Devil's Garden (11 page)

“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

S
am 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 dried 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.

“I’ll suck it for two bits,” she said. The bar was dark and filled with red light and the smell of gasoline and urine.

Sam shook her away. In the long mirror, he watched as Phil Haultain walked into the room and took off his hat, as if this was the kind of place that demanded hat removal. Another girl approached Phil, and Sam smiled as he watched Phil’s eyes grow big at the offer. Sam was pretty sure he read the boy’s mouth saying, “Ma’am?”

The boy took a seat at a table near the piano player. The girl stayed and took purchase on his knee.

Sam rested his head into his hands. It was past one o’clock in the morning and for a moment he lost his place in time. Sometimes his mind played tricks like that when he drank. He could be in Baltimore or Philly or a mining camp in Montana or on the wharves in Seattle or on his grandfather’s farm, knee-deep in tobacco, walking endless rows as a summer sun stood red and strong to the west.

He asked for another drink, and in his mind he stood on a dock holding a shotgun in his arms as raggedy men tried to reach for him through fence posts, spitting at him and threatening to rip out his throat. The men wore torn rags, their bodies like skeletons. And then he broke away, hearing calliope music at the edge of a county fair, crushing a cigarette with the edge of his boot and staring up at the brightly lit Ferris wheel that had been boosted from back east.

And then he was back looking at the circle of the glass in his hand.

Sam knew he couldn’t return home by morning or else he’d risk Jose knowing he had it on him and what he was doing to his lungs and going against the cure he’d learned from her at Cushman.

The giant black man poured another shot of rye and Sam dished out another quarter, and he sat and he waited and exchanged a quick glance with Haultain, who now had another girl on his knee, and he watched as the girls worked him and bargained. Haultain was young but good at playing the rube.

They played around like that until two, when Rumwell came out from a back room. Even slightly drunk, Sam noticed the man was still put together just so in that boiled shirt and suit and bowler hat. He walked to the bar and moved against Sam, never glancing across at him, and Sam kept his head down and his eyes down as the gigantic negro reached down into his breast and pulled out a thick wad of cash and laid it down on the bar across from Rumwell, and Rumwell, not so much as looking at the black man, counted out the money in his hand and then tucked it into a fat wallet in his breast pocket, and, carrying his brown medical bag, walked briskly out of the bar and onto the cobblestones. Sam turned but found Phil already gone. Following, he clicked open his pocket watch, knowing he had hours to kill before daylight and getting home to Jose and acting like he gave a damn if he lived or didn’t.

But he knew he probably wouldn’t reach another six months, and the filthy trade he’d been taught by Jimmy Wright might just let him give a few bucks to Jose and the child and, by the grace of God, in a few years they’d forget him like smoke in the wind. Sam had thoughts like these as he wandered in and out of the bars of the Barbary, his lungs feeling squeezed and wrung out, before collapsing into a coughing fit in the great arms of a heiferlike woman with big painted blue eyes who thought he was the most humorous man she’d ever met.

Her breasts felt like great pillows.

“SO THE GIRL CHANGED HER STORY? ” Mr. Hearst asked the next morning.

“She said that was never her story.”

“But the assistant D.A.—what’s his name, Pisser?”

“U’ren, sir.”

“So ole U-rine is saying the girl was bribed.”

“I don’t know what Mr. U’ren is saying, but it looks like the girl was coerced into giving the statement. Miss Prevon-Prevost was arrested the other night at that dry raid at the Old Poodle Dog.”

“I read the story.”

“Yes, sir.”

The reporter, whatever his name was, seemed to be having a hard time standing there with his tablet in his hand and ink on his fingers, waiting for Mr. Hearst to spell out the story for him. Or maybe it was because Hearst was wearing war paint and an actual Indian headdress that had belonged to Sitting Bull.

Hearst took off the headdress, much to the disappointment of his six-year-old twin boys, who shot another arrow from the top floor of the Hearst Building out onto Market Street.

Hearst leaned into his desk and jotted out some notes. “Randolph, Elbert: Settle.”

The boys, dressed in identical blue Eton suits with knickers, looked at each other and sat down on a short couch, arms crossed over their chests and not saying a word.

“Can we get to the girl?”

“No one can find her. U’ren and Judge Brady put her somewhere. That other showgirl, Miss Blake, has disappeared all together.”

“What about this Delmont woman?”

“She’s sticking with the story that Virginia Rappe told her that Arbuckle had crushed her.”

“Wasn’t enough to get murder with the grand jury. What’s Judge Brady saying about manslaughter?”

“He says he’s looking for a second opinion in police court.”

“Will that work?”

The reporter shrugged. “If the police judge agrees, he can still try Fatty for murder.”

“What about this other woman?”

“She’s waiting outside, sir. That’s who I wanted you to meet.”

“Would you like a turkey leg?” Hearst said, pulling a big drumstick off a china plate and holding it out to the skinny young man. The young reporter shook his head and walked from the room, returning seconds later with the homeliest woman Hearst had ever seen. She looked like Buster Brown as an old unkempt man.

“This is Nurse Cumberland.”

“Good God,” Hearst said, and looked to his sons with wide eyes. Randolph whispered to Elbert, and the boys giggled from the little couch.