Ace Atkins - Devil’s garden

“Did they dust the room before that?”

“Not that I saw.”

“And they just did this when?”

“Friday,” Glennon said. “I wanted to keep you wise.”

He handed Sam his old business card from the St. Francis. GEORGE GLENNON. HOUSE DETECTIVE. An address. An extension number. Sam flipped the card and on the back was written, “Kate Brennan.”

“Fine Celtic girl.”

“Who’s she?”

“A hell of good maid,” Glennon said. “Fired her, too. You folks may want to ask Mrs. Brennan if she wiped down the doors after Arbuckle checked out.”

“They fixed it.”

“Is that possible?”

“I know a guy who can add any set of prints you want for fifty bucks.”

Sam offered his hand. Glennon took it with a wink and disappeared back onto Ellis. Sam finished the coffee, too poor to pay for a meal, and smoked a cigarette on his way back to the Flood Building.

It was late when he reached the third-floor office. The Old Man had gone home. Haultain was out on assignment. Sam recognized a couple other ops at their desks and one young boy who worked the Teletype and telephone in case something big happened. Sam found a desk, not his desk but a desk they all used, and called his landlady, the bootlegger, and asked her to send word to Jose that he’d be home in an hour or so.

In a half hour, the room thinned out. The ops gone. Just Sam and the office boy.

Sam asked the office boy to place a call for him to the Baltimore branch. He wanted to run down the name of a possible op: medium build, with iron-gray hair, brown eyes, and half an ear missing.

Does this goddamn rain ever stop?” Roscoe asked. “How do you people live here?”

“You lived here,” McNab said. “You tell me.”

They sat in a private booth, along with Minta and Ma, at the Tadich Grill off Washington. The Tadich was all dark paneled wood and soft yellow lights. The floors were honeycombed black and white and the waiters wore stiff bleached linen. Roscoe felt human in a good restaurant again, straightening his tie and relaxing into the booth. The waiters called him “sir” and brushed away bread crumbs.

“Before the Quake,” Roscoe said, “Sid Grauman hired me to work for seventeen bucks a week. I sang to illustrated slides, songs like ‘Tell Mother You Saw Me,’ crapola like that. Remember that stuff, Minta? Just like Long Beach. Good money back then. But then there was the goddamn Quake and I was out in the street, hauling rocks into oxcarts. Ma, you shoulda seen the city back then, everything was on fire, any able man was given a shovel or faced the point of a gun. I never seen anything like it, and hope I never do again.”

“Roscoe?” McNab said.

“Yeah?”

“I was here, too. The Quake was tough on all of us, but we dusted ourselves off, buried the dead, and built a brand-spanking-new city. Let’s skip over memory lane and to the shitstorm at hand. ’Scuse me, ladies.”

Roscoe adjusted his silver cuff links, put his hand on Minta’s knee, and winked across the table at Ma. Ma winked back. He loved Ma.

“We’re not so different, me and you,” Roscoe said, pointing the nubbed end of his cigarette at McNab. “We’re both performers with our own set of talents. We both know how to work a room, feel a crowd.”

McNab looked uneasy and shook his head.

“You know the secret of working a room?”

“Tell me.”

“You have to be quick on your feet. If a joke bores ’em, head off into a dance. If they don’t like dancing, try a little physical stuff on stage. A crowd isn’t just a bunch of people, it’s a single thing, and that single thing reacts as one person. You just have to find that vein and tap into it.”

“Why risk it?” McNab said. “You talk too much and people think you’re a liar. You talk too little and they think you have something to hide. Hell, Roscoe, you’re a fat man. You sweat. The jury will think you’re nervous.”

“That’s not what I was saying.”

“Sure it was.”

“That’s Zukor talking.”

“Did I say a goddamn thing about Al Zukor?”

“You don’t have to,” Roscoe said, plugging a fresh cigarette into his mouth and striking a match. “Zukor doesn’t think I’m able to take the stand. He thinks I’m a kid no matter how much money I’ve made that bastard.”

“Roscoe,” Minta said.

Ma broke off a piece of bread and chewed with her toothless mouth.

“Zukor is a Jew bastard,” Roscoe said, breaking a match and starting a new one. “I said it. Have I heard from him once since I left Los Angeles? He’s waiting to see how this plays out. I think he wants me locked in San Quentin. That way he can wiggle out of that contract.”

A waiter opened the curtain to the back booth and brought the table a bottle of white wine and three bowls of soup, a loaf of sourdough. Roscoe poured wine for Minta and McNab. Ma didn’t drink. The soup was hot and steaming and perfect on a cold, foggy day. He could stay here all afternoon, enjoy lunch, enjoy dessert and coffee, smoke a bit, tell a few jokes, sing a few songs. Every time he walked into the hall, he felt like a goddamn circus elephant paraded down Main Street.

“Who do you work for?” Roscoe said, pointing the end of his spoon at McNab.

McNab leaned back in the booth and took in Roscoe, as if seeing him for the first time. His craggy old face split into a smile, “I work for myself.”

“You work for Paramount.”

“I do what’s best for the client,” McNab said. The waiter came over and tucked a towel around McNab’s neck, setting a big bowl of steaming mussels and sea creatures in front of him. The crusty old lawyer ate with beautiful manners, dipping the spoon away from him, very little splattered on the linen.

“Well?” Roscoe said.

“A jury isn’t vaudeville, Roscoe,” he said. “It can be a mob.”

“I can make ’em love me,” Roscoe said. “They haven’t taken that away from me, have they?”

McNab looked up from the soup and over at Minta and then over to toothless Ma and there was a steady silence in the booth, the sounds of the restaurant carrying on, until they’d finished eating and made their way back to court. Roscoe wasn’t two steps outside when someone tapped him on the shoulder and called his name. At first he didn’t place the rail-thin man, maybe the thinnest man he’d ever seen, but then he knew it was the Pinkerton he’d met down south.

McNab stood beside Roscoe and stared at the young detective.

“He’s all right,” Minta said, waiting for her mother to get in the limousine and then following her. “He’s with the Pinkertons.”

McNab looked at his gold timepiece and crawled into the limousine and slammed the door. “Hurry up with it.”

Roscoe buttoned his jacket and pulled his hands into some leather gloves. “What a shit day.”

“What’s your connection to William Randolph Hearst?” the Pinkerton asked.

Roscoe shook his head.

“You know him?”

“I met the man once,” Roscoe said. “He’s been giving me a hell of a trashing in the papers, but that’s no secret.”

“He have a reason?”

“He’s an asshole. You need much else?”

“He works with Paramount?”

“He gets Paramount distribution.”

“And they get Hearst press?”

“Something like that.”

“Then why’s he laying into you, Roscoe?”

Roscoe shook his head again but felt himself sweat underneath the coat.

He tried to keep a light smile and shook the detective’s hand warmly. “I got to go, Pinkerton. Judge Louderback doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

The detective just stood there, watching him, waiting for an answer.

But instead, Roscoe gave him an old pat on the back and climbed in the limousine, the door barely closing before the big machine rolled up the hill and toward Portsmouth Square. Roscoe took a deep breath, feeling more trapped than ever, thinking of what it must be like to be swimming under a sheet of ice.