Devil’s garden

5

So you were there?” “Sure,” Alice Blake said. Two minutes after Sam left, Phil had sipped his malt and heard the soda jerk ring up the Woodrow Hotel and ask for a Miss Blake. He didn’t say much, only relayed that some dick was looking for her and that if she had any goddamn sense she wouldn’t come to work tonight. He said the cops had been by, too. Fifteen minutes later, Sam asked a hotel clerk what room his sister Alice Blake was staying in and to please not ring the poor girl because it was a surprise for Ma and all.

“So you dance?” Sam asked, sitting across from the girl in her hotel efficiency, Phil in the lobby, scouting out the stairs and elevators in case she bolted.

“I’m a dancer,” Alice Blake said.

“What’s the show?”

“Tonight we’re doing the powder-puff number, where all the girls come out in their drawers and sing a little song about our sweet little powder puffs, and then we take these big powder puffs, really too big to be real because I guess that’s funny and all, and we whack you goofy bastards in the kisser with some face powder. Only I don’t think it’s face powder, because that would be a damn waste. I think it’s just flour, because later on my hands smell like a cake.”

“I like cake.”

“You gonna see the show?”

Alice Blake was a girl of average height and average build, with a brown bob and big baby-doll eyes. She giggled a lot when she talked, and after she invited Sam into her room her hands shook a bit as she struck a match and lit a little cigarette. A half-packed suitcase sat on a chair below a window looking out onto O’Farrell.

“You want to tell me what happened last Monday?”

“I seen the girl sick.” Alice had finished up the smoke and now worked a thick coat of dark paint to her eyelid with her twitching hands, using a mirror above the bureau. She switched to another brush and arched her eyebrows.

“Did Mr. Arbuckle hurt her?”

“I told you. When that Delmont woman started screaming and carrying on and beating on the door with her shoe and all, that’s what made me come running.”

“Where were you?”

“In the bathroom.”

“Which bathroom?”

“I don’t know. The big room where they had the Victrola.”

“1220?”

“I guess.”

“How long were you in the bathroom?”

“Twenty minutes?”

“You sick or something?”

“I was with a fella. That actor buddy of Roscoe’s with the funny voice.”

“Lowell Sherman?”

“That’s the one. So anyway, I finished up having a real nice conversation with Lowell.”

“In the bathroom?”

“You can talk in the bathroom same as anywhere else,” Alice Blake said. “And so Mrs. Delmont come running into the room, and the way that broad was yelling you’d think the whole St. Francis was on fire or there was an earthquake or some crazy thing. Only she was moaning about Virginia being with Roscoe, and so I sez to Zey-that’s my girlfriend-I say to Zey, What gives if old Fatty gets him some tail? I mean, we all need it. I said, Good on him.”

“And then what?”

“And then the hotel dick comes and ruins the party, and then Virginia is moaning and thrashing and all that on the bed and that ruined the party, too. God rest her soul.” Alice crossed her heart the way Sam’s mother had at mass. “And then Maude Delmont and Zey and me tried to help the poor girl out by putting her in a cold bath. Fatty and that good-looking foreign fella Fishback helped, too. We thought she was just drunk is all.”

“Did the girl say anything?”

Alice was finished with the paint job and turned her head from side to side inspecting what she’d done with her eyes and apple cheeks. Satisfied with it, she gave her bob a nice little comb through and then felt the weight of her breasts in the lace camisole and smiled.

“You think I have nice tits?”

“Spectacular.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Sam.”

She smiled. Then she frowned.

“Kind of a boring name-Sam. That sounds like a schoolboy.”

“How ’bout Craig Kennedy?”

“Who’s that?”

“A master detective with four speedy cars.”

“I love speedy cars.”

“Zoom.”

“So I was telling you about what I didn’t see. I’m telling you like I told the policeman who called me, I didn’t see nothing and I didn’t hear nothing. They’ve been hunting me down like a rabbit and my nerves are just about shot. You wouldn’t have a little drink with you?”

Sam shook his head and asked, “Who was the policeman?”

“Said his name was Reagan. Didn’t say his first name.”

Sam smiled. “Did Miss Rappe say anything else?”

“I only know what Maude Delmont said. She said that ole Fatty had crushed that poor girl with all that weight.”

“You believe it?”

“She was groaning and moaning and all that. Zey heard her say something.”

“What’d she hear?”

“She said Virginia said that she was dying. He said he’d hurt her.”

Sam nodded and jotted down a few notes. “ ‘He’ being Arbuckle?”

“He being he. I don’t know who the screwy girl was talking about. We was just there having a good time, and then we tried our best to help her. It’s a real shame. It really is. Gosh, I feel bad about what I said about poor Virginia ruining the party. She seemed like a nice lamb. Screwy. But a real lamb. Did you know she was the model for the sheet music to ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’?”

“Nope.”

“She sure was. I like it when you meet somebody who’s somebody.”

“Everybody is somebody.”

“Who are you kidding?” Alice Blake smiled. She had a dynamite smile. “You’re only somebody if you get your picture made and people pay a nickel to take a look. The rest of us are just deadbeats.”

“Where can I find Zey?”

Alice shrugged and smiled over at Sam.

He mouthed the word spectacular.

“Keep talkin’, Craig Kennedy.”

THE COPS LOCKED ROSCOE in a cell by himself, checking on him twice in the first four hours, and he’d made jokes with them, trying to make them feel at ease, but they’d only answer with curt replies about supper, toilet paper, or a tin cup for water and walk back down the hall. He’d laid back into his narrow bunk, the newsboys already noting his bunk was made for a man half his size, and he’d wriggle his toes in his silk socks and look at the ceiling. Roscoe knew what disappointed reporters most was the fact that he’d weighed in at only two hundred sixty on the Bertillon charts, not the three-fifty he’d told the press men in Hollywood. He loved making up stories for the publicity folks at Paramount about how he ate a pound of bacon and a dozen eggs every morning with a pot of coffee.

The cell was six by six. One of the walls decorated with some nice prison art, stick figures of Gloom and Joy shaking hands, Mary’s Little Lamb, and the simple inscription HELL above his head.

But it wasn’t so bad. Roscoe had fashioned a coat hanger from a strand of wire from the springs of his bunk. He’d hung the Norfolk jacket he’d had fitted at Hart Schaffner Marx neatly from a single hook and knocked off his shoes by the bed.

He had paper and a pouch of tobacco Dominguez had brought him along with a safety razor and some soap.

When he was a boy, this little place would’ve seemed like a palace. Sometimes he’d awake from a drunk or a dream and think he was still living in that sod house in Smith Center, Kansas, with dust storms and tornadoes and gully washers that would turn half the kitchen into a pile of mud. Other times he’d be in that dead, dazed time in Santa Clara after his mother had died and he was sent north to live with a father he hadn’t seen in years only to find his father had split town and started over again. He remembered the shame of sitting in the train station overnight and waiting for ole Will Arbuckle to show up and finally finding pity from the man who’d bought his family’s hotel and offered him a job.

When the old man finally came to claim him, those wild, drunken beatings had returned like some half-remembered dream, and so did the comments about his fattened face and blubbery belly, and, once in a bath-house, his father lay drunk in a tub and pointed out his son’s genitalia with the tip of a burning cigar, calling it a tiny worm. Sometimes Roscoe liked the beatings better than the insults. When the old man took to drink and held the power of the whip in his hand, at least the bastard would shut up.

You fashioned your own way, carried your own water.

Roscoe had always been good at that. When people stare and point and smile, you just do a little dance and make them smile more. It was a hell of a trick he learned.

He heard the guard walking the length of the hall and the splatter of a man pissing in the cell next to him, calling out to Fatty to do some tricks for him. Roscoe turned over and felt for the shaving mirror Dominguez had brought.

He stared at himself for a long time, looking at his pale blue eyes and the odd way God had left his face to resemble an infant’s. He smiled at himself and then stopped, and then just looked into his eyes.

He just wished he could remember.

HEARST HEARD THE HORSE HOOVES from a mile up the great hill, as he sat on a boulder he’d known since he was a boy staring out at midnight over the Pacific Ocean. The old campsite at San Simeon was dotted with crisp white canvas tents lit from the inside like paper lanterns, while men worked to unload wagons and trucks, not stopping for the last three months, only working in shifts, to bring in his collection from back east. Little mementos from Bavarian strongholds and Italian palaces that would become the foundation, the cornerstones of his American castle. The foundation had been poured, and already he could imagine the way the stone turrets would rise from the ragged hillside in a way that no man said could be done. So he’d used a woman architect from San Francisco who dreamed without limits.

By the time the horses rounded that final bend on the great hill, he could barely make out the man’s face sitting next to the coachman. The white hair, the big nose, and little eyes of Al Zukor, who stared straight ahead under a bowler hat with great annoyance that brought a smile to Hearst’s face. He walked toward the wagon as it slowed and Zukor hopped to the ground, dusting off his three-piece suit with the flat of his hands and readjusting the bowler on his head. He still looked like a guy peddling furs on the streets of New York, not the head of Paramount Pictures.

He stood a good two feet below Hearst, who was a tall man. The wide-brimmed hat and big boots on Hearst made him seem even larger, as he gripped the short man’s little hand.

“I’ve cabled you sixteen times.”

“I’ve received them all.”

“And you did not cable back,” Zukor said.

“No,” Hearst said. “No, I did not.”

“What’s all this?”

“Just a little cottage or two.”

“Five miles up in the goddamn air?”

Hearst shrugged, wrapped his arm around Zukor, steered him back to the old childhood rock, and swept his free hand across the expanse that hung in the air like a dream above the clouds. And Zukor closed his eyes and then opened them wide, taking in the way the moonlight caught on the great mossy boulders down along the craggy shore and all the inlets and coves and hardscrabble pines clinging to the hills and wide pastureland with little dots of cattle below. A single stray cloud moved under them and the sight of it made Zukor step back from the edge to find his feet and turn back to the familiar movement of the Chinese workers tearing into great wooden crates and pulling out statues of winged women and horses and thick, beaten columns that Zukor had probably only seen in papier-mâché.

“How much is this goddamn thing gonna cost?”

“Do you Jews only think about money?”

“Yes,” Zukor said.

“Let me show you something,” Hearst said, steering into a brightly lit tent, larger than the others, pulling the canvas door aside. He took Zukor to a table littered with drawings of great fountains with spitting lions and a mammoth swimming pool copied from a Roman bath, of fireplaces large enough to burn a forest, and of a cleared strip to land his airplane atop the mountain instead of having to be jostled all the way up the hill like poor Zukor.

“How’s that Arabian picture coming along?” Hearst asked.

“It’s in the can.”

“That’s the one with the Italian fella.”

“Valentino.”

“And he’s playing a sheik.”

“Like a girl from Brooklyn playing a queen. We all like to pretend, Willie.”

Hearst grinned at him with his big teeth and breathed, and then smiled a bit more.

“I came for Roscoe.”

“I didn’t crush that poor girl.”

“You’re not just crucifying this fat boy in your goddamn papers, you’re making the whole goddamn picture industry look like devils. That’s bad business. Very bad business.”

“I don’t tell my men what to write.”

“And you don’t start wars with Spain either. You must lay off Arbuckle, see? What’s with your paper showing him as a drunken spider? The Examiner printed that crazy letter from Henry Lehrman. Have you gone nutso?”

Hearst narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms.

“Let’s have a drink.”

“Don’t screw me, Willie, okay? We got a nice thing going with Cosmopolitan and we have a nice run ahead of us with those pictures with Miss Davies, okay? I just can’t figure out why you’re doing this. Those stories get read in small papers everywhere. In two days you’ve turned my biggest star into a three-hundred-pound gorilla with bloodlust for snatchola.”

“Come now.”

“Don’t fuck me, Willie. We have such a nice thing going.”

“You don’t understand journalism.”

“I understand when a fella is being fucked in his tokhes.”

The Chinese had busted apart more wooden crates and they’d started a big fire near the edge of the cliff, the smell of burning pine and salt in the air. Hearst dug his hands into the pockets of his ranch coat and kicked at a stray stone with his big boots. He stole a look from the corner of his eye at dusty Al Zukor, traveling all damn day just to have a second of his time, dusty and hungry and refusing a drink, on this magnificent hill.

“Let’s watch the sunrise,” Hearst said. “We’ll eat our breakfast from an iron skillet like cowboys.”

“I know why you’re doing this. But I don’t know how you did it.”

Hearst smiled a bit and took in the expanse of statues brought out from crate and shadow and storage to catch the moonlight on the hill. He recalled being here as a boy with his dad-old rough-talking George Hearst-and the way the chewing tobacco would stain that gray beard and the stories he would tell about Missouri and how he was born to talk to the earth. Hearst would stay awake all night, after the old man collapsed from exhaustion and whiskey, and he’d cling to the rock until morning light and imagine himself a king.

“Who do you think you are?” Zukor asked.

“Would you like a drink, Mr. Zukor?”

“No, I would not.”

“Then I have work to do,” Hearst said, giving him a hard pat on the back and using the little man’s shoulder for purchase as he pushed and moved off to view a new statue he’d purchased of Zeus’ three daughters locked in an erotic embrace.

It had always taken his breath away.

TWO HOURS EARLIER, Sam sat with his wife on the roof of their apartment in the Tenderloin District and smoked a cigarette atop a little stack of brick by the narrow chimneys. Jose sat in a ship’s deck chair and finished up a piece of cold chicken Sam had brought from town. She wore a big, loose-fitting dress and smiled back at him when she noticed him watching her. He wore an old Army sweater and a little cap, striking a match on the sole of his boot.

He’d showered and was clean-shaven and wanted a drink very badly, something Jose would not agree to since it wasn’t part of the cure.

“Did you take your balsamea?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And your breathing exercises?”

“Done.”

“No more than ten cigarettes.”

“Done.”

“And no drinking.”

“Not a drop.”

“You want to feel it?”

Sam stood and walked to her, reaching down to feel the hard wedge on his wife’s stomach.

“That’s a foot.”

“Already kicking Ma around.”

“I’m worried we’re not going to make it,” she said. “I still have an offer from my aunt. I can go back to Montana until the baby comes. We could take care of the rest later.”

“This is working.”

“For now,” she said. “Sam, you still haven’t unpacked your steamer trunk.”

“I don’t own much.”

“You did what I asked,” Jose said. “For the child. But you don’t have to take care of us later. You’re not the kind to settle.”

“Says who?”

“The nurse who you dallied.”

Sam reached into his tweed trousers and pulled out a wad of cash in his money clip. “The old man gave me an advance.”

“New case?”

“Big case.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“Sure. They got me working on Fatty Arbuckle’s train wreck.”

“That is big. What do they have you doing?”

“Running down a couple girls who were at the party.”

“Did he really do it?”

“I don’t know and I don’t really care. Have you ever seen one of his films?”

“I used to see him when I was still in Montana. He made a lot of films with Mabel Normand. I remember one where they went to the World’s Fair.

They had these little motorized cars you could rent and go from exhibit to exhibit, and it always seemed like so much fun to me.”

“I liked his dog.”

“Luke?”

“Yep.”

“How do they say he killed her?”

“He’s being accused of smothering her during rape.”

“But she didn’t die till four days later. Did he break some ribs?”

“I don’t know.”

Sam smoked down some more of his cigarette and stood up, stretching up his stick-thin frame and peering down onto Eddy Street and a Model T parking down across from the Elk Hotel, a man strolling across the street to the corner market.

He looked back to Jose.

“You still hungry? I can run to the market.”

She shook her head. “How’d he crush her? Did she suffocate?”

“He is a big fella.”

“The paper says he weighs two-sixty. Was her vagina badly torn?”

“I love when you talk dirty.”

“I’m talking like a nurse.”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you were a detective.”

“I’m paid to interview a couple showgirls, not solve the case.”

“And that got your attention. The showgirls.”

“I like showgirls.”

“Help me up,” Jose said.

Sam reached down his hand and pulled her to her feet. Jose waddled to the edge of the apartment building roof and borrowed his cigarette for a puff and then handed it back.

“I’ve treated girls who’ve been beaten and raped. That happens a lot in soldier towns.”

Sam nodded.

“Can you bring me the autopsy file?”

“What ever happened to flowers?”

The stairwell door opened and an old crinkly woman in a flowered dress walked out. She lived right below their apartment and made moonshine with her old crinkly husband in their bathtub. Sam had tasted better gasoline.

“You got a call,” the old woman said.

Bootleggers always had phones.

“Okay.”

“Said it’s important.”

“Okay.”

Sam took the call. It was Phil Haultain.

“I got a bead on the Zey Prevon girl. She’s working at the Old Poodle Dog.”

“I’ll meet you there.”