by Ace Atkins
“The Palace Hotel,” Sam said. “Last week.”
Roscoe looked at him.
“You should really put on a shirt, Roscoe,” Minta said.
“Did Frank introduce us?”
“I was sitting in the lobby in a chair reading a paper. You stepped off the elevators and spotted me right off.”
“Did I say something?”
“No, but you gave me a look that coulda melted paint.”
“I suppose I took you for a newsboy. You look like a writer.”
“No such luck,” Sam said. “I only made it to eighth grade.”
“Self-made man,” Roscoe said. “How ’bout a drink?”
“Are you kidding?” Sam asked. “That’s the toughest, meanest dry agent in the state of California out there playing with your dog.”
“She’s got a hell of a figure,” Minta said. “She with you?”
Sam felt his face heat but he managed a smile. “I suppose one drink. You wouldn’t happen to have Scotch?”
ROSCOE WAS DRUNK and two hours late for his meeting with Al Zukor. But he was clean-shaven and showered and smelling sweet as he stepped into the dimly lit room at Musso & Frank’s and straightened his tie. The bourbon had given him kind of a loose, resolved dignity, as it seemed to him—maybe he only imagined—that all voices fell silent, forks stopped scraping on plates, and the clink of glasses had all but ceased. In his standard corner was little Mr. Zukor in a high red leather booth, and the little white-headed man stood and smiled and waved Roscoe over. Roscoe knew that being seen in public with an outcast truly pained Al, but it was all show business, and being given a good handshake by Al Zukor in Musso & Frank’s was rock-solid.
He made his way through the maze of tables following the same little maître d’ that was always there but whose name Roscoe could never remember. And he’d about made it to that back booth when he spotted Broncho Billy at a side table over candlelight, guffawing it up with a couple tarts in sequins and hats that looked as if they were made with dead squirrels, and so Roscoe waved over to Mr. Zukor and stumbled up to Broncho Billy and asked him with great sincerity, as he—Roscoe—straightened his diamond cuff links, where the two broads killed that squirrel.
Broncho Billy stopped the guffawing and stood, slipped his pearl Stetson back on his head, and shifted his gunless belt on his waist. He stood toe to toe with Roscoe, and Roscoe looked at the little man with the big nose and bigger ears. Billy sucked a tooth, trying to figure out what to say.
“You have a good time in Frisco?” Roscoe asked.
“Someone has to make the picture business clean.”
“If you keep hanging out with broads like that, your pecker is gonna turn green.”
Little Mr. Zukor inserted himself between Billy and Roscoe and smiled, sweet and calming, but tough, too. Because even though Mr. Zukor was a pint-sized little bastard who used to sell furs on street corners, he was a hard-edged son of a bitch that no one in their right mind wanted to cross if they ever wanted to step foot on a picture lot again.
“Our table.”
Roscoe followed and squeezed into the booth. Every bastard and bitch in the restaurant craned their necks to get a good look at the zoo animal. Roscoe rubbed his face and straightened the cuffs of his shirt under his pressed suit jacket. He took a deep breath as a waiter laid a napkin in his lap and handed him the menu.
“How ’bout a fucking drink?” Roscoe said.
Mr. Zukor made a face, as if Roscoe had just dropped a turd on the table, and sent away the waiter with a flick of the hand.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“I’d like a drink.”
“Not here,” Mr. Zukor said. “Not like this.”
Roscoe shrugged. “I’m plastered anyway. So what’s the difference?” “That’s a spiffy suit you got there, Roscoe.”
“Bought it in Frisco,” Roscoe said. “Labor Day. You might’ve heard about a little party I threw. I crushed some woman while I was giving her a solid lay.”
“Please keep your voice down.”
“These people are cannibals,” Roscoe said. “They’ll eat your flesh from your bone.”
“It’s a tough business.”
Roscoe leaned back into the comfort of the leather booth and lit a cigarette with a gold tip. He removed a spot of tobacco from his tongue and met the stare of a beautiful woman across the way. When she matched eyes with him, she turned her head.
“Let’s talk about Frank Dominguez,” Zukor said.
“What’s to talk about? You fired him.”
“I didn’t fire him. I discussed your trial with him. We’ll need the best.”
“Frank is the best.”
“Frank is your drinking buddy, the guy you play poker with when you’re feeling lonesome. Not the best, Roscoe. Maybe down here, but not up there.”
“So you want this McNab fella? Who’s he?”
“The best defense attorney we can buy.”
“I didn’t do this, Al. I did not touch that girl and they got no one to say I did.”
“Sometimes men become a target for hate. When I was a kid, people used to say they were cursed. You’re a cursed fella right now. But a fella I got a lot of dough wrapped up in.”
“The checks have stopped.”
“They’ll resume after the trial. I have investors worried.”
“What if I’m guilty?”
“I don’t think it will come to that.”
“How many cities have banned my pictures? How many?”
“Let’s eat, Roscoe. Just like we used to. Let’s laugh and remember old songs. Okay, friend?”
“I’d like to walk right over to that Broncho Billy and piss in his drink.”
“I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”
“I don’t want you to fire Frank,” Roscoe said. The words sounded slurred, but he goddamn well meant them. “Okay?”
“He’s not fired,” Al said, spreading his hands wide, pleading. “He served you well during all that preliminary mumbo jumbo.”
“I need him.”
“You’ll be fine,” Al said. “McNab is just a little, um, insurance.”
Roscoe looked across the room at all the laughing and talking starting up again. The people had stopped staring. In fact they weren’t looking at Roscoe at all. Even when his eyes would meet another’s, it was as if he was invisible, or, worse, just another Joe.
Roscoe pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to breathe. His face felt hot and moist, and he just stared at the blue of the linen-covered table. Tears dropped one after another and he wiped them away before looking up again.
He felt Al’s small hand rubbing circles on his back and again sending away the waiter, telling him to just give them a minute.
“Mein Kind,” Mr. Zukor said.
“Why does everyone leave me?” Roscoe said, saying it as a question for himself. “Why do they do that?”
IT WAS MIDNIGHT, and Sam rode with Daisy way the hell out of town on Wilshire to the Ambassador Hotel and the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. Long after she’d killed the machine’s engine, they sat there in the front seat of the open cab and watched a long line of Kissels and Kings and Nashes and Hayneses wheeling up to those carved wooden doors where the crowd walked up the red carpet and was swallowed into the great mouth of the pulsing shell, jazz floating out on the warm wind.
“So how do we know who’s Lawrence?” Sam asked.
“I know a fella who knows a fella.”
“And that fella’s gonna give you the nod.”
“Right.”
“Shouldn’t we go inside?”
“You’re a puzzle, Pinkerton.”
“How so?”
“You’re a lunger, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“Still running down dank alleys and climbing fire escapes and beating the truth out of stoolies.”
“I don’t run so much.”
“And you wear a ring.”
“I do.”
<
br /> “And you have a wife.”
“She goes with the ring.”
“Children?”
“One on the way.”
Daisy nodded, both hands placed on the wooden steering wheel, watching the line of cars move in a slow, delicate dance like the mechanical turn of a carousel. There was the opening of the car door, a hand for the lady, and the slick greasing of the palm. Sam rubbed his jaw, finding himself thirsty, and balanced his hat on his knee. He looked over at Daisy, in her silk dress and soft turban, clenching that tight little jaw. She’d changed into a dress with a fur collar and the warm wind made the fur ruffle as if it were alive.
“How ’bout you?” Sam asked.
Daisy kept watching the door and the carousel movement, and Sam noted that she saw it all in the exact same way. “How ’bout let’s have a drink?”
“Don’t you find that hypocritical?” he asked.
“I call it an agent’s job to not make themselves known. Hell, it’s in the manual.”
“Dry agents come with a manual?”
“On some things.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest is all intuition, Pinkerton. Don’t you ever find yourself in a situation that ain’t according to Hoyle and you have to just use the noodle?”
The Cocoanut Grove was a big bubble of jazz and smoke and cocktails and laughter. Stars twinkled in a plaster-domed sky. There were twenty-foot palm trees that looked so real, Sam had to reach out and touch them to check his eyes—a woman at the bar said they’d been brought straight from the set of The Sheik. Fat paper lanterns hung from the drooping fronds and brightly colored tents had been set up all over the nightclub, where people smoked and laughed, walking in and out of silky floating curtains like a hazy, smoky dream. Women lounged on large pillows and danced on tables, a paper moon going down over a painted lake far on the wall, a horizon that made you feel unsteady, almost as if you could drown yourself in it if you stared long enough. And there was Daisy at a bar with a bartender dressed as a sultan, and Sam watched the drape of her hair down the reach of her long neck and the elegant placement of her thin arms across the bar, and she turned to Sam and smiled with that red mouth.
And Sam smiled back.
A mass of people separated them, but Sam could see through them to Daisy, the way your eyes can make out shapes and patterns of trees and roads through the fog. There was laughter and dancing and jazz and the sound of a trumpet.
He walked toward her.
Daisy put her finger to her nose and sloughed it off, turning to a skinny fella in a black suit bopping his way though the party. Sam could not see the man’s face but noted the way his shoulder blades cut up into the material of his jacket and the long droop of the neck. He walked with speed—deliberate yet loose and disjointed.
Sam followed him out onto the hill and then lost him in the mass of a hundred machines, finding him again as he piled into a Studebaker Big Six, Sam knowing it was a Studebaker by the insignia as it shot past close enough to feel the engine’s heat on his face.
When he turned, there was the Hupmobile idling next to him.
“Do I need to spell it out for you?” Daisy asked.
16
The Studebaker drove east, back through downtown, with its flashing signs and jostling streetcars, and joined up with Valley Boulevard until there was nothing but pasture and produce trucks and lonesome gas stations and the odd farmhouse or seed store. Daisy hung back a quarter mile, watching the Big Six’s courtesy lamp on the driver’s side like a beacon. Sam commented on the lamp being a great thing and Daisy shot back that it didn’t really matter because there was nothing else out here besides farmers and cows and orange trees. The hills were silver and rolling in the moonlight, the wind coming through the Hupmobile’s cab warm on Sam’s face, the dashboard glowing under the instrument panel and showing off Daisy’s lean legs as she mashed the accelerator when the Studebaker would disappear around another lone turn.
VISIT GAY’S LION FARM read the billboard. At El Monte on Valley Boulevard.
“You don’t think?” Sam asked.
“I don’t like animals.”
The Studebaker rolled off a little access road and Daisy slowed to a near stop. There was a dusty lot and a broad stucco entrance bragging about the place being Internationally Famous, and from his vantage point Sam could see the figure of the lean man walk through the gates and disappear. Daisy followed, parked, and killed the engine. The only other machine in the lot besides the Hupmobile and the Big Six was a long flatbed truck with slatted sides.
Flies buzzed in the back of the truck, and in the moonlight Sam could see rancid meat and blood.
The entrance gate was open, and they followed the man down a winding path of crushed pebbles. Signs to the lion cages were fashioned from bamboo and oak trees canopied the path, past small red barns and little kiosks that sold postcards and stuffed lions and gum and cigarettes. They were well down the path when they heard the first scream.
“What’s that?”
“The King of the Beasts,” Sam said.
“They keep ’em locked up, don’t they?”
“One would hope.”
There were more screams and roars—definitely roars—and Daisy stepped back from the lead to take a stride beside Sam, too worried to lead but too proud to follow. The trees looked old, spared from the bulldozer and plow, and it all seemed natural and prehistoric in the moonlight.
They stopped and listened for steps but only heard the screams until the screams seemed to be coming from all around them. It was a great ring, a chain-link circle as wide around as a baseball field, at least thirty feet high, with bleachers and long nets strung from what looked like telephone poles.
“Where are they?” she whispered.
“I don’t see ’em.”
“You see him?”
“I don’t,” Sam said.
“This was a goddamn fool thing to do.”
They kept on the path, over a little bamboo bridge and toward a long red barn lit up with tiny white bulbs. Sam nearly ran into Daisy when she stopped and pulled him behind the large trunk of an oak. From the barn, an engine started, and soon another flatbed truck, identical to the one parked in front, came rambling down the path, breezing past their hiding place and slowing to an idle by the giant cage. The headlights lit up the center of the ring, and the long, lean man, Jack Lawrence, unlocked a gate and walked inside. Sam and Daisy stood watching at the narrow spot in the path well back from the idling truck.
They watched Lawrence squat on his haunches and walk backward with the edge of a tarp, the dust and gravel falling away and choking the night air. The beams of the headlights caught the dust as Lawrence emerged into the light and removed one large wooden beam and then another before disappearing for several moments down below and returning with a large crate. They could hear the bottles jostle and rattle against one another as he slid the crate into the truck and went back for more. On his third trip down into the hidden hole, Daisy walked down the path and into the headlight beams and locked the cage door.
Sam followed.
Soon Lawrence emerged with another flat of hooch and walked to the closed doors and looked puzzled, before he saw Daisy and asked, “What gives?”
Daisy twisted her knee inward and removed the pearl-handled .22 and aimed it through a diamond in the chain-link. “Got to hand it you.”
“Who are you?”
“Daisy Simpkins, federal dry agent.”
“This isn’t what you think.”
“What is it?”
“It’s mineral oil,” Lawrence said with a noticeable Australian accent.
“For the animals.”
“Sam, hold ’im.”
Sam walked up to the man, who was still hoisting the crate in his arm, and he pulled a gun and showed it. He winked at Lawrence.
“I didn’t do nothing.”
Sam smiled back.
“Hey,” Lawrence said. “What’s she doing? Hey!”
Sam heard the rusted bars and the metal gates swing open one after another. The cries of the lions had stopped, and as the animals filled the ring through their now-open chutes there was soft, contented purring. Lawrence dropped the hooch. The bottles cracked and broke, and Sam shook his head at the damn shame of it all.
