by Ace Atkins
The boys looked at each other again.
“You fools,” Kate Eisenhart said. “You poor fools.”
“THE CHRONICLE’S BEEN RUNNING this serial ’bout this detective named Craig Kennedy,” Phil Haultain said. “You got to see this thing. This guy ain’t like us. He’s a real gentleman. A Nob Hill type, only he lives in New York, and has a manservant and four speedy cars.”
“Four of ’em?”
“Four of ’em.”
Haultain and Sam walked out back of the Flood Building, heading toward Powell.
“See, this guy’s some big brain who can smell a brand of cigarette on a woman and uses a microscope to match hairs found at a murder. He also wears expensive clothes and knows how to talk to women.”
“Nothing like us. We can’t talk to women.”
“See, Craig Kennedy is some man about town but he wants to right the wrongs of society,” Haultain said. “The paper’s running part four next week, but I think you can catch up. Last time we left Craig he’d been drugged but came out of it to make this big-time raid. But before he could make a raid, the whole goddamn house blew up. Kennedy escaped without a hair out of place, located some underground tunnel, and followed the bad guys just as the chapter ended. I can’t wait to find out what happens next.”
“You mind if we drop by Marquard’s? I’m out of smokes.”
“Thought you rolled your own.”
“Too much work.”
“How’s the lungs?”
“Working.”
“It’s worse in the fog, ain’t it?”
Sam nodded.
Sam bought his cigarettes and they cut back across Powell, waiting for a horse-drawn wagon, bumping along, loaded down with fish and crabs on ice blocks. As they followed O’Farrell, the electric streetlights tripped on one after another like dominoes.
“So what’s the plan?”
“Wait a couple minutes and follow me inside. When you come in, you don’t know me.”
“Sam, what do you think happened to that girl?”
“Ain’t my problem.”
“You just want the truth?”
“I just write reports.”
Inside Tait’s, a man with a face like a skillet cleaned out sundae glasses and dirty spoons in a sudsy bucket of water. Sam leaned into the counter and asked for a drink and the man said, “It’s Prohibition, ain’t you heard?,” and Sam said he thought this place was a speak.
The ice-cream man snorted and pumped out some chocolate in a glass.
“So what are you, a dry agent?”
Sam reached for the leather wallet in his tweeds and opened it to the Pinkerton badge.
“Just looking for a couple girls. One of ’em’s named Alice Blake. The other’s name is Prevon or Prevost. No trouble. Just want to ask them a couple questions.”
“I know Alice.”
“She here?”
The man looked back at the octagon clock on the wall and then at Sam and said, “What’d she do? Break an old man’s heart?”
“Exactly.”
The door opened, a bell jingled overhead, and three girls flitted past the counter and toward a back door. The ice-cream man’s sharp little eyes clicked to the girls, as they disappeared through an unmarked door, and then back to Sam.
The bell jingled again, and Phil stepped up to the bar and asked for a chocolate malt.
“Can you leave her a message?” Sam asked.
The soda jerk shrugged and said something about this being America, and then Sam wrote out a phone number on the back of a business card.
“What’s in this for me?” the soda jerk asked.
“Helping out your fellow man.”
“That’s some racket.”
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.”
