s.
“What happened to the bedclothes?”
“Cops took ’em.”
“You see them?”
He nodded.
“Blood?”
“Nope,” he said. “But someone sure had pissed them good. Both in 1219 and 1227. You know they brought the whole grand jury by the hotel rooms today? Boyle’s ticked ’cause those are his primo suites and he’s told he can’t rent them out.”
“Did you hear anything from any maids, workers, Arbuckle’s crowd?” He shook his head. “The cops asked me this already.”
“What didn’t they ask you?”
Glennon blew his smoke straight up from the side of his mouth, the smoke hitting the fan and scattering across the tin ceiling.
“They didn’t ask me about the doctors.”
“More than one?”
“Three.”
“Who were they?”
“House doctor was out Labor Day, so we had a fill-in. Then the house doctor was back on Tuesday, but Mrs. Delmont didn’t want any of that. She brought in her own doctor.”
“She know him?”
“Called him Rummy.”
“Name?”
“Rumwell,” he said. “This guy was a true nut, all nervous and stuttering. Wore his coat buttoned to the top button even when it’s so hot you can’t breathe. He has a funny-looking eye that goes back and forth and sometimes crosses with the good one. Short little mustache. He’s the one that finally took the girl to Wakefield.”
“Where she died.”
“Where she died.”
“You think Arbuckle did this?”
“I’m saying that Mrs. Maude Delmont ain’t playing a straight game, and I’m not so sure whose interest she’s serving. You ever checked out the connection between Fatty and her?”
“THEY’RE BURNING My FILMS,” Roscoe said.
“That was just one case,” Dominguez said.
“It says it right here a bunch of cowboys rode into a movie house in Wyoming, shooting up the place, and dragged out the projector and the canister for Gasoline Gus and burned it in the street.”
“What do those people know? They probably have sex with cattle.”
“You want to talk about all the cities banning my films? I’ve been called indecent, immoral, and a bloated beast. How do you like that alliteration?”
“Only that idiot director Lehrman called you a beast.”
“And they put the bastard on the front page. He said he couldn’t come to San Francisco to claim the body because he was worried what he might do to me. Pathé? Now, that’s a laugh. The Examiner had a picture of him showing off a pair of cuff links that he sez Virginia bought for him. Hell, he probably had them engraved himself. ‘With Love Always, Virginia,’ ” Roscoe said, tossing the paper near his hat on the jailhouse floor. “That girl was nothing but a receptacle for him.”
“The grand jury is meeting right now, Roscoe.”
Roscoe began to shuffle a deck of cards in his hands, bare feet on concrete. Dominguez leaned against the bars, his neckerchief loosened in the heat.
Roscoe began to absently toss cards into his driving cap.
“What haven’t you told me about the party, Roscoe?”
“I told you everything, Frank. Ten times I told you.”
“You never told me about the Coke bottle.”
Roscoe tossed a joker onto the brim of the hat.
“It works better with a bowler.”
“We need to talk about everything.”
Roscoe felt his face flush and he hated the feeling of it. He stood and straightened his Norfolk jacket on the wire hanger and smoothed down the lapels. He adjusted his shoes by the commode.
“It was just a test. I’d always heard that when a person was knocked out that ice would bring ’em to. If a person was just faking it, you could tell.”
“You thought she was faking it?”
“One minute the girl is on my lap calling me snuggle pup
and the next she’s screaming bloody murder.”
“Did you touch her with the bottle?”
“It wasn’t a goddamn bottle, Frank. It was an ice cube.”
“I got a copy of an interview with this fella Al Semnacher. He says he saw you put something on her lady parts. Who the hell is this guy?”
“I just met him. He said he was an agent.”
“He work for Miss Rappe?”
“I never saw him when she was with Sennett,” Roscoe said. “Listen, I just put the ice on her to wake her up.”
“Did it work?”
“Not really.”
“Where did you put it?”
Roscoe sat down on the creaking bed, shuffling out more cards, from one hand to the other, and then eyeing the hat from across the room.
“I put an ice cube from my Scotch on her.”
“Where?”
“On her snatch,” Roscoe said. “Okay. I put some ice on her snatch. Don’t tell me that killed her.”
“Did you ever place a bottle into her?”
“Is that what Semnacher said?”
“I don’t know. We’ve heard things. I don’t know if the D.A. is going to present this or not.”
“A Coke bottle. Jesus.”
“Other things may come out, too. I want you to know that. They may say the bottle was a substitution for masculinity.”
Roscoe flipped a steady stream of a dozen cards and then moved his eyes up to Frank. He could not stop shaking his head, feeling the shame being directed on him. The worst part about feeling the shame was that it felt like an old friend that he had abandoned long ago.
THE PREVON GIRL LEFT the grand jury room at eleven-seventeen, red-faced and tear-streaked and on the arm of Griff Kennedy, who held up the girl with one hand while slipping into his slicker and hat and pushing past the newspapermen and the camera flashes. Sam stood from the bench where he’d been parked since five and slid around back to the car pool and waited for Griff and Zey, holding up his hand to stop them.
The girl wiped her eyes with a starched white handkerchief and snorted into it when they stopped and looked up at the big red-haired detective for her next order. But Griff didn’t say a word to her or Sam, only pushed Sam away with the heel of his hand and pushed the girl into the back of his black machine.
“She’s a witness,” Sam said. “Not your property.”
Griff Kennedy hoisted up the waistband of his pants and spit on the ground before starting his automobile and pulling back around to Portsmouth Square. The girl watched Sam as the machine glided in a wide circle, her big, sad eyes searching out the fogged glass before turning a corner and disappearing.
Back inside, Sam found his bench had been taken up by two fat women knitting. They wore all black and large hats. A few more of the hat crew stood along a circular staircase where another big lady had opened up a picnic basket and distributed coffee poured out into china mugs. By the bathrooms were four more. Three more walked in from the front doors.
“What’s this?” Sam asked.
“Vigilant Committee,” said a newspaperman.
“What?”
“We call them the Vigilantes,” the man said with a smirk. “You can bet these sob sisters are going to be all over this case like stink on shit. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Sure.”
“You didn’t see the part about Mrs. Hamilton and Mrs. Bertola saying they were going to monitor the trial to honor that dead woman.”
“Why?”
“’ Cause they hate men. They all want to crush our balls in silver-plated nutcrackers they all keep locked up in their purses.”
Sam nodded, tucking a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and striking a match. “Jesus, we gonna sleep in there?”
“Already missed deadline.”
“The nerve.”
“You telling me.”
Sam took a seat on the last step of the staircase and stole a glance at a little man with slick black hair, tiny mustache, and one wandering eye. A little past midnight, a bailiff emerged from the great twin doors and called out for a Dr. M. E. Rumwell.
The man jumped to attention and followed the bailiff.
Forty-six minutes later, Dr. Rumwell returned, shaking off a half dozen reporters and exiting out a side door.
Sam followed.
8
Sam had learned to shadow from his old boss in Baltimore, Jimmy Wright. Jimmy had worked for the Pinks most his life, and when he wasn’t sending out Sam for sandwiches or cigarettes or running messages to the office boys he’d teach him how to follow a person. Wright wasn’t a thing like the detectives in the dime-store novels Sam had read growing up. He didn’t have a handlebar mustache or wear tweeds and a bowler. Jimmy Wright was a thick, squat fella, a fireplug, who wore raincoats even when it was warm and had a taste for Fatima cigarettes. He had scar tissue around his eyes and his knuckles, and told young Sam that detective work was a nasty, brutal profession and not a place for a boy who had other options. He told Sam to be a lousy lawyer or a stockbroker or, hell, even a goddamn grocery clerk. But Sam would run those roast beef sandwiches and packs of Fatimas to street corners and back alleys and safe houses where Wright would wait out some con man and bank robber just for a simple word from a man who, although short, towered over his father.
Rumwell headed down California from Portsmouth Square in a lope, probably heading to the Embarcadero to catch a streetcar. But at the Ferry Building, the doctor turned south, not north, and continued walking past an empty streetcar, the off-duty driver reading a newspaper, feet up on the controls. Sam followed him past pier after pier, and endless warehouses that smelled of fish oil and machine parts, and men playing dice next to barrel fires and prostitutes who’d gone long past their day dishing out fifty-cent blow jobs and hand jobs for a quarter.
Sam walked past them all, careful to keep that sacred space, the good doctor never looking over his shoulder as he followed the Embarcadero deeper inside the Barbary, a collection of shanties and clapboard bars that had been open to sailors ever since San Francisco had been a city. It had burned down during the Quake and had been shut down by moral crusaders more than anyone cared to remember. But there was always the sailor’s trade for booze and women, and, for the most part, the Barbary became a no-man’s-land.
Rumwell turned east up a narrow little alley paved with smooth cobblestones and ballast from cutter ships. Barkers in top hats spit out carnival spiels about harems and belly dancers and shows with Shetland ponies. There were gas lamps and red lamps in bay windows where sad-eyed girls in saggy slips and torn stockings would press their bodies against the warped glass or crook a finger at you. The doctor ducked into another alley and curved again, but Sam did not rush, as he looked both ways, and heard the tinny piano music of a little bar called Purcell’s that advertised itself with a wooden sign that swung and creaked in the breeze off the Pacific. A fat man in a little hat banged out the keys to a song about a girl from Kansas City who wore gumdrops on her titties.
Sam wandered in and found the bar mostly empty except for the piano player and another negro, a gigantic man with a shining bald head. The man switched a toothpick from the other side of his cheek as Sam entered and sat down.
“Rye.”
The gigantic negro said nothing but uncorked an unlabeled bottle and poured out a generous measure of thin-looking stuff. Despite the taste of gasoline and leather tannins, the burning sensation was quite pleasant on Sam’s stomach and deep into his lungs, spreading out a burning warmth and giving him a bit of relief. The bartender’s skin shone the color of the deepest black, the whites of his eyes the color of an egg. His hulking form cast a shadow against the brick, with twin notches above his smooth head.
The negro was about to cork the bottle but saw the glass was empty and motioned to Sam, who nodded. He did this several times until the feeling held right and Sam waved him off.
Soon a whore came to Sam, and he smelled her before he saw her, a scent of dri
ed flowers and spawning fish. She wrapped an arm around Sam’s neck and whispered in his ear a price. She wore a terrible wig, almost looking as if it were made of straw, and had painted a beauty mark or what most people called a mole at the bottom of her chin. Another look at her told him she couldn’t have been more than thirteen.