by Ace Atkins
“I read The Call last night,” she said, face never changing. “I heard the purser located some of the gold through a dream. I found that odd.”
“So did we,” Sam said. “But the fella we make for it jumped ship yesterday morning and hasn’t been seen since.”
“How much is still missing?”
“Twenty thousand,” Sam said. “I’ll make sure you and the baby have plenty. I can pay up the rent for some time.”
“How?”
“It’d be taken care of. You wouldn’t have to worry for a thing.”
“I never asked for a thing, Sam.”
There were just the sounds in the kitchen for a while and the silence just kind of hung there between them for a long moment, Sam searching for something to say but Jose speaking first.
“I read about Mr. Arbuckle, too,” she said, cooking eggs now, hard-frying them, and browning the toast alongside in the skillet. “Doesn’t look good. His friend Mr. Fishback said that Arbuckle asked him to sneak into the women’s changing room to see Virginia.”
“Don’t believe everything you read.”
“You want some of those preserves?’
“You bet.”
“Say, you’re good with the kid, Sam. She asleep?”
“Like a baby.”
“Ha.”
“I’ve been doing some thinking about Mr. Arbuckle.”
“You have some theories?”
“I don’t think the autopsy was covering up her being pregnant. I think one of the reasons she came to the city was to get rid of the child.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s a doctor,” Sam said. “The one called by Mrs. Delmont to the St.
Francis. I shadowed him sometime back and, among other things, he treats whores.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s an abortionist.”
“Easy enough to find out.”
“But you don’t believe he was protecting Miss Rappe’s virtue when he destroyed her organs.”
“Nope.”
“You believe he was covering for something he botched.”
“Yep.”
“You don’t say much.”
“Nope.”
He smiled.
She laid down his plate of eggs. He slowly, very carefully, passed over the sleeping child to her. She took the handoff with a smile, the kid still dozing.
“That would be a hell of a thing to prove.”
“It’s not my case anymore,” Sam said. “Other men are on it.”
“But you’re still poking around?”
“A fella I think is a good egg asked me to.”
“That simple?”
“Yep.”
“You’re a good egg, Sam.”
Sam didn’t respond.
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON when Sam stepped foot back on the Sonoma.
A couple of seamen in coveralls painted the deck and smoked cigarettes. He recognized one of them from the days before and gave him a short wave and hello, looking for the first officer, McManus or Captain Trask, but was told that both of ’em had gone ashore to meet with their families. Sam was headed back down, stepping onto a staircase leading belowdecks, back to the engine room and the hidden vent shaft, when he heard his name called.
He turned.
Tom Reagan stood there looking down on him. He wore a black slicker and black fedora and motioned for Sam to come on back up. “We need to talk.”
Sam followed him.
The wind on deck was a cold bastard. He lit a cigarette for warmth. Tom did the same.
“Hell of a place to be on Thanksgiving.”
Sam nodded.
“I think that gold is long gone,” Tom said. “How ’bout you?”
Sam nodded.
Tom smiled at him and it was a knowing smile. Sam shuffled on his feet a bit.
“’ Course it wouldn’t take much to hide a coin here or there. A man could fill up his pockets and walk right out.”
Sam studied Tom’s face, his granite features pinching, taking a draw on the cigarette. Those small eyes in that bullet head squinted at Sam.
“I guess that’s right.”
“Something’s not sitting well with me, Sam.”
Sam watching him. He waited.
“I don’t like when someone isn’t straight with me. I like ’em to be honest.
I like to lay out the truth, plain and unvarnished, for all the world to see. I don’t like cheaters. Even when I wrestled back in school, I knew the rules and played ’em straight.”
“Get on with it,” Sam said.
“Now, hold on. I need you to listen to me. ’Cause I’m not even sure what to do about this.”
Sam’s heart started to race. He took in a breath of cold air and dropped his hands into his pockets. He could smell the paint fumes from the deck ahead of them and it was making him nauseated. He grabbed the edge of the railing and felt it was slick with paint, which he wiped off on his clean handkerchief.
“Goddamnit.”
“I like you, Sam,” Tom said. “I think you’re a straight shooter and I respect that. I want to give you a fair chance.”
Sam nodded. “How’d you know?”
“Something’s been wrong from the start. You can’t blame a person for cheating, but this . . . this is something else altogether. Makes me ill.”
“Tom—”
“Hold on,” Tom said, putting up his meaty paw. “Hold on. Hear me out.
I don’t want a word of this coming back to me. You hear me?”
Sam nodded.
“Arbuckle is being crucified,” Tom said. “Brady knows he’s innocent.”
“What?”
“There’s more,” Tom said. “But I need you to figure some stuff out on your own.”
Sam took a deep breath, wiping more paint from his fingers. The sun was behind Tom and it was weak and white through the clouds. The men painting the deck whistled while Sam found his footing. He lit another cigarette and began to walk side by side with Tom.
“You’re okay, Tom.”
“You look sick.”
“I’m okay now.”
“So what do we do?”
“What can you tell me about Rumwell?”
“You don’t fool around, do you? You go straight to it.”
Sam shrugged.
“So you know?”
“I guess so.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” Tom said, beside him, making Sam feel small although the men were the same height. “Everyone on this case is a liar. It can make you screwy.”
“I say we talk to him about what we know.”
“Rumwell?”
“Why not?”
“He won’t admit a goddamn thing.”
“It’s a funny thing the way the conscience works on a guilty man.”
“You look like a man with experience, Sam.”
THE PINKERTON OFFICE kept a running list of every greased palm in every hotel in The City. You worked the city by who you knew, who you kept up with, who you routinely paid for the privilege. And they had a beaut of a list, starting with the top hotels, with names and numbers of the hotel dicks, on-duty managers, and doormen. After meeting with Rumwell for a solid three hours, Sam went to his apartment and then returned to the office, placed exactly four calls, and soon came up with a time and place, the Fairmont Hotel tearoom atop Nob Hill. He waited in the office for an hour, used the time to type and then retype a short letter, and then hopped a cable car up Powell.
He wore his best suit—his only suit—freshly pressed, with shoes shined. He was able to make it to the tearoom before being stopped.
From where he stood, talking to the maître d’, he could see the big party. The table stretched behind marble columns and iron banisters, taking up nearly half of the restaurant. Men wore their best black and ladies wore their newest hats. There was gay laughter and toasts and mountains of food. Turkeys with dressing, hams, fresh fruit, and pies sitting atop silver stands. Sam smiled as
he watched Police Chief O’Brien uncorking a bottle and pouring a bit for District Attorney Brady, Brady proposing a drunken toast, Mr. Hearst himself wiping crumbs away from his mouth and answering the toast back, clinking glasses with Mrs. Hearst and winking over at two boys who looked nearly identical.
The maître d’ was arguing with Sam, telling him that he could not enter. He said it was closed, private, and the accent was vaguely German. Sam reached into his coat, offering his apologies, and told the man he had urgent business from Mr. Hearst’s office and it was absolutely imperative that this letter reach Mr. Hearst’s hands and no one else’s.
The man took the envelope with great seriousness, taking pride in the task in the way that only Germans can. He shook Sam’s hand warmly and told him to consider it done.
Sam tried to pay the guy a nickel for his trouble, but he looked at the coin in his palm like it was a dog turd.
HEARST RECEIVED THE LETTER not from the maître d’ but from his valet, George. And he left the letter next to his half-eaten plate for many minutes, almost an hour. He drank more red wine, just to taste, since he was not a man to indulge in a weakness, ate a turkey leg, and clapped with joy at the sight of the Baked Alaska.
While the men sat back to cigar stewards and glasses of cognac, Hearst shared a story with the table about serving the flaming dessert to Pancho Villa. He said Villa had been a guest at his mother’s ranch, and after demonstrating some of the most abhorrent table manners he’d ever witnessed the revolutionary jumped from his seat and cocked a pistol at the flaming Baked Alaska.
“He was convinced I’d brought him a bomb.”
There was cordial laughter and much harrumphing from the men, the mayor, the chief, and the D.A., all of San Francisco’s elite. Millicent, Hearst’s wife, smiled over at him, quite tired from her journey west with the twins, prepared once again to make their way back to New York.
Hearst would miss the boys.
Millicent, as always, had begun to bore him with her incessant talk of the Milk Fund.
While the men grew sleepy from the food and drink, plied with more cognac, cigars burning and satisfied, the women’s talk began to dominate the table. Chatter of the latest styles from Paris and of that handsome Italian Valentino. They particularly seemed to like his eyes, finding them oddly hypnotic, and Hearst thought to himself that perhaps he should reexamine the man’s films, learn the technique that had transformed a dishwasher into a lustful attraction.
As his plate was cleared, he remembered the letter, and tore at the envelope with his thumbnail. The message was as simple and straightforward a group of sentences as he’d ever read, so Hearst thought that it had to have been written by one of his newspapermen, an insider. But the last line made him know differently, and he looked up from the cleared linen and smiled, just catching the last few words from Millicent about the boys’ antics when they visited the British Museum and begged their father to buy them an ape.
“He not only can climb a tree,” Hearst said. “But he can serve cocktails.”
“He cannot,” Millicent said, blushing.
“He’s quite talented, you know. Better than a Chinaman.”
More laughter from Hearst’s side of the table, and Hearst stole a glance at George, who leaned against a marble column. Hearst crooked his finger, and as soon as George was at his side he looked up from the long row of family and friends, smelling of sweets and smoke and hearing laughter and great mirth. “Take care of this, will you?”
He dropped the envelope into his man’s waiting hands as if the edges had been set afire.
29
Roscoe picked lint from his hat and wondered what life would be like in prison, judging if he’d grown too soft, those times working laundries and barrooms too far away. But he decided he’d made a good go of it in the city pen, making friends with the jailers and hoods. He should have expected this shitstorm anyway, knowing that’s the way life works—that sucker punch coming when you least expected. He picked more lint, remembering what the Pinkerton had said about him being a whipping boy. He didn’t like to be anyone’s whipping boy, feeling that old shame heat up his face.
Satisfied with the crown, Roscoe went to work on the brim, picking, and slowly bringing his pale blue eyes up to the stand as Dr. Rumwell continued talking about the dead girl.
“The first thing I did was inspect the body,” said the little man with the shrill voice. “I decided that she was about twenty-five years of age and about five foot five inches and weighed about a hundred and forty pounds. And then I looked at the external surface of the body. I used a measuring stick for precision.”
Rumwell was small and lean. He wore a black suit of no style and a matching tie of no style. The man looked as if he’d shopped from a street vendor. His thin black hair was oiled and creased, and he wore a small black mustache under a reddened, bulbous nose.
Roscoe inverted his hatband and then tucked it back along the rim. Milton U’Ren paced before the judge and witness. “Go on,” he said.
“I examined the body and limbs, both the lower and upper,” Rumwell said. “I examined the face and the head by inspection and did not notice any marks on the face or head or on the scalp. But on the arms I noticed a few areas of ecchymosis.”
“Please speak to us in plain terms,” Judge Louderback said. He yawned, the whole goddamn show boring him to tears.
Rumwell looked up and over at the judge, mouth open, and then turned back to the courtroom. “Well, ecchymosis is a bruise. I think ecchymosis would be the more definite term.”
“How many bruises did you see on the right arm?” U’Ren asked.
“May I refer to my notes for the exact number?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There was a large area of ecchymosis—bruises—three inches above the external condyle of the right humerus . . .”
Roscoe looked over the McNab and let out a long breath. He readjusted himself in his seat and turned back to Ma and Minta. Minta had on a little fur hat and it was very attractive, and he wondered if the newspapermen would write about it, trying to make some sense of why she wore squirrel now and not monkey or mink. The newsboys always tried to make something out of a little detail. Like that time Roscoe couldn’t bring a manicurist to the jail. They wrote it as if he was trying to be uppity when really he just wanted someone to cut his nails. They even wrote about his playing with elastics, and would probably write about him cleaning his hat in the afternoon editions.
He placed the hat down on the table.
“This is the external condyle of the humerus, this bone called the humerus,” Rumwell said, pointing. “And this would be the arm and this the forearm. This was three inches above the external condyle of the humerus. And it varied in width from half an inch to an inch and it was exactly four inches long—that is, measuring from the posterior surface of the arm.”
McNab stood, tucked his hands in his pocket, waiting for the judge to let him speak. “I wonder, Your Honor, please, if the doctor couldn’t describe that a little more technically?”
Much laughter in the court. Even a few of the jury laughed, which was good because Roscoe had rarely seen them laugh at anything. McNab sat back at the desk, straight-faced, like a good sidekick. Roscoe nudged him in the ribs and winked.
McNab didn’t even respond.
“Over to the left arm,” U’Ren said. “What did you find?”
Roscoe could not take it anymore. It took everything in him not to stand up, walk out into the hallway and out to the park for a smoke. He imagined the whole farce in his head. Not as Roscoe Arbuckle on trial but Fatty. Fatty would be dressed as an infant and they would place him behind the judge’s bench, a rattle for a gavel, and the Kops would bring in his father in shackles. Al St. John would play the part as a wandering drunk, maybe even drop in a role for Luke the dog. They’d dress up Luke as the district attorney, and when a motion was overturned he’d lift his leg on the witness’s leg and run off, a chase would follow, out of the cour
troom and onto dusty Hollywood streets. Al St. John would ride a giant bicycle, shaking his fist in the air. They’d rig Baby Fatty’s high chair as a machine and he’d begin pursuit.
Roscoe laughed.
Testimony stopped.
McNab gave him a hard look. Testimony started up again.
“We commonly call that the shinbone?” asked Judge Louderback.
