Devil's Garden (12 page)

Hearst said, “Settle.”

“Miss Cumberland attended Miss Rappe at the St. Francis.”

“And at Wakefield, too,” the woman said.

Hearst nodded and tried not to laugh at the woman’s haircut, recalling the lawsuit he had with the cartoonist who’d created Buster Brown and now wishing he could ring up the man. The boys continued to whisper and giggle, and Hearst lumbered out of his chair and plucked the bow and a few arrows from their hands. “Boys.”

“Miss Cumberland, tell us your story,” he said, walking to the window and taking in Market Street and the final rolling slope down to the bay.

The woman looked to the young reporter and the young reporter looked to Hearst.

“Oh, of course,” Hearst said. “How much?”

“I don’t want to tell nothin’ but the truth, mind you.”

“And I assure you I’ll tell you my price when I know what your truth is worth.”

“Miss . . . Nurse Cumberland says that before Virginia Rappe died at Wakefield, she told her that she’d been dragged by Arbuckle, by the arm, into the back bedroom.”

“Is that true?”

“God’s truth, sir.”

“Have you been summoned by District Attorney Brady?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you given your story yet?”

“No, sir.”

Hearst set an arrow into the tiny wooden bow, war paint still on his face, and sighted a big boat pulling away from the Ferry Building, switching his sights to the tiny shape of a man hanging from the Ferry Building’s clock. A cleaner of some sort.

He let the arrow go and watched it sail until out of sight.

“Tear up the front page.”

“A TALLY WHACKER,” Maude Delmont said. “A man’s manhood.”

The women whispered to each other, dropping their spoons on the china plates and stopping that chattering altogether.

“And that is where the parrot landed?” asked Mrs. W. B. Hamilton, vice president of San Francisco’s Vigilant Committee.

“Yes, ma’am,” Maude Delmont said, ever so delicately stirring her tea in the great room of the Fairmont Hotel on the Wednesday after the girl had died. She took a little sip and a small bit of sugar cookie.

The two hundred or so women remained silent.

“Were these orgies common?” Mrs. Hamilton used a big voice, loud enough for all the women to hear. There was a stray cough, the light tinkling of a spoon, the shift of the chair, but in it all Maude Delmont had her audience.

“Yes,” she said. “A decent moral woman has no place in the film colony. I worked to sell magazine subscriptions to
Ladies’ Home Journal
. By the way, I will have subscription cards after I speak. But these parties were no places for a lady.”

“And they were nude at these orgies?”

“Completely,” Maude Delmont said. “At the party in question, that beast Arbuckle had taken offense with the parrot. The bird called him ‘Fatty,’ and nothing makes Arbuckle madder than to hear that. He sat there, mind you, in a very drunken state, arguing with the bird and calling it all kinds of foul names, words that would only be uttered in pool halls and houses of ill repute.”

My God. How awful.

“It was after he’d disrobed and slathered his whalelike hide with buckets of hot oil, to better lubricate himself and such orifices, when the bird took its revenge and swooped through the party, through the maze of nudity and sea of alcohol, to affix its talons on his man snake.”

Oh, my.

Two women fainted. Another woman choked on a delicate slice of coconut cake. A gigantic fat woman screamed.

“I don’t quite know how to say this . . .”

The Vigilant Committee members, the dozens of them all dressed in black with great round hats banded with trailing feathers, leaned in, making their folding chairs creak and groan. The room at the Fairmont was all brass and gold and crystal and china.

“. . . Arbuckle was making his man snake perform a rare Arabian dance as a man played a flute, as if charming the throb of his anatomy.”

More shrieks.

Police Chief Daniel O’Brien, the group’s special guest at the Fairmont, finally stood and asked Maude Delmont to take her seat, and said he had heard many stories about the film people down south. But he also said that he’d been assured by many high-ranking, moral, upstanding people that the Arbuckle types accounted for only a sliver of the artists who lived there.

“And in that spirit, I would like to introduce a man who has made grown-ups and children smile the world over,” Police Chief O’Brien said, sweeping his hand to a short man with a blunt cut of brown hair who wore a western shirt, leather chaps, and boots, “Broncho Billy.”

Maude Delmont rolled her eyes and asked the waiter for more cake. Big Kate Eisenhart leaned in close to her ear and whispered, “The nerve.”

Maude wiped her lips of icing.

Broncho Billy hitched a thumb in his chaps and hand-tooled belt and removed the big buckaroo hat from his head and held it to his heart. “May I lead you all in prayer?”

These women were the worst, a black-clad army of grim-faced suffragists, the kind Maude remembered in Kansas who’d march the town streets on a Saturday banging the old drum and causing the whole goddamn country to go dry. The leader of the group was a stout lady physician named Marina Bertola, who stood first and last after Broncho Billy finished up his prayer and promised the group to amass a posse if Arbuckle wasn’t brought to justice. As she spoke, the chandelier light refracted in her lenses, making her eyes disappear behind the glass, her eyes twin pools of ice.

“We have let our ardor cool down,”
Dr. Bertola said. “And for that reason we are all responsible in some measure for the conditions that bring about such outrageous affairs as the Arbuckle party. Our purpose is to secure enforcement of the law. We must be faithful to that purpose, not only in regard to the Arbuckle case but for the sake of the future.”

THE OLD MAN listened with great interest to Sam’s story about shadowing Dr. Rumwell into the Barbary the night before. He left out the part about getting blind drunk, stopping short of the payoff with the big negro and Haultain tailing Rumwell out of the bar.

“He got on a streetcar and headed back to his place on Lombard,” Haultain said.

“How long did you sit on the house?”

“Till this morning,” Haultain said. “He left the house for Wakefield. That’s where the boy came for me and I broke off the tail.”

“Get some sleep,” the Old Man said. “Roll back on the job tonight.”

“I’ll take him,” Sam said.

“You find that Blake girl.”

“Checked out of the Woodrow on Tuesday.”

“Just find her.”

“What do you make of this Rumwell making house calls to whores?”

“I’d say he’s a true philanthropist.”

Sam smiled. “He performed an illegal autopsy on the Rappe girl and may have disposed of some of her organs.”

The Old Man took off his gold spectacles, folded them, and tucked them into the pocket of his dress shirt. He wore a pin high and tight at his collar, and leaned onto the desk with his forearms. “That may be. But one problem at a time. Alice Blake is scared. The other little tart is under lock and key by the state. Alice is the only one who can set the story straight about that party. Did you see the afternoon papers? The Delmont woman is on a goddamn speaking tour.”

“Does Los Angeles have anything on her?”

“Nope. Someone’s on that.”

“The Blake girl,” Sam said.

“The Blake girl.”

“I’ll check back with the hotel and run down some people at Tait’s.”

“You feeling all right?” the Old Man asked.

“Peaches and cream.”

“You look like shit warmed over.”

“Thanks.”

“You need a break?”

“No.”

The Old Man looked at Sam a long while and then put his glasses back on and nodded. He didn’t add a good-bye or give a speech, only went back to his paperwork, sleeves rolled well above the ink, and expected Sam and Phil to find their way out.

9

S
am found Alice Blake two days later, on a Friday, living in a Sunset District row house with her mother. He’d spent a five spot on a phone number from a dancer at Tait’s and used a city directory at the office to find the address, borrowed a machine from a nearby garage, and had been sitting on the house since yesterday. There was a corner grocery up on Irving where he’d buy cigarettes and a sandwich with coffee and use the toilet and pay phone. Most of the houses on the street were brand-new, narrow, two-story jobs with stucco and tile roofs. He’d spotted a nice empty one, directly across from the mother’s house, where he slipped through a window and could make himself comfortable on an apple crate with field glasses. It was late afternoon when he saw a yellow cab pull up to the address and saw Alice Blake skip out to the street and get in back.

Five minutes later, Sam was behind the cab in his machine and trailing across the southern part of Golden Gate Park and then dipping down into the Castro, thinking she was headed back downtown but instead watching the cab slow in front of a theater. She got out, paid the cabbie, bought a ticket at the window, and slipped inside. Sam parked and followed.

The picture had already started and Sam had to adjust his eyes in the darkness. The theater was a fantasy palace filled with gilded Oriental and Moroccan designs, the latter being appropriate since the moving images were of sheiks and the desert and far-off places with camels. The ceiling was a night sky, complete with moving clouds and winking stars. The screen was fifty feet high, bordered by balconies and plush red curtains. The effect made you feel as if you were at an outdoor play.

Sam took a seat in a side row where he had a good view of Alice Blake’s profile while she ate popcorn and stared, openmouthed, at the moving images. A man sat in front of a great organ, as if he were playing liturgy instead of accompaning a woman outside a sheik’s tent, nervous but accepting the invitation to come inside. The flap to the tent was held open and Alice stopped eating. Her big brown eyes remained wide at the sight of the woman removing her pith helmet and belt and the sheik’s servants doing the same for him. Caston, the French valet in service of the sheik since his school days, closing the curtain.

Why have you brought me here?

The sheik, with a great smile, saying, Are you not woman enough to know?

Sam turned to the others staring at the huge screen, watching the man Valentino strut in his tent, standing twenty feet tall in the darkness, hands on his hips, robes flowing behind him. Sam leaned back into his seat. The women in the seats around him breathing so loud that it sounded like one great gasp of a chorus. The sheik pointed to his big bed and the woman tried to run. He caught her in his arms and made his eyes real big. The bigger he made his eyes, the more the women in the crowd gasped.

Sam lit a cigarette and settled in.

Alice Blake resumed with her popcorn.

I am not accustomed to having my order disobeyed.

And I’m not accustomed to obeying orders.

You will learn! said the sheik, banishing her from his tent.

It was almost as if you could put your hands up in front of you and touch them or perhaps walk into the screen and be a part of it all. The light of the screen brought a white sheen to the faces of the women, some holding a single red rose.

After a while, Sam fell asleep. When he came to, the picture still rolling and organ pumping, he looked over to Alice Blake and she was gone.

He left the darkness and pushed open into the light, the new world seeming almost unreal against the desert, and looked for the girl, twice checking her seat and the washroom, then walked out into the Castro. A half hour later, he returned to his machine to ride back to the Sunset District and sit on the house. He bought a loaf of bread and more cigarettes and a
Photoplay
magazine to read up on this woman he’d seen in
The Sheik
because somehow the woman seemed like someone he now knew.

When he moved up the landing to the vacant house, he heard a shift and found someone already sitting on the apple crate. The Prohibition agent from the Old Poodle Dog looked over at him, dropping his field glasses by her side, and pulled on a cigarette. She looked at Sam but didn’t smile. The street-light shone off the white blond hair peeking out from under a silk turban.

She turned, cocking a dark brow at him. “Sit down. I won’t bite.”

MAUDE DIDN’T SEE Al Semnacher, didn’t know he was following her, until he plopped down next to her on the cable car just before it started its jerky ride up Powell Street, past the St. Francis and Union Square and slowly up Nob Hill. Maude had to do a double take to make sure it was Al because the dumb son of a bitch didn’t say anything, just stared at the people climbing the hill as they glided by in the car, and even casually waved to an old Chinese woman selling persimmons from a corner. Maude shook her head and checked her watch, already ten minutes late.

In the narrow slit in the street, Maude could see the tension of the cable hoisting them all up the hill, the straining of tons of metal and flesh being brought to the top.

“I’m ready to negotiate,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw your picture in the paper. Cute, really. You with the Vigilant Committee and Harry Carey.”

“It was Broncho Billy.”

The cable car stopped and three different newsboys from the
Examiner
,
The Call
, and
Chronicle
climbed on like little monkeys scrambling down the row and hawking the latest news of Fatty. The boy from the
Examiner
shouted an exclusive: “Nurse Says Fatty Dragged Girl into Hotel Room.”

Maude paid the boy a nickel and looked at the ugly face of that woman who had attended to Virginia at Wakefield. She read the first few lines and shook her head.

“I told the police about the ice and about Fatty threatening to throw Virginia out the window,” Al whispered.

“He wanted to throw me out the window.”