Ace Atkins - Devil’s garden

“Five years.”

“How’s the money?”

“Check comes every month as promised.”

“This business won’t affect any of that,” he said, running his hands over his profile and through his hair. “Jeez, I’m sorry about all that. I feel like an animal in here.”

“You remember what I told you when we first met?”

“You said, ‘I don’t like fat men and I don’t like blondes.’ ”

“After that.”

“In Long Beach? At the Byde-A-While?”

“Backstage at the theater.”

Roscoe shook his head, feeling something wet running down his cheek.

“I told you to quit apologizing. I know who you are.”

IN MANY WAYS, the girls from the Arbuckle party had been getting more ink than Roscoe himself. Alice Blake’s pretty mug was on the front page of the three papers almost every day, with police looking for their LOST WITNESS, while little personal tidbits about her affairs and those of Zey Prevon got to be regular fixtures in the news. The world learned that Zey was from Alabama and that Alice had grown up in the city. Alice’s repertoire of songs and dance numbers were cataloged, as were her dreams of making it to the screen. Some even wondered if Zey Prevon was using the name Prevost because maybe she was related to the Prevost sisters, who’d made it big down in Hollywood.

Sam rolled a cigarette and sat back down on the apple crate.

Since dropping off Minta and Ma, he’d been watching the house owned by Alice Blake’s mother and logging entries in a little notebook. Back at the Flood Building, he’d type it all up in a neat report for the Old Man, who’d then make his own report and cable it on to the home office in Baltimore.

It was six a.m. Sam picked up the Examiner.

He read yet another story about a girl he hadn’t even known had been at the St. Francis. Her name was Betty Campbell, and it turned out that Betty was the true virgin at the party. Or so she said. Despite the big front-page spread, with a photo of Betty and Lowell Sherman wrapped in a heart, she admitted she barely met Arbuckle, let alone Virginia Rappe, who’d already taken sick and been moved to a room down the hall. But the boys sure got this Miss Campbell to call what she witnessed a “gay alcohol orgy” and to share how Lowell Sherman had tried to trick her into going to a back bedroom with him.

Sam wondered if Lowell Sherman ever got tired, because this would’ve been after his in-depth conversation with Alice in the bathroom.

He finished the cigarette and put down the paper, wiping the fresh ink on his pants.

It was early morning on the street, and men in suits and ties were starting their machines and driving into the city. Negro women with large baskets of cleaning supplies knocked on doors to start their days. Wives emerged from doorways with baby carriages or children in hand, heading to the market.

A little after nine, Sam thought about walking over to Sunset and Irving and trying out a little diner he’d seen that advertised a plate of eggs and bacon with coffee for fifteen cents. He checked his watch again and noted the time.

Slipping out the back door, he rounded his way to the front lawn and sidewalk just about the time three police cars slowed to a stop and a half dozen men in uniform climbed out. A plainclothes man that Sam didn’t know walked up to the house and knocked on the door.

Sam stood from across the street and watched.

A half minute or so passed and the fella in plainclothes stepped back and nodded to a couple red-cheeked Irishmen in blue. One of the cops held an ax.

They knocked again, and then, seconds later, the big cop tore into the front door of the narrow home, breaking apart the wood and lock. He kicked inside, followed by his uniformed brothers.

Sam lit a cigarette.

The men soon pushed Alice Blake, screaming, hands behind her back, wearing nothing but a nightie and one stocking, out onto the street. She craned her neck and caught Sam’s eye, giving him a hateful glance and spitting in his direction. She screamed and yelled that the men hadn’t got any right, but all that stopped when they pushed her in the back of a car.

Sam noted the time.

He wrote it into the book.

MINTA PICKED OUT a blue suit for Roscoe, a new one Dominguez had brought from Los Angeles, and a crisp white shirt with a red-and-blue-striped tie. He was clean-shaven, his shoes spotless thanks to Ma, and he smelled of Bay Rum and powder, walking between two guards down the jailhouse steps and around a cove toward the Hall of Justice police court. He had a smile on his face, chewing gum, waiting for this big mess to blow over. But when he entered the second-floor hallway, the guards had to stop and cut a path through a room choked with women. They sat on stairways, on benches, leaned against walls, and blocked doors. Hundreds of them. Some were young with skirts almost to their knees, but most were gray-headed, with thick brooches, fur hats, and long black dresses. The room smelled of perfumed sweat and stale breath, the big courthouse windows not helping with the September heat wave.

According to the papers, the temperature was a record setter.

All heads turned to Roscoe and he didn’t meet an eye, following the guards, Minta and Ma already waiting for him inside, as the tall doors parted. Roscoe walked an endless path lined with more women dressed in black, the sweetness covering up a mass body odor so strong he placed a silk handkerchief over his mouth, everyone silent, wooden benches creaking as the women strained to get a good look at Roscoe C. Arbuckle.

He felt a trickle of wetness on his neck and at first thought he was sweating, but then he felt more pock on his cheek and suit coat, like the first drops from a rainstorm, and he craned his neck away from the path and looked up into the sea of faces up in the court balcony and the old women with eyeglasses and fur hats and prune faces who looked sour and distant. A few more bits on his face. The old women spat on him and whispered, murmured, sounding like the summer buzzing of insects high in the trees.

The policemen called out for them to stop.

The judge, Sylvain Lazarus, entered the room in his long black robe and quickly took control, and hit the gavel over and over until the women stopped the noise and took their seats, and he launched into a big speech about how the women were in a court of law, not a Broadway spectacle, and if they came for entertainment or to make comment they might quickly find themselves tossed out on their ear.

“Are we understood?” asked the judge.

Roscoe took a seat beside Frank Dominguez and his young attorneys, Brennan and Cohen. Minta and Ma at the table. Minty sat beside Roscoe and reached under the heavy wooden table and squeezed his fingers.

Roscoe took a breath. It felt like the first breath in a while, as he used the silk hankie to remove sweat from his brow and spit from his cheeks and lapel. Judge Lazarus said something about the court not trying the film star but in a larger sense the community was trying itself.

Roscoe wanted a drink.

His heart would not stop jackhammering in his chest and he was afraid to turn around and look back at all the hate-filled faces staring at him. He felt the stares, their eyes on his back, the heat of it all burning so badly that he shifted in the chair. Minty’s hand squeezed his even tighter.

The court called Al Semnacher.

The big doors parted and the man passed Roscoe, taking the stand beside the bench. He was sworn in and faced Milton U’Ren from the district attorney’s office, and Roscoe tried to remember where he’d met Semnacher before the party but failed.

Roscoe wanted a smoke.

He looked down at the nicotine-stained fingers of his free hand.

Semnacher was a small-eyed man, even in those big horn-rimmed glasses, with a thick head of graying black hair and thick, furry eyebrows.