Ace Atkins - Devil’s garden

“So you want this McNab fella? Who’s he?”

“The best defense attorney we can buy.”

“I didn’t do this, Al. I did not touch that girl and they got no one to say I did.”

“Sometimes men become a target for hate. When I was a kid, people used to say they were cursed. You’re a cursed fella right now. But a fella I got a lot of dough wrapped up in.”

“The checks have stopped.”

“They’ll resume after the trial. I have investors worried.”

“What if I’m guilty?”

“I don’t think it will come to that.”

“How many cities have banned my pictures? How many?”

“Let’s eat, Roscoe. Just like we used to. Let’s laugh and remember old songs. Okay, friend?”

“I’d like to walk right over to that Broncho Billy and piss in his drink.”

“I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”

“I don’t want you to fire Frank,” Roscoe said. The words sounded slurred, but he goddamn well meant them. “Okay?”

“He’s not fired,” Al said, spreading his hands wide, pleading. “He served you well during all that preliminary mumbo jumbo.”

“I need him.”

“You’ll be fine,” Al said. “McNab is just a little, um, insurance.”

Roscoe looked across the room at all the laughing and talking starting up again. The people had stopped staring. In fact they weren’t looking at Roscoe at all. Even when his eyes would meet another’s, it was as if he was invisible, or, worse, just another Joe.

Roscoe pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to breathe. His face felt hot and moist, and he just stared at the blue of the linen-covered table. Tears dropped one after another and he wiped them away before looking up again.

He felt Al’s small hand rubbing circles on his back and again sending away the waiter, telling him to just give them a minute.

“Mein Kind,” Mr. Zukor said.

“Why does everyone leave me?” Roscoe said, saying it as a question for himself. “Why do they do that?”

IT WAS MIDNIGHT, and Sam rode with Daisy way the hell out of town on Wilshire to the Ambassador Hotel and the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. Long after she’d killed the machine’s engine, they sat there in the front seat of the open cab and watched a long line of Kissels and Kings and Nashes and Hayneses wheeling up to those carved wooden doors where the crowd walked up the red carpet and was swallowed into the great mouth of the pulsing shell, jazz floating out on the warm wind.

“So how do we know who’s Lawrence?” Sam asked.

“I know a fella who knows a fella.”

“And that fella’s gonna give you the nod.”

“Right.”

“Shouldn’t we go inside?”

“You’re a puzzle, Pinkerton.”

“How so?”

“You’re a lunger, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“Still running down dank alleys and climbing fire escapes and beating the truth out of stoolies.”

“I don’t run so much.”

“And you wear a ring.”

“I do.”

“And you have a wife.”

“She goes with the ring.”

“Children?”

“One on the way.”

Daisy nodded, both hands placed on the wooden steering wheel, watching the line of cars move in a slow, delicate dance like the mechanical turn of a carousel. There was the opening of the car door, a hand for the lady, and the slick greasing of the palm. Sam rubbed his jaw, finding himself thirsty, and balanced his hat on his knee. He looked over at Daisy, in her silk dress and soft turban, clenching that tight little jaw. She’d changed into a dress with a fur collar and the warm wind made the fur ruffle as if it were alive.

“How ’bout you?” Sam asked.

Daisy kept watching the door and the carousel movement, and Sam noted that she saw it all in the exact same way. “How ’bout let’s have a drink?”

“Don’t you find that hypocritical?” he asked.

“I call it an agent’s job to not make themselves known. Hell, it’s in the manual.”

“Dry agents come with a manual?”

“On some things.”

“And the rest?”

“The rest is all intuition, Pinkerton. Don’t you ever find yourself in a situation that ain’t according to Hoyle and you have to just use the noodle?”

The Cocoanut Grove was a big bubble of jazz and smoke and cocktails and laughter. Stars twinkled in a plaster-domed sky. There were twenty-foot palm trees that looked so real, Sam had to reach out and touch them to check his eyes-a woman at the bar said they’d been brought straight from the set of The Sheik. Fat paper lanterns hung from the drooping fronds and brightly colored tents had been set up all over the nightclub, where people smoked and laughed, walking in and out of silky floating curtains like a hazy, smoky dream. Women lounged on large pillows and danced on tables, a paper moon going down over a painted lake far on the wall, a horizon that made you feel unsteady, almost as if you could drown yourself in it if you stared long enough. And there was Daisy at a bar with a bartender dressed as a sultan, and Sam watched the drape of her hair down the reach of her long neck and the elegant placement of her thin arms across the bar, and she turned to Sam and smiled with that red mouth.

And Sam smiled back.

A mass of people separated them, but Sam could see through them to Daisy, the way your eyes can make out shapes and patterns of trees and roads through the fog. There was laughter and dancing and jazz and the sound of a trumpet.

He walked toward her.

Daisy put her finger to her nose and sloughed it off, turning to a skinny fella in a black suit bopping his way though the party. Sam could not see the man’s face but noted the way his shoulder blades cut up into the material of his jacket and the long droop of the neck. He walked with speed-deliberate yet loose and disjointed.

Sam followed him out onto the hill and then lost him in the mass of a hundred machines, finding him again as he piled into a Studebaker Big Six, Sam knowing it was a Studebaker by the insignia as it shot past close enough to feel the engine’s heat on his face.

When he turned, there was the Hupmobile idling next to him.

“Do I need to spell it out for you?” Daisy asked.

The Studebaker drove east, back through downtown, with its flashing signs and jostling streetcars, and joined up with Valley Boulevard until there was nothing but pasture and produce trucks and lonesome gas stations and the odd farmhouse or seed store. Daisy hung back a quarter mile, watching the Big Six’s courtesy lamp on the driver’s side like a beacon. Sam commented on the lamp being a great thing and Daisy shot back that it didn’t really matter because there was nothing else out here besides farmers and cows and orange trees. The hills were silver and rolling in the moonlight, the wind coming through the Hupmobile’s cab warm on Sam’s face, the dashboard glowing under the instrument panel and showing off Daisy’s lean legs as she mashed the accelerator when the Studebaker would disappear around another lone turn.

VISIT GAY’S LION FARM read the billboard. At El Monte on Valley Boulevard.

“You don’t think?” Sam asked.

“I don’t like animals.”

The Studebaker rolled off a little access road and Daisy slowed to a near stop. There was a dusty lot and a broad stucco entrance bragging about the place being Internationally Famous, and from his vantage point Sam could see the figure of the lean man walk through the gates and disappear. Daisy followed, parked, and killed the engine. The only other machine in the lot besides the Hupmobile and the Big Six was a long flatbed truck with slatted sides.

Flies buzzed in the back of the truck, and in the moonlight Sam could see rancid meat and blood.