Devil’s garden

17

You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” Minta Durfee said. It was early afternoon the next day and Minta and Sam walked the ringed path of Echo Lake, not far from the Mack Sennett Stage. Men rowed boats with their honeys relaxing, the men trying to not break a sweat with their suits busting at the seams. There were flower gardens and park benches, tall palm trees and drooping, tired willows dangling their branches into the water. Swans shuffled their way through the tall grass and into the lake, making it seem so damn easy, all the action going on below the surface.

“You drew your weapon on him,” Minta said. “You stood strong while his machine raced toward you.”

“I squeezed off a few rounds so he’d know I was armed,” Sam said. “He could’ve killed us if he’d wanted.”

“But you protected that dry agent. That’s what matters.”

Sam scratched his cheek and they kept going around the lake, this the second pass on the loop.

“She tackled me out of the way,” Sam said. “The son of a bitch in the car kept going and sideswiped her Hupmobile. Nearly knocked the damn thing over.”

“And then you shot the man.”

“He got away.”

“And how did you get back?”

“We walked.”

“And Miss Simpkins?”

“She’s fine,” Sam said. “She headed back to deal with the busted machine.

She waited till it was daylight ’cause she didn’t care for all the coyotes.”

“Did you see many?”

Sam smiled. “I told her I saw hundreds. All of ’em with mean red eyes.”

“Did she really lock that bootlegger in a cage with lions?”

“She enjoyed it.”

“You’re quite the storyteller, Sam.”

Minta and Sam left the loop and walked across an arced bridge to a small island in the center of the lake. Minta wore a wide-brimmed straw hat with a big-flowered dress that hugged her full frame. Sam offered her a cigarette but she declined, landing on the island and pointing out a small bench.

“So, tell me more about your sleuthing in Chicago.”

“I found the woman who’d raised the girl, a Mrs. J. Hardebach. By the way, the girl’s name is just plain ole Rapp. She added the e and accenting after she’d returned from a trip to Paris.”

“What else?”

“I told Mr. Dominguez most of this.”

Sam smoked and thought, a brief pause. “Let me hear it again, if you don’t mind.”

Minta took a deep breath.

“The girl was born in 1894 to woman named Mabel Rapp who worked as a chorus girl and perhaps a prostitute. The father was either a big Chicago banker or British nobility. No one seems to buy that one. Mabel died when Virginia was eleven and Virginia went to live with her grandmother. Before she was sixteen, the girl was pulling up her skirt for the asking. She had a total of five abortions and gave birth to one child. A daughter.”

“You’re good,” Sam said. “So, where’s the daughter?”

“Given to an orphanage.”

“Is there record of that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Go on.”

“Virginia’s grandmother died ten years ago and that’s when she went to live with Mrs. Hardebach. This was after she’d had the child. Apparently Mrs. Hardebach provided more structure for the girl. She said she was the one who taught Virginia to be a lady and pull up her bloomers for a while. She also gained her employment as a model and as a salesgirl at Marshall Field’s. Virginia became a style expert of sorts and a shopper for society ladies. This led to a trip to Paris where Virginia caused a big scandal by dancing in her nightie with another woman. Apparently she kissed the woman full on the mouth.”

“How’d she come west?”

“She came to San Francisco for the Exhibition.”

“In ’15.”

“And from there, she moved to Los Angeles.”

“Where she met Henry Lehrman, who got her into pictures.”

“Mabel will know more about that than me,” Minta said. “I’d already left for New York by that time.”

“You’d make quite a sleuth, Minta.”

“I just want to help Roscoe.”

“So when do I meet Miss Normand?”

CAPTAIN OF DETECTIVES Duncan Matheson checked the time on the wall clock and then flicked open his gold timepiece. Satisfied they matched and all was right in San Francisco, he clicked it closed and hung it back in his vest pocket. He took a seat across from Maude Delmont and smiled at her. He offered her coffee. He offered her a cigarette.

He wanted to know more about Cassius Clay Woods in Madera. She said it had been a misunderstanding. She said he’d beaten her.

And then he asked about Earl Lynn in Los Angeles.

“Come again?”

“Surely you know Mr. Lynn?”

“I may have met someone by that name.”

Griff Kennedy coughed behind her and the cough was so sudden and sharp that it made her jump a little. “According to Mr. Lynn, you bragged about carrying his child last year. Musta been a quick meeting.”

“That is a personal matter.”

Kennedy coughed again. Maude couldn’t see him, and his talking and coughing and general harrumphing was starting to piss her off. She turned in her chair to glower at him a bit.

“I have a speaking engagement at two,” Maude said.

“It can wait,” Kennedy said.

“Where’s your partner?” she asked.

“Tom? He’s in Los Angeles.”

“I see.”

“With Mr. Lynn.”

“Does the San Francisco Police Department normally poke into the affairs of taxpaying citizens? I find poking into the private life of a woman to be quite unsavory.”

“Un-what?” Kennedy asked.

“Unsavory.”

Harrumph.

Matheson walked. He twirled the end of his mustaches like a one-reel villain. He looked out from his glass wall into the pool of detectives smoking and talking with stoolies, con men, rapists, and robbers.

Maude straightened her hat and readjusted the black parasol in her hand. All her wardrobe was black now. She’s become known for it, her signature. She planned on buying a little black dog perhaps, a little dog that would attend the trials with her, and she thought about naming the little pooch Virginia after her poor, dear dead friend.

“Mr. Lynn claims you wanted five thousand dollars to make the baby go away,” Matheson said.

“That’s a fool’s talk…”

“Mr. Lynn has agreed to be a character witness in the trial.”

“He’s a liar.”

“He says he has documentation that you asked for money,” Matheson said.

“He told Detective Reagan that he was not or could not be intimate with you,” fathead Kennedy said. “That ring any bells?”

Maude remembered an old grifter adage, one she’d learned long before California from an old-timer in Wichita, but the rule was simple and everlasting. When they’re on to you, you brass the son of a bitch out.

Maude stood.

“I find this talk to be gutter talk and unfitting to a woman. While you two should be out finding women who have been ill-treated by that beastly Arbuckle, you are here questioning my character with lies and rumors. From what I recall, Mr. Lynn is a mixed-up little man who has no interest in women whatsoever. He is what is called in polite society a ‘sissy.’ Why would I have anything to do with a soul like that? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a speaking engagement with the fine women of this city. Apparently Chief O’Brien will be there to discuss the orphans’ fund that I’m now heading. You both must know that the chief found his own little lost bundle on his very doorstep last week. The matter of orphans is very dear to him, and I’m sure he’ll find it quite interesting to see how I, a respected woman in this city, was treated.”

“Take a breath, sister,” Kennedy said.

Maude turned to him. He had a cigarette bobbing out the side of his big bullet head.

“Slow down when you talk,” Kennedy said. “Makes it easier to breathe.” She snarled at him. She gave a short bow to Matheson. Kennedy opened the door wide. He used the hand gesture of a doorman, a smirk on his face as he pretended to tip his hat.

The bastard didn’t even have a hat on his fat Irish head.

“HOW WAS I TO KNOW?” MABEL Normand asked. “I thought it was some kind of fever. All I knew is that Mack didn’t want that girl on the lot. He was afraid it would infect the whole crew.”

“You know what it was?”

“Mack would know,” Mabel said. “He’s had all those social diseases. Isn’t it funny that they call them that, ‘social diseases’? Makes it almost seem dignified, as if you got ’em from shaking hands or doing the waltz.”

Mabel Normand reminded Sam of a child’s doll, with her milk-colored skin and saucer black eyes. Her hair in ringlets. She looked even more like a toy as she perched on top of a cracker barrel, her feet drumming on the wood while she talked about the good ole days with Fatty and Minta and the craziness on the lot at Keystone.

“Minta’s a good egg,” Mabel said. “I don’t know if I’d stand by Roscoe in all this.”

“She says she loves him.”

“That’s another kind of sickness. I got the same sickness and it’s terminal, brother. Say, do you have a smoke?”

Sam fished out a cigarette and handed it to her.

She remained in her stage costume, that of a turn-of-the-century washerwoman, complete with a frumpy dress and slouch hat. When Minta introduced them on the back lot at Sennett Studios, Mabel showed off the pruning of her hands from all the wash she had to do for the part in Molly O’.

“I swore to myself I wouldn’t step foot back on this lot without killing Mack, but, here I am, crawling back to the son of a bitch. I shoulda stayed with Goldwyn. He’s an all right fella, if he’d just keep his hands off my ass.”

“I heard that Roscoe had a thing for Virginia.”

“A thing? He had a hard-on like a divining rod for that piece. Every man on the lot did. She showed up here from somewhere back east, with her polite smile and those gorgeous clothes, and every boy knew they had some pie fresh from the oven. Little did they know she gave it away for free.”

“Was she ever with Roscoe?”

“She wouldn’t,” Mabel said. “Said he was too fat. She said she didn’t like fat men. But he sent her flowers and candies and took his hat off when she walked by. Even when she was with Lehrman, he tried.”

“You know this?”

“I saw this. He acted like a fool.”

“You know, I saw you once in a nickelodeon in Baltimore,” Sam said.

“I never been to Baltimore.”

“I saw you in one of those things you crank and the photos flip.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you look like Wallace Reid?” Mabel asked.

She smiled at him and Sam decided she had a very nice smile.

“All the time.”

“Well, you do. If the detective thing doesn’t work out, you could make a fine living as his double.”

“I don’t think I could live here.”

“How come?”

“Too spread out. I like a city where you can walk and get to know the neighborhoods and back alleys. A real city you can know on your feet. I’d get lost here.”

“This is no city,” Mabel said, looking down the row of wooden barns and façades of a city set. “Sometimes I think I live in purgatory. I had the craziest dream the other night. I dreamed I was bleeding from my mouth and couldn’t breathe or see. Say, you wanna get a drink, Sam?”

“I’m catching the three o’clock back to Frisco.”

“Too bad,” Mabel said, finishing the cigarette and flicking it into the dusty streets of the lot. “Next time you’re here, give me a ring.”

“Does the name Hibbard mean anything to you?”

Mabel Normand, the old little girl in makeup and ringlets, looked to Sam like he was some kind of rube.

“Don’t you read the papers?”

“Mainly the comics,” Sam said. “I love Mutt and Jeff. ”

“That’s Roscoe’s buddy.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Fred Hibbard. The Romanian. He calls himself Fishback now. He thinks it’s pretty goddamn funny because he directs comedies.”

“I LOVE YOU.”

“I love you, too, W.R.”

“Are you ready to open your eyes?”

“Where are we?”

“Quit fiddling with that blindfold,” Hearst said. “Two more steps and we’re there.”

“I been b-blind since you picked me up,” Marion Davies said in that cute staccato Brooklyn accent. “You ride me all over the city up and down hills and around c-corners and I don’t know which way is up. Do you call that fair?”

“What’s that?”

“K-keeping a person blind for the whole goddamn drive? It’s c-c-cruelty.”

“It’s a present.”

“Because you love me.”

“Yes.”

“Can I t-take this off now?”

Hearst was silent. And then he thumbed open the bottle of champagne, making Miss Davies jump back, maybe thinking it was a gunshot, as she fingered open the silk blinds on her eyes and smiled. He could almost hear her smile, the moist parting of her lips, that small cracking noise of lip on teeth, as she spun around in the center of the theater, in the middle of all those slabs of wooden seats. She crooked her head up at the ceiling, still half done-the sloths-but enough done to see those Spanish patterns and curves and buttresses and delicate designs he’d had hand-copied from Madrid.

“Where are we?” Miss Davies asked.

“Miss Davies, we’re in your theater.”

“Mine? Don’t k-k-kid me, W.R.”

“Have you ever known me to joke about a gift?”

Davies raised her eyebrows and shrugged a bit, pursing her lips. “No.”

“It’s called the Granada. Isn’t that just a wonderful name? The perfect place to premiere Enchantment.”

“You b-bought a whole theater for one picture?”

“Why not?”

He walked tall and erect down the aisle toward the stage, not a soul in the place, just as it was supposed to be. The screen wasn’t up yet, or the big red curtains he’d handpicked from a hundred samples, but he just couldn’t wait another moment. She had to see it.

“The stage will be set on the seventeenth of November. When the clock strikes one, the guarding doors will swing wide for those lucky San Franciscans who will first taste the glories of the new Granada. ‘A surprise upon surprise awaits. A foyer smiling beautiful-a palace where quiet luxury warmly glows-and then thousands of comfortable, hospitable seats.’ ”

“You ham.”

“Now for the program,” Hearst said, mounting the steps and comfortably finding the stage. “Enchantment. Heralded and accepted by New York-of course New York, letting all these San Franciscans know about the true tastemakers-as an exquisite photo comedy-and chosen for the Granada’s opening program in competition with the best current, super features, ‘Enchantment will add a captivating climax to an event already big.’ ”

“You fool.”

“Do you love me?” Hearst asked from the stage.

“I love you.”

“Even as a ham?”

“Even as a f-fool.”

The theater was as large, or larger, than any movie house in New York.

The façade was just grand, the opening mouth to a palace, a castle, a cathedral onto Mission Street. He could see all those faces on opening night, their mouths agape, looking at the black-and-white images floating across the screen. Miss Davies’s angelic profile, her lithe form, the goddess in ringlets smiling at all of them. He felt his heart shift inside him.

“W.R.? You okay up there?”

“Fine.”

“You looked as if you’d pass out.”

“I did this all for you, Miss Davies.”

“C-come down this instant.”

“I like it up here.”

He mouthed the words “All for you.”

Marion found the staircase and the stage and walked to him, finding a spot under his big arm. He pulled her into his stiff black suit, the kind George said reminded him of an undertaker, her head not even reaching his shoulder.

“I miss the eye contact,” she said. “When you’re on stage, you c-can see people having a good time. B-b-but in a picture, you’re just one of them.”

“Isn’t that the point?”

She smiled up at him and pinched his cheek. Hearst felt his face turn red as he looked out onto the empty seats, feeling the jitters of opening night coming into play. Everything was set. All there was to do was sit back and watch the thing play out.

“How ’bout dinner?”

“More champagne?” she asked.

“Always.”

“In p-pajamas?”

“Of course.”

“You screwy boy.”

“SO HE’s A LIAR?” the Old Man asked.

“He’s not so much a liar as he just left some things out,” Sam said.

“With his fat ass on the line, you’d think he could stand to be a little more truthful,” said Phil Haultain.

“He probably left out that the Fishback fella brought the booze to keep him out of trouble,” Sam said.

“What about lying about knowing the girl?” the Old Man asked.

“To keep himself out of trouble,” Sam said.

“He should’ve figured he’d get found out on that one,” the Old Man said. “I wonder who Brady has lined up to tell about Arbuckle’s passion for Miss Rappe.”

“Plenty,” Sam said. “I heard Tom Reagan was down, too.”

“You run into him?”

“No,” Sam said. “But I hear he was talking to the same people.”

“You think they know about Maude Delmont running that con on that fairy actor?”

“I’d bet on it,” Sam said.

Phil Haultain walked to the windows and looked down on Ellis Street. You could hear the sound of the cable cars zipping up and down Powell and the yelps of the little newsboys hawking the afternoon editions. The big lug was wearing his big brown Stetson and a double-breasted suit and nodded while the Old Man and Sam talked, as if making sure they knew he was all right with what they were saying.

“I wouldn’t screw that Delmont broad,” Haultain said. “She’s old as my mother and twice as ugly.”

“You’re a romantic, Phil,” Sam said.

“I likes what I likes.”

“Phil, stick with those two women.”

“I got to know Miss Blake and Miss Prevon on an intimate basis,” Haultain said.

“Where are they?” the Old Man asked.

“Living on the hospitality of Ma Murphy.”

“And who’s Ma Murphy?” the Old Man asked.

“Mother of George Murphy, young assistant district attorney in the employ of Brady,” Haultain said. “She runs a rooming house and they got guards round-the-clock.”

“Sam, go home, see your wife, take a shower, have a hot meal.”

“Will do.”

“And then I want you to shadow Maude Delmont. I want to know what the coppers know. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s something at that party we’ve missed,” the Old Man said.

“That’s why I followed Jack Lawrence,” Sam said. “But the more I know about that party, the less I know.”

“You don’t trust Arbuckle?” the Old Man asked.

“Not as far as I can throw him.”

Sam looked to young Phil Haultain and he smiled back.

“You got this guy running shadows now?” Sam asked.

The Old Man cracked a smile. A rare smile for the Old Man, who didn’t seem to know what a smile was all about.

“Stir the pot,” the Old Man said. “See what floats to the top.”

“Even if we don’t like it?” Sam said.

The Old Man placed his feet on his desk. He lit a cigar. The sounds of people and machines and cable cars came from outside. He smiled but said nothing.

“It’s good to know,” Sam said.

“You bet,” said the Old Man, the cigar a burning orange plug in the side of his mouth. “Even if we want it buried.”