Devil's Garden (31 page)

“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 trade, 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

D
oes 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.

“He’s all right,” Minta said, waiting for her mother to get in the limousine and then following her. “He’s with the Pinkertons.”

McNab looked at his gold timepiece and crawled into the limousine and slammed the door. “Hurry up with it.”

Roscoe buttoned his jacket and pulled his hands into some leather gloves. “What a shit day.”

“What’s your connection to William Randolph Hearst?” the Pinkerton asked.

Roscoe shook his head.

“You know him?”

“I met the man once,” Roscoe said. “He’s been giving me a hell of a trashing in the papers, but that’s no secret.”

“He have a reason?”

“He’s an asshole. You need much else?”

“He works with Paramount?”

“He gets Paramount distribution.”

“And they get Hearst press?”

“Something like that.”

“Then why’s he laying into you, Roscoe?”

Roscoe shook his head again but felt himself sweat underneath the coat.

He tried to keep a light smile and shook the detective’s hand warmly. “I got to go, Pinkerton. Judge Louderback doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

The detective just stood there, watching him, waiting for an answer.

But instead, Roscoe gave him an old pat on the back and climbed in the limousine, the door barely closing before the big machine rolled up the hill and toward Portsmouth Square. Roscoe took a deep breath, feeling more trapped than ever, thinking of what it must be like to be swimming under a sheet of ice.

WHEN Dr. RUMWELL saw Maude sitting in his parlor having tea with his wife, he looked as if he’d just shit his drawers. His little mustache, the one that looked like he dyed it with boot polish, twitched under his nose and his eyelids fluttered as he removed his hat and black overcoat, leaving his well-worn medical bag by the door.

“Mrs. Delmont is such good company,” his wife said, laughing. “So charming.”

Rumwell just stood in the doorframe staring down at Maude, who crossed her legs and took another cookie his wife had offered. She sipped some tea and smiled up at Rumwell from the lip of the cup.

“Won’t you sit down?” Maude asked him.

He shook his head. He’d begun to perspire at the brow.

“Darling,” his wife said, “Mrs. Delmont has been waiting on you for more than an hour.”

“She may see me during office hours.”

“But I tried to call the clinic,” Maude said. “They told me you wouldn’t see me.”

“Quite right.”

Rummy’s wife looked shocked and put down her tea. She was the kind of frail woman who wore going-out clothes around the house, got the vapors, and would invite some complete stranger into her little velvet parlor and serve cookies and tea. Her husband’s manners were making her physically ill.

“But, Doctor,” Maude said, “you remember that itch I have? You’ve treated it before.”

She smiled at him and took another bite of cookie. The frail wife left the room, the kitchen door swinging back and forth behind her, the woman muttering something about dinner burning on the stove. Rumwell looked as if he’d swallowed a turd.

“You must be going,” Rumwell said.

Maude stood and walked to him. He held out a hand as if she was some kind of leper and all that unease was making Maude pretty damn happy. She smiled at him, walking slow and swatting her giant hat from side to side and against her buttocks. “Come on, Rummy.”

“Not here.”

“I don’t believe you’d see me anywhere.”

“I will if you’d please leave.”

Maude turned from him to a little wooden cabinet and opened a glass door. She pulled out a little porcelain curio of a kitten and held it in the palm of her hand, staring at it, appraising it. “Darling.”

“I will ring you at the Palace.”

“I’m not at the Palace.”

“I thought you were getting the royal treatment.” He said it snotty. “It was in all the newspapers.”

“Yeah, I was getting the treatment all right, out on my ass.”

“What do you want?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“You must be joking.”

Maude shook her head and said, “Nope.” She reached back into the glass cabinet and found another little figure, this one of a little girl holding a basket of flowers. She twirled it up in the failing light coming from the front door and smiled. “Doesn’t this look like Virginia?”

Rumwell grabbed her arm and his fingers were tight and strong, but he couldn’t budge her. She smiled at him. “Do you remember Mrs. Spreckles’s party? You took me from behind in the garden. Like some kind of animal. We’ve had so many adventures. I’ve brought you so much business.”