Maude found her hands, looking for her feet.
“You people,” Maude said. “You don’t want to know what happened.”
“What happened?” Tom Reagan said, offering her hand.
She stood on her own and dusted herself off. “You’ll never know. You idiots.”
Big Kate returned from the Dodge, coat flying behind her, matador hat hanging crazy on her head, clutching a baseball bat. Her face heated, breathing excited, she looked as if her body would swell and explode like a balloon. Tom blocked her path.
“Outta my way, Detective Reagan. This saucy bitch needs a talkin’ to.”
“Not like that,” Reagan said.
Griff Kennedy remained leaned back on the machine, flicking the butt of his cigarette and coolly lighting a new one, watching the action play out through the smoke.
Kate hoisted the baseball bat in her hands. Tom stood in her way.
“Don’t you care?” Maude said, screaming. “Don’t you care? Rumwell is a liar.”
“Dr. Rumwell is respected,” Kate said, getting a better grip. “You are gutter trash.”
“Dr. Rumwell is an abortionist. A killer of children.”
“Liar,” Kate said, howling. “Black liar.”
Tom made a move for the bat, but Kate eluded him, circling Maude Delmont in all that open, hilly green space. The wind cold and salty off the Pacific. Overhead, a hawk circled.
“He killed her,” Maude said. “There you have it.”
“Black liar.”
“He removed the child from her the day before the party,” she said. “She was ill. I don’t care if you crucify the fat bastard, but there you have it. Take it.”
Griff Kennedy perked up at her words and moved in beside Tom, Tom slacking his shoulders as if the other Irishman could talk down the dyke. Instead, he handed Tom a cigarette, the bullet-headed man looking over at his partner, the partner slipping his arms around his big shoulders and leading him away.
Kennedy looked back at Maude. “I didn’t hear what you just said, and I hope for your sake you never repeat it.”
“You don’t want it,” Maude said, laughing. “I serve the truth to you on a silver platter, but you’re so far gone with it you don’t want it. How wonderful. How pious.”
Kate choked up on the bat, the cop Reagan trying to get away from Kennedy when the fat policewoman took the first swing into Maude’s stomach, knocking out all the air, the second blow knocking out her legs, and then two hard blows against the back, pushing her in the dirt. The beating was savage and quick and dull and hard, until the screaming and profanities from Kate become gibberish, her fat ass pulled from Maude’s back. The big Dodge started and pulled off, moving away from the sun and into the shadow, and above and over a hill, until they were gone.
Maude spit out sand and blood. Her dress torn, ribs cracked, body battered. She wavered to her feet and tried to find the road south.
SAM WAS ON THE DECK of the Sonoma all of ten minutes before he was introduced by the captain, a man named Trask, to Daisy Simpkins. Daisy smiled at Sam and shook his hand as the captain explained she was a federal dry agent snooping for any alcohol that may have made it to Pier 35 unchecked. He kind of smiled about it, like it was such a big joke, as the morning sun shone over Oakland, the wind harsh in his ears. Behind Daisy, the light made her hair seem more gold than white, a lock covering up one of her silver eyes, red mouth pursed into a wry smile.
Sam walked beside her on the long, endless deck of the ocean liner, other Pinkertons interviewing hundreds of passengers and checking their trunks and suitcases before they could head down the gangplank. City cops prowled the guts of the big ship, Sam spotting Chief of Detectives Matheson and Tom Reagan; Reagan caught Sam’s eye but turned back to interviewing the purser.
“I heard it’s not a half mil,” Daisy said. “They carried a half mil, but the robbers only got a hundred and a quarter.”
“Still, a nice haul.”
“Would set me up for a while.”
“You check every boat that comes in?”
“We had a tip about LaPeer,” Daisy said, walking beside Sam, strolling the top deck like an average couple taking in the sights, through the backed-up passengers and out onto the aft deck loaded down with bunches of green bananas. Daisy wore a cape with a blue jumper dress, and the wind blew the cape up off her shoulders while they walked. “But I figure they already dumped the hooch at the three-mile limit.”
“You miss me?”
“I ached,” she said. “In the gut.”
“Funny girl.”
“How ’bout you? How’s that baby?”
“A girl. Very pretty.”
“What’s her name?”
“Mary Jane.”
“Wife okay?”
“Dandy.”
“I like the tie.”
Sam looked down to see which one he put on with the tweeds that morning. Red with blue dots. He readjusted the cap on his head to block out the morning sun, finding the end of the boat and then turning around the bow and heading back around.
“So what happened, after you were south?”
“You shoulda seen Jack Lawrence after the bit with the lion. He was scared to death of me, practically begged to work for us. I think it was the lion balls in his face that did it, emasculated him. So, I set up a little meeting in Frisco with my boss, F. Forrest Mitchell, and he thought Lawrence was on the square, too. And we turned the son of a bitch loose.”
“And he ran.”
“No, not then,” Daisy said. “He was a good boy for a while. He went back to the same ring that supplied the booze for Fatty and ended up getting sent to Plumas County to help run a moonshine still with this fella named Clio. This old-timer Clio. You shoulda seen this guy, looked like a real miner forty-niner type with the whiskers and flop hat and all. He ran a fifty-gallon still in this abandoned lumber camp that was only eight miles from the Blairsden railroad station, where they’d move a lot of the stuff. We knew every move LaPeer was going to make but played it patient waiting for the good stuff to make its way from the Philippines or up in Canada. But all of our plans got shot to shit.”
A little girl in a straw hat with a pink ribbon turned to stare at Daisy with an open mouth and then leaned back over the ship’s railing and tossed bread crumbs to a dozen seagulls. The seagulls just hung in the wind, barely moving their wings, catching and fighting over the crumbs, another dozen joining the others squawking and fighting.
“LaPeer sniff him out?”
“Mr. Mitchell and I figure we got a rat on the inside,” Daisy said. She stopped walking and found a spot to lean over the rail and look out at the fishing boats heading out through the Golden Gate. “A few weeks back, LaPeer sends Jack Lawrence back to the old lumber camp with a letter, telling him to hand it off to Clio. And of course what does Lawrence do but open the son of a bitch. It read something like, ‘I don’t know whether to trust this Australian bastard or not, keep one eye open.’ That being kind of a joke between LaPeer and Clio, I guess, because Clio only had one eye.”
“Then he ran?”
“Scared shitless.”
Sam offered her a smoke.
“Don’t you have a coat?” she asked.
“I hocked it.”
“For what?”
“A nice cut of meat.”
“Hard times.”
“Not too bad,” Sam said. “I got some bum lungs and a lousy job. You read about all these vets who come home shell-shocked out of their mind and end up checking out early with a.45.”
“That’s a solid way to look at things, Sam.”
“It’s the truth,” he said, leaning over the railing with her, about the same spot over the edge and meeting her eye. She smiled at him and he smiled back.
“Don’t you need to work?”
“Guess so,” Sam said. “Waiting for the cops to finish up with the purser and then I’m headed down below.”
“What’s below?”
“Where they kept the money,” he said. “Stronghold. So they say it’s an inside job?”
“That’s what I heard.”
Sam nodded, still staring back at Daisy. He wanted to touch her face. She had a lovely cleft in her chin.
“They pulled me off the Arbuckle case.”
“This is a big job.”
“Wasn’t the job.”
“What was it?”
“Greed.”
“From who?”
“You ever feel like you’re no better than a prostitute?”
“Every day,” she said. “You got an alternative?”