Authors: Ace Atkins
When the old man finally came to claim him, those wild, drunken beatings had returned like some half-remembered dream, and so did the comments about his fattened face and blubbery belly, and, once in a bath-house, his father lay drunk in a tub and pointed out his son’s genitalia with the tip of a burning cigar, calling it a tiny worm. Sometimes Roscoe liked the beatings better than the insults. When the old man took to drink and held the power of the whip in his hand, at least the bastard would shut up.
You fashioned your own way, carried your own water.
Roscoe had always been good at that. When people stare and point and smile, you just do a little dance and make them smile more. It was a hell of a trick he learned.
He heard the guard walking the length of the hall and the splatter of a man pissing in the cell next to him, calling out to Fatty to do some tricks for him. Roscoe turned over and felt for the shaving mirror Dominguez had brought.
He stared at himself for a long time, looking at his pale blue eyes and the odd way God had left his face to resemble an infant’s. He smiled at himself and then stopped, and then just looked into his eyes.
He just wished he could remember.
HEARST HEARD THE HORSE HOOVES from a mile up the great hill, as he sat on a boulder he’d known since he was a boy staring out at midnight over the Pacific Ocean. The old campsite at San Simeon was dotted with crisp white canvas tents lit from the inside like paper lanterns, while men worked to unload wagons and trucks, not stopping for the last three months, only working in shifts, to bring in his collection from back east. Little mementos from Bavarian strongholds and Italian palaces that would become the foundation, the cornerstones of his American castle. The foundation had been poured, and already he could imagine the way the stone turrets would rise from the ragged hillside in a way that no man said could be done. So he’d used a woman architect from San Francisco who dreamed without limits.
By the time the horses rounded that final bend on the great hill, he could barely make out the man’s face sitting next to the coachman. The white hair, the big nose, and little eyes of Al Zukor, who stared straight ahead under a bowler hat with great annoyance that brought a smile to Hearst’s face. He walked toward the wagon as it slowed and Zukor hopped to the ground, dusting off his three-piece suit with the flat of his hands and readjusting the bowler on his head. He still looked like a guy peddling furs on the streets of New York, not the head of Paramount Pictures.
He stood a good two feet below Hearst, who was a tall man. The wide-brimmed hat and big boots on Hearst made him seem even larger, as he gripped the short man’s little hand.
“I’ve cabled you sixteen times.”
“I’ve received them all.”
“And you did not cable back,” Zukor said.
“No,” Hearst said. “No, I did not.”
“What’s all this?”
“Just a little cottage or two.”
“Five miles up in the goddamn air?”
Hearst shrugged, wrapped his arm around Zukor, steered him back to the old childhood rock, and swept his free hand across the expanse that hung in the air like a dream above the clouds. And Zukor closed his eyes and then opened them wide, taking in the way the moonlight caught on the great mossy boulders down along the craggy shore and all the inlets and coves and hardscrabble pines clinging to the hills and wide pastureland with little dots of cattle below. A single stray cloud moved under them and the sight of it made Zukor step back from the edge to find his feet and turn back to the familiar movement of the Chinese workers tearing into great wooden crates and pulling out statues of winged women and horses and thick, beaten columns that Zukor had probably only seen in papier-mâché.
“How much is this goddamn thing gonna cost?”
“Do you Jews only think about money?”
“Yes,” Zukor said.
“Let me show you something,” Hearst said, steering into a brightly lit tent, larger than the others, pulling the canvas door aside. He took Zukor to a table littered with drawings of great fountains with spitting lions and a mammoth swimming pool copied from a Roman bath, of fireplaces large enough to burn a forest, and of a cleared strip to land his airplane atop the mountain instead of having to be jostled all the way up the hill like poor Zukor.
“How’s that Arabian picture coming along?” Hearst asked.
“It’s in the can.”
“That’s the one with the Italian fella.”
“Valentino.”
“And he’s playing a sheik.”
“Like a girl from Brooklyn playing a queen. We all like to pretend, Willie.”
Hearst grinned at him with his big teeth and breathed, and then smiled a bit more.
“I came for Roscoe.”
“I didn’t crush that poor girl.”
“You’re not just crucifying this fat boy in your goddamn papers, you’re making the whole goddamn picture industry look like devils. That’s bad business. Very bad business.”
“I don’t tell my men what to write.”
“And you don’t start wars with Spain either. You must lay off Arbuckle, see? What’s with your paper showing him as a drunken spider? The
Examiner
printed that crazy letter from Henry Lehrman. Have you gone nutso?”
Hearst narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms.
“Let’s have a drink.”
“Don’t screw me, Willie, okay? We got a nice thing going with Cosmopolitan and we have a nice run ahead of us with those pictures with Miss Davies, okay? I just can’t figure out why you’re doing this. Those stories get read in small papers everywhere. In two days you’ve turned my biggest star into a three-hundred-pound gorilla with bloodlust for snatchola.”
“Come now.”
“Don’t fuck me, Willie. We have such a nice thing going.”
“You don’t understand journalism.”
“I understand when a fella is being fucked in his
tokhes
.”
The Chinese had busted apart more wooden crates and they’d started a big fire near the edge of the cliff, the smell of burning pine and salt in the air. Hearst dug his hands into the pockets of his ranch coat and kicked at a stray stone with his big boots. He stole a look from the corner of his eye at dusty Al Zukor, traveling all damn day just to have a second of his time, dusty and hungry and refusing a drink, on this magnificent hill.
“Let’s watch the sunrise,” Hearst said. “We’ll eat our breakfast from an iron skillet like cowboys.”
“I know why you’re doing this. But I don’t know how you did it.”
Hearst smiled a bit and took in the expanse of statues brought out from crate and shadow and storage to catch the moonlight on the hill. He recalled being here as a boy with his dad—old rough-talking George Hearst—and the way the chewing tobacco would stain that gray beard and the stories he would tell about Missouri and how he was born to talk to the earth. Hearst would stay awake all night, after the old man collapsed from exhaustion and whiskey, and he’d cling to the rock until morning light and imagine himself a king.
“Who do you think you are?” Zukor asked.
“Would you like a drink, Mr. Zukor?”
“No, I would not.”
“Then I have work to do,” Hearst said, giving him a hard pat on the back and using the little man’s shoulder for purchase as he pushed and moved off to view a new statue he’d purchased of Zeus’ three daughters locked in an erotic embrace.
It had always taken his breath away.
TWO HOURS EARLIER, Sam sat with his wife on the roof of their apartment in the Tenderloin District and smoked a cigarette atop a little stack of brick by the narrow chimneys. Jose sat in a ship’s deck chair and finished up a piece of cold chicken Sam had brought from town. She wore a big, loose-fitting dress and smiled back at him when she noticed him watching her. He wore an old Army sweater and a little cap, striking a match on the sole of his boot.
He’d showered and was clean-shaven and wanted a drink very badly, something Jose would not agree to since it wasn’t part of the cure.
“Did you take your balsamea?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And your breathing exercises?”
“Done.”
“No more than ten cigarettes.”
“Done.”
“And no drinking.”
“Not a drop.”
“You want to feel it?”
Sam stood and walked to her, reaching down to feel the hard wedge on his wife’s stomach.
“That’s a foot.”
“Already kicking Ma around.”
“I’m worried we’re not going to make it,” she said. “I still have an offer from my aunt. I can go back to Montana until the baby comes. We could take care of the rest later.”
“This is working.”
“For now,” she said. “Sam, you still haven’t unpacked your steamer trunk.”
“I don’t own much.”
“You did what I asked,” Jose said. “For the child. But you don’t have to take care of us later. You’re not the kind to settle.”
“Says who?”
“The nurse who you dallied.”
Sam reached into his tweed trousers and pulled out a wad of cash in his money clip. “The old man gave me an advance.”
“New case?”
“Big case.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Sure. They got me working on Fatty Arbuckle’s train wreck.”
“That is big. What do they have you doing?”
“Running down a couple girls who were at the party.”
“Did he really do it?”
“I don’t know and I don’t really care. Have you ever seen one of his films?”
“I used to see him when I was still in Montana. He made a lot of films with Mabel Normand. I remember one where they went to the World’s Fair.
They had these little motorized cars you could rent and go from exhibit to exhibit, and it always seemed like so much fun to me.”
“I liked his dog.”
“Luke?”
“Yep.”
“How do they say he killed her?”
“He’s being accused of smothering her during rape.”
“But she didn’t die till four days later. Did he break some ribs?”
“I don’t know.”
Sam smoked down some more of his cigarette and stood up, stretching up his stick-thin frame and peering down onto Eddy Street and a Model T parking down across from the Elk Hotel, a man strolling across the street to the corner market.
He looked back to Jose.
“You still hungry? I can run to the market.”
She shook her head. “How’d he crush her? Did she suffocate?”
“He is a big fella.”
“The paper says he weighs two-sixty. Was her vagina badly torn?”
“I love when you talk dirty.”
“I’m talking like a nurse.”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you were a detective.”
“I’m paid to interview a couple showgirls, not solve the case.”
“And that got your attention. The showgirls.”
“I like showgirls.”
“Help me up,” Jose said.
Sam reached down his hand and pulled her to her feet. Jose waddled to the edge of the apartment building roof and borrowed his cigarette for a puff and then handed it back.
“I’ve treated girls who’ve been beaten and raped. That happens a lot in soldier towns.”
Sam nodded.
“Can you bring me the autopsy file?”
“What ever happened to flowers?”
The stairwell door opened and an old crinkly woman in a flowered dress walked out. She lived right below their apartment and made moonshine with her old crinkly husband in their bathtub. Sam had tasted better gasoline.
“You got a call,” the old woman said.
Bootleggers always had phones.
“Okay.”
“Said it’s important.”
“Okay.”
Sam took the call. It was Phil Haultain.
“I got a bead on the Zey Prevon girl. She’s working at the Old Poodle Dog.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
6
T
he fog rolled in before midnight, flooding in from the bay and along the docks and Embarcadero, sinking the lower maze of San Francisco in a fine mist. Hammett had his tweed jacket on, collar popped up around his ears, and his sporting cap down far on his head. He walked Leavenworth through the curving fog up to Bush, coughing a spot of blood into a crisp handkerchief, and then up Bush and over Nob Hill, passing the Hell’s Gate of Chinatown and smelling the garlic and cooked chickens and fresh-cut flowers, and then down a ways, his breath strangled again as he descended back into the static of fog, and toward Bergez-Franks’s OLD POODLE DOG sign, lit up with spotlights, and a line of cars that stretched from the front portico down Kearny to Market. Most of the men had on expensive suits with high collars and bow ties, and the women wore tight long dresses and furs and large hats that trailed large, expensive feathers.
Sam tucked his cap into the side pocket of his coat and ran his hand over his white hair to smooth it down a bit. He just hoped no one noticed his laced boots, which could use a good shine.
He walked ahead of the line of sedans and touring cars and little black Fords and into the restaurant. He soon found Phil Haultain back by the kitchen, most of the diners sitting behind curtains in honeycombed rooms where waiters responded to a buzzer to keep a bottle or a mistress private. Downstairs you’d find roulette wheels and blackjack tables and games of faro, and a long hand-polished mahogany bar that stopped serving whiskey only during the Quake.
Sam winked at Phil and followed the big man down a curving wood staircase and past a big door with a sliding view and into a wide-open basement nightclub, where a gathering of negroes played trumpets and trombones, banjos and guitar, in the New Orleans style. The negroes all wore tuxedos and tails and played the wild music with such dignity that Sam thought the whites in the room seemed slovenly by comparison.
Sam leaned against an ornate column, and Phil stepped up next to him as he took in the scene. A bar stretched from one end of the room to the other, with several oblong mirrors and an endless brass rail. Linen-covered tables filled the room. The dance floor a chessboard.
“She sells cigarettes and is wearing a dress above her knees.”
“How’s she look?”
“Face like a horse. A body that would do Mr. Ziegfeld proud.”
“You talk to her?”
“Just found her, like you said.”