Sam knew he couldn’t return home by morning or else he’d risk Jose knowing he had it on him and what he was doing to his lungs and going against the cure he’d learned from her at Cushman.
The giant black man poured another shot of rye and Sam dished out another quarter, and he sat and he waited and exchanged a quick glance with Haultain, who now had another girl on his knee, and he watched as the girls worked him and bargained. Haultain was young but good at playing the rube.
They played around like that until two, when Rumwell came out from a back room. Even slightly drunk, Sam noticed the man was still put together just so in that boiled shirt and suit and bowler hat. He walked to the bar and moved against Sam, never glancing across at him, and Sam kept his head down and his eyes down as the gigantic negro reached down into his breast and pulled out a thick wad of cash and laid it down on the bar across from Rumwell, and Rumwell, not so much as looking at the black man, counted out the money in his hand and then tucked it into a fat wallet in his breast pocket, and, carrying his brown medical bag, walked briskly out of the bar and onto the cobblestones. Sam turned but found Phil already gone. Following, he clicked open his pocket watch, knowing he had hours to kill before daylight and getting home to Jose and acting like he gave a damn if he lived or didn’t.
But he knew he probably wouldn’t reach another six months, and the filthy trade he’d been taught by Jimmy Wright might just let him give a few bucks to Jose and the child and, by the grace of God, in a few years they’d forget him like smoke in the wind. Sam had thoughts like these as he wandered in and out of the bars of the Barbary, his lungs feeling squeezed and wrung out, before collapsing into a coughing fit in the great arms of a heiferlike woman with big painted blue eyes who thought he was the most humorous man she’d ever met.
Her breasts felt like great pillows.
“SO THE GIRL CHANGED HER STORY? ” Mr. Hearst asked the next morning.
“She said that was never her story.”
“But the assistant D.A.-what’s his name, Pisser?”
“U’ren, sir.”
“So ole U-rine is saying the girl was bribed.”
“I don’t know what Mr. U’ren is saying, but it looks like the girl was coerced into giving the statement. Miss Prevon-Prevost was arrested the other night at that dry raid at the Old Poodle Dog.”
“I read the story.”
“Yes, sir.”
The reporter, whatever his name was, seemed to be having a hard time standing there with his tablet in his hand and ink on his fingers, waiting for Mr. Hearst to spell out the story for him. Or maybe it was because Hearst was wearing war paint and an actual Indian headdress that had belonged to Sitting Bull.
Hearst took off the headdress, much to the disappointment of his six-year-old twin boys, who shot another arrow from the top floor of the Hearst Building out onto Market Street.
Hearst leaned into his desk and jotted out some notes. “Randolph, Elbert: Settle.”
The boys, dressed in identical blue Eton suits with knickers, looked at each other and sat down on a short couch, arms crossed over their chests and not saying a word.
“Can we get to the girl?”
“No one can find her. U’ren and Judge Brady put her somewhere. That other showgirl, Miss Blake, has disappeared all together.”
“What about this Delmont woman?”
“She’s sticking with the story that Virginia Rappe told her that Arbuckle had crushed her.”
“Wasn’t enough to get murder with the grand jury. What’s Judge Brady saying about manslaughter?”
“He says he’s looking for a second opinion in police court.”
“Will that work?”
The reporter shrugged. “If the police judge agrees, he can still try Fatty for murder.”
“What about this other woman?”
“She’s waiting outside, sir. That’s who I wanted you to meet.”
“Would you like a turkey leg?” Hearst said, pulling a big drumstick off a china plate and holding it out to the skinny young man. The young reporter shook his head and walked from the room, returning seconds later with the homeliest woman Hearst had ever seen. She looked like Buster Brown as an old unkempt man.
“This is Nurse Cumberland.”
“Good God,” Hearst said, and looked to his sons with wide eyes. Randolph whispered to Elbert, and the boys giggled from the little couch.
Hearst said, “Settle.”
“Miss Cumberland attended Miss Rappe at the St. Francis.”
“And at Wakefield, too,” the woman said.
Hearst nodded and tried not to laugh at the woman’s haircut, recalling the lawsuit he had with the cartoonist who’d created Buster Brown and now wishing he could ring up the man. The boys continued to whisper and giggle, and Hearst lumbered out of his chair and plucked the bow and a few arrows from their hands. “Boys.”
“Miss Cumberland, tell us your story,” he said, walking to the window and taking in Market Street and the final rolling slope down to the bay.
The woman looked to the young reporter and the young reporter looked to Hearst.
“Oh, of course,” Hearst said. “How much?”
“I don’t want to tell nothin’ but the truth, mind you.”
“And I assure you I’ll tell you my price when I know what your truth is worth.”
“Miss… Nurse Cumberland says that before Virginia Rappe died at Wakefield, she told her that she’d been dragged by Arbuckle, by the arm, into the back bedroom.”
“Is that true?”
“God’s truth, sir.”
“Have you been summoned by District Attorney Brady?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you given your story yet?”
“No, sir.”
Hearst set an arrow into the tiny wooden bow, war paint still on his face, and sighted a big boat pulling away from the Ferry Building, switching his sights to the tiny shape of a man hanging from the Ferry Building’s clock. A cleaner of some sort.
He let the arrow go and watched it sail until out of sight.
“Tear up the front page.”
“A TALLY WHACKER,” Maude Delmont said. “A man’s manhood.”
The women whispered to each other, dropping their spoons on the china plates and stopping that chattering altogether.
“And that is where the parrot landed?” asked Mrs. W. B. Hamilton, vice president of San Francisco’s Vigilant Committee.
“Yes, ma’am,” Maude Delmont said, ever so delicately stirring her tea in the great room of the Fairmont Hotel on the Wednesday after the girl had died. She took a little sip and a small bit of sugar cookie.
The two hundred or so women remained silent.
“Were these orgies common?” Mrs. Hamilton used a big voice, loud enough for all the women to hear. There was a stray cough, the light tinkling of a spoon, the shift of the chair, but in it all Maude Delmont had her audience.
“Yes,” she said. “A decent moral woman has no place in the film colony. I worked to sell magazine subscriptions to Ladies’ Home Journal. By the way, I will have subscription cards after I speak. But these parties were no places for a lady.”
“And they were nude at these orgies?”
“Completely,” Maude Delmont said. “At the party in question, that beast Arbuckle had taken offense with the parrot. The bird called him ‘Fatty,’ and nothing makes Arbuckle madder than to hear that. He sat there, mind you, in a very drunken state, arguing with the bird and calling it all kinds of foul names, words that would only be uttered in pool halls and houses of ill repute.”
My God. How awful.
“It was after he’d disrobed and slathered his whalelike hide with buckets of hot oil, to better lubricate himself and such orifices, when the bird took its revenge and swooped through the party, through the maze of nudity and sea of alcohol, to affix its talons on his man snake.”
Oh, my.
Two women fainted. Another woman choked on a delicate slice of coconut cake. A gigantic fat woman screamed.