Authors: Ace Atkins
She watched the floors slide by the door, keeping her eyes on the needle pointing down toward the lobby.
“Mrs. Delmont, have you spent much time in Madera County?” Detective Reagan asked behind her.
Maude Delmont kept her eyes forward, letting the elevator slow to a stop and the gated door open. Without a word, she walked ahead of them.
“SO ARBUCKLE is A FREE MAN?” Mr. Hearst asked.
“Yes, sir,” said the young reporter.
“You saw him walk out of jail?”
“Yes, sir. Bail was five thousand.”
“Did he smile?”
“He grinned.”
“That’s a smile.”
The big black locomotive steamed south from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the young reporter still looking uneasy from when Hearst asked him on the journey, still worried about making the morning edition. The young man sat across from Hearst, afraid to touch the plate of food that George had carried from the kitchen, the roast beef and potatoes growing cold on the gilded china.
“Do you think he deserved to be tried with more than manslaughter?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Hearst sliced into the roast beef, adding a touch of mashed potatoes on the fork. The gravy was creamy and bloody, fresh green beans on the side. He asked George to pour more wine and looked out at the flat, barren northern California countryside as they sped along, the occasional whistle blowing from the engineer.
“When should we expect a trial?”
“In a month or so.”
“What else do we have for the afternoon?”
“The disarmament conference begins in a few weeks. The Tong War continues in Chinatown. Mollie Merrick has a piece on the high rate of college coeds never marrying.”
“I mean on Arbuckle.”
“They bury the girl tomorrow in Hollywood. I’ve brought you the story of her viewing from the wire.”
Hearst set it by his elbow and scanned the story, George refilling his wineglass. The young reporter nervously checked his wristwatch, wanting more than anything to be away from the man the newsboys called The Chief and off his goddamn train.
8,000 AT L.A. VIEW BODY OF VIRGINIA RAPPE.
Eight thousand persons—gray-headed matrons with their daughters, men in overalls who stood hat in hand, and schoolgirls with braided hair down their backs—all inspired by love, friendship, or morbid curiosity, viewed the body of Virginia Rappe, beautiful motion picture actress, as it lay in state between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. at the undertaking establishment of Strother and Drayton in Hollywood today.
Draped in a white satin shroud, with flowers in her hands, the body of the girl, central figure of the tragedy which startled the country last week, looked extremely lifelike and natural. The casket was banked high with flowers, including the 1,000 tiger lilies ordered by Miss Rappe’s fiancé, Henry Lehrman, from New York, and across it was a white satin ribbon and in gold letters this: To my grave sweetheart.—From Henry.
Hearst closed the folder over the story and looked across the table at the young reporter fidgeting.
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
“Sorry. I’m a little nervous.”
“Of what?”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“At least drink your wine,” Hearst said, downing the rest of his. “I never trust a newspaperman who doesn’t drink. Shows me he doesn’t have ink in his blood.”
He smiled, watching the reporter down the glass.
“I want Arbuckle smiling up high. I want you to show his cockiness and aloofness from the judge’s decision. What was the first thing he did when released?”
“Got a shave, sir.”
“A shave. From whom?”
“A neighborhood barber offered him one for free.”
“Set it up with the smile, walking out a free man for now, and then the smugness of getting a shave and a big meal at the Palace Hotel. He did have a big meal, I assume.”
“I can find out.”
“He’s not concerned about the girl at all. She’s dead, lying cold in a mortuary with her adoring fans swarming over her, and Arbuckle just wants to stuff himself to satisfy his mammoth appetites.”
The engineer blew the locomotive’s whistle again, and soon hovels slapped together from scrap wood and tin showed in the long coach windows. A fat Mexican woman cooked meat on an open stove, dirty children playing by her feet, a skinny baby on her bosom. Coolies hefted boxes from the backs of wagons and trucks to the train platform, and soon the locomotive slowed and drew to a long, steady stop.
The only sound in the cabin came from the hissing of the engine as the train took on more water and wood.
“You can go,” Hearst said. “Take the story on the girl.”
“Here?”
“Another train will come through,” Hearst said. “If not, just write your story and have it cabled to the office.”
The reporter stood and grabbed his coat and hat and nervously shook The Chief’s hand and walked back through the coach, George already holding the door open and then shutting it with a tight pop.
“Odd little fellow,” George said.
“They all are.”
“Are you okay, Mr. Hearst?”
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”
Hearst stood and watched as George cleared the china plates from the table. The coolies and Mexes looked up from their work at the strange black train pulling only two coaches. Hearst waved at them, and made his way back to the bath, shutting the door and locking it behind him, splashing water on his face and trying to steady himself from the nausea.
There had been a picture attached to the wire story on the girl’s burial. He had decided it was too much, the Rappe girl, with her insides cleaned out and sewn back whole, photographed in her Sunday best and covered with that goddamn white veil, a sweet smile upon her dead lips. Hearst ran cold water and wiped his giant eyes with a moist towel.
But his legs gave out and soon the big man was on his knees, hands wrapped around the brass commode and vomiting out the roast beef and potatoes, George knocking on the door.
Hearst yelled back that he was fine and to fetch some ice water.
Hearst, still on his knees, steadied himself. The image of the girl would not shake free of his mind. When he saw the girl’s face, it wasn’t the Rappe girl but Marion, pennies covering her eyes.
He felt feverish as he stood and tried to calm himself.
THE CAPTAIN OF DETECTIVES, Duncan Matheson, was an odd-looking duck, thought Maude Delmont. Odd because he looked so much like a policemen that she figured him to be a stock player in Hollywood. He wore one of those thick, waxed mustaches and smoked a pipe while he interviewed her in his little partitioned office made of pebbled glass and oak. His eyes were as black as coal, and he would ask questions as if they were statements and Maude didn’t know whether to answer, nod her head, or call him a liar.
“You’ve been married for a year or so.”
She decided to nod.
“To a Mr. Woods of Madera.”
She nodded again.
“Are you aware that Mr. Woods has been searching for you for months now and only knew you were in the city when he picked up a newspaper?”
She shook her head. It called for a shake.
“Are you in the process of divorce?”
“No, sir.”
“Mr. Woods has complained you left him without explanation.”
Maude’s throat felt dry and cracked. She had started to sweat. She never sweated. She almost closed her eyes, waiting for Captain Matheson to ask her all about the bonds and cash she stole from Cassius Clay Woods’s safe.
She held her breath and dropped her head into her waiting fingertips.
“I can explain,” she said. “Please. This has all been so traumatic.”
Captain Matheson stood. He was a great deal shorter than he looked sitting behind the desk and appeared downright minuscule as he passed Detectives Kennedy and Reagan, who stood against a brick wall lined with photos and fancy inked documents.
“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.”
13
S
am 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.