Devil’s garden

10

Sam set the typewriter on the kitchen table and started hitting the keys while Jose reheated some Irish stew from the night before. The windows were open, letting out the hot air from the stove and the hot air in from Eddy Street, while Sam worked in his undershirt and smoked and hammered out a response to his latest reply from the United States Veterans’ Bureau. A Mr. Carter had curtly replied that Sam’s lung condition rated less than ten percent of a disability, to which Sam replied-in a very official tone-that that was absolutely incorrect, and he requested another evaluation, this time with a lung specialist.

“Mr. Carter again?” she asked.

“I’d like to meet this Mr. Carter,” Sam said. “Rotten bastard probably keeps a stack of denials on his desk with a big fat quill pen. Look at the flourish, the way he writes ‘Carter.’ ”

Sam ripped the paper from the black L. C. Smith, held it up to the bulb hanging in the kitchen, cigarette bobbing in his mouth, and read back through what he’d written. “Do you know how many veterans are illiterate or just yes-men and take the government’s word as the word of Christ? I read a story in the paper today about this man called Zero in New York who sells off jobless veterans at an auction.”

“Do you want bread?”

“Yes, please.”

“I mended your socks,” Jose said. “They’re hanging on the fire escape.”

Sam folded the letter and stuck it in an envelope.

He took a seat across from Jose at the little table, the typewriter he’d borrowed from the office pushed between them. She poured him some coffee, and they ate for a while, and it seemed to him that the stew she’d made from the butcher’s special was the sweetest meat he’d ever tasted.

“Do you ever wish you’d met an officer?” Sam said.

“I was gunning for a private,” Jose said. She smiled with her eyes, which were soft and blue, curly brown hair pulled from her strong, contented face with pins. She wore a housecoat with a soiled apron and no makeup.

“I’d love to take you out on the town.”

“Like this?”

“After the baby comes,” Sam said. “We’ll have dinner at the Cliff House and go dancing on the beach. Later on, we’ll find a speakeasy and dance till dawn.”

“A speakeasy?”

“Since when did you become a nun?”

“From a reformed Catholic, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Thanks for the stew.”

“I think it’s better on the second day.”

“Has the old woman asked for the rent?”

“Yes.”

“And did you stall her?”

“I said she’d have it Monday.”

Sam didn’t say anything, only fished with the spoon in the bowl.

They had four dishes, some borrowed silverware, the table, and a Murphy bed that folded down at night. A table fan swept the room from its spot in the corner.

“What’s new on the Rappe girl?”

Sam finished the bowl and set it aside. He lit another Fatima and leaned back in the chair, mismatched from the other three.

“Just like the papers said, a ruptured bladder.”

“Caused by external force.”

“That’s what they said in the grand jury and what they’re taking to police court.”

“Still doesn’t make sense,” Jose said. “No other injuries?”

“She had bruises on her arms,” Sam said. “But Dominguez can argue that she got those when they were moving her around.”

“Nothing about her vagina being torn or bruised?”

“Not that we know about.”

“And no broken bones.”

“No broken bones.”

“Do you realize the kind of weight that it would take to burst a woman’s bladder?”

“They do call him ‘Fatty.’ ”

Jose shook her head and reached for his pack of cigarettes. She smoked and stared out onto Eddy Street, looking through the bars of the fire escape lined with clothes she’d scrubbed in a galvanized pot.

“Unless the bladder was diseased.”

Sam looked up at her and mashed out his cigarette. He reached for more coffee.

“The attending doctor ordered an autopsy immediately after the girl died.”

“And?” Jose said.

“After,” Sam said, “he had several of her organs destroyed. Including the bladder.”

“What do you know about this girl’s past?”

“What you read,” Sam said. “She was an angel plucked from heaven to remain a virgin until Arbuckle met her.”

“You know many thirty-year-old virgins?” she asked.

“Plenty.”

“I bet.”

“Jose, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that a bladder can rupture from all types of things. I’ve seen some horrible bladder conditions brought on by venereal ailments.”

“Ailments?”

“Ailments.”

“When do you want to go dancing?” Sam said.

“After we pay the rent,” she said. “And when you finally unpack that damn trunk. You make me feel like this is a hotel.”

“Fair enough,” Sam said, standing and pulling himself into his tweed jacket and pulling his cap on his head. He tucked a little.32 in his side pocket and his Pinkerton’s badge at the breast.

“Where you headed?”

“Lucky me,” Sam said. “I get to play chauffeur to Mrs. Arbuckle.”

“You don’t mean…?”

“I do.”

HEARST MET MARION DAVIES when she was sixteen and performing in the chorus line in Stop! Look! Listen! on Broadway. He’d made the show every night it had run, paying a boy to wait at the stage door with flowers and jewelry and a diamond-encrusted watch that Marion had promptly lost on their third date. But he’d agreed to more watches-that she never wound or checked-and there were secret dinners at Delmonico’s and drinks at the Plaza and lovemaking that made Hearst feel half of his fifty-eight years. Hearst’s wife, Millicent, had been a chorus girl, too, but back in the nineteenth century, and after five boys she’d lost a bit of her charm and zest for life. With Marion, he’d finally found a solid girl with enough energy to keep up with him and realize that life was just one big rolling party where the world provided constant entertainment. And it was best in San Francisco. There they could escape the prying eyes of the scandal sheets and be out on the town as producer and ingénue, getting ready for the town’s world premiere of Enchantment in November.

By the time they left the Opera House, they were already feeling a bit of the champagne they’d had at the intermission of Tosca, and it had all been a bunch of laughs during the opera, because Marion had dressed as a little Chinese man in a blunt-cut wig and silk pajamas. She’d even made up her eyes to look like an Oriental, while Hearst had dressed as a grand emperor with a flowing red robe decorated with dragons and flowers and a Fu Manchu mustache pasted to his face.

A driver in a Cadillac touring car motored them up Nob Hill from the Civic Center, looping to the portico of the Fairmont, and the grand Chinese Ball that had brought out all the little yellow people from the Chinese colony to serve food, dance, and mix with the elite dressed gaily in their own pajamas and silks.

The lobby air had been perfumed with incense and jasmine, and there was much handshaking and silly bowing by the city elite, and the Oriental people scrambled around with big smiles, offering up pork with bamboo shoots and chrysanthemum salad and little cups of ny ka pa. Dozens of men donned a dragon costume that snaked through the party, and women dressed as men or as Oriental princesses squealed and yelped in the great candlelit room decked out in silk tapestries and gold.

Hearst clapped and pronounced the affair wholly magnificent when approached by District Attorney Matthew Brady and Chief O’Brien. Both men smiled and shook Hearst’s hand warmly. Marion did a little bow and stayed in character, rattling off some gibberish that no one in their right mind would think was Chinese. Somewhere was the sound of a xylophone. Cymbals crashed. The giant, bigheaded dragon wove in and out of screaming, laughing women.

“Judge Brady, Chief,” Hearst said, “Miss Marion Davies.”

Brady said hello. Chief O’Brien kissed her hand.

The men introduced their wives, in jade and ostrich feathers and floor-length Oriental robes. More fireworks crackled in the ballroom. The two women looked uncomfortable meeting Miss Davies, and Hearst put his arm around the smaller woman’s waist for reassurance.

The lobby, lit with green and red lanterns, cast the faces in a weird light. Judge Brady was a bit younger than Hearst and had been serious-minded enough to keep on his black tie and tails from Tosca. He had a hangdog face and droopy eyes, with gray hair parted to the side, but was sharp and smart and wanted more than anything to be California’s next governor.

“No costume?”

“I’m not much for theatrics,” Judge Brady said.

“Confucius see,” Hearst said. He smiled a big-toothed smile and rubbed the phony mustache. He then smiled normally, dropping the act. “A hold-over from my school days back east.”

The men exchanged glances with their spouses. Hearst looked to Marion.

The women left.

“Where can a man get an honest drink in this town?” Judge Brady asked.

A little Oriental walked past with small blue china cups on a silver tray. Chief O’Brien stopped the man and gathered three. The pointy straw hat on O’Brien’s head seemed out of place with his walrus mustache, giant gold-rimmed glasses, and bright blue eyes. The seams on his black pajamas were about to burst.

“Manslaughter?” Hearst asked.

Brady looked to Chief O’Brien. Chief O’Brien cleared his throat and said, “Our detectives have some new information.”

Hearst squinted his eyes, slid his hands into the opposite sleeves of his silken robe, and bowed. “I see… I see.”

Hearst toasted the men and took his drink.

Judge Brady finished the drink, pronouncing it god-awful, and placed his hand in the pant pocket of his tuxedo. He glanced around the room, his eyes staying away from Hearst’s stare, which was making him nervous. Hearst could always do that with the stare, could watch a man incessantly without prejudice or malice, his eyes merely lingering on the man’s face, making strong men grow shy. It was almost as if some felt Hearst’s gaze to be too private, too intimate, the way his eyes could rove over you and take in all of you and seem to know what you were thinking even as he was trying to figure it all out.

Miss Davies bounced up and bumped her behind to his and handed him another cup of the ny ka pa and said, “What’s the h-haps, Daddy?”

And Hearst smiled at that. The chief and the D.A. looked uncomfortable with the informality of the exchange. Hearst bowed, formally and very Orientally, and took Miss Davies’s arm and led her into the deeper red-and-green light and the smell of sweet jasmine. He slid his large hand onto her lower back, the spread of his fingers encompassing the base of her spine, and whispered into her ear, “I wish I could take you here in front of everyone.”

She squealed and said, “W.R.!”

The feeling of her so close, even in the silliness of a costume ball where they could be anyone and no one, made his heart race. He remembered only days ago standing with her alone at the beaches of San Simeon and taking pictures with his big box camera as she would emerge from the sea, a Venus with golden locks, covered in sand. Her beautiful, healthy body glowing from sun and sand and vitality and life.

He made love to her there in a cove along the shores and in the gentle sound of the surf, the cool night creeping in from the Pacific, and he could feel the rage drumming in his blood and in his ears until he thought his entire body would ignite in flame.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Her breath a sweetness, a cooling mint in his face.

“Just fine,” Hearst smiled. “Let’s dance.”

THE TRAIN WAS LATE.

Eight hours late from the east, coming in on the Overland Limited, some trouble with another train’s wreck in Iowa, and now the big Southern Pacific clock on the wall of the station terminal read two in the morning. Sam went back to the paper, sitting on the large bench drinking a cup of coffee he’d bought from a blind man at the newsstand. He massaged his temples, reading up on five men busted in Bakersfield for trying to organize oil workers on strike in Kern County. The Examiner called them “card-carrying reds” and agitators with the International Workers of the World. The sheriff rounded them up, drove them out of the city, and turned them loose to walk south toward Los Angeles. The paper said if the owners of the oil rigs couldn’t handle their men, they’d take over the job.

Sam folded the paper and leaned back into his seat, his cap sliding down in his eyes, as a conductor walked into the giant cathedral in Oakland and announced that the Overland Limited would arrive in ten minutes.

Sam checked his watch and made his way to the platform, watching that giant eye of the locomotive grow closer in the dark, chugging and steaming. He yawned and rested a hand against a metal support beam and then noticed all the men crowding behind him carrying writing tablets and pencils and box cameras and flashes. The Old Man had told him there was to be some sort of announcement at the station and that one of Dominguez’s men, a fella named Brennan, would handle it. But after Arbuckle’s wife said a few words, to take her and her mother back to the city by ferry, making sure they weren’t hassled by any newsmen.

The giant engine shook the platform and steamed and hissed as it slowed to a stop, metal on metal, brakes screaming, wheels slowly circling to a stop. As cabled, Minta Durfee, vaudeville songstress, film comedienne, and the estranged wife of Roscoe Arbuckle, waited for a little negro porter to mount the steps before her and she walked down, hungry newspapermen shouting and taking photos, and she smiled glibly-as one would expect the wife of the accused to act-showing more attention to helping a little gray-headed woman with a sunken-in toothless smile and round black hat onto the platform.

Sam introduced himself to a man in a suit who carried two hatboxes. The man, Brennan, introduced Sam to Minta and “Ma.”

Minta told them the terminal would be quite fine for a short meeting with the newsboys. But Sam could tell she was quite tired, as she stood under the big clock, now at two thirty-two, and read off neatly folded sheets of paper.

“Upon my arrival here I have only one request to make of all the fair-minded people of this city. I simply ask them to be fair to Mr. A. I ask them to give him only that to which he is entitled in all fairness, and for which San Francisco is noted around the world-a square deal. I know and his friends all know that he is innocent. He is entitled to a trial by a jury made up of men and women whose minds will be receptive alone to the truth. Only one side of this story has been told, and I know that the people of this good city will wait until the other side comes out in the proper, orderly fashion of the court. I believe everyone will agree with me that first impressions gained from rumor and report are most times found, on closer investigation, to be false, and that when the truth is heard in this matter-when the entire story has been unfolded-that my husband will be completely exonerated, and his good name will be thoroughly cleared, and that he again will take his place in the hearts of the American…”

But as she continued to speak, the newspapermen and photographers broke away, filing back out to the platform, leaving Minta alone to look at Ma and Ma just to shrug her bony shoulders. Brennan had already made arrangements with the porter to bring their trunks to the waiting car, and from there they would take the ferry back to the city.

Sam left the attorney and filed back out to the platform, watching the newspaper men standing in a great huddle, not at the Overland Limited coming in but at the Owl making ready to head south to Los Angeles.

The strobes of the big flashes looked like pockets of lightning in the early dark as Sam walked toward the openmouthed crowd and watched as four negro porters carried a white coffin onto the last car and two negro boys hoisted armloads of pink lilies onto the train.

Sam could smell the fresh-cut flowers from where he stood.

“Read us the note,” a newsman called out.

The porter shook his head and pulled the sliding door shut with a giant clank.

An hour later, a faint gray dawn broke over the city, as the ferry made its way over the bay to San Francisco. Sam sat with Minta and Ma in their stateroom and waited for more knocks and to make more threats, sending the newsboys away. The ferry rolled and bobbed, and Ma’s head was slumped with a snore, her hat fallen onto the seat beside her.

Sam caught Minta’s eye and smiled.

They were alone.

“You see the coffin?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He’s innocent.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I spent two days in Chicago looking for people who knew that little tramp.”

Sam leaned forward. “It was awfully nice of you to come.”

“Of course.” Minta looked at Sam, confused. “I love Roscoe with all my heart.”

AL SEMNACHER never cared to be on stage. He was just fine being a bit player in Hollywood, standing in the shadows helping along a career or two, having lunch at Musso & Frank’s, putting together a deal, maybe working a con or two on the side. The conning didn’t start until he met up with Maude, and she’d kept him busy as a jackrabbit in the spring. Back then it was just plain old Maude Parker from Wichita and she’d needed some cash, so he’d introduced her around, and Hollywood had been a real gas. Soon she’d set her sights on a couple of actors and they’d pull a rape, or set them up with a man-one director was particularly into that type of thing-and they’d get a statement or take a photo and the money would soon be turned over to Maude. They’d live in high style for a few months till the tank was empty.

But now here was Al sitting in the lobby of the Palace Hotel, ten o’clock or so at night, waiting for Maude to show up and make good on their deal. He paced the lobby until he drew stares from the doorman and hotel manager and he told them he was a good friend of Mrs. Delmont’s. But by midnight, he knew she was there but wasn’t going to take his calls or come down to the lobby till hell froze over, and so he said to hell with it, retiring to the hotel’s Rose Room, a little back-corner restaurant where they’d moved the hotel bar since the dry laws were on.

He ordered a Scotch and sat at a corner table. The rest of the Rose Room empty.

The walls were stained paneled wood, with a lot of low light and brass, and a large mural against the far wall that the waiter had said once hung over the bar before they broke it up.

The painting was of a strange-looking old man dressed in a harlequin checkerboard getup leading children away from a village by playing a flute. The little children raced with determination to catch up while others walked along bored or sat under great twisted trees the way you find trees in California, corrupted by the salt air from the Pacific.

Al had another Scotch and stared so long at the mural that it became real to him. The rough boulders, the failing light of day, and a giant stone castle on the hill. One boy in particular seemed so strange and foreign but known to him. He seemed the most important of the bunch, racing in jutting determination with the Pied Piper, mirroring the older man, trailing in the failing yellow California light and going somewhere over the rough little hills and boulders whittled away with time. The boy and the Piper the same, walking with the same stride, the same face, only the man much, much larger, towering over them all, but walking with a youthful stride, seeming to know exactly where he was headed.

Al finished his drink, knowing he couldn’t pay for it.

He decided to put it on Maude’s tab and had a laugh at that.

About that time, he watched a fat man enter the bar in a silk bathrobe and slippers and recognized him instantly as Frank Dominguez. He’d never met Dominguez officially but had seen him plenty on the Paramount lot and knew he was a regular at Jesse Lasky’s poker games.

Dominguez took a seat under the mural.

Al smiled at his luck.

With a self-confidence that only a strong drink can give, he pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Can’t sleep.”

Dominguez shook his head.

“Lots to worry about with the police court and all.”

“We’re not talking to the press.”

“I’m not the press.”

“Then who the hell are you?” Dominguez said, putting fist to mouth in a giant yawn.

“Your new best friend.”

Dominguez signaled the waiter, slumped against a back wall, for another round.