“But you’re not done poking at this?” the Dark Man said. He smiled, understanding.
Hearst turned and watched the rain fall across the window, the light coming into the limousine’s carriage again across his face and eyes, and he said nothing.
JUST OUTSIDE the Flood Building, Sam heard someone call out to him from across Ellis Street. He turned and stared into the long, driving sheets of rain and just made out the face of a man and an umbrella. The man was smiling and offered a hand and Sam stepped back, watching for any quick moves.
“George Glennon,” the man said, “the St. Francis?”
Sam shook Glennon’s hand and told him he was sorry. “A little nervy, I guess.”
“Let’s get out of the rain,” the hotel dick said.
They walked a couple doors down to John’s Grill, where Sam sat next to the pudgy fella up at the bar. They ordered a couple coffees and were disappointed when the cups came back as plain joe. Sam asked the Greek what gives and the Greek pointed to a couple cops eating a steak dinner by the front door.
“As if they care,” Sam said.
The Greek shrugged and walked.
Sam drank the coffee and had a smoke. Glennon did the same.
“You ever get a bead on that Dr. Rumwell?”
“I did,” Sam said. “Thanks for the tip.”
“What’d you think?”
“Strange little man, nervous, jumpy. I tailed him one night out into the Barbary and watched him attend to a mess of whores at a place called Purcell’s.”
“That’s mighty white of him.”
“He got a big wad of cash for the effort,” Sam said. “Dr. Rumwell works the unwashed trade, no telling what the sailors bring to port.”
“How’s he know Mrs. Delmont?”
“Don’t know,” Sam said. “I got pulled off to work some business down south.”
Glennon smoothed down his mustache, scratched his neck, and drank more coffee. He thought about it, added some more sugar to his coffee, stirred it a bit, and then said, “That bastard manager at the St. Francis let me go.”
Sam listened.
“I gave a deposition to Gavin McNab last week saying that Virginia Rappe told me personal she didn’t know what was wrong with her. Suddenly there are two pigheaded Irish cops in my lobby, showing their muscles and badges and swinging their dicks around wanting to charge me with dereliction of duty.”
“And they fired you?”
“Yep,” Glennon said. “The cops say they’ll charge me if I see McNab again.”
“Ain’t the legal system a beaut?”
Glennon shook his head and drank his coffee. Sam let the cigarette burn in his fingers and watched the rain outside on Ellis Street. The arc lamps were on, shining gold patterns of water running naked down the road.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said.
“It’s not your fault.”
Sam shook his head.
“I didn’t come to tell you a sob story,” Glennon said. “Before I left I watched a team of policemen go upstairs to the Arbuckle suite. They removed three big doors. Two from 1219 and one from 1220. It took four men to carry each of ’em out.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Some guy named Heinrich and a broad named Salome Doyle,” he said. “Get this. When they entered the lobby, this Heinrich guys sez to the cops, ‘Make way for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.’ He’s a complete screwball.”
“Did they dust the room before that?”
“Not that I saw.”
“And they just did this when?”
“Friday,” Glennon said. “I wanted to keep you wise.”
He handed Sam his old business card from the St. Francis. GEORGE GLENNON. HOUSE DETECTIVE. An address. An extension number. Sam flipped the card and on the back was written, “Kate Brennan.”
“Fine Celtic girl.”
“Who’s she?”
“A hell of good maid,” Glennon said. “Fired her, too. You folks may want to ask Mrs. Brennan if she wiped down the doors after Arbuckle checked out.”
“They fixed it.”
“Is that possible?”
“I know a guy who can add any set of prints you want for fifty bucks.”
Sam offered his hand. Glennon took it with a wink and disappeared back onto Ellis. Sam finished the coffee, too poor to pay for a meal, and smoked a cigarette on his way back to the Flood Building.
It was late when he reached the third-floor office. The Old Man had gone home. Haultain was out on assignment. Sam recognized a couple other ops at their desks and one young boy who worked the Teletype and telephone in case something big happened. Sam found a desk, not his desk but a desk they all used, and called his landlady, the bootlegger, and asked her to send word to Jose that he’d be home in an hour or so.
In a half hour, the room thinned out. The ops gone. Just Sam and the office boy.
Sam asked the office boy to place a call for him to the Baltimore branch. He wanted to run down the name of a possible op: medium build, with iron-gray hair, brown eyes, and half an ear missing.
25
Does this goddamn rain ever stop?” Roscoe asked. “How do you people live here?”
“You lived here,” McNab said. “You tell me.”
They sat in a private booth, along with Minta and Ma, at the Tadich Grill off Washington. The Tadich was all dark paneled wood and soft yellow lights. The floors were honeycombed black and white and the waiters wore stiff bleached linen. Roscoe felt human in a good restaurant again, straightening his tie and relaxing into the booth. The waiters called him “sir” and brushed away bread crumbs.
“Before the Quake,” Roscoe said, “Sid Grauman hired me to work for seventeen bucks a week. I sang to illustrated slides, songs like ‘Tell Mother You Saw Me,’ crapola like that. Remember that stuff, Minta? Just like Long Beach. Good money back then. But then there was the goddamn Quake and I was out in the street, hauling rocks into oxcarts. Ma, you shoulda seen the city back then, everything was on fire, any able man was given a shovel or faced the point of a gun. I never seen anything like it, and hope I never do again.”
“Roscoe?” McNab said.
“Yeah?”
“I was here, too. The Quake was tough on all of us, but we dusted ourselves off, buried the dead, and built a brand-spanking-new city. Let’s skip over memory lane and to the shitstorm at hand. ’Scuse me, ladies.”
Roscoe adjusted his silver cuff links, put his hand on Minta’s knee, and winked across the table at Ma. Ma winked back. He loved Ma.
“We’re not so different, me and you,” Roscoe said, pointing the nubbed end of his cigarette at McNab. “We’re both performers with our own set of talents. We both know how to work a room, feel a crowd.”
McNab looked uneasy and shook his head.
“You know the secret of working a room?”
“Tell me.”
“You have to be quick on your feet. If a joke bores ’em, head off into a dance. If they don’t like dancing, try a little physical stuff on stage. A crowd isn’t just a bunch of people, it’s a single thing, and that single thing reacts as one person. You just have to find that vein and tap into it.”
“Why risk it?” McNab said. “You talk too much and people think you’re a liar. You talk too little and they think you have something to hide. Hell, Roscoe, you’re a fat man. You sweat. The jury will think you’re nervous.”
“That’s not what I was saying.”
“Sure it was.”
“That’s Zukor talking.”
“Did I say a goddamn thing about Al Zukor?”
“You don’t have to,” Roscoe said, plugging a fresh cigarette into his mouth and striking a match. “Zukor doesn’t think I’m able to take the stand. He thinks I’m a kid no matter how much money I’ve made that bastard.”