Ace Atkins - Devil’s garden

The woman looked to the young reporter and the young reporter looked to Hearst.

“Oh, of course,” Hearst said. “How much?”

“I don’t want to tell nothin’ but the truth, mind you.”

“And I assure you I’ll tell you my price when I know what your truth is worth.”

“Miss… Nurse Cumberland says that before Virginia Rappe died at Wakefield, she told her that she’d been dragged by Arbuckle, by the arm, into the back bedroom.”

“Is that true?”

“God’s truth, sir.”

“Have you been summoned by District Attorney Brady?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you given your story yet?”

“No, sir.”

Hearst set an arrow into the tiny wooden bow, war paint still on his face, and sighted a big boat pulling away from the Ferry Building, switching his sights to the tiny shape of a man hanging from the Ferry Building’s clock. A cleaner of some sort.

He let the arrow go and watched it sail until out of sight.

“Tear up the front page.”

“A TALLY WHACKER,” Maude Delmont said. “A man’s manhood.”

The women whispered to each other, dropping their spoons on the china plates and stopping that chattering altogether.

“And that is where the parrot landed?” asked Mrs. W. B. Hamilton, vice president of San Francisco’s Vigilant Committee.

“Yes, ma’am,” Maude Delmont said, ever so delicately stirring her tea in the great room of the Fairmont Hotel on the Wednesday after the girl had died. She took a little sip and a small bit of sugar cookie.

The two hundred or so women remained silent.

“Were these orgies common?” Mrs. Hamilton used a big voice, loud enough for all the women to hear. There was a stray cough, the light tinkling of a spoon, the shift of the chair, but in it all Maude Delmont had her audience.

“Yes,” she said. “A decent moral woman has no place in the film colony. I worked to sell magazine subscriptions to Ladies’ Home Journal. By the way, I will have subscription cards after I speak. But these parties were no places for a lady.”

“And they were nude at these orgies?”

“Completely,” Maude Delmont said. “At the party in question, that beast Arbuckle had taken offense with the parrot. The bird called him ‘Fatty,’ and nothing makes Arbuckle madder than to hear that. He sat there, mind you, in a very drunken state, arguing with the bird and calling it all kinds of foul names, words that would only be uttered in pool halls and houses of ill repute.”

My God. How awful.

“It was after he’d disrobed and slathered his whalelike hide with buckets of hot oil, to better lubricate himself and such orifices, when the bird took its revenge and swooped through the party, through the maze of nudity and sea of alcohol, to affix its talons on his man snake.”

Oh, my.

Two women fainted. Another woman choked on a delicate slice of coconut cake. A gigantic fat woman screamed.

“I don’t quite know how to say this…”

The Vigilant Committee members, the dozens of them all dressed in black with great round hats banded with trailing feathers, leaned in, making their folding chairs creak and groan. The room at the Fairmont was all brass and gold and crystal and china.

“… Arbuckle was making his man snake perform a rare Arabian dance as a man played a flute, as if charming the throb of his anatomy.”

More shrieks.

Police Chief Daniel O’Brien, the group’s special guest at the Fairmont, finally stood and asked Maude Delmont to take her seat, and said he had heard many stories about the film people down south. But he also said that he’d been assured by many high-ranking, moral, upstanding people that the Arbuckle types accounted for only a sliver of the artists who lived there.

“And in that spirit, I would like to introduce a man who has made grown-ups and children smile the world over,” Police Chief O’Brien said, sweeping his hand to a short man with a blunt cut of brown hair who wore a western shirt, leather chaps, and boots, “Broncho Billy.”

Maude Delmont rolled her eyes and asked the waiter for more cake. Big Kate Eisenhart leaned in close to her ear and whispered, “The nerve.”

Maude wiped her lips of icing.

Broncho Billy hitched a thumb in his chaps and hand-tooled belt and removed the big buckaroo hat from his head and held it to his heart. “May I lead you all in prayer?”

These women were the worst, a black-clad army of grim-faced suffragists, the kind Maude remembered in Kansas who’d march the town streets on a Saturday banging the old drum and causing the whole goddamn country to go dry. The leader of the group was a stout lady physician named Marina Bertola, who stood first and last after Broncho Billy finished up his prayer and promised the group to amass a posse if Arbuckle wasn’t brought to justice. As she spoke, the chandelier light refracted in her lenses, making her eyes disappear behind the glass, her eyes twin pools of ice.

“We have let our ardor cool down,” Dr. Bertola said. “And for that reason we are all responsible in some measure for the conditions that bring about such outrageous affairs as the Arbuckle party. Our purpose is to secure enforcement of the law. We must be faithful to that purpose, not only in regard to the Arbuckle case but for the sake of the future.”

THE OLD MAN listened with great interest to Sam’s story about shadowing Dr. Rumwell into the Barbary the night before. He left out the part about getting blind drunk, stopping short of the payoff with the big negro and Haultain tailing Rumwell out of the bar.

“He got on a streetcar and headed back to his place on Lombard,” Haultain said.

“How long did you sit on the house?”

“Till this morning,” Haultain said. “He left the house for Wakefield. That’s where the boy came for me and I broke off the tail.”

“Get some sleep,” the Old Man said. “Roll back on the job tonight.”

“I’ll take him,” Sam said.

“You find that Blake girl.”

“Checked out of the Woodrow on Tuesday.”

“Just find her.”

“What do you make of this Rumwell making house calls to whores?”

“I’d say he’s a true philanthropist.”

Sam smiled. “He performed an illegal autopsy on the Rappe girl and may have disposed of some of her organs.”

The Old Man took off his gold spectacles, folded them, and tucked them into the pocket of his dress shirt. He wore a pin high and tight at his collar, and leaned onto the desk with his forearms. “That may be. But one problem at a time. Alice Blake is scared. The other little tart is under lock and key by the state. Alice is the only one who can set the story straight about that party. Did you see the afternoon papers? The Delmont woman is on a goddamn speaking tour.”

“Does Los Angeles have anything on her?”

“Nope. Someone’s on that.”

“The Blake girl,” Sam said.

“The Blake girl.”

“I’ll check back with the hotel and run down some people at Tait’s.”

“You feeling all right?” the Old Man asked.

“Peaches and cream.”

“You look like shit warmed over.”

“Thanks.”

“You need a break?”

“No.”

The Old Man looked at Sam a long while and then put his glasses back on and nodded. He didn’t add a good-bye or give a speech, only went back to his paperwork, sleeves rolled well above the ink, and expected Sam and Phil to find their way out.

Sam found Alice Blake two days later, on a Friday, living in a Sunset District row house with her mother. He’d spent a five spot on a phone number from a dancer at Tait’s and used a city directory at the office to find the address, borrowed a machine from a nearby garage, and had been sitting on the house since yesterday. There was a corner grocery up on Irving where he’d buy cigarettes and a sandwich with coffee and use the toilet and pay phone. Most of the houses on the street were brand-new, narrow, two-story jobs with stucco and tile roofs. He’d spotted a nice empty one, directly across from the mother’s house, where he slipped through a window and could make himself comfortable on an apple crate with field glasses. It was late afternoon when he saw a yellow cab pull up to the address and saw Alice Blake skip out to the street and get in back.