Ace Atkins - Devil’s garden

“I only wanted to ask you a question,” Roscoe said. He could feel a barman or a doorman or someone’s hands on his arm. “Just a question.”

Freddie looked at him. The champagne cocktail had rolled from his fingers onto the bar, the thin glass breaking into shards. Freddie stared at him and breathed, a little smile on his lips.

“Why’d you bring her there? Why Virginia? You knew, didn’t you?” Freddie’s smile widened.

“You goddamn son of a bitch.”

SAM AND DAISY stayed up that night, finding an Owl drugstore downtown just like the one at the bottom of the Flood Building. Daisy ordered eggs. Sam ordered toast. They both had coffee and cigarettes, which was a fine thing to Sam at four a.m. when you were too tired to sleep.

“What’s it all about, Sam?” she asked.

“A good shot of rye and a warm bed.”

“You don’t let anyone get in there, do you?”

“In where?”

She moved her knuckles over to his forehead and lightly knocked. “What about you, sister?”

She sipped her coffee, elbows on the lunch counter, watching the fat man at the grill burning up a steak, bacon, and some home fries. Outside, a streetcar zipped past, littering electric sparks in the leftover night.

“You got a man?”

“Nope.”

“Family?”

“Back east.”

“Did you see the set of balls on that lion?”

“I did,” she said. “That one’s got it all figured out.”

“So why you working for the G?”

“What if I told you H. F. LaPeer killed the man I loved?”

“I’d tell you to peddle your story to the pictures.”

Daisy drank more coffee. The fat cook laid down a plate of ham and eggs and she didn’t touch it. Sam placed a pack of Fatimas on the counter.

“That’s not true, is it?” Sam asked. “About your man?”

Daisy shrugged. She reached for his cigarettes and lit up. The smoke was in her eyes and she fanned it away.

“Why do you gals paint your lips in the center?”

“The Kewpie doll effect,” she said, pursing her lips and closing her eyes.

She opened them and parted her lips and smiled at Sam. He turned back to his plate and grabbed a slice of dry toast.

“You don’t give a damn about Prohibition, do you?” he asked.

“I didn’t make the law.”

“But it bothers you that some places are off the books? Like the Cocoanut Grove?”

She shrugged again, looking good every time she shrugged, and took a bite of eggs. Her soft light blond hair tucked behind her ears and a slouch hat tucked over her head. Sam reached out and traced the edge of her jaw with his middle finger and she cut her eyes at him but kept eating, and he kept his eyes on her until she met his gaze.

Her eyes flicked back to the window and Sam glanced over his shoulder, watching a very dark, very compact man in a black suit staring in the window. He turned back to her and removed his fingers and hand and caught his smoldering cigarette in the ashtray. He looked back to the window and saw the dark man again.

Sam left his toast and laid down some coin and walked out the door. Daisy followed, and soon they were on the street, catching the back of the man and his dark hat and long coat, a coat too warm for Los Angeles. Sam was not shadowing him but calling out to the man’s back, which slumped as his legs pumped fast around the corner. He heard the start of a machine and Sam called out to Daisy to retrieve the Hupmobile.

He saw the car turn and pass him with a lot of speed, and he caught the dark man’s profile again, all so familiar from somewhere, some town, some old report.

“You could’ve said something back there,” Daisy said.

“I know him.”

“Who is he?”

“I’m not sure.”

“So why do we care?”

“It wasn’t his face,” Sam said. “It’s because he ran.”

The road led a quarter mile up the mountain into more cleared roads, more gravel and half-finished houses and open lots. Sam jumped out of the machine and searched the landscape, with his.32 in hand, for shadows and movement, finding only the gentle flickering of eucalyptus leaves and the burning smell of a big ancient oak on a smoldering pile. He rounded a large stack of brick and timber and made his way into a house without a roof, the ceiling big and black and pockmarked with bright stars, seeming not as real as those at the Cocoanut Grove.

He listened for feet and heard none.

A flash of headlights crossed over the open mountain ground and Daisy skidded to a stop and hopped out of the little automobile. She followed Sam on foot up a hill and into the elbow of an embankment. There were poured foundations and clearing machines. Fat, gnarled trees had been left naked in the cleared land and they looked prehistoric and skeletal in the moonlight.

They heard an engine crank and saw headlight beams flash from the back of a hill, and then the car was up and over the hill and coming straight for them. Sam pulled Daisy into him and around the back of a brick pile, and the car left dust and smoke and taillights as it disappeared over the lip of the mountain and down into the curving roads leading back to the city.

Daisy ran to the Hupmobile and circled back for Sam, soon catching the glow of taillights appearing and disappearing around curves and more straightaways, and then she headed west down a fire road, the bounce of the car nearly throwing Sam from his seat. Daisy smiled, grinning with her big white teeth, and leaned forward into the wheel, mashing the accelerator for all it was worth, skidding and spinning down through the dust and gravel, the beams catching the fender of the machine they followed. She drove through a tunnel of tree branches and across more cleared land, up the mountain and down again, and looping back on another fire road, coming out this time into a narrow entrance where the road just stopped.

There were giant earthmoving machines with large bucket scoops and heavy tracks as wide as a car. The car they followed had stopped cold at the mountain wall but then doubled back and idled.

The earth around them carved out like a huge bowl.

Sam told Daisy to switch off the lights and the two piled out of the car, moving for the rear and glancing around corners, waiting for the dark man to make his next move.

A few seconds later, the man fired. It was a big goddamn gun, something like a.44 that a man could feel hard into his elbow and shoulder and which could deafen an ear a bit, too.

Sam responded with a couple shots from the.32 that sounded tinny and small but clacked and echoed in the big earthen bowl. They squatted down behind a rear tire, and the man fired again, Sam and Daisy both covering their heads, the solid blam, blam, blam from the.44 like a drum all around them.

The bowl felt damn-near Roman to Sam, as he waited for the dark man to either speed forward his machine or keep trading bullets with them.

“I can’t see the bastard.”

“I hope he can’t see us.”

Sam squeezed off another few rounds from the edge of the Hupmobile. Blam, blam, blam.

The radiator cap blew off Daisy’s machine and steam shot out. “Goddamnit,” she said.

Another big shot from the.44 and a tire was out.

Sam reached into his coat pocket and reloaded some more bullets. The .44 answered before he could even aim.

“I think you pissed him off,” Sam said.

“Me?”

The big black car of unknown make or model, just a big goddamn closed-cab machine, built up speed, heading straight for Daisy’s little two-seater, as Sam squeezed off all six, aiming straight between the headlights and up for the driver. But it just kept coming, sounding like a choir out of hell.

You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” Minta Durfee said. It was early afternoon the next day and Minta and Sam walked the ringed path of Echo Lake, not far from the Mack Sennett Stage. Men rowed boats with their honeys relaxing, the men trying to not break a sweat with their suits busting at the seams. There were flower gardens and park benches, tall palm trees and drooping, tired willows dangling their branches into the water. Swans shuffled their way through the tall grass and into the lake, making it seem so damn easy, all the action going on below the surface.