With glasses on the end of his nose, McNab made small checks on lists of names and occupations.
“The jury?”
“Potential names.”
“Where’d you get that?”
McNab glanced over at Roscoe, shrugged, and then turned back to the sheets of paper.
“I didn’t kill her, you know.”
“I don’t care if you did.”
“But I didn’t.”
“So much the better,” McNab said. “I think you’d like knowing we’ve located two witnesses in Chicago and three in this state who will testify that Miss Rappe suffered serious ailments before.”
“What kind?”
McNab reached into his briefcase and pulled out another file, using the tip of his empty pen to find a few names and check over notes from a neatly typed report. “Apparently the girl had spells like this before. Whenever she drank alcohol, she’d become agitated, frustrated, begin to tear at her clothes. This happened quite often, and she wouldn’t find release from the pressure until she was very nude.”
Roscoe looked at him and then rested his head on his knuckles. They passed oil wells now, little herds of them in the flat, grassland earth pumping in a mechanized rhythm.
“You’re not happy?”
“I’m sure it took a lot.”
“One of the women, a Mrs. Minnie Neighbors, attended a hot springs with Miss Rappe and saw her under one of these spells. Another,” McNab said, checking his list, “another is a Harry B. Barker. He’d apparently gone with Virginia for five years before she moved to California. He said Miss Rappe suffered from enough venereal ailments to kill a sailor.”
“She was lovely,” Roscoe said.
“Of course she was, Roscoe.”
“She had soft brown eyes.”
“And a warm, wet pussy, too, I bet. But let’s not get nostalgic. We have hours till San Francisco and there are things you must know.”
“Invented things.”
“Facts.”
“How much?”
“How much?” McNab asked.
“How much will this cost me?”
“It’s not your tab.”
“Unless you lose.”
“I never lose, Roscoe,” McNab said. He didn’t turn to Roscoe when he said it, just said it like he was talking about a box score or the weather, a certain fact. “We’ll make sure of that.”
“With facts.”
“Call ’em what you like,” McNab said.
Roscoe’s driver, Harry, hit a pothole, and all their asses jimmied around for a second, slugging Brennan’s head against the window frame, startling him, perking him right on up.
He rubbed a hand over his face and opened his eyes wide: “Did I miss something?”
THE ENTIRE BREADTH of City Hall and the Civic Center was crammed with people. People brought their babies to see Harding. Immigrant people-Chinese, Italian, Japanese-came to wave little American flags on sticks. More people, Gold Star mothers, who came in tribute to their dead sons. People who’d fought in the war, even some old ones who’d fought the Spanish or the aged ones who’d fought each other in ’65. Box cameras were set atop of cars. Ragtag bands played Sousa. Men sold hot sausages from makeshift grills and sacks of popcorn for pennies. By the time Sam got to the park before City Hall, he saw it, what the Examiner called the largest American flag ever on display. The Stars and Stripes hung from high under the rotunda-modeled to a larger scale than the Capitol in D.C.-covering the columns and bleeding down and swaying at the top of the steps.
A large path had been cut between the people and the steps, and in the center police dressed in their most crisp blue stood ready to march. Sam figured almost the entire San Francisco Police Department was there on foot and horse, all the top men up front to lead the parade near the band. He saw Chief O’Brien and the white-haired D.A., Judge Brady, and behind them stood Matheson, talking and smoking with detectives Reagan and Kennedy. The horses nervously skirted the edge of the regiments, waiting for the damn mass of blue to get moving.
Sam shouldered his way to a rope run down to the foot of City Hall. On the side opposite of him, the people parted as a dozen or so policemen cut an opening and held up the rope, letting in a tall man with great bulging eyes. He wore a homburg and tall coat with a fur collar. Smiling and holding leather gloves, he strode across to the mayor and the police chief, Brady and their ilk, and shook a lot of hands.
Sam didn’t recognize him. But he heard whispers of “Hearst” all around him.
The band started up.
The police began to march to Market Street.
The D.A., the chief, and mayor, and William Randolph Hearst led the way.
Boots marched from City Hall, along the cleared roadway, and past the big Bull Durham advertisement on the last building standing on the cleared grounds. The trees newly planted and immature, the lampposts all new and polished. The smiles on the leaders’ faces. Hearst confident, hands in pockets, sharing a quick joke with Judge Brady. A quick smile from Chief O’Brien.
“Say, how about making way for a kid?”
Sam felt an elbow in the back and looked back to see a man with a ruffian boy on his shoulders trying to catch a glimpse of the big blue walk. The kid smiled with amazement, and his father handed a tiny flag up to him and he waved it and yelled. His father held on to his legs and smiled at the syncopated rhythm of the police boots, the strength of it.
Sam stayed there until the blue parade moved down onto Market, heading toward the Embarcadero. The crowd began to mass up toward the steps of City Hall, where workers put the final touches on a great wooden dais. Soldiers walked the grounds, spending time with country virgins and proud old men. They shook hands and patrolled with rifles strung across their backs. Sam asked one of them about the handouts for the veterans, and the soldier, a pink-faced boy with hair the color of straw, pointed him to a series of trucks parked along Larkin in front of the library.
Sam waited there in line for nearly two hours before being handed a pound of flour and a hand-painted greeting card thanking him for his effort overseas.
He stared back at the old soldier who’d handed this to him, the old man himself leaning on a crutch and missing part of his left leg. The soldier smiled with apology, offering a warm hand, and turned back to the next in line, the line of cripples, lungers, and shell-shocked boys-now men-stretching down around McAllister Street.
Sam kept the flour and tossed the greeting card into the trash by the public library.
He sat on the steps and smoked two cigarettes. CHAUCER. SHAKESPEARE. MILTON. HAWTHORNE. POE. Other names he didn’t recognize carved in marble on the library walls.
He walked up the steps and went inside.
19
There’s no way this Petrovich fella is smarter than Craig Kennedy,” Phil Haultain said. “He’s pretty sharp,” Sam said. “He understands people.”
“Well, so does Craig Kennedy. Craig Kennedy isn’t just a detective, he’s a scientist. He uses his knowledge of chemistry and physics to chase down criminals. Does that fella Petrovich ever look through a microscope?”
“He’s got a sense for body language.”
“Does he have a nice car?”
“The book was published in 1866.”
“How ’bout a horse?” Haultain asked.
The men were side by side in long separate tubs filled with hot mud. Sam smoked a cigarette. Phil smoked a cigar.
They’d driven north up through Napa Valley the day before and found rooms in the old wooden hotel downtown. Calistoga was a terrible town for shadow work, only about a half dozen buildings along a single street. The girls were staying at a resort down the road, but Phil said they came in for dinner every night. Phil knew their schedule and movements, the shifts of their guards, and the whole racket. He’d been watching them for nearly a week before picking up Sam. But there wasn’t much sense in watching them today, so they’d taken the afternoon off, waiting for the girls to come back to town.