Devil's Garden (9 page)

“Good man.”

Phil looked away for a moment, dead-eyed, and then turned back. “Now, there’s someone you’d write home to Mom about.”

At the long wooden bar stood a tall blond woman, hair almost white, with bright-red-painted lips. She held her booted foot up off the floor on the brass rail in the manner of a man, her hair shorn above her shoulders and covering the right side of her face when she turned. She held a long fox coat across her arm.

The woman looked over the room and then matched stares with Haultain and Sam and smiled a bit, and cocked a dark eyebrow, taking away the curtain of hair over her eye and turning back to face the bar mirror and wall of booze. The shape of her wasn’t unknown, as she turned back to the bar, the coat before her now, in her long black skirt that hugged her well-proportioned fanny and legs.

“Sam?”

“I’m here.”

“Thought I lost you.”

Sam noted a man in black tails and bow tie, thick black mustache and hair split and plastered to the skull and hard-parted with grease. When he laughed, you could see at least an inch gap between his big teeth.

“H. F. LaPeer,” Phil said.

“You know him?”

“Biggest bootlegger in the city. How long you been in Frisco, Sam?”

“Since July.”

“That’s right, you came for that head-busting job on the docks.”

“What’s the story with LaPeer?”

“Most of the booze in town flows from him. Runs the good stuff from Canada and brings it ashore at Half Moon Bay. Cops here are well paid, and no one seems to want to stop his party.”

“He looks like he combs his hair with olive oil.”

“Doesn’t seem to bother the girl.”

The blond girl stood against the long bar now, in the middle of an endless row of men in black suits getting drinks for their women. She smoked down a cigarette and made it look elegant the way she balanced the cigarette while holding the fox coat.

Her eyes looked as soft as her lips.

“That’s her.”

“You bet it is.”

“Sam? Over there.”

Phil pointed out a girl wearing a white bodice covered in glinting toy gems flitting her way around the table with a cigarette box hung around her neck. The first image Sam had of Zey Prevon wasn’t of a horse but of a Boston terrier. The girl had a sharp nose and soft chin and large bulging eyes, the kind that seemed to be in fashion these days among the movie-picture types. But she was long-legged, with biscuit-colored skin and large round breasts that hung handsomely in the jeweled top when she would lean over the table and the laps of men to light their cigars and cigarettes. The men would guffaw and laugh, and then motion the little twirling girl onto the next gentlemen. Please repeat it, nice and slow, sister.

“Why’d you say she looked like a horse?”

“Horses are ugly.”

“Horses are beautiful,” Sam said. “Don’t you go to the track?”

“What kind of animal has big tits?” Phil asked.

Sam waited for the girl to finish up, and he was going to meet her before she hit the next big table. For just two seconds the negro band stopped on a pin and then launched into “Fidgety Feet,” and the girl moved on, counting out cash into her hand and then tucking a few bills into her brassiere.

Two steps forward, Sam moved on her.

But then two large men in flowing overcoats stepped between Sam and Zey Prevon, and he could see only the men’s broad backs and then the girl pleading and smiling in profile and then turning down her mouth and sauntering away, one of the beefy men grabbing her arm. The other showed his silver badge. Tom Reagan.

H. F. LaPeer was there now, talking to the policemen and falsely smiling. He pulled out a silver cigar case, offering the men a smoke, but the men obviously declined and instead told LaPeer a few things. LaPeer dismissed them with a wave of his hand, in the thick cigar smoke, the band launching into the first few bars of the “St. Louis Blues,” the men and women drunk and going wild with it. A little girl in a flowered dress bumped into Tom Reagan’s partner and he tried to strong-arm the girl before she leapt up a good two feet, wrapped her arms around his ox neck, and planted a kiss on his sizable forehead.

“Having fun?” Sam asked.

Tom turned and nodded. “Hammett.”

“When you’re through, we’d like to talk to Miss Zey here, too. Is it Prevon or Prevost?”

“The papers call me both,” the big-eyed cigarette girl said. “I guess you can put one of those things between the two.”

“A hyphen?” Sam asked.

“That’s it.”

“Who’s this?” Griff Kennedy, the other cop, asked, finally pushing off the little girl and wiping lipstick from his forehead.

“Pinkerton,” Tom said. “Helped me out on that Southern Pacific job last month.”

Griff Kennedy nodded. His hair looked to be the color and fiber of copper wire.

“Beat it, Pink,” Kennedy said. “We got business with this little lady.”

“You gonna arrest her?”

“Does this have a damn thing to do with you?”

Kennedy struck his two fattened fingers in Sam’s sternum, moving him a foot back. Sam just smiled at him but didn’t turn, only held the gaze, till about the time LaPeer joined the little group again and told them if they had business with Miss Prevon that was their business but they were making his customers nervous.

“You want us to bust open this whole place?” Tom Reagan said.

“Chief O’Brien sends me Christmas cards.”

“Har,” Griff Kennedy said.

Zey seemed to shrink a little bit as she unstrapped herself from the cigarette box and sat down in a nearby booth, lighting a cigarette she’d taken from the case, and she smoked it, exhausted and bored, her great bulging eyes flashing back and forth between LaPeer and the two detectives.

Sam sat down across from her.

“How’d you like to come with me?”

“I don’t think you’re any better than those two.”

“I’d disagree.”

“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

“I’m a Pinkerton. I work for the attorneys representing Mr. Arbuckle. You’d like to help out Mr. Arbuckle, wouldn’t you?”

She shrugged and laughed, the cops and LaPeer starting to yell and point now but being drowned out by the trumpet player barking out the lyrics to “Bow Wow Blues” and the smart set at the tables and on the dance floor screaming.

Sam turned back to the bar and noticed it was all men now, all dressed in that identical black, the blond woman with the nice shape and the fox gone.

“I don’t know a thing,” Zey said.

Sam spotted the woman by a door near the stage, pushing away that piece of hair from her eye and readjusting the fox as if it carried a great weight. She had the most wonderful shoulders.

“Alice said you heard Virginia say she’d been hurt?”

“How many times have I got to be asked this? I wish I’d never even gone to that stupid party, but Alice dragged me there because she wanted to meet Lowell Sherman ever since she saw him in that picture where he played a king. You know he’s not even English?”

From across the bar, the tall girl with the legs and the snow blond hair scanned the room and nodded. Sam looked over the dance floor that resembled a chessboard and saw a man in a long raincoat and flop hat nod back to the woman and then nod again to another fella dressed just like him by another door. Sam put his hand across the table and held Zey’s long fingers.

“What’s the idea?”

“We need to go.”

“Why?”

“Now.”

Just then, the fox coat dropped to the floor at the feet of the long-legged woman and a 12-gauge shotgun appeared in her delicate hands, which slammed out two cartridges into the plaster ceiling, killing the music and cuing the screams.

The girl brushed back the hair from her face again. The face was lovely, heart-shaped, with full red lips and silver eyes that jumped out at you from all that white skin and hair.

Sam found himself smiling with admiration at the girl with the gun.

“Nobody better shimmy a goddamn inch,” yelled the girl. “I’m a federal agent and this is a raid.”

“Did SHE REALLY shoot into the ceiling?” Frank Dominguez asked.

“She did,” Sam said.

“And was she a real beaut?”

“She had a hell of a shape. I don’t know if I’d call her a beauty. When the houselights turned on, you could see maybe her nose had been busted at one time. But she had a quality about her. Sleepy bedroom eyes. You know the type.”

“And they just let you go?”

Sam nodded and stifled a cough with a handkerchief and his fist.

“And the girl?”

“She went with Reagan and Kennedy.”

“You know ’em?”

“I know Reagan. I know Kennedy by reputation.”

“And you don’t like him?”

“I heard stories.”

The two men sat in the center of the Palace Hotel’s Garden Court. It was early and a negro woman worked an electric vacuum machine on the carpet. The first light showed through the glass-paneled ceiling that domed the Garden Court, filled with potted palms and fresh-cut flowers, chandeliers that winked with prisms of color. A bird was caught in the ceiling and flew from side to side, slamming and fluttering against the glass.

“You’re not going to eat?”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s on me,” Dominguez said.

“Nice place.”

“The man who built it killed himself. Jumped into the bay right before his bank went bust.”

Sam ordered ham and eggs with hash, but the waiter said they didn’t serve hash at the Palace and so Sam ordered toast. It wasn’t quite six a.m.

“Coffee?” the waiter asked.

“Sure.”

Sam lit a cigarette and settled in. “I talked to the Blake girl. She said she didn’t hear anything but Virginia Rappe saying she was going to die. Before she got pinched, Zey Prevon told me she’d heard Virginia saying the same thing.”

“And we have Maude Delmont saying Virginia accused Mr. Arbuckle before she died.”

“Can you use that?”

“Conversations with someone killed in a crime are completely admissible.”

“Did the cops turn over the autopsy records to you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m just wondering how she died. I know the papers say she was crushed. But how? Were her bones broken?”

“Ruptured bladder.”

Sam nodded.

“During the rape?”

“There was no rape.”

Sam nodded.

“It’s a medical impossibility.”

“She was hurt in another way?”

“This is a very delicate matter, Mr. Hammett.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said. “But I do work for you.”

Dominguez nodded and crossed his legs, showing off a pair of bedroom slippers that didn’t quite match his pin-striped suit. He tried lighting a cigarette with a lighter out of juice. Sam passed him a pack of matches.

“This goes no further.”

“Of course.”

Dominguez let out smoke from the side of his mouth and shrugged, leaning into the table. “Mr. Arbuckle’s pencil isn’t as sharp as it used to be.”

Sam sat still.

“In fact, it hasn’t written for some time.”

“I’d like to see the coroner’s report.”

“I’d like that, too,” Dominguez said. “This whole thing stinks. I just learned last night that the autopsy was conducted immediately after the girl died on Friday at the hospital.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“The county coroner wasn’t present and wasn’t notified. Somebody called the coroner’s office Saturday about the dead girl and rang off. After that the coroner called the police and it was the police who talked to Maude Delmont. The autopsy was completely illegal.”

“YOU GODDAMN SON OF A BITCH,” Maude Delmont said. “Where’d you go?”

“If I got pinched, all our work woulda been out the window.”

On the staticky telephone line down to Los Angeles, Al Semnacher’s voice sounded as squeaky and annoying as ever.

“Do you know the flaming pile of shit you left me with?” Maude said.

“How was I supposed to know he was gonna kill her? That wasn’t exactly the plan.”

“But you sure as hell waltzed off with her slip and bloomers. What were you going to do with those, Al?”

“That’s why I’m calling.”

“Well, fuck you. You can take your apology and shove it up your ass.”

“They have them.”

“Who?”

“The cops. They came down to L.A. yesterday and they knew all about the slip and the bloomers and they took them from me.”

“How’d they know?”

“Those two girls Lowell Sherman brought. They told the cops they’d seen me take the torn clothes.”

“Are you in jail?”

“No.”

“Are you trying to frame me? Because if you are, I’ll tell them about every goddamn con we worked together. I’ll sing Hallelujah, you fucking rat bastard, as the stern slips beneath the waves.”

“Poetic.”

“They know.”

“I told the cops I’d taken Virginia’s clothes because they looked like nice rags to wash my machine.”

“And they bought that crock?”

“Come again? Bad connection.”

“They bought it?”

“I think so,” Al said. “But I have to come to Frisco and testify to the grand jury.”

“Me, too.”

“We should talk. You know, before.”

“What the hell are we doing now?”

“I’ll call when my train arrives.”

“Al?”

“Yeah?”

“If you fuck me, I won’t think twice about bringing us both down.”

“Don’t worry, sweetie. If I fuck you, I’ll kiss you first.”

“You call me sweetie again and I’ll bust your head wide-open.”

Maude rang off and put the earpiece back on the hook. She walked to the basin and placed a washcloth in some cool water, running the cloth over the back of her neck and her brow and looking at herself in a little mirror. She smiled, admiring her full fanny. She snatched a wide-brimmed black hat off the bed and adjusted it on her head to convey the proper tilt for mourning and took the washcloth to wipe off the paint from her eyes and mouth and bare breasts. A black dress that ran straight to her ankles hung on a hook on the door.

She practiced a few mournful looks until she heard a knock at the door. Staring out the peephole, she saw that gigantic policewoman, Katherine Eisenhart, standing in the hall with a bouquet of flowers.