by Mary Miley
A stocky, dark-haired woman with a splotchy rash on her cheeks opened the door. There on her porch she saw a figure dressed in a smocked, sky-blue dress partially covered by an overcoat. On her head she wore a Tam o’ Shanter that looked as if someone had knitted it in a valiant attempt to use up all the remnants of yarn in their sewing basket.
‘Yes?’ she said, not rudely, but clearly irritated to have been disturbed by this unfamiliar young person.
‘Oh. Excuse me, I must have come to the wrong house in the dark.’ The girl stepped back a few feet, looked up at the house, and frowned in confusion. ‘No, this is right. I’ve come to see Kit Riley. Is she here?’
‘There’s no one here by that name,’ said the woman, and she started to close the door, when the girl spoke up again.
‘I was here just two weeks ago, and she was here then. I’m sure this is the right house.’
‘Well, hon, it probably is, but the Provenzanos live here now. We just moved in.’
‘When?’
‘When what?’
‘When did you move in?’
‘Almost three weeks ago, so you couldn’t have been here two weeks ago.’
‘It seemed like two weeks ago. I guess it was more than that. Well, I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs Provenzano, but can you tell me where the Rileys moved to? My friend borrowed two books from me, and I came to get them back. She didn’t say anything about moving when I saw her last.’
The woman softened a little. ‘I don’t know the Rileys, so I can’t say where they went. Sorry.’
‘Were there any books left here?’
A deep voice with a heavy Italian flavor called from inside the house, ‘Isobel, what the hell’s going on? I’m hungry!’
‘Just a neighbor girl, Georgio. I’ll be right there,’ she screeched, then to the girl, she said, ‘No, there was nothing at all left here when we moved in on November third. Every room was empty. Now, I’m sorry about your books, hon, but that’s all I can do for you.’ She closed the door and clicked off the porch light.
I retraced my steps until I turned the corner where Carl had parked the police motorcar. He was pacing beside it like a nervous father waiting for his unchaperoned daughter to come home after a party.
‘How did it go?’ he asked.
Without answering, I climbed into the car. No need advertising our business to the world. You never knew who was listening beside an open window.
‘Bingo,’ I said, once he was sitting next to me. ‘The Georgio Provenzanos have lived there for nearly three weeks. Which means our friend Iron Man cleared out the house shortly after Rose Ann did a flit.’
‘Which means he knew she wasn’t coming back,’ he said, starting the motor and pulling away from the curb.
‘Which means he had no intention of finding her and bringing her home. He knew she was gone. He must have been furious. Here’s how I see it: he knew she would be looking to support herself the only way she knew how – with her voice – so he put out the word to every speakeasy and cabaret on the west coast to contact him if Rose Ann came looking for work.’
‘So he tracked her to San Diego and tried to get her to come back—’
‘I don’t think so. I doubt he wanted her back at that point. He’d have been furious. Humiliated. I think he wanted her dead. He wanted revenge.’
‘Hmmm. So he tracked her to San Diego and made her drink “smoke” to kill her.’
‘That’s my guess,’ I said.
‘Georgio Provenzano. Sounds very Italian.’
‘Like Ardizzone.’
Carl nodded. ‘No sense in letting a good house go to waste. Betcha Iron Man junked Rose Ann’s things and moved in one of his trusted paisanos.’ As I nodded my agreement, he made a right-hand turn and headed back toward Hollywood.
I was reading in bed later that night when the door to my room opened. I knew who it was before I saw her face peering around the door – anyone else would have knocked. Without waiting for an invitation, she came in and sat at the end of my bed, folding her skinny legs beneath her, Indian-style. I guessed she wanted to talk about her mother or maybe Mrs Reynolds. I was wrong.
She stared at me in a vaguely hostile way, as if I had interrupted her and not the other way around.
‘What is it, Kit?’ I asked, finally.
‘You’re moving,’ she began, in her oddly-modulated voice.
‘So are you. So is Helen and Myrna. We’ll still see each other. We’ll get together for holidays and reunions. No one will be far away, except Helen.’
‘Why did you want my clothes?’
‘I needed to look young so I could ask some questions without looking suspicious. I can’t tell you more than that. Sorry.’
‘Did it work?’
I smiled. ‘Yes, it did. Thanks for your help.’
‘I have more help. I know why your friend David can’t get out of jail.’
‘Really?’ I said, setting aside my book. I realized the girl had been present during some of the conversations between Mike Allenby and me, so she was aware of David’s trial and sentence. It was sweet of her to give thought to his case, so I gave her my full attention, as if I expected to hear something significant.
‘I saw men talking about someone named David a few weeks ago.’ She scrunched up her face and corrected herself, ‘No, longer ago than that. I didn’t know it was your David. Now I know. Some government men and Joe’s men made a deal to get rid of him. Joe’s men wanted to kill him, but the government men said no, let us have a trial and put him in prison so we look good, like we’re fighting bootleggers, and you get rid of him that way.’
Our roles had reversed. Now it was I who stared at her in wide-eyed silence, unable to speak. Finally Kit took pity on me and explained further.
‘That’s why the bribes weren’t working for that lawyer to get David bail,’ she continued, patient as a teacher with a dull pupil. ‘It was them that told the judge about the bribed jury so he got a different jury.’
‘H-how could you possibly know this?’
She gave a modest shrug. ‘Some things I read in the newspaper. Most I saw at our house when men came there to meet Joe. Everyone thinks I’m deaf and dumb, and that deaf people are simps, and I’m just eleven, so I sit in the corner of the room when the men come and draw their faces and watch their lips. I know lots of things.’
‘Who – what men?’
‘Joe’s men. The bootleggers. You know Joe Ardy Zone. He’s the bootleg boss of the whole city.’
And her mother was his mistress. ‘I know that, but … he lived with you?’ I asked, aghast.
She shook her head in disgust at my slow uptake. ‘Of course not. He’s married. He got Ma a nice house and came to visit when he wanted to. Lots of times he would meet men at our house ’cause he didn’t want them at his real house and ’cause it was nicer than his office.’
‘And … and government men came there too? Who are they? Do you mean federal prohibition agents?’
‘Yeah, I guess. They were getting pushed around by some lady boss in Washington they hated.’
‘Mabel Willebrandt?’ I asked, thinking of President Coolidge’s much-loathed Assistant Attorney General, a woman who had the audacity to take her job seriously. She vigorously prosecuted thousands of prohibition cases every year to enforce the Volstead Act. Some thought she was a hero, but not everyone.
Kit shrugged. The name didn’t seem to register.
I continued. ‘I’ve read about her in the papers. She likes to fire men who don’t have good records putting bootleggers in prison.’
‘That’s her, then. These government men said a big win would get her off their backs. They don’t like women telling men what to do. They do what Joe tells them because he pays them lots of money, lots more than the government, so that’s how they knew Joe’s men wanted to kill David.’
‘But … but,’ I sputtered. ‘Why would Joe Ardizzone want to kill David?’
Another shrug from Kit.
By now my b
rain was grinding gears. ‘It’s because he sells whiskey in his drug stores, isn’t it? His is medicinal whiskey, so it’s legal. And their whiskey isn’t. David must have been cutting into their business. But …’ I paused, confused. Thousands of drug stores all over the country sold legal, medicinal alcohol without interference from the local gangsters – or the local gangsters owned the drug stores. What was it that made David and his stores a particular target?
The brand of whiskey. Old Grand-Dad. David had thousands of cases of the top-shelf hooch, so much that it was drawing too many people into his drug stores, not because it was a legal product, per se, but because they preferred the real McCoy to the lousy bathtub gin at the speakeasies.
‘Legal, not legal. They don’t care. Only about money. Get it?’
I got it. In crashing Technicolor, I got it. David had undercut sales for southern California’s biggest crime boss, ‘Iron Man’ Ardizzone. Ironically, I remembered David telling me once that he would never try to muscle into the territory of an existing gang, because he understood the likely consequences. He must have thought selling legal whiskey wouldn’t interfere with the gang’s regular bootleg business – a logical, if somewhat risky, assumption. He’d been caught up in a collaboration between gangsters who needed to rid themselves of a rival and federal agents who needed to look effective. Oddly enough, I was grateful Mabel Willebrandt had browbeaten her agents into this high-profile prosecution, because it had saved David’s life. Without her, the competition would have ended with a bullet in his brain.
I understood now why Allenby couldn’t get his appeals to work. Why no one in the governor’s office returned his telephone calls. Everyone had been warned, either by the gangsters or by the federal agents, to not interfere with David’s case.
And I understood something else. David Carr was not going to get out of prison early, no matter how angelic his conduct behind bars. No appeal, no parole, no visitors, no time off for good behavior. He would serve the entire three and a half years – probably longer if they could figure out a way to add time on some trumped-up charge – and when he came out – if he came out – he would be a changed man.
Thank heavens we girls could afford a telephone! The past few weeks had seen me burning up the wires. I put a call through to Mike Allenby at once, expecting him to be elated to learn the truth behind his logjam. I blurted out the basics and asked him to stop by my house or to meet me someplace so I could fill in the details and discuss our next move. To my astonishment, he refused.
‘Too busy. Just tell me everything now.’
‘Well, it’s complicated,’ I began. ‘I’ve learned the reason you couldn’t get David off was because the federal agents were working with “Iron Man” Ardizzone to put David away. The agents are in the pay of the Ardizzone gang. The gangsters didn’t like David’s medicinal whiskey competing with their bathtub hooch, so Ardizzone was going to have him killed until the feds convinced him to let them put him behind bars in a big win so they could look good with their lady boss in Washington, Mabel Willebrandt.’
‘The Assistant Attorney General. Yeah, yeah, everyone’s heard of her. A real battleax. Where did you get this?’
‘Someone overheard them talking about it. I can’t say who.’
‘Yeah, well, don’t say who, and keep it to yourself too. If this got out, you and your snitch would be dead. And the story rings true. Top-notch, bonded whiskey is going to cut into the sales of the crap the bad boys peddle. And Iron Man has bought his own distillery, so now he’s both buyer and seller in the great game we all play. Seems Mr David Carr was a threat on more than one front. So what do you want me to do?’
‘What do you mean, what? Now you know the federal agents are in bed with the bootleggers. Doesn’t that give you some leverage in your appeals or in getting David’s sentence reduced? What about a parole now?’
He heaved a long sigh. ‘Look, sweetheart honey. Your boy David is lucky to be alive. He might not be if I got him out.’
‘Get him out, and he’ll leave town.’
Another sigh. ‘There’s nothing I can do with your information, see? Everyone in the chain – judges, clerks, prison officials, whoever – everyone on both sides is being bribed or threatened by either Iron Man or by the feds. No one’s going to stick his neck out on this one. You need to come to grips with the cold, hard fact that your boy is going to stay where he is until his sentence runs out. He’s stuck. Be glad it’s not forever. But when he does get out, please remember that he’ll need to leave Los Angeles within the hour or he’ll find himself in an even smaller cell six feet under.’
‘But—’
‘Okay, listen. Let this blow over, and I’ll look into the situation again in a year or so. Maybe the players will have changed, and we can do something. But we can’t do anything now. Okay?’
I swallowed the lump of anger and tears that clogged my throat. ‘Can I see him?’
‘Maybe in a few months. We’ll try then.’
‘Can you see him?’
‘Sure. I’ll be going to the prison tomorrow to see another client. I can see Carr then too. You want me to take him a message?’
‘Yes, please. Tell him I’ve decided to move into his house, like he wanted.’
‘Good girl. That’ll make him happy.’
‘Tell him I got his message and will make every effort to take care of his belongings. Got that?’
‘Sure.’
‘Repeat it to me, to make sure.’
‘You got his message and will make every effort to take care of his belongings. That it?’
‘That’s it.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Turns out I didn’t move into David’s house the next day after all. Tuesday found me on a crowded northbound train to San Francisco and, instead of sleeping in David’s bed on Tuesday night, I was at my grandmother’s house in Pacific Heights, where I had stayed last year after the Oregon impersonation swindle went wrong. As I sipped raspberry cordial in her very Victorian parlor in front of all the photographs of my father’s family, I poured the story of my investigations into her discerning ears.
‘… and so early this morning I got a telephone call from Barbara Petrovitch, the widow who’d invited me to dinner Monday night. She wanted to tell me the Western Union boy had delivered a telegram during their dinner. I could tell by her voice she blamed me for not being there when he came, but I was with Carl Delaney investigating Kit’s mother’s death. Anyway, this telegram was the only response Barbara has had thus far from the obituary Carl placed in Serbian-language newspapers across the country. We were hoping some pals of Joe Petrovitch would notice an obituary about him and maybe lead us to some clues about who would want to kill him and why.’
I paused as she refilled my cordial glass, took a sip, and continued my story. ‘The telegram was from a man named Paul Pavlovitch in San Francisco. It didn’t say much. He merely sent his condolences to the widow and said he had known Joe years ago in Serbia. That’s all. I telephoned the police station to let Carl know I was going to San Francisco to find Pavlovitch, but he wasn’t there. They’ll give him the message when he calls in. I thought he might want to come up here with me, but honestly, it isn’t worth his time, and I told him so in my message. All I’m going to do is hunt up this Pavlovitch fella and ask him a few questions – and warn him that someone’s shooting certain Serbian men who served in their military before the Great War.’
Grandmother listened intently, absorbing details like a dry sponge soaking up water, her shrewd eyes fixed on my face, her hands clasped in her lap. Not for the first time, I wondered how old she was. I would never have dared ask, but that didn’t prevent me from adding twenty to the approximate age of my detestable Uncle Oliver, her eldest, which let me peg her at around eighty.
Until last year, I hadn’t known I had any relatives at all, and their discovery still amazed me. Having blood relations provided a sense of belonging that tethered me to the present in a way I hadn’t realized I�
�d lacked and gave me confidence about the future. Relatives meant security. No matter what horrible turn life took, there was someone who cared about me, someone who would stand by me to the best of her ability. When I’d needed a place to recuperate from a broken leg, Grandmother had taken me into her house for two whole months, using the time to stuff my head so full of Beckett family history that I could almost forget I’d never actually known my father or his people. Others had grandmothers who were sweet and soft and sang them lullabies. My grandmother suffered no fools and took no prisoners. I adored her.
Steadying herself with an ivory-handled cane, Grandmother made her way to her desk where her telephone sat. She pulled a city directory out of the top drawer and, without comment, handed it to me.
Flipping to the Ps, I ran my finger down the list of names and addresses. ‘Pavlovitch, Paul. Here he is! What does “mtrmn” mean?’
‘Motorman,’ she said. ‘It means he’s a gripman on one of the cable car lines.’ My blank look brought a slight crease to her brow. ‘Come now, Jessie, you’ve ridden the cable cars. You’ve surely noticed that each car has two men, a gripman and a conductor. The gripman is the main brakeman; the conductor handles the money and the passengers.’
‘I see. Here’s his address. I’ll go there first thing tomorrow.’ I gave a great yawn. ‘Meanwhile, I’m bushed.’
The twelve-hour train trip had left my muscles crying for release. With Douglas Fairbanks no longer fronting first-class tickets, I was back where I belonged – in a thirteen-dollar seat in a crowded, second-class car. The Daylight Limited traveled the four hundred miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco without a single stop, but there was only one of them a day, so I was lucky to get a seat at all. This good fortune did not prevent me from grousing about wailing infants, rambunctious children, and the quarrelsome couple behind me who, had they been on stage, could have been heard in the highest balcony. Fortunately, I’d snagged a window seat on the left-hand side so I could lose myself in the spectacular coastal scenery.
‘If you are no longer working for Mr Fairbanks, why do you continue to pursue the Serb murder investigation?’ Grandmother asked tartly, ignoring my attempt to escape to my bedroom.