She checked herself in a compact mirror, rubbed some more paint on her lips, and, satisfied, clicked it closed. Sam smiled and Phil started the machine and pulled off, dust trailing behind them in the red glow of the taillights just as they heard the screaming and yelling and profanities of a woman.
For a moment Sam thought Zey had changed her mind, but behind them he saw an old woman in a housecoat, Ma Murphy, trailing like a stray dog, trying to keep up and shaking her gnarled fist at the moon.
MAUDE DELMONT STARTED THINKING something was truly wrong with this picture when she turned that final corner on the first floor of the Hall and began to follow the policeman down a marble staircase into the basement. She got to the first landing, well in sight of the bottom floor and a long caged storeroom where they held court files and mug shots and bullets and fired pistols and some of the recently dead. She stood there on the landing, halfway upstairs or halfway down, and waited and listened to the masses of men and women being called for jury selection for ole Fatty. She could hear their feet above her that morning shuffling like horse hooves.
Soon another policeman came to the landing and shouted down that Miss Eisenhart had been called as she’d requested. Kate would understand. Big Kate would get to the bottom of all these snobs in Brady’s office giving her the high hat.
Maude yelled back up the dimly lit stairs, but the cop was already gone.
When Big Kate finally arrived an hour later, Maude leaned against the wall of the landing and smoked a cigarette, confessing it must be her feminine assertiveness that scared Brady. Eisenhart leaned against the wall, too, dressed in her woolly blue uniform, and scratched her head, listening. The silver badge on her chest seemed tiny and strange, like a toy pinned on her big fat bosom.
“Scared him to death,” Maude said, pointing a closed parasol as a cane.
“Men don’t know how to take an assertive woman. They find it threatening or, at the least, offensive. He doesn’t want me in that courtroom because I’m a woman, a powerful woman with a mind of her own, who will do everything in her being to make sure her dear friend’s last words are heard.”
She squashed the spent cigarette under her pointed boot.
“Dearest, District Attorney Brady doesn’t want the jury to hear about your past,” Kate Eisenhart said, her frown turning her fat face into dough. “In the eyes of the law you are a bigamist. You’ll ruin his case.”
“Good gracious me,” Maude said, holding her chest as if expecting a heart attack.
“You must divorce a man before you marry another. Or didn’t you learn that in Wichita?”
Maude narrowed her eyes at the fat policewoman.
“This is all a slow boat of slanderous lies because I’m now a known person,” she said. “My former husbands who treated me terribly can’t stand that I am now a public darling. They seethe on it. Did you know I’ve had offers to tell my life story on film? On film!”
“Truly?” The look she shot at Maude was that of a schoolmarm questioning a whopper told to her from the back of the room.
“Miss Eisenhart, is there something you wish to say? I’ve been waiting on this landing for more than an hour. I thought we were sisters.”
“And how did you figure that?”
“I know how you feel.” Maude adjusted her big black hat and smiled a bit. She touched the edge of Kate’s badge, rubbing her fingers across the emblem.
“Who are you?” Eisenhart asked, crooking her head to get a better angle at Maude’s face. “Really? Because the trusted friend of Virginia Rappe doesn’t work for me anymore. Or the divorced wife of Cassius Clay Woods. I do believe you could be the woman who tried to bamboozle a young actor type in Los Angeles who, as it seems, prefers the company of men. Just why were you and Mr. Semnacher at that party with Mr. Arbuckle? What was your angle? I guess Mr. Semnacher has jackrabbited from here, but you still stick around waiting to be heard. What is in it for an aging grifter like you?”
“Good Lord, you fat old bitch,” Maude Delmont said, turning and raising her hand to slap Kate Eisenhart. But Big Kate caught Maude’s hand in midstrike and held it there. She looked Maude in the eye for a long time and then muscled her arm down, using her thick man muscles and man ways to control her. There was a slight sheen of perspiration on Eisenhart’s upper lip.
Maude adjusted her big hat.
“I think you like it,” Kate said. The smile wasn’t smug but knowing, which pissed off Maude all the more.
“Like what?”
“The cameras, the newspaper boys, the boys on the corner hawking the afternoon edition with your name on it. You can’t let it go, even if it will lead you down the flowered path to prison.”
Maude’s indignant face and fetid manners dropped, much like the first layer of wax burning off a candle. She breathed it out. “You want me. You want us to make love like man and wife. You wish me to wear a bedpost between my legs?”
“You disgust me.”
Maude turned to her in the streaming light and dust, row upon row of boxes holding court cases and reports of criminal acts and faded mug shots. Maude watched her, feeling her breath coming in uneven gasps.
“I find your advances and your false manners repugnant,” Eisenhart said.
“You find the Vigilant women stupid? You think all it takes is a black dress and a large hat and some kind of silliness and you’re one of us? Do you have any idea where I’ve been all night? This silly group of women are the ones who tune the deaf ear of our chief of police. Three weeks ago, a fourteen-year-old girl, a child in ribbons, was brought to this city by an uncle to work at a hotel. I won’t say the name of the hotel because it is of no consequence. But at the height of her employment she was forced into relations with more than forty men in a single afternoon. When the girl complained to us at the Hall, her story was written off by a city detective who believed that only a young girl’s foolishness, naiveté, or lust could have produced it. Dr. Marina Bertola attended to this young girl’s wounds personally and, mark my words, Mrs. Delmont, they were horrifying and deep.”
Maude just stared at her. “What’s your point, sister?”
“I expect this conduct from men, but when a woman sells out her own kind it turns my stomach.”
Kate Eisenhart ripped the big black hat off Maude Delmont and tossed it down the stairwell, the hat pin wheeling on its brim until hitting a wall. The large policewoman picked up the heavy blue dress from her boots, well above the dirty stairs, and made her way back to the first floor, where Maude could hear a crowd beginning to gather.
THEY COULD HAVE BROUGHT the being to him in a box or cage, Hearst decided. The man was so scrawny and scared that he reminded Hearst of a feral animal presented for inspection before being locked in a zoo. He had the eyes of a monkey, nervous and quick, and Hearst half expected the man to leap onto his giant desk and steal an apple. Two hired men had stayed at the Hollywood cemetery all night to find the odd little fellow clutching the pink tiger lilies and Hearst could not wait to get the first interview with this man everyone wanted to know. He was the key to the mystery, the paradox solved-the man who worshipped at Virginia Rappe’s grave daily. He was real but created by Hearst, an international sensation storied in ink and then unmasked for all, and the reason he’d been whisked onto a train north to the city and brought right into the Examiner offices as if he were their own property.
“Your name is truly Crystal Rivers?” Hearst asked.
“Yes, sir,” the odd little man said. “I am.”
The top floor of the Examiner office was brisk with publicity men, and four projectionists, nine florists, and at least one organ player. There had been four, but he’d fired the others for not getting the feel of Enchantment right. Tonight was the premiere.