Devil's Garden (21 page)

“So how do we know who’s Lawrence?” Sam asked.

“I know a fella who knows a fella.”

“And that fella’s gonna give you the nod.”

“Right.”

“Shouldn’t we go inside?”

“You’re a puzzle, Pinkerton.”

“How so?”

“You’re a lunger, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“Still running down dank alleys and climbing fire escapes and beating the truth out of stoolies.”

“I don’t run so much.”

“And you wear a ring.”

“I do.”

“And you have a wife.”

“She goes with the ring.”

“Children?”

“One on the way.”

Daisy nodded, both hands placed on the wooden steering wheel, watching the line of cars move in a slow, delicate dance like the mechanical turn of a carousel. There was the opening of the car door, a hand for the lady, and the slick greasing of the palm. Sam rubbed his jaw, finding himself thirsty, and balanced his hat on his knee. He looked over at Daisy, in her silk dress and soft turban, clenching that tight little jaw. She’d changed into a dress with a fur collar and the warm wind made the fur ruffle as if it were alive.

“How ’bout you?” Sam asked.

Daisy kept watching the door and the carousel movement, and Sam noted that she saw it all in the exact same way. “How ’bout let’s have a drink?”

“Don’t you find that hypocritical?” he asked.

“I call it an agent’s job to not make themselves known. Hell, it’s in the manual.”

“Dry agents come with a manual?”

“On some things.”

“And the rest?”

“The rest is all intuition, Pinkerton. Don’t you ever find yourself in a situation that ain’t according to Hoyle and you have to just use the noodle?”

The Cocoanut Grove was a big bubble of jazz and smoke and cocktails and laughter. Stars twinkled in a plaster-domed sky. There were twenty-foot palm trees that looked so real, Sam had to reach out and touch them to check his eyes—a woman at the bar said they’d been brought straight from the set of
The Sheik
. Fat paper lanterns hung from the drooping fronds and brightly colored tents had been set up all over the nightclub, where people smoked and laughed, walking in and out of silky floating curtains like a hazy, smoky dream. Women lounged on large pillows and danced on tables, a paper moon going down over a painted lake far on the wall, a horizon that made you feel unsteady, almost as if you could drown yourself in it if you stared long enough. And there was Daisy at a bar with a bartender dressed as a sultan, and Sam watched the drape of her hair down the reach of her long neck and the elegant placement of her thin arms across the bar, and she turned to Sam and smiled with that red mouth.

And Sam smiled back.

A mass of people separated them, but Sam could see through them to Daisy, the way your eyes can make out shapes and patterns of trees and roads through the fog. There was laughter and dancing and jazz and the sound of a trumpet.

He walked toward her.

Daisy put her finger to her nose and sloughed it off, turning to a skinny fella in a black suit bopping his way though the party. Sam could not see the man’s face but noted the way his shoulder blades cut up into the material of his jacket and the long droop of the neck. He walked with speed—deliberate yet loose and disjointed.

Sam followed him out onto the hill and then lost him in the mass of a hundred machines, finding him again as he piled into a Studebaker Big Six, Sam knowing it was a Studebaker by the insignia as it shot past close enough to feel the engine’s heat on his face.

When he turned, there was the Hupmobile idling next to him.

“Do I need to spell it out for you?” Daisy asked.

16

T
he Studebaker drove east, back through downtown, with its flashing signs and jostling streetcars, and joined up with Valley Boulevard until there was nothing but pasture and produce trucks and lonesome gas stations and the odd farmhouse or seed store. Daisy hung back a quarter mile, watching the Big Six’s courtesy lamp on the driver’s side like a beacon. Sam commented on the lamp being a great thing and Daisy shot back that it didn’t really matter because there was nothing else out here besides farmers and cows and orange trees. The hills were silver and rolling in the moonlight, the wind coming through the Hupmobile’s cab warm on Sam’s face, the dashboard glowing under the instrument panel and showing off Daisy’s lean legs as she mashed the accelerator when the Studebaker would disappear around another lone turn.

VISIT GAY’S LION FARM read the billboard. At El Monte on Valley Boulevard.

“You don’t think?” Sam asked.

“I don’t like animals.”

The Studebaker rolled off a little access road and Daisy slowed to a near stop. There was a dusty lot and a broad stucco entrance bragging about the place being
Internationally Famous
, and from his vantage point Sam could see the figure of the lean man walk through the gates and disappear. Daisy followed, parked, and killed the engine. The only other machine in the lot besides the Hupmobile and the Big Six was a long flatbed truck with slatted sides.

Flies buzzed in the back of the truck, and in the moonlight Sam could see rancid meat and blood.

The entrance gate was open, and they followed the man down a winding path of crushed pebbles. Signs to the lion cages were fashioned from bamboo and oak trees canopied the path, past small red barns and little kiosks that sold postcards and stuffed lions and gum and cigarettes. They were well down the path when they heard the first scream.

“What’s that?”

“The King of the Beasts,” Sam said.

“They keep ’em locked up, don’t they?”

“One would hope.”

There were more screams and roars—definitely roars—and Daisy stepped back from the lead to take a stride beside Sam, too worried to lead but too proud to follow. The trees looked old, spared from the bulldozer and plow, and it all seemed natural and prehistoric in the moonlight.

They stopped and listened for steps but only heard the screams until the screams seemed to be coming from all around them. It was a great ring, a chain-link circle as wide around as a baseball field, at least thirty feet high, with bleachers and long nets strung from what looked like telephone poles.

“Where are they?” she whispered.

“I don’t see ’em.”

“You see him?”

“I don’t,” Sam said.

“This was a goddamn fool thing to do.”

They kept on the path, over a little bamboo bridge and toward a long red barn lit up with tiny white bulbs. Sam nearly ran into Daisy when she stopped and pulled him behind the large trunk of an oak. From the barn, an engine started, and soon another flatbed truck, identical to the one parked in front, came rambling down the path, breezing past their hiding place and slowing to an idle by the giant cage. The headlights lit up the center of the ring, and the long, lean man, Jack Lawrence, unlocked a gate and walked inside. Sam and Daisy stood watching at the narrow spot in the path well back from the idling truck.

They watched Lawrence squat on his haunches and walk backward with the edge of a tarp, the dust and gravel falling away and choking the night air. The beams of the headlights caught the dust as Lawrence emerged into the light and removed one large wooden beam and then another before disappearing for several moments down below and returning with a large crate. They could hear the bottles jostle and rattle against one another as he slid the crate into the truck and went back for more. On his third trip down into the hidden hole, Daisy walked down the path and into the headlight beams and locked the cage door.

Sam followed.

Soon Lawrence emerged with another flat of hooch and walked to the closed doors and looked puzzled, before he saw Daisy and asked, “What gives?”

Daisy twisted her knee inward and removed the pearl-handled .22 and aimed it through a diamond in the chain-link. “Got to hand it you.”

“Who are you?”

“Daisy Simpkins, federal dry agent.”

“This isn’t what you think.”

“What is it?”

“It’s mineral oil,” Lawrence said with a noticeable Australian accent.

“For the animals.”

“Sam, hold ’im.”

Sam walked up to the man, who was still hoisting the crate in his arm, and he pulled a gun and showed it. He winked at Lawrence.

“I didn’t do nothing.”

Sam smiled back.

“Hey,” Lawrence said. “What’s she doing? Hey!”

Sam heard the rusted bars and the metal gates swing open one after another. The cries of the lions had stopped, and as the animals filled the ring through their now-open chutes there was soft, contented purring. Lawrence dropped the hooch. The bottles cracked and broke, and Sam shook his head at the damn shame of it all.

“Keep the gun on him,” Daisy called out.

“Them animals will kill me,” Lawrence said.

He rattled the door and Sam squeezed the padlock with a tight click. The purring became more insistent, and in the headlights Sam noted one male, with a large, regal mane, and three females. The male hung back, his noticeable set of balls moving to and fro, while the females circled the bootlegger.

A long, trailing spot of wetness showed on Lawrence’s trousers.

“Tell us about Frisco,” Daisy said.

“It’s a nice town,” Lawrence said.

Daisy fired off the .22 at his feet. The cats growled.

“I’ll shoot you in the leg, sure as shit,” Daisy said. “You brought the booze to Arbuckle.”

The man held up his hands in the light. The truck continued to idle.

“We met at this garage,” Lawrence said. “This man opened his trunk and we loaded him down. I was paid and the man drove away.”

“Who was it?”

“His name was Hibbard.”

“First name?”

“I don’t know. Jesus, I don’t know.”

“Hibbard,” Daisy repeated. “The stuff you brought matched cases we took out of a joint called the Old Poodle Dog in Frisco. That jackass brandy came in the same bottles. The Scotch was bonded out of Canada.”

“So what?”

“You work for H. F. LaPeer.”

“Never heard of him,” Lawrence said.

“If those big cats smell a little blood, they’re gonna want a taste,” Daisy said.

“You’re crazy.”

“When’s LaPeer’s next shipment?”

One of the female lions sauntered over and ran herself between’s Lawrence’s legs, purring and growling. The male jumped from five feet away, knocking Lawrence flat on his back, his screams not unlike those of a little girl. The male straddled his chest, balls in Lawrence’s face, and yawned. Another female licked at the man’s hand while yet another sniffed at his crotch.

“I can find out.”

“What’s that?”

In a whisper, “I can find out. I can find out. I can find out.”

“And what about the Arbuckle party?”

“It’s all I know. Jesus, God. Holy hell. Mother Mary.”

“What do you think?” Daisy asked.

“I think the man has been properly motivated,” Sam said.

ROSCOE FOUND FREDDIE FISHBACK at the Cocoanut Grove bar at midnight, talking to a barmaid wearing a beaded headdress and veil, a golden bodice, and a long flowing skirt. She was laughing at one of his jokes and Freddie was laughing, too, until he saw the shadow of Roscoe over him and his smile simplified into something more like Freddie, droll and impersonal, and he offered his hand.

Roscoe looked at his hand as if it were a dead mackerel.

Freddie shrugged and puffed on his cigaratte.

The girl in the Arabian getup looked to Roscoe and bit her lip before moving on back down the bar. People were whispering and pointing, and Roscoe didn’t give a good goddamn.

“You look very sharp,” Freddie said, his Romanian accent more pronounced. He wore a tuxedo. He was very dark, with black hair and eyes. The kind of guy with a heavy brow and thick fur on his hands.

“Your housekeeper said you were in New York.”

Freddie took a sip of his cocktail and said, “She was wrong.”

“I got ditched when you stepped off the
Harvard
,” Roscoe said. “I pulled my Pierce off the ship and waited for you to load your bags.”

“I don’t like to wait. Do you mind, Roscoe? People are staring.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

Freddie turned back to the bar. Roscoe touched his shoulder.

“Don’t be a stupid man,” Freddie said and raised his eyebrows. “The papers?”

Freddie ordered another drink, a cocktail served in a champagne glass with a cherry. “The soldiers made this up during the war,” Freddie said. “Call it a French 75. Like the big guns. How ’bout a drink? We drink and we forget, okay?”

“How ’bout I shove that champagne glass up your ass?”

“Why not a Coke bottle?”

Roscoe gripped Freddie by the front of his tuxedo shirt and twisted him into his face. He ground his teeth so hard, he could hear them grind and pop deep into his jaw.

“I only wanted to ask you a question,” Roscoe said. He could feel a barman or a doorman or someone’s hands on his arm. “Just a question.”

Freddie looked at him. The champagne cocktail had rolled from his fingers onto the bar, the thin glass breaking into shards. Freddie stared at him and breathed, a little smile on his lips.

“Why’d you bring her there? Why Virginia? You knew, didn’t you?” Freddie’s smile widened.

“You goddamn son of a bitch.”

SAM AND DAISY stayed up that night, finding an Owl drugstore downtown just like the one at the bottom of the Flood Building. Daisy ordered eggs. Sam ordered toast. They both had coffee and cigarettes, which was a fine thing to Sam at four a.m. when you were too tired to sleep.

“What’s it all about, Sam?” she asked.

“A good shot of rye and a warm bed.”

“You don’t let anyone get in there, do you?”

“In where?”

She moved her knuckles over to his forehead and lightly knocked. “What about you, sister?”

She sipped her coffee, elbows on the lunch counter, watching the fat man at the grill burning up a steak, bacon, and some home fries. Outside, a streetcar zipped past, littering electric sparks in the leftover night.

“You got a man?”

“Nope.”

“Family?”