Ace Atkins - Devil’s garden

“That’s it?”

“There’s some kissing, too. The kissing takes a lot of time.”

The girl fingered open the window blinds, the arc lamps brightening the streets, the window looking like a framed, slatted picture. Sam could see the Blake house and a Ford parked outside and a man and a woman pushing a stroller across the road.

The girl let the field glasses dangle from the leather strap against her leg and set her head back, smoking.

“Since I saw you at the Old Poodle Dog, I’ve wanted to ask you something.”

“Does it start with ‘How does a nice girl…’?”

“Something like that.”

“I was in a secretary pool when Prohibition broke,” she said. “They needed someone to slip into speakeasies unnoticed.”

“I wouldn’t say you go unnoticed.”

She looked at him and brought her lips together, looking down at her velvet shoes with bows, blew smoke up into the ceiling and then crushed the cigarette underfoot.

Sam shrugged and switched to the apple crate. “You after LaPeer?” “What do you think?”

“I read he was out of jail so fast the ink wasn’t dry on his thumbs. You don’t have a clue where he gets the stuff.”

“We know he has this Australian fella who works for him and we know that same fella was at the St. Francis bringing in cases through the back door.”

“But you don’t know his name.”

“And here we are looking for Miss Blake.”

“Seems like a lot of work just for a dumb skirt.”

“Maybe she knew the bootlegger.”

“Or maybe you think some knucklehead Pinkerton will point you in the right direction?”

The woman walked over to Sam and placed a velvet shoe on top of the crate, hitching up her black skirt just a bit, showing off a nice long stretch of stocking and garter before plucking out a silver flask and handing it to Sam.

“Will you arrest me?” Sam asked.

“Only if you do something bad.”

“You have a name?”

“I do.”

“Wanna tell me?”

“Let’s drink first,” the girl said. “Wait till I know you better.”

MAUDE MADE THE CALL at nightfall from the back of a mom-and-pop place on Columbus, the kind with red-and-white tablecloths, salami hanging from the ceiling, and dago red sold out of the basement. She had a couple glasses of the red before lifting the handset, giving the operator the number, and hearing the man’s voice. Thirty minutes later, she was out on Columbus walking toward Washington Square when a long green touring car pulled up to the curb and a man hung out the driver’s side and said, “Sister, you look like you could use a ride.”

She got in the passenger side and closed the door and he sped off, rounding the square by the big church, and headed up and over a hill down by the wharf.

It was him.

He didn’t say much for most of the ride, one of those tight-lipped fellas that made you all spill it out to them because they know you’re feeling uncomfortable as hell in the silences. And usually that was Maude’s trick, but not today. Today, maybe because she had two nickels to her name and had been booted out of the St. Francis with nowhere to go, she laid it all out there. She talked about the two beefy Irish cops and the dyke woman Eisenhart, the crazy old Vigilant broads and Al Semnacher following her on the cable car and wanting some more dough.

“Can you believe the nerve of the son of a bitch?”

The man driving said nothing, turning down by the wharf, hugging the last of the Embarcadero, and scattering a gathering of seagulls pecking at a dead fish in the middle of the road.

“He skipped town with the girl’s bloomers and now he’s coming back for more.”

The man was silent, passing the cannery and heading up the hills and south toward Lombard and then taking a turn west up into Pacific Heights, where Maude had once bamboozled a ninety-year-old man out of his dead wife’s jewelry. Maude had been running the good ole sweetheart swindle ten years back when there wasn’t a man with a pulse who could turn her down. But, God, letting that old man’s old wrinkled head between her tits almost wasn’t worth it.

They hit a bump. The driver was talking to her. “I said, what do you want?”

“I need a place to stay and the money I was promised.”

The man turned to look at her as he drove, leaning over the wheel at an intersection and then cutting up to Union Street. He spit out an open window and looked back at Maude and nodded.

Ever since she’d met him in Los Angeles, the guy had given her the creeps. He wasn’t a bad-looking fella, maybe fifty or so, with iron-colored hair and kind of a dark complexion. He wore a black suit with a black tie and a fedora-type hat made of velour. A real dandy.

He kept on driving and nodding to himself before making a big, sloppy U-turn on Union and then meeting Van Ness and heading south again.

“Where we headed?” she asked.

“You tell me. I’m just driving.”

“We have a deal?”

“You’ll get half tomorrow.”

“What about Semnacher?”

“Set a meetin’.”

Maude smiled and fixed her hands on the empty purse in her lap, feeling the rumble of the six cylinders under the big, long hood with all that space in back. She adjusted in the seat and stared straight ahead, smiling, and asked him to drop her at the Palace Hotel. As they drove, the streetlights clicked on along Market, shining down into the cabin and showing a good chunk of the man’s right ear missing, as if someone forgot to complete the picture.

Sam set the typewriter on the kitchen table and started hitting the keys while Jose reheated some Irish stew from the night before. The windows were open, letting out the hot air from the stove and the hot air in from Eddy Street, while Sam worked in his undershirt and smoked and hammered out a response to his latest reply from the United States Veterans’ Bureau. A Mr. Carter had curtly replied that Sam’s lung condition rated less than ten percent of a disability, to which Sam replied-in a very official tone-that that was absolutely incorrect, and he requested another evaluation, this time with a lung specialist.

“Mr. Carter again?” she asked.

“I’d like to meet this Mr. Carter,” Sam said. “Rotten bastard probably keeps a stack of denials on his desk with a big fat quill pen. Look at the flourish, the way he writes ‘Carter.’ ”

Sam ripped the paper from the black L. C. Smith, held it up to the bulb hanging in the kitchen, cigarette bobbing in his mouth, and read back through what he’d written. “Do you know how many veterans are illiterate or just yes-men and take the government’s word as the word of Christ? I read a story in the paper today about this man called Zero in New York who sells off jobless veterans at an auction.”

“Do you want bread?”

“Yes, please.”

“I mended your socks,” Jose said. “They’re hanging on the fire escape.”

Sam folded the letter and stuck it in an envelope.

He took a seat across from Jose at the little table, the typewriter he’d borrowed from the office pushed between them. She poured him some coffee, and they ate for a while, and it seemed to him that the stew she’d made from the butcher’s special was the sweetest meat he’d ever tasted.

“Do you ever wish you’d met an officer?” Sam said.

“I was gunning for a private,” Jose said. She smiled with her eyes, which were soft and blue, curly brown hair pulled from her strong, contented face with pins. She wore a housecoat with a soiled apron and no makeup.

“I’d love to take you out on the town.”

“Like this?”

“After the baby comes,” Sam said. “We’ll have dinner at the Cliff House and go dancing on the beach. Later on, we’ll find a speakeasy and dance till dawn.”