by Ace Atkins
“Yes.”
“And did you two decide on this trip yourselves?”
“I don’t know,” Zey said. “I was just sent there.”
“By who?”
“Mr. Brady.”
“Did you have a nice time?”
“I guess.”
“I hear the treatments are quite relaxing,” McNab said. “Especially when it’s on the taxpayer tab.”
U’Ren and Brady stood in unison, Louderback shot down a stare from the bench. McNab just rubbed his craggy face and stretched his neck, and he continued on while Zey looked as if she was sitting on a griddle, turning and readjusting, crossing her leg and showing her black stockings and silk ballerina shoes, her smile plastic.
“Did Mr. U’Ren tell you that you had to sign that statement?”
Zey shook her head.
“Please state your answer.”
“No, sir.”
“But now you’re saying the statement is incorrect.”
Zey’s mouth opened, her pudgy little face dropped, and she put her hands to her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Please answer,” Judge Louderback said.
“It’s just all mixed up,” Zey said. “All of it is all mixed up.”
“Then,” McNab said, pointing to her and then turning to the jury, Roscoe watching him work like a goddamn acrobat, even turning back to Minta and Ma with a look on his face like Look at that bastard go, and Minta winking back at him. “You could have mistaken Miss Rappe’s statement that day?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hadn’t Miss Rappe just been immersed into a cold bath by you and Miss Blake and a Mr. Fishback?”
“Yes,” Zey said, shaking her head, trying to find his meaning.
“Mr. Fishback had hold of her arms?”
“Yes.”
“And even the contact of her clothes hurt her, isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
“So when Miss Rappe said ‘he,’ she could’ve meant that it was Mr. Fishback and not Mr. Arbuckle that hurt her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if she meant Mr. Fishback, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you don’t know if she meant Mr. Arbuckle, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your Honor, I would ask you to direct the witness to answer my question and remind her that she is under oath and failing to do so amounts to perjury. Punishable by imprisonment.”
Zey smiled and shrugged.
“Objection,” U’Ren said, shouting and jumping up.
“Objection to the crime of perjury?” McNab asked, smiling a bit.
“Sit down, Mr. U’Ren,” Louderback said, before leaning toward Zey.
“Please answer the question yes or no, Miss Prevon.”
“You don’t know if he meant Mr. Arbuckle was the one who hurt her, do you, Miss Prevon?” McNab asked.
Zey glanced at U’Ren, before she said in a small, soft voice, “No.”
“Because it’s quite possible she could have been referring to Mr. Fishback when she said ‘he,’ since you and Mr. Fishback had just roughly handled her and tossed her into a bath of very cold water to cure what you thought was a bad drunk?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your Honor?”
Judge Louderback leaned toward her. “Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, she could have meant Mr. Fishback hurt her and not Mr. Arbuckle?” McNab asked, voice booming.
“Yes.”
“No further questions,” McNab said.
McNab sat back down next to Roscoe and Roscoe smiled at him, giving his lawyer a soft shot on the arm, but the old crotchety bastard just looked at him like he’d just pissed on his shoe and returned to the papers spread out before him.
HEARST DIRECTED GEORGE to drive him to the Embarcadero, having him slow behind a streetcar and wait until it rambled off into the rainy night. The Dark Man was at the curb and spotted the Chandler limousine, hat tilted over his eyes, black umbrella in hand, looking to Hearst like a funeral director. Two more streetcars passed, each going the opposite way, the inside of each great rattling box filled with artificial light as it rambled past the piers and endless fishing boats. Old men sat under lean-tos fixing fishing nets by the light of kerosene lanterns. The Dark Man closed the umbrella and crawled inside with Hearst.
The limousine pulled out onto the roadways hugging the bay and headed up past Market Street and the Ferry Building, more piers flashing by the windows, George now overtaking the streetcars. The big black car seeming to glide on rails. Hearst held his head in his hand as they rolled along and stared out the glass, feeling the Dark Man staring at him but saying nothing. They soon wound around the Cliff House and the Sutro Baths and the terrain grew rocky and ragged, the road narrowing, the headlights cutting a wide path into the rain.
“I read Enchantment was the best picture ever made.”
Hearst stared at the man and took in his black suit, smug grin.
The man flipped open a writing tablet and read. “Her name is Irene Morgan.”
“Is she genuine?”
“I think so.”
“I will not have Miss Rappe’s name besmirched.’ ”
“You want some advice, Mr. Hearst?”
“Did I ask you for any?”
“Sometimes people just die,” the Dark Man said. He removed the hat from his gray head and shook loose some rainwater. The outline of the rocky coast looked like jagged silhouettes. “That wasn’t the plan.”
“They want her to be called a whore.”
“You ever play cards, Mr. Hearst?” The Dark Man’s face was half lit in the lights from the baths, the other split in shadow.
Hearst just looked at him.
“You get out when the gettin’ is good,” the Dark Man said. “And that was some time back.”
Hearst continued to stare. The man stared back. Hearst called for George to circle back downtown. The big, lumbering car found a spot along the cliffs and made a wide, squeaking turn. Rain began to fall harder now and the windows were completely obscured with grays and blacks, the rocky outline and silhouettes gone. The man across from Hearst smelled of heavy cologne and Hearst took him as someone who needed to cover up a strong offensive odor.
“But you’re not done poking at this?” the Dark Man said. He smiled, understanding.
Hearst turned and watched the rain fall across the window, the light coming into the limousine’s carriage again across his face and eyes, and he said nothing.
JUST OUTSIDE the Flood Building, Sam heard someone call out to him from across Ellis Street. He turned and stared into the long, driving sheets of rain and just made out the face of a man and an umbrella. The man was smiling and offered a hand and Sam stepped back, watching for any quick moves.
“George Glennon,” the man said, “the St. Francis?”
Sam shook Glennon’s hand and told him he was sorry. “A little nervy, I guess.”
“Let’s get out of the rain,” the hotel dick said.
They walked a couple doors down to John’s Grill, where Sam sat next to the pudgy fella up at the bar. They ordered a couple coffees and were disappointed when the cups came back as plain joe. Sam asked the Greek what gives and the Greek pointed to a couple cops eating a steak dinner by the front door.
“As if they care,” Sam said.
The Greek shrugged and walked.
Sam drank the coffee and had a smoke. Glennon did the same.
“You ever get a bead on that Dr. Rumwell?”
“I did,” Sam said. “Thanks for the tip.”
“What’d you think?”
“Strange little man, nervous, jumpy. I tailed him one night out into the Barbary and watched him attend to a mess of whores at a place called Purcell’s.”
“That’s mighty white of him.”
“He got a big wad of cash for the effort,” Sam said. “Dr. Rumwell works the unwashed t
rade, no telling what the sailors bring to port.”
“How’s he know Mrs. Delmont?”
“Don’t know,” Sam said. “I got pulled off to work some business down south.”
Glennon smoothed down his mustache, scratched his neck, and drank more coffee. He thought about it, added some more sugar to his coffee, stirred it a bit, and then said, “That bastard manager at the St. Francis let me go.”
Sam listened.
“I gave a deposition to Gavin McNab last week saying that Virginia Rappe told me personal she didn’t know what was wrong with her. Suddenly there are two pigheaded Irish cops in my lobby, showing their muscles and badges and swinging their dicks around wanting to charge me with dereliction of duty.”
“And they fired you?”
“Yep,” Glennon said. “The cops say they’ll charge me if I see McNab again.”
“Ain’t the legal system a beaut?”
Glennon shook his head and drank his coffee. Sam let the cigarette burn in his fingers and watched the rain outside on Ellis Street. The arc lamps were on, shining gold patterns of water running naked down the road.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said.
“It’s not your fault.”
Sam shook his head.
“I didn’t come to tell you a sob story,” Glennon said. “Before I left I watched a team of policemen go upstairs to the Arbuckle suite. They removed three big doors. Two from 1219 and one from 1220. It took four men to carry each of ’em out.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Some guy named Heinrich and a broad named Salome Doyle,” he said. “Get this. When they entered the lobby, this Heinrich guys sez to the cops, ‘Make way for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.’ He’s a complete screwball.”
“Did they dust the room before that?”
“Not that I saw.”
“And they just did this when?”
“Friday,” Glennon said. “I wanted to keep you wise.”
He handed Sam his old business card from the St. Francis. GEORGE GLENNON. HOUSE DETECTIVE. An address. An extension number. Sam flipped the card and on the back was written, “Kate Brennan.”
“Fine Celtic girl.”
“Who’s she?”
“A hell of good maid,” Glennon said. “Fired her, too. You folks may want to ask Mrs. Brennan if she wiped down the doors after Arbuckle checked out.”
“They fixed it.”
“Is that possible?”
“I know a guy who can add any set of prints you want for fifty bucks.”
Sam offered his hand. Glennon took it with a wink and disappeared back onto Ellis. Sam finished the coffee, too poor to pay for a meal, and smoked a cigarette on his way back to the Flood Building.
It was late when he reached the third-floor office. The Old Man had gone home. Haultain was out on assignment. Sam recognized a couple other ops at their desks and one young boy who worked the Teletype and telephone in case something big happened. Sam found a desk, not his desk but a desk they all used, and called his landlady, the bootlegger, and asked her to send word to Jose that he’d be home in an hour or so.
In a half hour, the room thinned out. The ops gone. Just Sam and the office boy.
Sam asked the office boy to place a call for him to the Baltimore branch. He wanted to run down the name of a possible op: medium build, with iron-gray hair, brown eyes, and half an ear missing.
25
Does this goddamn rain ever stop?” Roscoe asked. “How do you people live here?”
“You lived here,” McNab said. “You tell me.”
They sat in a private booth, along with Minta and Ma, at the Tadich Grill off Washington. The Tadich was all dark paneled wood and soft yellow lights. The floors were honeycombed black and white and the waiters wore stiff bleached linen. Roscoe felt human in a good restaurant again, straightening his tie and relaxing into the booth. The waiters called him “sir” and brushed away bread crumbs.
“Before the Quake,” Roscoe said, “Sid Grauman hired me to work for seventeen bucks a week. I sang to illustrated slides, songs like ‘Tell Mother You Saw Me,’ crapola like that. Remember that stuff, Minta? Just like Long Beach. Good money back then. But then there was the goddamn Quake and I was out in the street, hauling rocks into oxcarts. Ma, you shoulda seen the city back then, everything was on fire, any able man was given a shovel or faced the point of a gun. I never seen anything like it, and hope I never do again.”
“Roscoe?” McNab said.
“Yeah?”
“I was here, too. The Quake was tough on all of us, but we dusted ourselves off, buried the dead, and built a brand-spanking-new city. Let’s skip over memory lane and to the shitstorm at hand. ’Scuse me, ladies.”
Roscoe adjusted his silver cuff links, put his hand on Minta’s knee, and winked across the table at Ma. Ma winked back. He loved Ma.
“We’re not so different, me and you,” Roscoe said, pointing the nubbed end of his cigarette at McNab. “We’re both performers with our own set of talents. We both know how to work a room, feel a crowd.”
McNab looked uneasy and shook his head.
“You know the secret of working a room?”
“Tell me.”
“You have to be quick on your feet. If a joke bores ’em, head off into a dance. If they don’t like dancing, try a little physical stuff on stage. A crowd isn’t just a bunch of people, it’s a single thing, and that single thing reacts as one person. You just have to find that vein and tap into it.”
“Why risk it?” McNab said. “You talk too much and people think you’re a liar. You talk too little and they think you have something to hide. Hell, Roscoe, you’re a fat man. You sweat. The jury will think you’re nervous.”
“That’s not what I was saying.”
“Sure it was.”
“That’s Zukor talking.”
“Did I say a goddamn thing about Al Zukor?”
“You don’t have to,” Roscoe said, plugging a fresh cigarette into his mouth and striking a match. “Zukor doesn’t think I’m able to take the stand. He thinks I’m a kid no matter how much money I’ve made that bastard.”
“Roscoe,” Minta said.
Ma broke off a piece of bread and chewed with her toothless mouth.
“Zukor is a Jew bastard,” Roscoe said, breaking a match and starting a new one. “I said it. Have I heard from him once since I left Los Angeles? He’s waiting to see how this plays out. I think he wants me locked in San Quentin. That way he can wiggle out of that contract.”
A waiter opened the curtain to the back booth and brought the table a bottle of white wine and three bowls of soup, a loaf of sourdough. Roscoe poured wine for Minta and McNab. Ma didn’t drink. The soup was hot and steaming and perfect on a cold, foggy day. He could stay here all afternoon, enjoy lunch, enjoy dessert and coffee, smoke a bit, tell a few jokes, sing a few songs. Every time he walked into the hall, he felt like a goddamn circus elephant paraded down Main Street.
“Who do you work for?” Roscoe said, pointing the end of his spoon at McNab.
McNab leaned back in the booth and took in Roscoe, as if seeing him for the first time. His craggy old face split into a smile, “I work for myself.”
“You work for Paramount.”
“I do what’s best for the client,” McNab said. The waiter came over and tucked a towel around McNab’s neck, setting a big bowl of steaming mussels and sea creatures in front of him. The crusty old lawyer ate with beautiful manners, dipping the spoon away from him, very little splattered on the linen.
“Well?” Roscoe said.
“A jury isn’t vaudeville, Roscoe,” he said. “It can be a mob.”
“I can make ’em love me,” Roscoe said. “They haven’t taken that away from me, have they?”
McNab looked up from the soup and over at Minta and then over to toothless Ma and there was a steady silence in the booth, the sounds of the restaurant carrying on, until they’d finished eating and made their way back to court. Roscoe wasn
’t two steps outside when someone tapped him on the shoulder and called his name. At first he didn’t place the rail-thin man, maybe the thinnest man he’d ever seen, but then he knew it was the Pinkerton he’d met down south.
McNab stood beside Roscoe and stared at the young detective.