Ace Atkins - Devil’s garden

“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.”

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.