by Ace Atkins
“It’s just me, honeybee,” she said.
“You girls come on,” Sam said. “And be quiet about it.”
“Zey’s not going.”
“Come again?” Sam said, whispering.
“She likes it here,” Alice said, leaning down, whispering, elbows laid across the threshold. “ ’Sides, she ain’t got a job since the Old Poodle Dog was busted. She’s got no dough and nowhere to stay. Did you have the fried chicken tonight?”
“Pork chops.”
“You shoulda had the chicken.”
“I’m coming in,” Sam said.
Phil laced his hands together and propped up a place for Sam to stand, lifting him through the cottage window. Sam fell with a thud to the floor and waited there for a moment, and, not hearing anything, then whispered to Alice about where he could find Zey.
She whispered back, “I’m telling you, it won’t do no good. She likes the treatments, too.”
Alice Blake closed the window and curtains behind him and walked to the bed. She lay back into the mattress, propped on her elbows, and crooked her finger at Sam. “We got time.”
Sam gritted his teeth and took a breath.
Alice started to unbutton the length of her dress and Sam watched her, unable to speak until the entire front of the dress was open. She wore a brassiere and bloomers, lots of lace and silk, tall laced boots, stockings, and garters. She ran her fingers across her stomach, stroking her white belly, the way a proud owner shows off a fine machine.
“I’m married.”
“I won’t tell.”
“I’ll know.”
“Poo.”
Alice smiled and parted her legs. She crooked her finger again. She reached down and unsnapped a single garter. Sam walked to her and reached for her hand, pulling the short girl to her feet. He put a hand to her shoulder and closed his eyes. Her eyes closed, too, and her mouth parted just as Sam snapped the garter back and began to work on the buttons up the line, stitching them closed.
“I thought you were fun,” she said.
“A damn dirty lie.”
Sam followed her into a long hallway, noting the front door to the porch was closed, and Alice rapped on a bedroom door twice. Zey appeared in a long Oriental robe, hand on her hip, and said, “About goddamn time. Where’s Phil? And where the hell are my goddamn records, Alice? Are you trying to take the Victrola, too?”
“Phil’s outside,” Sam said. “Waiting.”
“Outside? That doesn’t do us any good.”
“Come on,” Sam said. “Get packed.”
Zey made a pouty look and shook her head. The inside of her room smelled of lavender and candy-sweet perfume and glowed red from a silk handkerchief she’d placed over a lamp. Undergarments and stockings were strung across the room and over bedposts. An open armoire spilled out unfolded clothes. A bottle of unmarked wine sat on the bed stand with two teacups.
“Where’s the Victrola, Alice?” Zey asked.
“Take it.”
“And the records?”
“They’re yours. But I packed that new one though. ‘Dangerous Blues.’ ”
“I liked that one. You know I liked that one.”
“Ladies,” Sam said, holding up his hand, Zey still keeping herself wedged in the doorframe, hand on her hip. “All the way to Frisco.”
“Well, you tell Phil that if he didn’t have the class and decency to come in and say good-bye, then I don’t care if I ever see him again,” Zey said. “No, tell him I hope he gets hit by a bus. All of you can go straight to hell.”
She slammed the bedroom door.
The front porch creaked and the screen door opened. The copper knocked on the front door. “Hello?” the man called out, sounding more like a boy. Sam motioned to Alice with his head and she followed him back to her room.
The knocking grew frantic and the cop called out for them again. Zey poked her head out and held her teeth clenched and said, “Sorry.”
Sam ducked back into Alice’s room and slid open the back window, tossing the suitcase through the curtains and motioning for Alice to come on. The banging on the front door was tremendous and Phil was muttering, “Come on. Come on.”
Alice stood there paralyzed, hands against her mouth, with Zey now in the room saying, “I want that record.”
“Zey,” Sam said. “Answer the door.”
“Please, Zey,” Alice said.
“Really?”
“Really. I can’t breathe here. Ma Murphy with her corsets and hot-water bottles gives me the creeps. Tell her to take her corset and stick it.”
More banging. A click. The door opened. The copper called out.
Zey walked into the hall and told the cop there was no trouble, none at all, but the man wanted to check the rooms, make sure everything was on the square. And Zey said everything was just beautiful, peachy in fact, and asked him if he’d like a drink. The man asked again to see the rooms and Zey said she had something better to show him, saying it real sexy and slow.
Phil helped Alice out the window. Sam slid out himself and down to the ground. Phil stood there in the full moonlight holding the big suitcase and listening. He walked slowly to a side window, peeking in, and Sam touched his shoulder.
“Phil?”
“Do you see what she’s doing to him?”
“She’s saving us.”
“She’s naked.”
“No, she’s not,” Sam said, peeking in and then turning back to Phil.
“Guess she is.”
“She dropped that robe to the floor and started biting his ear. That was supposed to be my ear. She said she only did that for me.”
“Come on.”
“Goddamn women.”
Sam looked back inside and the man’s hands were on Zey’s naked white backside, squeezing her butt cheeks, while Zey crooked one of her legs around his legs. The cop turned his head to the window and Sam ducked down.
When Sam looked again, the man was headed back to Alice’s room.
Phil, Sam, and Alice found the path around the springs and heard someone yelling from the open window, curtains billowing about the cop’s head, the cop yelling, telling them to halt, the word halt seeming kinda comical coming from a boy. They ducked down behind some hedge as the cop, a young kid with freckles and jug ears, came barreling out yelling, and Zey followed moments later, back in her robe, and catching the young boy at the hot springs. The boy saying “goddamnit” at least fifteen times before she reached her arms around him and planted one right on his mouth.
He still had the 12-gauge out in his hand, over her shoulder, and was waving it around all crazy like he might start shooting at the bushes.
“Alice went for a walk,” Zey said.
“With her suitcase?” asked the boy.
“Not much you can do now,” Zey said. She grabbed the young boy between the legs and started to rub. The boy was saying, “Hold on, Miss Prevost, hold on,” but Zey kept working him like a piston and kissing his neck. Behind the shrubs, Alice had her hand over her mouth, snickering, but Phil turned his head in disgust. The cop was now begging for Zey to stop, please stop, but calling her “Miss Zey.” Zey just kept kissing and rubbing, the boy standing taller and more rigid and breathing hard until his body convulsed, the shotgun clattering to the rocks. The boy said, “See what you done? I was savin’ it.”
He kicked at his gun and walked back to the cottage, his head down.
Alice snickered so hard she about fell over. As the three followed the moon-lit path back to the gassed-up flivver, Phil said, “I thought she loved me.”
“Oh, go give yourself a good slap,” Alice Blake said as they piled in the car.
She checked herself in a compact mirror, rubbed some more paint on her lips, and, satisfied, clicked it closed. Sam smiled and Phil started the machine and pulled off, dust trailing behind them in the red glow of the taillights just as they heard the screaming and yelling and profanities of a woman.
For a moment Sam thought
Zey had changed her mind, but behind them he saw an old woman in a housecoat, Ma Murphy, trailing like a stray dog, trying to keep up and shaking her gnarled fist at the moon.
MAUDE DELMONT STARTED THINKING something was truly wrong with this picture when she turned that final corner on the first floor of the Hall and began to follow the policeman down a marble staircase into the basement. She got to the first landing, well in sight of the bottom floor and a long caged storeroom where they held court files and mug shots and bullets and fired pistols and some of the recently dead. She stood there on the landing, halfway upstairs or halfway down, and waited and listened to the masses of men and women being called for jury selection for ole Fatty. She could hear their feet above her that morning shuffling like horse hooves.
Soon another policeman came to the landing and shouted down that Miss Eisenhart had been called as she’d requested. Kate would understand. Big Kate would get to the bottom of all these snobs in Brady’s office giving her the high hat.
Maude yelled back up the dimly lit stairs, but the cop was already gone.
When Big Kate finally arrived an hour later, Maude leaned against the wall of the landing and smoked a cigarette, confessing it must be her feminine assertiveness that scared Brady. Eisenhart leaned against the wall, too, dressed in her woolly blue uniform, and scratched her head, listening. The silver badge on her chest seemed tiny and strange, like a toy pinned on her big fat bosom.
“Scared him to death,” Maude said, pointing a closed parasol as a cane.
“Men don’t know how to take an assertive woman. They find it threatening or, at the least, offensive. He doesn’t want me in that courtroom because I’m a woman, a powerful woman with a mind of her own, who will do everything in her being to make sure her dear friend’s last words are heard.”
She squashed the spent cigarette under her pointed boot.
“Dearest, District Attorney Brady doesn’t want the jury to hear about your past,” Kate Eisenhart said, her frown turning her fat face into dough. “In the eyes of the law you are a bigamist. You’ll ruin his case.”
“Good gracious me,” Maude said, holding her chest as if expecting a heart attack.
“You must divorce a man before you marry another. Or didn’t you learn that in Wichita?”
Maude narrowed her eyes at the fat policewoman.
“This is all a slow boat of slanderous lies because I’m now a known person,” she said. “My former husbands who treated me terribly can’t stand that I am now a public darling. They seethe on it. Did you know I’ve had offers to tell my life story on film? On film!”
“Truly?” The look she shot at Maude was that of a schoolmarm questioning a whopper told to her from the back of the room.
“Miss Eisenhart, is there something you wish to say? I’ve been waiting on this landing for more than an hour. I thought we were sisters.”
“And how did you figure that?”
“I know how you feel.” Maude adjusted her big black hat and smiled a bit. She touched the edge of Kate’s badge, rubbing her fingers across the emblem.
“Who are you?” Eisenhart asked, crooking her head to get a better angle at Maude’s face. “Really? Because the trusted friend of Virginia Rappe doesn’t work for me anymore. Or the divorced wife of Cassius Clay Woods. I do believe you could be the woman who tried to bamboozle a young actor type in Los Angeles who, as it seems, prefers the company of men. Just why were you and Mr. Semnacher at that party with Mr. Arbuckle? What was your angle? I guess Mr. Semnacher has jackrabbited from here, but you still stick around waiting to be heard. What is in it for an aging grifter like you?”
“Good Lord, you fat old bitch,” Maude Delmont said, turning and raising her hand to slap Kate Eisenhart. But Big Kate caught Maude’s hand in midstrike and held it there. She looked Maude in the eye for a long time and then muscled her arm down, using her thick man muscles and man ways to control her. There was a slight sheen of perspiration on Eisenhart’s upper lip.
Maude adjusted her big hat.
“I think you like it,” Kate said. The smile wasn’t smug but knowing, which pissed off Maude all the more.
“Like what?”
“The cameras, the newspaper boys, the boys on the corner hawking the afternoon edition with your name on it. You can’t let it go, even if it will lead you down the flowered path to prison.”
Maude’s indignant face and fetid manners dropped, much like the first layer of wax burning off a candle. She breathed it out. “You want me. You want us to make love like man and wife. You wish me to wear a bedpost between my legs?”
“You disgust me.”
Maude turned to her in the streaming light and dust, row upon row of boxes holding court cases and reports of criminal acts and faded mug shots. Maude watched her, feeling her breath coming in uneven gasps.
“I find your advances and your false manners repugnant,” Eisenhart said.
“You find the Vigilant women stupid? You think all it takes is a black dress and a large hat and some kind of silliness and you’re one of us? Do you have any idea where I’ve been all night? This silly group of women are the ones who tune the deaf ear of our chief of police. Three weeks ago, a fourteen-year-old girl, a child in ribbons, was brought to this city by an uncle to work at a hotel. I won’t say the name of the hotel because it is of no consequence. But at the height of her employment she was forced into relations with more than forty men in a single afternoon. When the girl complained to us at the Hall, her story was written off by a city detective who believed that only a young girl’s foolishness, naiveté, or lust could have produced it. Dr. Marina Bertola attended to this young girl’s wounds personally and, mark my words, Mrs. Delmont, they were horrifying and deep.”
Maude just stared at her. “What’s your point, sister?”
“I expect this conduct from men, but when a woman sells out her own kind it turns my stomach.”
Kate Eisenhart ripped the big black hat off Maude Delmont and tossed it down the stairwell, the hat pin wheeling on its brim until hitting a wall. The large policewoman picked up the heavy blue dress from her boots, well above the dirty stairs, and made her way back to the first floor, where Maude could hear a crowd beginning to gather.
THEY COULD HAVE BROUGHT the being to him in a box or cage, Hearst decided. The man was so scrawny and scared that he reminded Hearst of a feral animal presented for inspection before being locked in a zoo. He had the eyes of a monkey, nervous and quick, and Hearst half expected the man to leap onto his giant desk and steal an apple. Two hired men had stayed at the Hollywood cemetery all night to find the odd little fellow clutching the pink tiger lilies and Hearst could not wait to get the first interview with this man everyone wanted to know. He was the key to the mystery, the paradox solved—the man who worshipped at Virginia Rappe’s grave daily. He was real but created by Hearst, an international sensation storied in ink and then unmasked for all, and the reason he’d been whisked onto a train north to the city and brought right into the Examiner offices as if he were their own property.
“Your name is truly Crystal Rivers?” Hearst asked.
“Yes, sir,” the odd little man said. “I am.”
The top floor of the Examiner office was brisk with publicity men, and four projectionists, nine florists, and at least one organ player. There had been four, but he’d fired the others for not getting the feel of Enchantment right. Tonight was the premiere.
“And you were acquainted with Miss Rappe?”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“How so?”
“She loves me.”
“You?” Hearst said, laughing. He nudged the ribs of the young reporter who was taking dictation, standing by his side at the great desk. The young reporter smiled back but continued to write. A florist held up a handful of roses and Hearst nodded. A publicity man placed a still shot of Marion Davies in his hand and Hearst shook him off. “She loved you? You have proof of this?”
The skinny little man with enormou
s ears and hands peered down at his long skinny fingers with those great bulging eyes and shook his head. “She smiled at me once.”
“And where was this?” Hearst asked. He opened a top-floor window to let in some air and it smelled of the sea and salt and of ragged adventure stories. He thought about what he would serve to Miss Davies after the premiere. He needed someone to call the Fairmont. Or had that been arranged? There was also the question of getting a massive chandelier to the Grenada Theatre before the doors opened. It had to be moved from the docks and inside with great care.
“In a movie house,” Crystal Rivers said.