by Ace Atkins
“It’s good to know,” Sam said.
“You bet,” said the Old Man, the cigar a burning orange plug in the side of his mouth. “Even if we want it buried.”
18
Weeks later, the morning of November 11, Sam awoke to military bands warming up by the Civic Center and City Hall—the first few chords of “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm?”—and the metallic sounds of the testing of amplified voices from where President Harding would address the crowds later in the day. The apartment windows were open onto Eddy; a soft, cold breeze parted the torn curtains and brought in the early sounds of Armistice Day. But Sam soon closed the windows to shut out the racket and returned to watching his daughter sleep. Her name was Mary Jane, perfect and tiny and pink, with the sad soft eyes of her mother and the long delicate fingers of his mother’s family, the Dashiells.
After the baby had been born, Jose didn’t miss a beat, changing and washing diapers, soothing the late-night cries, and walking that creaking floor with the child just about the time Sam would come in from a shadow job. He’d sit with the child, after a long day on his feet, and rock her, careful not to breathe close, head turned and sometimes holding his breath, at the doctor’s request. Sam made camp on the Murphy bed, an alarm clock and bottle of balsamea kept nearby for company, while Jose and the baby slept in the bedroom.
Sam left the crib and Jose and the bedroom and set a match to the burner on the iron stove, making coffee. He was off today, as was most of San Francisco, but was already showered and dressed, his military papers tucked securely in the vest pocket of his tweeds. The Examiner had run a story the day before about veterans being given food and coal, and even toys for their children, and this was the first day since making his way west that he’d been proud he’d signed up for the goddamn circus. He’d been ignored by pencil pushers, told the sickness he’d caught back in camp wasn’t worth a damn, and was now forbidden by docs to be close to his daughter. He’d be damned if he wouldn’t get every scrap offered by his government.
The coffee boiled and he strained it over a mug. On a hook by the door sat his old Army-issue coat and cap. He heard Jose stir and she came tiptoeing into the room and leaned down to kiss Sam on the cheek.
“You think we’ll have room in the icebox?” Sam asked.
“We’ll make room.”
“The paper said to come to the Civic Center.”
“Do you hear all that?”
“It’s what woke me.”
“You think you’ll see the president?”
“I’ll give him your best.”
“I’d like to get the baby out.”
“It’s shoulder to shoulder,” he said. “Drunks and fat politicians. I won’t take long.”
Sam stood, finished the coffee, and walked with Jose to the door, sliding into his Army coat and cap.
“I don’t think I’ve seen this,” she said.
“From my steamer trunk,” Sam said. “The only thing worth a damn I got from the Army.”
She buttoned him up into his coat and pulled his hat down into his eyes.
“It’s cold.”
“Who turned out the lights?”
Eddy Street was choked that morning with flivvers and cabs and crowded buses in from the county. Men in overalls and women in catalog dresses looked lost on city streets. Newsboys shouted out special editions from every corner and every other old woman wore a paper gold star on her breast. There was a legless man in ribbons and medals propped atop a wooden crate and holding a tin cup. A blind man walked in the opposite direction of Sam, being led by a nurse in white wearing a flowing black cape. Sam turned onto Van Ness, passing over Turk, and was almost over Golden Gate when he saw the thick heads of folks clear and heard a police whistle, an arc forming around the open door to a hotel.
The Mariah was parked out front, doors wide-open and waiting for a gaggle of red-faced cops who emerged from a flophouse, pushing out three men—two in their undershorts and shirts and a third with no shirt but pants and shoes—out into the street. One man was yelling at the cops. Another man’s face was spiderwebbed with blood from his nose. The yelling man got a beefy fist to his stomach and was told to shut the hell up. Sam stood there in his heavy coat, collar popped high and hands deep in his pockets, and watched the cops toss all three men into the back of the paddy wagon.
Sam asked the driver of the wagon, “What gives?”
“Filthy communist scum,” the man said. “Wobblies.”
“What did they do?”
“Nest of ’em,” the driver said. “In our city organizing, stewing up all that red bullshit for a family parade. I’m proud to give them a ride to San Quentin.”
“Not the Hall?”
“San Quentin, brother,” the man said. “Filth like that doesn’t deserve a trial. It’s goddamn Armistice Day.”
Sam continued watching another cop walk from the flophouse with a metal printing press hoisted in his thick arms. He threw it in the road, where it cracked and broke like a dismantled engine, and the cop dusted off his hands on his trousers with a big smile. One of the Wobblies broke free from the cop pushing him along and the big man caught him by the arm and began to beat him about the face and neck and back with his nightstick.
Sam yelled for him to stop and the sound coming from him felt odd, like it hadn’t been his own.
He ran for the cop and grabbed his arm, but the big cop just jabbed Sam in the stomach with the nightstick, squeezing every ounce of breath from him, and dragged the man into the Mariah, where the back door closed with a hard click. The wagon started and disappeared, and the circle of people grew smaller and smaller until there was nothing but people walking around Sam as he sat on the ground trying to find some air and his feet.
Sam could hear the crowds and noise and music down the hill at the Center and he staggered toward it.
“THIS is A NICE CAR, ROSCOE,” Gavin McNab said.
“Glad you like it.”
“It’s like sitting in your own living room.”
“Glad you like it.”
“You don’t like me much, do you?” McNab said.
“I’m tired, my ass hurts from the drive, and I’m not exactly thrilled about visiting San Francisco again.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry,” Roscoe repeated, staring out the wavy glass of his Pierce-Arrow at the endless pastures and hardscrabble little gardens. The engine hummed and purred and vibrated the limousine carriage in a fine, even way.
McNab was a big man, with a balding, closely shorn gray head and a pair of tremendous black eyebrows. His face was craggy and weather-beaten, his eyes a light blue, not as soft as those Roscoe found in the mirror but washed out and penetrating. They’d been out of Los Angeles for four hours and his new lawyer had yet to take off his black suit jacket, buttoned up over a black vest and tie, with his boiled shirt pinned tight to his thick neck. Most of the trip so far had been McNab telling tales of how he’d made it from bellhop to law school, and what it was like being right in the center of the city in ’06. He laid it on real thick about all the stone rubble and fires and smell of dead horses cooking. Gavin McNab was a hard guy all the way around.
In the bench seat across from them, the young attorney Brennan made a pillow from his jacket and leaned against the window, slack-jawed and sleeping, as the California nothingness rolled by. The driver, Harry, separated by glass, blissful and unaware, worked the wheel up a straight leg north. Good ole Harry.
“Don’t let one bad thing ruin Frisco for you,” McNab said. “It’s only after those old bitches got the vote has it been like this. Christ, they have a bull’s-eye drawn on every set of testicles they see. They won’t be happy till they turn us all to geldings.”
“Good to hear.”
“Hey,” McNab said. “I hear you have a shitter in here. Where is it?”
“Under your seat.”
McNab got up, bent at the waist, and removed the leather cushion from where he was s
eated. “So it is. Genius.”
“And a bar?”
“It’s empty.”
“Good. Good.”
“I’m on the wagon.”
“Good. Good.”
McNab rubbed his craggy face and stared for a moment at the sleeping young Brennan. He reached for a lever that brought down a skinny tabletop before him and opened a briefcase made from the skin of a crocodile. There was a silver flask inside and he took it out for a moment before taking a long sip. He offered it to Roscoe and Roscoe shrugged and then grabbed it and took a long pull.
With glasses on the end of his nose, McNab made small checks on lists of names and occupations.
“The jury?”
“Potential names.”
“Where’d you get that?”
McNab glanced over at Roscoe, shrugged, and then turned back to the sheets of paper.
“I didn’t kill her, you know.”
“I don’t care if you did.”
“But I didn’t.”
“So much the better,” McNab said. “I think you’d like knowing we’ve located two witnesses in Chicago and three in this state who will testify that Miss Rappe suffered serious ailments before.”
“What kind?”
McNab reached into his briefcase and pulled out another file, using the tip of his empty pen to find a few names and check over notes from a neatly typed report. “Apparently the girl had spells like this before. Whenever she drank alcohol, she’d become agitated, frustrated, begin to tear at her clothes. This happened quite often, and she wouldn’t find release from the pressure until she was very nude.”
Roscoe looked at him and then rested his head on his knuckles. They passed oil wells now, little herds of them in the flat, grassland earth pumping in a mechanized rhythm.
“You’re not happy?”
“I’m sure it took a lot.”
“One of the women, a Mrs. Minnie Neighbors, attended a hot springs with Miss Rappe and saw her under one of these spells. Another,” McNab said, checking his list, “another is a Harry B. Barker. He’d apparently gone with Virginia for five years before she moved to California. He said Miss Rappe suffered from enough venereal ailments to kill a sailor.”
“She was lovely,” Roscoe said.
“Of course she was, Roscoe.”
“She had soft brown eyes.”
“And a warm, wet pussy, too, I bet. But let’s not get nostalgic. We have hours till San Francisco and there are things you must know.”
“Invented things.”
“Facts.”
“How much?”
“How much?” McNab asked.
“How much will this cost me?”
“It’s not your tab.”
“Unless you lose.”
“I never lose, Roscoe,” McNab said. He didn’t turn to Roscoe when he said it, just said it like he was talking about a box score or the weather, a certain fact. “We’ll make sure of that.”
“With facts.”
“Call ’em what you like,” McNab said.
Roscoe’s driver, Harry, hit a pothole, and all their asses jimmied around for a second, slugging Brennan’s head against the window frame, startling him, perking him right on up.
He rubbed a hand over his face and opened his eyes wide: “Did I miss something?”
THE ENTIRE BREADTH of City Hall and the Civic Center was crammed with people. People brought their babies to see Harding. Immigrant people—Chinese, Italian, Japanese—came to wave little American flags on sticks. More people, Gold Star mothers, who came in tribute to their dead sons. People who’d fought in the war, even some old ones who’d fought the Spanish or the aged ones who’d fought each other in ’65. Box cameras were set atop of cars. Ragtag bands played Sousa. Men sold hot sausages from makeshift grills and sacks of popcorn for pennies. By the time Sam got to the park before City Hall, he saw it, what the Examiner called the largest American flag ever on display. The Stars and Stripes hung from high under the rotunda—modeled to a larger scale than the Capitol in D.C.—covering the columns and bleeding down and swaying at the top of the steps.
A large path had been cut between the people and the steps, and in the center police dressed in their most crisp blue stood ready to march. Sam figured almost the entire San Francisco Police Department was there on foot and horse, all the top men up front to lead the parade near the band. He saw Chief O’Brien and the white-haired D.A., Judge Brady, and behind them stood Matheson, talking and smoking with detectives Reagan and Kennedy. The horses nervously skirted the edge of the regiments, waiting for the damn mass of blue to get moving.
Sam shouldered his way to a rope run down to the foot of City Hall. On the side opposite of him, the people parted as a dozen or so policemen cut an opening and held up the rope, letting in a tall man with great bulging eyes. He wore a homburg and tall coat with a fur collar. Smiling and holding leather gloves, he strode across to the mayor and the police chief, Brady and their ilk, and shook a lot of hands.
Sam didn’t recognize him. But he heard whispers of “Hearst” all around him.
The band started up.
The police began to march to Market Street.
The D.A., the chief, and mayor, and William Randolph Hearst led the way.
Boots marched from City Hall, along the cleared roadway, and past the big Bull Durham advertisement on the last building standing on the cleared grounds. The trees newly planted and immature, the lampposts all new and polished. The smiles on the leaders’ faces. Hearst confident, hands in pockets, sharing a quick joke with Judge Brady. A quick smile from Chief O’Brien.
“Say, how about making way for a kid?”
Sam felt an elbow in the back and looked back to see a man with a ruffian boy on his shoulders trying to catch a glimpse of the big blue walk. The kid smiled with amazement, and his father handed a tiny flag up to him and he waved it and yelled. His father held on to his legs and smiled at the syncopated rhythm of the police boots, the strength of it.
Sam stayed there until the blue parade moved down onto Market, heading toward the Embarcadero. The crowd began to mass up toward the steps of City Hall, where workers put the final touches on a great wooden dais. Soldiers walked the grounds, spending time with country virgins and proud old men. They shook hands and patrolled with rifles strung across their backs. Sam asked one of them about the handouts for the veterans, and the soldier, a pink-faced boy with hair the color of straw, pointed him to a series of trucks parked along Larkin in front of the library.
Sam waited there in line for nearly two hours before being handed a pound of flour and a hand-painted greeting card thanking him for his effort overseas.
He stared back at the old soldier who’d handed this to him, the old man himself leaning on a crutch and missing part of his left leg. The soldier smiled with apology, offering a warm hand, and turned back to the next in line, the line of cripples, lungers, and shell-shocked boys—now men—stretching down around McAllister Street.
Sam kept the flour and tossed the greeting card into the trash by the public library.
He sat on the steps and smoked two cigarettes. CHAUCER. SHAKESPEARE. MILTON. HAWTHORNE. POE. Other names he didn’t recognize carved in marble on the library walls.
He walked up the steps and went inside.
19
There’s no way this Petrovich fella is smarter than Craig Kennedy,” Phil Haultain said. “He’s pretty sharp,” Sam said. “He understands people.”
“Well, so does Craig Kennedy. Craig Kennedy isn’t just a detective, he’s a scientist. He uses his knowledge of chemistry and physics to chase down criminals. Does that fella Petrovich ever look through a microscope?”
“He’s got a sense for body language.”
“Does he have a nice car?”
“The book was published in 1866.”
“How ’bout a horse?” Haultain asked.
The men were side by side in long separate tubs filled with hot mud. Sam smoked a cigarette. Phil sm
oked a cigar.
They’d driven north up through Napa Valley the day before and found rooms in the old wooden hotel downtown. Calistoga was a terrible town for shadow work, only about a half dozen buildings along a single street. The girls were staying at a resort down the road, but Phil said they came in for dinner every night. Phil knew their schedule and movements, the shifts of their guards, and the whole racket. He’d been watching them for nearly a week before picking up Sam. But there wasn’t much sense in watching them today, so they’d taken the afternoon off, waiting for the girls to come back to town.
