Devil's Garden (40 page)

“I went into 1219 after Miss Blake had come back from Tait’s Café for rehearsal, sometime between two-thirty and three o’clock. I don’t know when Virginia Rappe entered.”

“Do you recall doing anything from the time that Miss Rappe went into room 1221 until you went into room 1219?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“What did you do?”

“I put . . . changed a record on the phonograph. I think I danced with Miss Blake. I am not sure what I did.”

“Then you don’t recall what you did. You don’t recall doing anything?”

“I was around the room. I don’t just exactly know what I was doing.”

“As a matter of fact, when you arose on the fifth of September and went into the bathroom to clean up it was your intention then to get ready to go out riding in your Pierce-Arrow limousine with Mrs. Taube?”

“Yes.”

“But you did not get dressed at that time?”

“No, these people kept coming in and I was trying to be sociable.”

“With whom?”

“With them.”

“They were not your guests?”

“No. I didn’t want to insult them.”

“You didn’t invite them there, did you?”

“No, sir.”

“With the exception of Miss Rappe, you didn’t know anybody that was coming there at that time, any of these young ladies?”

“No.”

“You did not invite them?”

“No.”

And you didn’t tell anyone else to invite them?”

“No.”

“And they were not your guests?”

“No.”

“They just appeared as if by magic?”

“They appeared.”

“And you don’t know how long a time elapsed from the time that Miss Rappe went into room 1221 until you went into 1219?”

McNab stood. It was the first time that he’d objected in the two hours of grilling by U’Ren. He smiled at the jury, letting them know he understood this silly weasel-faced little man, and then smiled at Louderback. “If the court pleases, we are supposed to end this trial sometime. I object to the same question being asked more than ten times.”

The courtroom laughed. Louderback did not.

“Proceed with the examination,” he said.

“Very well,” U’Ren said. “Answer the question.”

Roscoe scratched the back of his neck and looked at the jury. “What was it?”

Two of the jury, Fritze and Sayre, smiled.

He had ’em.

32

T
he baby cried for two hours straight. Sam finished his coffee, took a shower, and changed into some fresh clothes, tugging on his cap and walking down to the first floor and out on Eddy Street. Newsboys shouted from corners that the jury was out on the Arbuckle case, yelling, “Will Fatty Fall?” and “Fatty’s Last Stand” and the like. Sam walked with no direction in mind, absently smoking cigarettes and trudging forward, just keeping his feet moving, and suddenly found himself at Powell. A cable car idled in front of him and he got on, winded, taking a seat on an empty bench, listening to his rasping lungs as the bell clanged and the cable caught and the whole damn box made its creaky way up Nob Hill.

He could still hear the baby. See Jose’s face.

The cable car passed the St. Francis and limousines and women in long furs, jewelry shops, solid restaurants with waiters and white tablecloths, tobacconists and men’s clothing shops. Sam absently felt at his tweeds, tearing out a loose thread, and sat back on the hard seat, just letting the cable car do all the work on the ascension as he smoked and watched, feeling good about not having to hoof it anymore, not caring where the damn thing ended up.

The car crested at Nob Hill and, for the hell of it, he got off. He liked being able to do that. He looked at the four corners and spotted the California line that intersected at the top of the hill. He waited a beat and caught the car as it rattled past, full of businessmen and ladies on their way to teas, and held tight to the brass fitting during the rickety descent, the brakemen catching the cable, letting go, and catching the cable again during the jerky ride.

A few stops and they were at Fillmore, the street opening up to him in early night, iron buttresses arcing the street, lit up with a million small white bulbs, reminding Sam of the midways he worked back east. There were flivvers and trucks parked all along the street. Three- and four-story buildings and jutting turrets and hand-painted signs for fish merchants and pawnshops and Italian barbers.

He dodged a streetcar and another heading the opposite direction and wandered into a nickelodeon. He popped a coin in a machine and watched the pages flip, showing the devastation of the big Quake, the flattened city, smoke rising from the ashes, the tent city built on the rubble.

Men boiled crabs on the street. Big wheels of cheese and fresh fruit were displayed from market windows, long dried sausages and peppers. There were dope pushers with dark-ringed eyes and prostitutes with sagging stockings. Sam smoked and caught all of them, starting up the night like the first strings of a symphony.

He turned and walked backward, heading out from the little district, his eye on a young man in a black hat holding two black satchels, one in each hand, as if they both contained a tremendous weight. The man’s head was down; slump-shouldered, he walked across the tracks.

There was music from a high window, opera with the soaring voice of Carmen, and a man in a tattered undershirt looked down at Sam, listening to his private songs. The man scratched his chest and his dirty chin and closed the window.

The steel buttresses of light ended and there was no music. The hard soles of his feet kept Sam company. He saw the Dark Man in his mind, seeing him spin and twirl, caught in the current, heading through the Golden Gate and far out into the ocean.

He heard the clang of a cable car behind him. He kept walking downhill.

He stepped off the curb to cross the street. And for some reason he would never understand, he simply stepped back, to check his pockets for change or perhaps a cigarette. He could not recall.

There was a tremendous pop and the earth rumbled beneath him and for a moment he thought it was a tremor, but then the entire raging, rattling box of a cable car crossed an inch from his nose, a wind crossing his face like a giant breath, and skittered and screamed downhill toward the bay, roaring with great yells and shrieks from the passengers, until there was a tremendous crash into an electric pole, the pole breaking in two as the cable car finally came to rest in the dead center of a house’s front porch.

Sam had not moved his feet since stepping back on the curb.

He could not move.

He was still yet his heart jackhammered in his chest. He could still feel the cut of wind across his nose. More screams and people yelling came from below and Sam ran downhill to the corner of Green, where a crowd had formed, as black snakes of electric cable jumped and zapped against the street, showering the night in bright sparks. He helped an old woman and the conductor from the heap. Four others had been helped into the street. They had been cut and bruised. One man walked in a circle, still in shock.

Sam walked back up Fillmore to where the car had gone loose. In the street, the cable continued to whirl and flow in the narrow gash, never stopping, never noticing the weight was gone.

THE JURY WAS OUT, the closings wrapped up, and at eight o’clock Roscoe returned to the courtroom with Minta. The big room was empty and quiet. A few newspapermen lay on benches smoking and reading back through their notebooks; other newsmen sat on staircases and occupied phone booths, waiting for the latest. McNab said it would be tomorrow at best. Told the boys from his firm to ring him at home if there was something brewing. Roscoe walked over to the jury box. Minta was restless, not wanting to have to dodge reporters. Half of them were out on the streets covering a visit by Marshal Foch, the French war hero, and that goddamn cat show at the St. Francis. Roscoe was officially banned from the hotel, but a stray tom called Mr. Whiskers and even a little bastard called Charlie Chaplin—on account of a black smudge under its nose—were welcome. A bunch of smelly cats purring and scratching at the furniture, taking dumps in the place, even if they did cost a few thousand like the papers said.

“Let’s go, Roscoe,” Minta said.

The little heads of a few newsboys popped up from where they slept on the benches, looking like gophers back in Kansas. His dad used to shoot at ’em with a .22 when they popped those heads up.

“Would you pay ten grand for a cat?” Roscoe asked.

“What?”

“Didn’t you read about the show at the St. Francis, crazy old women showing off ten-grand cats?”

“I read about Charlie Chaplin,” she said. “He was pretty cute.”

Roscoe opened the swinging door and sat down in the seat of Mrs. Hubbard, thinking that maybe if he warmed her seat he’d send her some positive thoughts. But all he could think about when he closed his eyes was the sharp little remarks made by U’Ren in the closing. U’Ren relished it, using the whole width of the box as his stage, pointing, enunciating, pulling from his whole bag of tricks, while Roscoe had to stay silent again.

“Come on, Roscoe.”

“Another minute.”

“They’re not coming back tonight,” said a newsman. “I got a tip.”

Roscoe ignored him. He leaned back into Mrs. Hubbard’s seat and tossed his big black shoes atop the seat in front of him. He lit a cigarette and looked at the ceiling.

The callous man—the man who laughs in the face of misery, who plays jokes on suffering women—whose only thought is to hurry a dying girl out of his room. Why didn’t Arbuckle tell that story in the first place? Why his silence? Why did he not tell a soul? Why did he not speak when yet in Los Angeles, before he had even seen a lawyer who might silence him? Why remain mute?

Goddamn bastard. Roscoe let out the smoke and watched it trail up to the tin stamped ceiling, a ceiling that looked for all the world like that of any crummy saloon. U’Ren’s words rattled around in his head, between his ears, and settled down in his gut.

And we shall shatter their theory of injury by immersion in cold water or by paroxysms of coughing or of nausea. And we have shattered the theory contained in Arbuckle’s statement to the effect that the girl fell from the bed.

U’Ren painted a picture for them of the fat beast throwing open the hotel door, ushering in the gash, pouring the drinks, turning up the jazz, and setting a trap for Virginia. He must’ve mentioned that Roscoe had worn pajamas and a robe at least thirty times, as if his dress was a crime in itself. Why can’t a man wear a goddamn robe and slippers in his own hotel room? Roscoe smoked some more and narrowed his eyes at where Louderback sat, trying to get a sense of the scene from a different point of view, get to see the whole drama from all angles and which ones worked best to tell the story.

And yet this defendant, who makes his living by acting—who has learned to disguise his thoughts—wants to make you believe that he did not see her go into that room.

U’Ren paused, reciting the testimony of the showgirls, that they saw him follow Virginia into 1219, then, just at the right moment, stopping to let the men and women picture the fat man locking the door behind him. His hand reaching over the poor girl’s as she tried to escape. The silence lasted long enough for all to envision Fatty crawling, sloppy drunk and bloated, on top of the girl, sticking his willy inside her and riding her like a dog until he squished her.

There is no doubt that at that time she was suffering from the injury inflicted by Arbuckle—the injury that caused her death. And Arbuckle cannot explain it. The only things he has seemed to remember in this trial are the things alleged to have occurred when no one else was there to see. Why should this man, famous throughout the world, allow himself to be damned without protest if all that had happened was that Virginia Rappe had become ill and had fallen off a bed?

“Because I was directed.”

“What’s that?” Minta asked.

“Nothing.”

“You said something,” she said. “It’s late. Please?”

Roscoe checked his watch, smoking the cigarette down to a nub. The newspapermen were up now, maybe eight or so of them, and they were watching him, the way children watch a polar bear in a zoo, just waiting for any little movement to bring them joy. But Roscoe’s mind reeled off, and McNab was before them all now, the projector rolling.

He began with a short, solemn prayer for Miss Irene Morgan, the war nurse who had braved the battlefields of Europe beside such men at Marshal Foch, coming to the city only to share her knowledge, and facing such danger.

The prosecution did nothing but try and besmirch her character when she could not appear. Have medical experts not shown—as Miss Morgan’s statement read into the record—that the girl suffered from many acute ailments? Still they want you to picture Miss Rappe as in perfect health, a giantess in strength, if you please. Would it have been possible in that little room for a man to have attacked a woman of that sort without everybody in the neighborhood knowing it or hearing it? And they try to tell you what a monster he was, this man who picked the girl up in his arms and yet could not carry her weight to another room a short distance without being assisted.

McNab walked, clad as always in a black suit with a vest, white shirt, and black tie. His balding gray head always with the same short stubble. He did not smile. He did not yell. He did not show emotion. He walked and talked to the jury as if working on things in his own mind, the way they should be thinking, too. So many questions. So many holes.

Throughout the length and breadth of this trial there has been hawked the name of Bambina Maude Delmont. Why was she not put on the stand? Why has she not been produced, this complaining witness of theirs? Why has the prosecution resorted to the spook evidence of dimly marked doors summoning their spirits of evil out of the woodwork, or through the manipulation of an expert holding a microscope to the floor, instead of producing human beings in flesh and blood who could have shed light upon this case? There has been more processing of witnesses than process of law. The district attorney has maintained his witnesses in private prisons—a thing I had believed to be abolished at the time of
Little Dorrit.