by Ace Atkins
“I’ll suck it for two bits,” she said. The bar was dark and filled with red light and the smell of gasoline and urine.
Sam shook her away. In the long mirror, he watched as Phil Haultain walked into the room and took off his hat, as if this was the kind of place that demanded hat removal. Another girl approached Phil, and Sam smiled as he watched Phil’s eyes grow big at the offer. Sam was pretty sure he read the boy’s mouth saying, “Ma’am?”
The boy took a seat at a table near the piano player. The girl stayed and took purchase on his knee.
Sam rested his head into his hands. It was past one o’clock in the morning and for a moment he lost his place in time. Sometimes his mind played tricks like that when he drank. He could be in Baltimore or Philly or a mining camp in Montana or on the wharves in Seattle or on his grandfather’s farm, knee-deep in tobacco, walking endless rows as a summer sun stood red and strong to the west.
He asked for another drink, and in his mind he stood on a dock holding a shotgun in his arms as raggedy men tried to reach for him through fence posts, spitting at him and threatening to rip out his throat. The men wore torn rags, their bodies like skeletons. And then he broke away, hearing calliope music at the edge of a county fair, crushing a cigarette with the edge of his boot and staring up at the brightly lit Ferris wheel that had been boosted from back east.
And then he was back looking at the circle of the glass in his hand.
Sam knew he couldn’t return home by morning or else he’d risk Jose knowing he had it on him and what he was doing to his lungs and going against the cure he’d learned from her at Cushman.
The giant black man poured another shot of rye and Sam dished out another quarter, and he sat and he waited and exchanged a quick glance with Haultain, who now had another girl on his knee, and he watched as the girls worked him and bargained. Haultain was young but good at playing the rube.
They played around like that until two, when Rumwell came out from a back room. Even slightly drunk, Sam noticed the man was still put together just so in that boiled shirt and suit and bowler hat. He walked to the bar and moved against Sam, never glancing across at him, and Sam kept his head down and his eyes down as the gigantic negro reached down into his breast and pulled out a thick wad of cash and laid it down on the bar across from Rumwell, and Rumwell, not so much as looking at the black man, counted out the money in his hand and then tucked it into a fat wallet in his breast pocket, and, carrying his brown medical bag, walked briskly out of the bar and onto the cobblestones. Sam turned but found Phil already gone. Following, he clicked open his pocket watch, knowing he had hours to kill before daylight and getting home to Jose and acting like he gave a damn if he lived or didn’t.
But he knew he probably wouldn’t reach another six months, and the filthy trade he’d been taught by Jimmy Wright might just let him give a few bucks to Jose and the child and, by the grace of God, in a few years they’d forget him like smoke in the wind. Sam had thoughts like these as he wandered in and out of the bars of the Barbary, his lungs feeling squeezed and wrung out, before collapsing into a coughing fit in the great arms of a heiferlike woman with big painted blue eyes who thought he was the most humorous man she’d ever met.
Her breasts felt like great pillows.
“SO THE GIRL CHANGED HER STORY? ” Mr. Hearst asked the next morning.
“She said that was never her story.”
“But the assistant D.A.—what’s his name, Pisser?”
“U’ren, sir.”
“So ole U-rine is saying the girl was bribed.”
“I don’t know what Mr. U’ren is saying, but it looks like the girl was coerced into giving the statement. Miss Prevon-Prevost was arrested the other night at that dry raid at the Old Poodle Dog.”
“I read the story.”
“Yes, sir.”
The reporter, whatever his name was, seemed to be having a hard time standing there with his tablet in his hand and ink on his fingers, waiting for Mr. Hearst to spell out the story for him. Or maybe it was because Hearst was wearing war paint and an actual Indian headdress that had belonged to Sitting Bull.
Hearst took off the headdress, much to the disappointment of his six-year-old twin boys, who shot another arrow from the top floor of the Hearst Building out onto Market Street.
Hearst leaned into his desk and jotted out some notes. “Randolph, Elbert: Settle.”
The boys, dressed in identical blue Eton suits with knickers, looked at each other and sat down on a short couch, arms crossed over their chests and not saying a word.
“Can we get to the girl?”
“No one can find her. U’ren and Judge Brady put her somewhere. That other showgirl, Miss Blake, has disappeared all together.”
“What about this Delmont woman?”
“She’s sticking with the story that Virginia Rappe told her that Arbuckle had crushed her.”
“Wasn’t enough to get murder with the grand jury. What’s Judge Brady saying about manslaughter?”
“He says he’s looking for a second opinion in police court.”
“Will that work?”
The reporter shrugged. “If the police judge agrees, he can still try Fatty for murder.”
“What about this other woman?”
“She’s waiting outside, sir. That’s who I wanted you to meet.”
“Would you like a turkey leg?” Hearst said, pulling a big drumstick off a china plate and holding it out to the skinny young man. The young reporter shook his head and walked from the room, returning seconds later with the homeliest woman Hearst had ever seen. She looked like Buster Brown as an old unkempt man.
“This is Nurse Cumberland.”
“Good God,” Hearst said, and looked to his sons with wide eyes. Randolph whispered to Elbert, and the boys giggled from the little couch.
Hearst said, “Settle.”
“Miss Cumberland attended Miss Rappe at the St. Francis.”
“And at Wakefield, too,” the woman said.
Hearst nodded and tried not to laugh at the woman’s haircut, recalling the lawsuit he had with the cartoonist who’d created Buster Brown and now wishing he could ring up the man. The boys continued to whisper and giggle, and Hearst lumbered out of his chair and plucked the bow and a few arrows from their hands. “Boys.”
“Miss Cumberland, tell us your story,” he said, walking to the window and taking in Market Street and the final rolling slope down to the bay.
The woman looked to the young reporter and the young reporter looked to Hearst.
“Oh, of course,” Hearst said. “How much?”
“I don’t want to tell nothin’ but the truth, mind you.”
“And I assure you I’ll tell you my price when I know what your truth is worth.”
“Miss . . . Nurse Cumberland says that before Virginia Rappe died at Wakefield, she told her that she’d been dragged by Arbuckle, by the arm, into the back bedroom.”
“Is that true?”
“God’s truth, sir.”
“Have you been summoned by District Attorney Brady?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you given your story yet?”
“No, sir.”
Hearst set an arrow into the tiny wooden bow, war paint still on his face, and sighted a big boat pulling away from the Ferry Building, switching his sights to the tiny shape of a man hanging from the Ferry Building’s clock. A cleaner of some sort.
He let the arrow go and watched it sail until out of sight.
“Tear up the front page.”
“A TALLY WHACKER,” Maude Delmont said. “A man’s manhood.”
The women whispered to each other, dropping their spoons on the china plates and stopping that chattering altogether.
“And that is where the parrot landed?” asked Mrs. W. B. Hamilton, vice president of San Francisco’s Vigilant Committee.
“Yes, ma’am,” Maude Delmont said, ever so delicately stirring her tea in the great room of the Fairmon
t Hotel on the Wednesday after the girl had died. She took a little sip and a small bit of sugar cookie.
The two hundred or so women remained silent.
“Were these orgies common?” Mrs. Hamilton used a big voice, loud enough for all the women to hear. There was a stray cough, the light tinkling of a spoon, the shift of the chair, but in it all Maude Delmont had her audience.
“Yes,” she said. “A decent moral woman has no place in the film colony. I worked to sell magazine subscriptions to Ladies’ Home Journal. By the way, I will have subscription cards after I speak. But these parties were no places for a lady.”
“And they were nude at these orgies?”
“Completely,” Maude Delmont said. “At the party in question, that beast Arbuckle had taken offense with the parrot. The bird called him ‘Fatty,’ and nothing makes Arbuckle madder than to hear that. He sat there, mind you, in a very drunken state, arguing with the bird and calling it all kinds of foul names, words that would only be uttered in pool halls and houses of ill repute.”
My God. How awful.
“It was after he’d disrobed and slathered his whalelike hide with buckets of hot oil, to better lubricate himself and such orifices, when the bird took its revenge and swooped through the party, through the maze of nudity and sea of alcohol, to affix its talons on his man snake.”
Oh, my.
Two women fainted. Another woman choked on a delicate slice of coconut cake. A gigantic fat woman screamed.
“I don’t quite know how to say this . . .”
The Vigilant Committee members, the dozens of them all dressed in black with great round hats banded with trailing feathers, leaned in, making their folding chairs creak and groan. The room at the Fairmont was all brass and gold and crystal and china.
“. . . Arbuckle was making his man snake perform a rare Arabian dance as a man played a flute, as if charming the throb of his anatomy.”
More shrieks.
Police Chief Daniel O’Brien, the group’s special guest at the Fairmont, finally stood and asked Maude Delmont to take her seat, and said he had heard many stories about the film people down south. But he also said that he’d been assured by many high-ranking, moral, upstanding people that the Arbuckle types accounted for only a sliver of the artists who lived there.
“And in that spirit, I would like to introduce a man who has made grown-ups and children smile the world over,” Police Chief O’Brien said, sweeping his hand to a short man with a blunt cut of brown hair who wore a western shirt, leather chaps, and boots, “Broncho Billy.”
Maude Delmont rolled her eyes and asked the waiter for more cake. Big Kate Eisenhart leaned in close to her ear and whispered, “The nerve.”
Maude wiped her lips of icing.
Broncho Billy hitched a thumb in his chaps and hand-tooled belt and removed the big buckaroo hat from his head and held it to his heart. “May I lead you all in prayer?”
These women were the worst, a black-clad army of grim-faced suffragists, the kind Maude remembered in Kansas who’d march the town streets on a Saturday banging the old drum and causing the whole goddamn country to go dry. The leader of the group was a stout lady physician named Marina Bertola, who stood first and last after Broncho Billy finished up his prayer and promised the group to amass a posse if Arbuckle wasn’t brought to justice. As she spoke, the chandelier light refracted in her lenses, making her eyes disappear behind the glass, her eyes twin pools of ice.
“We have let our ardor cool down,” Dr. Bertola said. “And for that reason we are all responsible in some measure for the conditions that bring about such outrageous affairs as the Arbuckle party. Our purpose is to secure enforcement of the law. We must be faithful to that purpose, not only in regard to the Arbuckle case but for the sake of the future.”
THE OLD MAN listened with great interest to Sam’s story about shadowing Dr. Rumwell into the Barbary the night before. He left out the part about getting blind drunk, stopping short of the payoff with the big negro and Haultain tailing Rumwell out of the bar.
“He got on a streetcar and headed back to his place on Lombard,” Haultain said.
“How long did you sit on the house?”
“Till this morning,” Haultain said. “He left the house for Wakefield. That’s where the boy came for me and I broke off the tail.”
“Get some sleep,” the Old Man said. “Roll back on the job tonight.”
“I’ll take him,” Sam said.
“You find that Blake girl.”
“Checked out of the Woodrow on Tuesday.”
“Just find her.”
“What do you make of this Rumwell making house calls to whores?”
“I’d say he’s a true philanthropist.”
Sam smiled. “He performed an illegal autopsy on the Rappe girl and may have disposed of some of her organs.”
The Old Man took off his gold spectacles, folded them, and tucked them into the pocket of his dress shirt. He wore a pin high and tight at his collar, and leaned onto the desk with his forearms. “That may be. But one problem at a time. Alice Blake is scared. The other little tart is under lock and key by the state. Alice is the only one who can set the story straight about that party. Did you see the afternoon papers? The Delmont woman is on a goddamn speaking tour.”
“Does Los Angeles have anything on her?”
“Nope. Someone’s on that.”
“The Blake girl,” Sam said.
“The Blake girl.”
“I’ll check back with the hotel and run down some people at Tait’s.”
“You feeling all right?” the Old Man asked.
“Peaches and cream.”
“You look like shit warmed over.”
“Thanks.”
“You need a break?”
“No.”
The Old Man looked at Sam a long while and then put his glasses back on and nodded. He didn’t add a good-bye or give a speech, only went back to his paperwork, sleeves rolled well above the ink, and expected Sam and Phil to find their way out.
9
Sam found Alice Blake two days later, on a Friday, living in a Sunset District row house with her mother. He’d spent a five spot on a phone number from a dancer at Tait’s and used a city directory at the office to find the address, borrowed a machine from a nearby garage, and had been sitting on the house since yesterday. There was a corner grocery up on Irving where he’d buy cigarettes and a sandwich with coffee and use the toilet and pay phone. Most of the houses on the street were brand-new, narrow, two-story jobs with stucco and tile roofs. He’d spotted a nice empty one, directly across from the mother’s house, where he slipped through a window and could make himself comfortable on an apple crate with field glasses. It was late afternoon when he saw a yellow cab pull up to the address and saw Alice Blake skip out to the street and get in back.
Five minutes later, Sam was behind the cab in his machine and trailing across the southern part of Golden Gate Park and then dipping down into the Castro, thinking she was headed back downtown but instead watching the cab slow in front of a theater. She got out, paid the cabbie, bought a ticket at the window, and slipped inside. Sam parked and followed.
The picture had already started and Sam had to adjust his eyes in the darkness. The theater was a fantasy palace filled with gilded Oriental and Moroccan designs, the latter being appropriate since the moving images were of sheiks and the desert and far-off places with camels. The ceiling was a night sky, complete with moving clouds and winking stars. The screen was fifty feet high, bordered by balconies and plush red curtains. The effect made you feel as if you were at an outdoor play.
Sam took a seat in a side row where he had a good view of Alice Blake’s profile while she ate popcorn and stared, openmouthed, at the moving images. A man sat in front of a great organ, as if he were playing liturgy instead of accompaning a woman outside a sheik’s tent, nervous but accepting the invitation to come inside. The flap to the tent was held open and Alice stopped eating.
Her big brown eyes remained wide at the sight of the woman removing her pith helmet and belt and the sheik’s servants doing the same for him. Caston, the French valet in service of the sheik since his school days, closing the curtain.
Why have you brought me here?
The sheik, with a great smile, saying, Are you not woman enough to know?
