Devil's Garden Page 15

  “I can find out.”

  “He’s not concerned about the girl at all. She’s dead, lying cold in a mortuary with her adoring fans swarming over her, and Arbuckle just wants to stuff himself to satisfy his mammoth appetites.”

  The engineer blew the locomotive’s whistle again, and soon hovels slapped together from scrap wood and tin showed in the long coach windows. A fat Mexican woman cooked meat on an open stove, dirty children playing by her feet, a skinny baby on her bosom. Coolies hefted boxes from the backs of wagons and trucks to the train platform, and soon the locomotive slowed and drew to a long, steady stop.

  The only sound in the cabin came from the hissing of the engine as the train took on more water and wood.

  “You can go,” Hearst said. “Take the story on the girl.”

  “Here?”

  “Another train will come through,” Hearst said. “If not, just write your story and have it cabled to the office.”

  The reporter stood and grabbed his coat and hat and nervously shook The Chief’s hand and walked back through the coach, George already holding the door open and then shutting it with a tight pop.

  “Odd little fellow,” George said.

  “They all are.”

  “Are you okay, Mr. Hearst?”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  Hearst stood and watched as George cleared the china plates from the table. The coolies and Mexes looked up from their work at the strange black train pulling only two coaches. Hearst waved at them, and made his way back to the bath, shutting the door and locking it behind him, splashing water on his face and trying to steady himself from the nausea.

  There had been a picture attached to the wire story on the girl’s burial. He had decided it was too much, the Rappe girl, with her insides cleaned out and sewn back whole, photographed in her Sunday best and covered with that goddamn white veil, a sweet smile upon her dead lips. Hearst ran cold water and wiped his giant eyes with a moist towel.

  But his legs gave out and soon the big man was on his knees, hands wrapped around the brass commode and vomiting out the roast beef and potatoes, George knocking on the door.

  Hearst yelled back that he was fine and to fetch some ice water.

  Hearst, still on his knees, steadied himself. The image of the girl would not shake free of his mind. When he saw the girl’s face, it wasn’t the Rappe girl but Marion, pennies covering her eyes.

  He felt feverish as he stood and tried to calm himself.

  THE CAPTAIN OF DETECTIVES, Duncan Matheson, was an odd-looking duck, thought Maude Delmont. Odd because he looked so much like a policemen that she figured him to be a stock player in Hollywood. He wore one of those thick, waxed mustaches and smoked a pipe while he interviewed her in his little partitioned office made of pebbled glass and oak. His eyes were as black as coal, and he would ask questions as if they were statements and Maude didn’t know whether to answer, nod her head, or call him a liar.

  “You’ve been married for a year or so.”

  She decided to nod.

  “To a Mr. Woods of Madera.”

  She nodded again.

  “Are you aware that Mr. Woods has been searching for you for months now and only knew you were in the city when he picked up a newspaper?”

  She shook her head. It called for a shake.

  “Are you in the process of divorce?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Mr. Woods has complained you left him without explanation.”

  Maude’s throat felt dry and cracked. She had started to sweat. She never sweated. She almost closed her eyes, waiting for Captain Matheson to ask her all about the bonds and cash she stole from Cassius Clay Woods’s safe.

  She held her breath and dropped her head into her waiting fingertips.

  “I can explain,” she said. “Please. This has all been so traumatic.”

  Captain Matheson stood. He was a great deal shorter than he looked sitting behind the desk and appeared downright minuscule as he passed Detectives Kennedy and Reagan, who stood against a brick wall lined with photos and fancy inked documents.

  “I don’t want to meddle in your affairs,” Matheson said. “I was just asked to pass on this news and ask you to call your husband. I think he’ll understand the trauma you have been through. And no matter what else, a woman needs a husband to make sense of things.”

  Maude nodded and said, “Of course.”

  She stood. But Captain Matheson held up his hand, asking her to sit back down. He refilled his pipe and sat on the edge of his desk. He got the pipe going with a set of matches and stared at her, evaluating her for several moments before blowing out a big mouthful of cherry-scented smoke and nodding to himself as if arriving at a decision.

  “You drove up here with Mr. Semnacher.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you and Semnacher intimate?”

  Maude put her hand to her mouth.

  Matheson waved away the worry on her face. “Do I look like a goddamn minister? I just said you need your husband now because I think that Semnacher fellow is a menace.”

  “He is.”

  “You don’t care for him anymore.”

  “We were friends. Not now.”

  Matheson looked back to Reagan and Kennedy and then back at Maude. “We understand that you and Mr. Semnacher had adjoining rooms at the Palace Hotel before this Arbuckle fiasco.”

  “I stayed in the room with Miss Rappe.”

  “You never opened the door that separated you.”

  Maude took a breath, took off her hat, and floated it onto a free chair. She stood up and pressed out the wrinkles in her dress, feeling the cool air coming off the desk fan. She smiled and looked at the little man. “Put it this way, Semnacher stuck me with the bill.”

  Maude made a big show of plunging her thumb back to her breastbone.

  “So you wouldn’t try and hide his whereabouts.”

  “He took off?”

  “He was due back in court yesterday. That’s why police court broke up early.”

  Maude laughed, a little giggle at first but spilling over into a gut buster, then she sat back down and asked Griff—really calling Detective Kennedy “Griff ”—for a cup of joe and a cigarette.

  “I wouldn’t hide that sorry ape if he was my own brother.”

  “He hadn’t checked out of the hotel.”

  “Come again?”

  “He left his possessions,” Matheson said, drawing on the pipe and then speaking with smoke coming out from his mouth. “The front desk said he checked messages two days ago, tipped a doorman, and walked away. His Stutz is still parked at the tunnel garage.”

  13

  Sam hired a taxi at the Los Angeles station early the next morning after taking the Owl south late the night before. Arbuckle was free for now, and Sam had his instructions from Frank Dominguez and the Old Man. He read off the only address they had for Virginia Rappe to the cabbie, taking him through the downtown lined with wrought-iron streetlamps and palm trees, and then out onto Wilshire and up on Western, through orange groves and large mansions being built on loose, dusty soil. The machine hit potholes and jostled him up and down as they made their way north to Hollywood around where the cabbie said the circus had just started.

  “You think it was bad yesterday,” said the cabbie. “Today they bury the poor girl. There ain’t no telling how many people want to see that.”

  “Why would they care?”

  “People feel bad for her. Say, what kind of work do you do?”

  “I work for the Fuller Brush Company.”

  “I’m bald, so no need to work your spiel on me.”

  “We also sell many items for the ladies.”

  “I read this morning that Arbuckle was smiling when they let him out of jail. That made me sick to my stomach. They say he walked right out of jail not feeling bad for nothing he did, only going down to see some barber and getting a free shave. You think the bastard would at least pay for it, him driving a thirty-thousand-
dollar machine.”

  “Why should he feel bad if he didn’t do it?”

  “Come on. Where you been? The guy’s an animal.”

  The little taxi painted canary yellow turned onto Melrose, two cars honking at the driver from the crossroad and him waving them off with disgust, turning so hard to the left that Sam thought the machine would lift up on two wheels. But all was steady as the driver headed east, passing the big barn buildings marked with signs for different studios, all of them surrounded by high fences and shut with gates.

  “I pick up girls like that at the station all the time,” the cabbie said. “They come in with their little suitcases, all big-eyed and bragging about winning Miss Corn Queen or the like, everything they own brought in from Bumfuck, Iowa, and wanting to be the next Mary Pickford.”

  “I think we might give a fella a break till his day in court.”

  The cabbie turned around in his seat, the cab rolling into oncoming traffic, and said, “Didn’t you hear the bastard stuck a Coca-Cola bottle in her pussy? Where I’m from, you find a rope and the tallest tree.”

  Sam didn’t say anything as they passed a long fence and a corner grocery and finally turned into a little neighborhood of bungalows. Most of them freshly built, the kind they advertise in the papers for veterans to start families. These were California specials, with stucco and red tile roofs and a dwarf orange tree in every front yard.

  “Hey, you got a friend with you?”

  “Come again?”

  “That little Hupmobile has been following us since the station.”

  Sam turned and noted the shadows of two figures in the coupe. He reached down to his ankle and slipped the .32 in his hand. His arm rested on the backseat, the gun in his lap, and he told the driver to keep circling.

  “That’s the house right there.”

  “Keep going,” Sam said. “Don’t circle back till I say.”

  ROSCOE WAS bowling to opera.

  Minta and Ma watched, eating ice cream from the little parlor he’d had built in the basement of his mansion on West Adams. It felt so damn good to be back home that the last weeks felt like a feverish nightmare, something from one of his pictures where he’d been locked up and whistled for Luke the pooch to come running with keys.

  Luke, who was really Minta’s dog, sat at her feet under the wire parlor chair and waited for her to finish her sundae to lick up all the ice cream and pineapple sauce.

  Roscoe let out all his breath and closed his eyes, taking a few steps down the lane and watching the ball glide and float to the pins, taking out all but two. A little negro at the end of the lane cleared off the downed pins as Roscoe hunted for another ball out of the dozens shining and gleaming on a brass rack.

  “Ma, how ’bout another sundae?”

  She shook her head, the spoon still in her mouth.

  He smiled over at the pair, finally ditching the depressing black they’d worn in the police court and now dressed like normal folks. Minta in a green-and-white print dress and Ma still in her housecoat she’d worn since running the servants from the kitchen and cooking a skilletful of bacon and eggs.

  Roscoe chose a red ball, eyeing the two pins, and stood at the line. Holding the ball up, he took a single step before hearing the warning bark from Luke, and he stopped to see Frank Dominguez coming down the curved wrought-iron staircase into the basement.

  He was alone, still dressed in his black suit and red scarf, a fat leather satchel at his side.

  Luke continued to bark and jut in and out at Dominguez’s feet without ever really taking a bite. Dominguez coolly smiled and threw down a biscuit the butler had given him, and Luke wandered off to a corner.

  Dominguez said hello to Minta and Ma and then took a seat at the parlor bar.

  Roscoe put down the ball and walked behind the bar and started to make Dominguez a sundae without him asking. He made a hell of a one with three different scoops of ice cream and three different sauces with chopped nuts and fresh whipping cream. A few cherries to boot.

  “When did you put this in?”

  “Last year,” Roscoe said. “You want to bowl a game?”

  He slid the sundae before Dominguez at the bar. Dominguez rested his satchel on the barstool next to him. He smiled to Roscoe, a really tired, worn-out-looking smile, as Roscoe cleaned out a couple dirty glasses in some sudsy water, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows.

  “Any word from Fishback or Sherman?”

  Roscoe shook his head.

  “You’ve called them?”

  “A million times,” Roscoe said. “Lowell’s still in New York. God knows what happened to Freddie. I even wrote the son of a bitch a letter when I was in jail.”

  “The Pinkertons can’t find him either. They believe he skipped Los Angeles right after you were arrested.”

  “Some friends.”

  “We need ’em.”

  “They’ll come around,” Roscoe said. “Hey, how’s that sundae?”

  It remained untouched.

  “Freddie Fishback was in that room right after the girl took ill. He could testify that the girl was too far gone to be making any dying accusation. He also moved her into the bath and could account for those bruises on her arms and legs.”

  “People think I got the leprosy.”

  “You’ll be back on the lot before the year’s out.”

  “All my pictures have been yanked, Zukor has stopped paying me till further notice, and when I got back from Frisco I found most of my furniture had been repossessed. Did you see upstairs? We don’t have a place to sit. Lucky the bastards didn’t come down here or they woulda taken every last pin.”

  “Let me handle Zukor,” Dominguez said. “We have a contract.”

  “A million a year only if I work. How am I supposed to work if they won’t let me on the lot? They pulled Gasoline Gus and it had only been out five days. No wonder the picture didn’t show a profit. Those goddamn bastards.”

  Dominguez looked down at his sundae and then up at Roscoe.

  “You got anything stronger?”

  “What’s eating you?”

  Roscoe dipped his hand into the cooler and came out with a bottle of jackass brandy. He poured a generous amount into a coffee mug.

  “They want to replace me.”

  Roscoe laughed. “Who?”

  “Zukor. Lasky. Paramount wants you to go with a bigger name. I think they’ve been going behind my back with that big swinging dick in Frisco. He’s the one who took on the Jack Dempsey mess.”

  “’ Cause of that shimmy girl, Bee Whosis, who shacked up with him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was just a dumb case,” Roscoe said. “The girl’s beau sued Dempsey for theft of love.”

  “But the newsboys like him and he’s local. Might make a difference with the jury.”

  “You still sore at how that son of a bitch U’Ren kept calling you Señor Dominguez?”

  “I’m just saying this fella, McNab, is local. You should do some thinking on this, Roscoe. Don’t get all loyal and stupid on me.”

  Dominguez finished the brandy, picked up his satchel, and told Minta and Ma good day.

  Roscoe followed Dominguez with his eyes as he twirled around the iron staircase and disappeared up into the mansion. Roscoe set Dominguez’s untouched sundae on the floor and whistled for Luke.

  “Roscoe, you’re going to make him fatter than he already is,” Minta said.

  Roscoe took a seat on the steps down to the bowling lane, eyeing those last two pins, and rolled a cigarette. He massaged Luke’s nub ears as the dog licked the glass clean and asked him, “What about you, boy? Can you see the future?”

  THE ADDRESS WAS A BUST.

  Sam read out another.

  The cabbie U-turned and headed west on Sunset, away from the city, along the long, barren road, and then cut up toward the cool, dark hills and zigzagged up a rough-cut path.

  The house was in the old Mission style, a big, fat adobe number built up a
steep drive and surrounded by high shrubs and palms. The early-afternoon shadows showed a set of twin hills, and the air smelled of citrus.

  The cab parked at the curb. Sam walked to the gate and stared up at the mansion. The day was cool, sky blue, and down below a bunch of men in overalls were digging a trough through an orange grove. Up a long, curving driveway, a butler washed a long Packard touring car.