Ace Atkins - Devil’s garden

“I told you everything, Frank. Ten times I told you.”

“You never told me about the Coke bottle.”

Roscoe tossed a joker onto the brim of the hat.

“It works better with a bowler.”

“We need to talk about everything.”

Roscoe felt his face flush and he hated the feeling of it. He stood and straightened his Norfolk jacket on the wire hanger and smoothed down the lapels. He adjusted his shoes by the commode.

“It was just a test. I’d always heard that when a person was knocked out that ice would bring ’ em to. If a person was just faking it, you could tell.”

“You thought she was faking it?”

“One minute the girl is on my lap calling me snuggle pup and the next she’s screaming bloody murder.”

“Did you touch her with the bottle?”

“It wasn’t a goddamn bottle, Frank. It was an ice cube.”

“I got a copy of an interview with this fella Al Semnacher. He says he saw you put something on her lady parts. Who the hell is this guy?”

“I just met him. He said he was an agent.”

“He work for Miss Rappe?”

“I never saw him when she was with Sennett,” Roscoe said. “Listen, I just put the ice on her to wake her up.”

“Did it work?”

“Not really.”

“Where did you put it?”

Roscoe sat down on the creaking bed, shuffling out more cards, from one hand to the other, and then eyeing the hat from across the room.

“I put an ice cube from my Scotch on her.”

“Where?”

“On her snatch,” Roscoe said. “Okay. I put some ice on her snatch. Don’t tell me that killed her.”

“Did you ever place a bottle into her?”

“Is that what Semnacher said?”

“I don’t know. We’ve heard things. I don’t know if the D.A. is going to present this or not.”

“A Coke bottle. Jesus.”

“Other things may come out, too. I want you to know that. They may say the bottle was a substitution for masculinity.”

Roscoe flipped a steady stream of a dozen cards and then moved his eyes up to Frank. He could not stop shaking his head, feeling the shame being directed on him. The worst part about feeling the shame was that it felt like an old friend that he had abandoned long ago.

THE PREVON GIRL LEFT the grand jury room at eleven-seventeen, red-faced and tear-streaked and on the arm of Griff Kennedy, who held up the girl with one hand while slipping into his slicker and hat and pushing past the newspapermen and the camera flashes. Sam stood from the bench where he’d been parked since five and slid around back to the car pool and waited for Griff and Zey, holding up his hand to stop them.

The girl wiped her eyes with a starched white handkerchief and snorted into it when they stopped and looked up at the big red-haired detective for her next order. But Griff didn’t say a word to her or Sam, only pushed Sam away with the heel of his hand and pushed the girl into the back of his black machine.

“She’s a witness,” Sam said. “Not your property.”

Griff Kennedy hoisted up the waistband of his pants and spit on the ground before starting his automobile and pulling back around to Portsmouth Square. The girl watched Sam as the machine glided in a wide circle, her big, sad eyes searching out the fogged glass before turning a corner and disappearing.

Back inside, Sam found his bench had been taken up by two fat women knitting. They wore all black and large hats. A few more of the hat crew stood along a circular staircase where another big lady had opened up a picnic basket and distributed coffee poured out into china mugs. By the bathrooms were four more. Three more walked in from the front doors.

“What’s this?” Sam asked.

“Vigilant Committee,” said a newspaperman.

“What?”

“We call them the Vigilantes,” the man said with a smirk. “You can bet these sob sisters are going to be all over this case like stink on shit. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Sure.”

“You didn’t see the part about Mrs. Hamilton and Mrs. Bertola saying they were going to monitor the trial to honor that dead woman.”

“Why?”

“’ Cause they hate men. They all want to crush our balls in silver-plated nutcrackers they all keep locked up in their purses.”

Sam nodded, tucking a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and striking a match. “Jesus, we gonna sleep in there?”

“Already missed deadline.”

“The nerve.”

“You telling me.”

Sam took a seat on the last step of the staircase and stole a glance at a little man with slick black hair, tiny mustache, and one wandering eye. A little past midnight, a bailiff emerged from the great twin doors and called out for a Dr. M. E. Rumwell.

The man jumped to attention and followed the bailiff.

Forty-six minutes later, Dr. Rumwell returned, shaking off a half dozen reporters and exiting out a side door.

Sam followed.

Sam had learned to shadow from his old boss in Baltimore, Jimmy Wright. Jimmy had worked for the Pinks most his life, and when he wasn’t sending out Sam for sandwiches or cigarettes or running messages to the office boys he’d teach him how to follow a person. Wright wasn’t a thing like the detectives in the dime-store novels Sam had read growing up. He didn’t have a handlebar mustache or wear tweeds and a bowler. Jimmy Wright was a thick, squat fella, a fireplug, who wore raincoats even when it was warm and had a taste for Fatima cigarettes. He had scar tissue around his eyes and his knuckles, and told young Sam that detective work was a nasty, brutal profession and not a place for a boy who had other options. He told Sam to be a lousy lawyer or a stockbroker or, hell, even a goddamn grocery clerk. But Sam would run those roast beef sandwiches and packs of Fatimas to street corners and back alleys and safe houses where Wright would wait out some con man and bank robber just for a simple word from a man who, although short, towered over his father.

Rumwell headed down California from Portsmouth Square in a lope, probably heading to the Embarcadero to catch a streetcar. But at the Ferry Building, the doctor turned south, not north, and continued walking past an empty streetcar, the off-duty driver reading a newspaper, feet up on the controls. Sam followed him past pier after pier, and endless warehouses that smelled of fish oil and machine parts, and men playing dice next to barrel fires and prostitutes who’d gone long past their day dishing out fifty-cent blow jobs and hand jobs for a quarter.

Sam walked past them all, careful to keep that sacred space, the good doctor never looking over his shoulder as he followed the Embarcadero deeper inside the Barbary, a collection of shanties and clapboard bars that had been open to sailors ever since San Francisco had been a city. It had burned down during the Quake and had been shut down by moral crusaders more than anyone cared to remember. But there was always the sailor’s trade for booze and women, and, for the most part, the Barbary became a no-man’s-land.

Rumwell turned east up a narrow little alley paved with smooth cobblestones and ballast from cutter ships. Barkers in top hats spit out carnival spiels about harems and belly dancers and shows with Shetland ponies. There were gas lamps and red lamps in bay windows where sad-eyed girls in saggy slips and torn stockings would press their bodies against the warped glass or crook a finger at you. The doctor ducked into another alley and curved again, but Sam did not rush, as he looked both ways, and heard the tinny piano music of a little bar called Purcell’s that advertised itself with a wooden sign that swung and creaked in the breeze off the Pacific. A fat man in a little hat banged out the keys to a song about a girl from Kansas City who wore gumdrops on her titties.