by Ace Atkins
“Keep the gun on him,” Daisy called out.
“Them animals will kill me,” Lawrence said.
He rattled the door and Sam squeezed the padlock with a tight click. The purring became more insistent, and in the headlights Sam noted one male, with a large, regal mane, and three females. The male hung back, his noticeable set of balls moving to and fro, while the females circled the bootlegger.
A long, trailing spot of wetness showed on Lawrence’s trousers.
“Tell us about Frisco,” Daisy said.
“It’s a nice town,” Lawrence said.
Daisy fired off the .22 at his feet. The cats growled.
“I’ll shoot you in the leg, sure as shit,” Daisy said. “You brought the booze to Arbuckle.”
The man held up his hands in the light. The truck continued to idle.
“We met at this garage,” Lawrence said. “This man opened his trunk and we loaded him down. I was paid and the man drove away.”
“Who was it?”
“His name was Hibbard.”
“First name?”
“I don’t know. Jesus, I don’t know.”
“Hibbard,” Daisy repeated. “The stuff you brought matched cases we took out of a joint called the Old Poodle Dog in Frisco. That jackass brandy came in the same bottles. The Scotch was bonded out of Canada.”
“So what?”
“You work for H. F. LaPeer.”
“Never heard of him,” Lawrence said.
“If those big cats smell a little blood, they’re gonna want a taste,” Daisy said.
“You’re crazy.”
“When’s LaPeer’s next shipment?”
One of the female lions sauntered over and ran herself between’s Lawrence’s legs, purring and growling. The male jumped from five feet away, knocking Lawrence flat on his back, his screams not unlike those of a little girl. The male straddled his chest, balls in Lawrence’s face, and yawned. Another female licked at the man’s hand while yet another sniffed at his crotch.
“I can find out.”
“What’s that?”
In a whisper, “I can find out. I can find out. I can find out.”
“And what about the Arbuckle party?”
“It’s all I know. Jesus, God. Holy hell. Mother Mary.”
“What do you think?” Daisy asked.
“I think the man has been properly motivated,” Sam said.
ROSCOE FOUND FREDDIE FISHBACK at the Cocoanut Grove bar at midnight, talking to a barmaid wearing a beaded headdress and veil, a golden bodice, and a long flowing skirt. She was laughing at one of his jokes and Freddie was laughing, too, until he saw the shadow of Roscoe over him and his smile simplified into something more like Freddie, droll and impersonal, and he offered his hand.
Roscoe looked at his hand as if it were a dead mackerel.
Freddie shrugged and puffed on his cigaratte.
The girl in the Arabian getup looked to Roscoe and bit her lip before moving on back down the bar. People were whispering and pointing, and Roscoe didn’t give a good goddamn.
“You look very sharp,” Freddie said, his Romanian accent more pronounced. He wore a tuxedo. He was very dark, with black hair and eyes. The kind of guy with a heavy brow and thick fur on his hands.
“Your housekeeper said you were in New York.”
Freddie took a sip of his cocktail and said, “She was wrong.”
“I got ditched when you stepped off the Harvard,” Roscoe said. “I pulled my Pierce off the ship and waited for you to load your bags.”
“I don’t like to wait. Do you mind, Roscoe? People are staring.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
Freddie turned back to the bar. Roscoe touched his shoulder.
“Don’t be a stupid man,” Freddie said and raised his eyebrows. “The papers?”
Freddie ordered another drink, a cocktail served in a champagne glass with a cherry. “The soldiers made this up during the war,” Freddie said. “Call it a French 75. Like the big guns. How ’bout a drink? We drink and we forget, okay?”
“How ’bout I shove that champagne glass up your ass?”
“Why not a Coke bottle?”
Roscoe gripped Freddie by the front of his tuxedo shirt and twisted him into his face. He ground his teeth so hard, he could hear them grind and pop deep into his jaw.
“I only wanted to ask you a question,” Roscoe said. He could feel a barman or a doorman or someone’s hands on his arm. “Just a question.”
Freddie looked at him. The champagne cocktail had rolled from his fingers onto the bar, the thin glass breaking into shards. Freddie stared at him and breathed, a little smile on his lips.
“Why’d you bring her there? Why Virginia? You knew, didn’t you?” Freddie’s smile widened.
“You goddamn son of a bitch.”
SAM AND DAISY stayed up that night, finding an Owl drugstore downtown just like the one at the bottom of the Flood Building. Daisy ordered eggs. Sam ordered toast. They both had coffee and cigarettes, which was a fine thing to Sam at four a.m. when you were too tired to sleep.
“What’s it all about, Sam?” she asked.
“A good shot of rye and a warm bed.”
“You don’t let anyone get in there, do you?”
“In where?”
She moved her knuckles over to his forehead and lightly knocked. “What about you, sister?”
She sipped her coffee, elbows on the lunch counter, watching the fat man at the grill burning up a steak, bacon, and some home fries. Outside, a streetcar zipped past, littering electric sparks in the leftover night.
“You got a man?”
“Nope.”
“Family?”
“Back east.”
“Did you see the set of balls on that lion?”
“I did,” she said. “That one’s got it all figured out.”
“So why you working for the G?”
“What if I told you H. F. LaPeer killed the man I loved?”
“I’d tell you to peddle your story to the pictures.”
Daisy drank more coffee. The fat cook laid down a plate of ham and eggs and she didn’t touch it. Sam placed a pack of Fatimas on the counter.
“That’s not true, is it?” Sam asked. “About your man?”
Daisy shrugged. She reached for his cigarettes and lit up. The smoke was in her eyes and she fanned it away.
“Why do you gals paint your lips in the center?”
“The Kewpie doll effect,” she said, pursing her lips and closing her eyes.
She opened them and parted her lips and smiled at Sam. He turned back to his plate and grabbed a slice of dry toast.
“You don’t give a damn about Prohibition, do you?” he asked.
“I didn’t make the law.”
“But it bothers you that some places are off the books? Like the Cocoanut Grove?”
She shrugged again, looking good every time she shrugged, and took a bite of eggs. Her soft light blond hair tucked behind her ears and a slouch hat tucked over her head. Sam reached out and traced the edge of her jaw with his middle finger and she cut her eyes at him but kept eating, and he kept his eyes on her until she met his gaze.
Her eyes flicked back to the window and Sam glanced over his shoulder, watching a very dark, very compact man in a black suit staring in the window. He turned back to her and removed his fingers and hand and caught his smoldering cigarette in the ashtray. He looked back to the window and saw the dark man again.
Sam left his toast and laid down some coin and walked out the door. Daisy followed, and soon they were on the street, catching the back of the man and his dark hat and long coat, a coat too warm for Los Angeles. Sam was not shadowing him but calling out to the man’s back, which slumped as his legs pumped fast around the corner. He heard the start of a machine and Sam called out to Daisy to retrieve the Hupmobile.
He saw the car turn and pass him with a lot of speed, and he caught the dark man’s profile again, all so f
amiliar from somewhere, some town, some old report.
“You could’ve said something back there,” Daisy said.
“I know him.”
“Who is he?”
“I’m not sure.”
“So why do we care?”
“It wasn’t his face,” Sam said. “It’s because he ran.”
The road led a quarter mile up the mountain into more cleared roads, more gravel and half-finished houses and open lots. Sam jumped out of the machine and searched the landscape, with his .32 in hand, for shadows and movement, finding only the gentle flickering of eucalyptus leaves and the burning smell of a big ancient oak on a smoldering pile. He rounded a large stack of brick and timber and made his way into a house without a roof, the ceiling big and black and pockmarked with bright stars, seeming not as real as those at the Cocoanut Grove.
He listened for feet and heard none.
A flash of headlights crossed over the open mountain ground and Daisy skidded to a stop and hopped out of the little automobile. She followed Sam on foot up a hill and into the elbow of an embankment. There were poured foundations and clearing machines. Fat, gnarled trees had been left naked in the cleared land and they looked prehistoric and skeletal in the moonlight.
They heard an engine crank and saw headlight beams flash from the back of a hill, and then the car was up and over the hill and coming straight for them. Sam pulled Daisy into him and around the back of a brick pile, and the car left dust and smoke and taillights as it disappeared over the lip of the mountain and down into the curving roads leading back to the city.
Daisy ran to the Hupmobile and circled back for Sam, soon catching the glow of taillights appearing and disappearing around curves and more straightaways, and then she headed west down a fire road, the bounce of the car nearly throwing Sam from his seat. Daisy smiled, grinning with her big white teeth, and leaned forward into the wheel, mashing the accelerator for all it was worth, skidding and spinning down through the dust and gravel, the beams catching the fender of the machine they followed. She drove through a tunnel of tree branches and across more cleared land, up the mountain and down again, and looping back on another fire road, coming out this time into a narrow entrance where the road just stopped.
There were giant earthmoving machines with large bucket scoops and heavy tracks as wide as a car. The car they followed had stopped cold at the mountain wall but then doubled back and idled.
The earth around them carved out like a huge bowl.
Sam told Daisy to switch off the lights and the two piled out of the car, moving for the rear and glancing around corners, waiting for the dark man to make his next move.
A few seconds later, the man fired. It was a big goddamn gun, something like a .44 that a man could feel hard into his elbow and shoulder and which could deafen an ear a bit, too.
Sam responded with a couple shots from the .32 that sounded tinny and small but clacked and echoed in the big earthen bowl. They squatted down behind a rear tire, and the man fired again, Sam and Daisy both covering their heads, the solid blam, blam, blam from the .44 like a drum all around them.
The bowl felt damn-near Roman to Sam, as he waited for the dark man to either speed forward his machine or keep trading bullets with them.
“I can’t see the bastard.”
“I hope he can’t see us.”
Sam squeezed off another few rounds from the edge of the Hupmobile. Blam, blam, blam.
The radiator cap blew off Daisy’s machine and steam shot out. “Goddamnit,” she said.
Another big shot from the .44 and a tire was out.
Sam reached into his coat pocket and reloaded some more bullets. The
.44 answered before he could even aim.
“I think you pissed him off,” Sam said.
“Me?”
The big black car of unknown make or model, just a big goddamn closed-cab machine, built up speed, heading straight for Daisy’s little two-seater, as Sam squeezed off all six, aiming straight between the headlights and up for the driver. But it just kept coming, sounding like a choir out of hell.
17
You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” Minta Durfee said. It was early afternoon the next day and Minta and Sam walked the ringed path of Echo Lake, not far from the Mack Sennett Stage. Men rowed boats with their honeys relaxing, the men trying to not break a sweat with their suits busting at the seams. There were flower gardens and park benches, tall palm trees and drooping, tired willows dangling their branches into the water. Swans shuffled their way through the tall grass and into the lake, making it seem so damn easy, all the action going on below the surface.
“You drew your weapon on him,” Minta said. “You stood strong while his machine raced toward you.”
“I squeezed off a few rounds so he’d know I was armed,” Sam said. “He could’ve killed us if he’d wanted.”
“But you protected that dry agent. That’s what matters.”
Sam scratched his cheek and they kept going around the lake, this the second pass on the loop.
“She tackled me out of the way,” Sam said. “The son of a bitch in the car kept going and sideswiped her Hupmobile. Nearly knocked the damn thing over.”
“And then you shot the man.”
“He got away.”
“And how did you get back?”
“We walked.”
“And Miss Simpkins?”
“She’s fine,” Sam said. “She headed back to deal with the busted machine.
She waited till it was daylight ’cause she didn’t care for all the coyotes.”
“Did you see many?”
Sam smiled. “I told her I saw hundreds. All of ’em with mean red eyes.”
“Did she really lock that bootlegger in a cage with lions?”
“She enjoyed it.”
“You’re quite the storyteller, Sam.”
Minta and Sam left the loop and walked across an arced bridge to a small island in the center of the lake. Minta wore a wide-brimmed straw hat with a big-flowered dress that hugged her full frame. Sam offered her a cigarette but she declined, landing on the island and pointing out a small bench.
“So, tell me more about your sleuthing in Chicago.”
“I found the woman who’d raised the girl, a Mrs. J. Hardebach. By the way, the girl’s name is just plain ole Rapp. She added the e and accenting after she’d returned from a trip to Paris.”
“What else?”
“I told Mr. Dominguez most of this.”
Sam smoked and thought, a brief pause. “Let me hear it again, if you don’t mind.”
Minta took a deep breath.
“The girl was born in 1894 to woman named Mabel Rapp who worked as a chorus girl and perhaps a prostitute. The father was either a big Chicago banker or British nobility. No one seems to buy that one. Mabel died when Virginia was eleven and Virginia went to live with her grandmother. Before she was sixteen, the girl was pulling up her skirt for the asking. She had a total of five abortions and gave birth to one child. A daughter.”
“You’re good,” Sam said. “So, where’s the daughter?”
“Given to an orphanage.”
“Is there record of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go on.”
“Virginia’s grandmother died ten years ago and that’s when she went to live with Mrs. Hardebach. This was after she’d had the child. Apparently Mrs. Hardebach provided more structure for the girl. She said she was the one who taught Virginia to be a lady and pull up her bloomers for a while. She also gained her employment as a model and as a salesgirl at Marshall Field’s. Virginia became a style expert of sorts and a shopper for society ladies. This led to a trip to Paris where Virginia caused a big scandal by dancing in her nightie with another woman. Apparently she kissed the woman full on the mouth.”
“How’d she come west?”
“She came to San Francisco for the Exhibition.”
“In ’15.”
“And
from there, she moved to Los Angeles.”
“Where she met Henry Lehrman, who got her into pictures.”
“Mabel will know more about that than me,” Minta said. “I’d already left for New York by that time.”