30
I know them,” Roscoe said. It was late and he sat in
his hotel room over a bottle of bourbon with Gavin McNab. “I don’t
follow,” McNab said, rubbing his eyes, still buttoned tight in his
boiled-and-pressed shirt and tie, black coat slung over the back of
his chair.
“You know your
audience.”
“They’re not an
audience,” McNab said. “They’re a jury.”
“What do you think an
audience is?”
“They watch you sing
and dance and do a little comedy. We’ve spoken of this
before.”
Roscoe shrugged and
took a sip of the bourbon. Minta had packed along a few bottles for
him in her suitcase, knowing they couldn’t be tipping a bellboy
during the trial, risking some kind of side scandal.
“What about Mrs.
Nelson?”
“What about her?”
McNab asked.
“She called her
occupation that of a housewife.”
“So?”
“She said it
forcefully—like, take it or leave it. She’s no-nonsense. Doesn’t
get wrapped up in emotion or bullshit.”
“Did you see her hat?”
McNab said.
“Of course,” Roscoe
said. “Enormous. Reminded me of something a pirate would wear. I
like her. Rock-solid old broad.”
“Who else do you
like?” McNab said, a smug grin creeping into one cheek, indulging
the fat man.
“Mr. Sayre?
C.C.?”
“Clarence,” McNab
said. “Cement contractor.”
“He smiles. Big
smiles, rosy cheeks. That’s a man who knows what it’s like to drink
a few whiskeys, do a little dance. He knows there’s no harm in
that. No Satan creeping in the bottle.”
McNab finished off his
whiskey. He leaned back into his seat. “Roscoe?” “Hold on,” Roscoe
said. “Hold on. Kitty McDonald.”
McNab’s face was
fogged out by the smoke coming from his lips, squinting across the
table, genuinely intrigued now. The whole indulgence thing passed.
“Go on.”
“Rich woman,” Roscoe
said. “A fine-looking woman. Did you see her furs?”
McNab
nodded.
“She doesn’t want to
be there. She wants this whole business to wrap up.
She’ll swing with the
rest of ’em. Okay, who’s next? Miss Whosit? The old
broad?”
“Mrs.
Winterburn.”
“Fantastic name. Isn’t
it? Winterburn. Don’t you love saying it? She’s the prim-faced
schoolteacher, the woman who’d whack your knuckles with a ruler.
Sour old kisser. Didn’t she say she was in one of those women’s
clubs?”
“She’s not a Vigilant,
if that’s what you’re asking. Do you think I’m an idiot, Roscoe?
Her club is literary. She’s part of the Jack London
Society.”
“Ha!” Roscoe said,
pounding his fist on the table, the whiskey glass trembling. “A
woman of the arts. And what am I?”
“You make movie
pictures.”
“The
arts.”
“If you say
so.”
“Okay. Okay. I’m
running them down in my mind. I watch them. Not directly but slyly
out of the corner of my eye. I don’t want them to think I’m trying
to make contact, as if I am a desperate man.”
“God forbid,” McNab
said, waving the smoke away with his hand. His eyes squinting more
at Roscoe, maybe a little less curious now. He checked his
timepiece again.
“It’s two minutes
past.”
“Past
what?”
“Last time you
checked,” Roscoe said.
“Christ
Almighty.”
“August
Fritze.”
“Solid fellow. Brokers
cotton.”
“That’s not why I like
him,” Roscoe said, pointing his index finger at McNab.
“Do
tell.”
“He wears spats.
Spats! What kind of man wears spats in San Francisco?”
“A man who likes
spats.”
“A man who likes
women, drinking, song,” Roscoe said. “Dierks is obvious. How on
earth did you get a former liquor salesman on the
jury?”
“Because I can
outthink and outmaneuver Brady and U’Ren in my sleep.”
“What’s the explosives
expert’s name?”
“Crane.”
“I don’t get a read on
him. He’s kind of a mystery. Same with that Reef fellow. Both
poker-faced bastards.”
“And we all know you
like Mrs. O’Dea.”
“She smiled at
me.”
“Stop the
earth.”
“And who is the big
man? The one with the hangdog face?”
“Mr.
Torpey.”
“And Kilkenny,” Roscoe
said. “Candy manufacturer. I know you found him kinda grim. But he
can be won. I can make a case to him.”
“When is
that?”
“When I
testify.”
“And you’ve
decided?”
“Yes.”
McNab stubbed out the
cigarette. He stood and slipped into his big black coat and
buttoned up the front. He checked the timepiece again before he got
the final buttons, and Roscoe knew it was an effort to unnerve
him.
It
worked.
“Just what did Zukor
say to you?”
McNab looked Roscoe in
the eye. He bit a cheek and rocked back on his heels, hands in
pockets. He kept the same dead-eyed stare and said, “He said you
weren’t quick-witted enough to keep up with those
jackals.”
“Brady and
U’Ren.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Zukor is a
fool.”
“I find him quite
shrewd.”
“But you know me
better.”
“Perhaps,” McNab said.
“Good night, Roscoe.”
“That’s
it?”
“We’ll speak on this
tomorrow. It’s quite late. Thank you for the drink.”
“I’ll see you
out.”
Roscoe walked down the
long hall of the Palace to the elevator, where McNab pressed the
button to ring the boy. He held his fattened leather satchel in his
left hand and kept quiet as the elevator groaned into motion, the
pulleys taking on the great weight of it all.
“You forgot one,”
McNab said, the boy rolling back the cage.
“Who?”
“Mrs.
Hubbard.”
Roscoe snapped his
fingers.
“The woman in the
feathered hat. Old and pinched face. Very sour.”
“She worries me,
Roscoe,” McNab said. “Very much.”
“Give me five
minutes.”
“U’Ren will ring you
dry.”
“You ever performed
before silver miners in Arizona while wearing a
dress?”
“Can’t say I
have.”
“Give me a
shot.”
“If they make you
bleed, it could ruin my career. Make me look foolish.”
“I’ve sat there and
listened to lies about me for two weeks,” Roscoe said.
McNab looked at him,
up and down, from slippers up to the top of his neatly oiled hair.
He slipped into the cage, placing a hat on his head and tipping the
brim at Roscoe just before the cage door rolled back and the
elevator disappeared below.
THE FOG WAS WET As
RAIN.
Sam moved out onto the
ferry’s deck to have a smoke, most of the passengers inside,
nothing visible beyond the running lights cutting through the night
and the thick banks of clouds. Sam lit a cigarette and clung to the
railing.
A wide swath of lights
shot from the military base on Alcatraz and from the north tip of
the city at the Ferry Building, crossing each other every minute or
so. From the city, great horns blared across the darkness, helping
the seamen find their balance, their place in the black. Sam
finished his cigarette. Started a new one.
He would go to the
Flood Building and file a report using his Pinkerton number and not
his name. You never used your name. The system didn’t work that
way.
He would skip coffee
and some hash and go straight home. Jose would be waiting up,
rocking the baby and looking down on Eddy Street, ready for him
before he put the key in the door. She’d have something warm for
him already, the Murphy bed laid out with clean linens, bleached
white and fresh smelling.
Jose.
His face heated with
shame.
Shoes clacked on the
wooden deck through the fog.
Tacoma seemed years
ago. She was the prettiest nurse by far, with those soft blue eyes
and a hell of a body. She’d laugh at his jokes and let him follow
her through her rounds at the sanitarium, helping her wheel out
terminal patients onto that giant front porch on sunny days. And
while the old soldiers would stare at the yellow-gray horizon with
gaping mouths, they’d trade stories about Montana or about her time
in London during the war. She convinced him he wasn’t terminal,
that he’d be fixed up before he knew it, and it’d taken him a full
two weeks before she met him in town for a plate of spaghetti and
to catch a moving picture. They saw Pollyanna with Mary Pickford, and for weeks after
that that had been his nickname for Jose every time she’d talk to
him about his cure, sitting outside in that same spot watching
those openmouthed, shell-shocked bedraggled men staring at the
skyline. Pollyanna.
She had a warmth about
her, a heat. And the films grew into the rental of a little
downtown flat where the passing streetcars would clang past and
rumble the building, he and Jose not seeming to notice, the little
metal bed they shared rocking so hard it would skip across the
beaten-wood floor, traveling from wall to wall, the pair joined at
the hip.
Sam flicked the
cigarette into the lapping waves.
The beams crossed over
each other, one from the shore, one from the island, nearly
connecting but passing, and it was night and blackness again. The
horns sounded. Sam lifted the collar on his suit and tucked his
hands into his jacket, moving toward the front of the ferry,
whistling.
A solid fist knocked
him square in the gut, dropping him to the deck, him
crawling.
A big black shoe came
for his face and split his lip.
Another hard kick in
the gut. Sam rolled to his back, trying to find just a pocket of
air for his squeezed lungs. He stared up at the man and saw the
face, the dark man smiling down at him and offering a hand. Sam
found an inch of breath and crawled backward, trying his feet but
only getting his knees, wiping his lip, a boxer just trying to make
it to round’s end.
The man kept his hands
in a large black overcoat. A wide-brimmed black hat sat on his gray
head. He just kept smiling at Sam, quickly glancing around him
through the thick blankets of fog misting their faces. He kicked at
Sam hard once more, and Sam landed with a giant thwack on the deck,
his mouth reaching for air, nothing coming into him, and he blacked
out for a moment but never lost sight, trying just to right
himself, the beams crossing overhead, cutting across the man’s dark
skin and misshapen ear. He toed at Sam as if he were a dead fish
found on the shore.
Sam tried to breathe.
The bovine horns called through the fog, dueling from the islands
and shore. Sam’s vision scattered, rolling to his hands, the deck a
patchwork of wooden planks, blindly searching, cold and wet. More
horns. They were close to the Ferry Building now. Four more
kicks.
No
questions.
The Dark Man reached
for Sam, finding the back of his suit and belt and hoisting him to
his feet and pushing him to the railing, forcing him to look at the
churning water, light cutting across and through the fog and
darkness, and whispering something in his ear about the way of the
world, repeating “the way of the world” at least twice, but Sam not
getting much, his mind turned back to ’17 and the wooden sidewalks
of Anaconda, the cold sprays of fog and bay tasting like copper
smelting in his bloodied mouth, moving into the heart of the little
mining town, the beaten floor-boards in a rooming house and Frank
Little’s empty bed. As his feet were hoisted from the creaking
deck, Sam’s body halved across the ferry’s railing and he grabbed
and reached for something to hold, finding only slick metal, the
man pushing with all his weight, pushing Sam farther off the ferry
and into the blackness and fog. Sam saw Little twirl from the
trestle, that first light cutting across the barren, raped hills
and over the sack that covered the labor leader’s head, and he let
go, the horns sounding loud and close, reaching into his tweed
jacket and leaning back with a little heft to his legs and aiming
his boots for the deck, collapsing in a crushed heap.
The Dark Man pressed
against him again.
Sam
turned.
He shot straight into
the Dark Man’s heart with his .32.
The man held his
chest, a look of surprise on his lips, as Sam flat-handed him
backward and lifted with everything he had, toppling the man over
into the darkness and foam, catching a glimpse of an air pocket in
his black coat, the rough, strong currents of the bay flushing him
out toward midnight and the Golden Gate and into the great sea—the
Pacific—and nothingness.
Sam dropped to his
knees, pressing his back to the steel of the ship, shaking and
gasping for breath. The front of his shirt was damp with sweat and
sea mist. He closed his eyes and just thought about
breathing.
A big, booming bovine
horn called him home.
SHE MET HIM at the
lunch counter of the Owl drugstore. It was midnight. A guy in a
paper hat behind the counter cleaned out coffee mugs and shined
forks with a dirty rag.
“You look like shit,”
Daisy said.
“Shucks. You’re just
sayin’ that.”
She smiled and asked
the guy in the paper hat for more coffee. She lit a cigarette and
blew it from the corner of her mouth. In the bright light, her eyes
looked very silver.
“We busted up LaPeer’s
stills last night,” she said. “Out toward Palo Alto, place called
Logan’s Roadhouse. One of our boys, De Spain, got wind of
automobiles and trucks loaded up with barrels and demijohns and the
like.”
“How
much?”
“Four thousand of
mash, one-fifty of jackass brandy, and truckloads of his bonded
stuff brought in on the Sonoma—Scotch,
Old Crow, you name it. But the big thing was the stills. Two of
’em. The latest design, all electric, new, and ready to crank out
thousands of gallons.”
“How’d it
taste?”
“Not bad,” Daisy said.
“Little rough. But, get this—when we got warrants for LaPeer and
found him at the Somerton Hotel, he claimed—”
“He didn’t own the
place.”
“No, better,” she
said, grinning. “Said the gallons of mash were actually hair tonic
and he had big plans to get the stuff in the hand of every bald man
in the States.”
“A true innovator,”
Sam said. “He make a fight of it?’
“Nope,” she said.
“Kinda sad. I brought my twelve-gauge and dressed for the newsboys.
We had boys all in the lobby of the Somerton and along the
stairwell and holding the elevator. Me and De Spain knocked on his
door.”
“And he just walked
out with you?”
“In a robe and
slippers. Meek as a kitten. He smiled for the cameras. It’s all a
big laugh to him.”
“What’s gonna happen
when his suppliers don’t get his dough?”
“Cry me a river,” she
said. “They got most of it back. The Seamen’s Bank has it. Makes me
sick. I just hope they spell my name right. It’s Simpkins. With an
s. Sometimes they spell it without the
s and it annoys the folks back
home.”
“They still haven’t
found the rest of it.”
“They
will.”
“It’s long
gone.”
Sam didn’t say
anything for a while, catching Daisy’s profile as she tipped her
head and let out some smoke. They were the only two at the counter,
a dozen or so empty stools down the line.
“Was that true what
you said down in Los Angeles?” he asked. “About LaPeer killing your
man?”
She
shrugged.
“Did I tell you LaPeer
had ratted out his two partners back in September, Jack Wise and a
Jap named Kukaviza?” she asked. “He went straight into Mr. F.
Forrest Mitchell’s office, gave him what we needed, and then took
over their turf. That’s some balls.”
“You look
shook-up.”
“You need glasses.”
She pulled her hand away and fiddled with another cigarette. “Why
are you asking me so many questions about LaPeer’s dough? He’s in
the life. He paid out a half mil, got the booze, and now lost it
all. Cry me a river.”
“You said
that.”
“So why do you
care?”
“What would you do if
you had a chance to keep his coin?”
“I’d be on a slow boat
to China.”
“I’m
serious.”
“Are you gonna
eat?”
“I’m not
hungry.”
“I want to
eat.”
“Then
eat.”
“Are you going to
Australia?”
“I haven’t decided,”
Sam said.
“It ain’t up to you. I
thought it was up to the Pinkertons.”
“I’m not a
number.”
“Why so
touchy?”