“The good woman who cleaned that room the day after the Arbuckle party. Since we’re calling her work into question, it’s only right that she has the opportunity to respond.”
THE STRONG ROOM on the Sonoma was a solid steel box, sealed with a solid steel door that took three keys to open. The keys belonged to the first officer, the purser, and the captain. According to the rules, all three had to be present when the door was opened and when it was closed and locked. The captain told Sam he’d made regular trips, night and day, to test the door’s integrity. But he did not open the door nor could he see inside. The strong room had no windows, no barred peepholes, and, as far as the captain knew, the loot had been stolen shortly after he’d seen the safes loaded inside at Honolulu. Fifteen chests, each one containing ten thousand gold sovereigns.
“Mr. Houdini couldn’t find his way out.”
“How much do they weigh?” Sam asked, examining the three locks.
“The chests?”
“Eighty pounds.”
“And five are missing?”
The first officer nodded. The purser joined them and then Captain Trask.
Each man showed Sam the lock procedure. Repeating it twice more. “Fifty thousand gold sovereigns. Four hundred pounds,” Sam said.
“Could they have been off-loaded with the booze?”
“What booze?” Captain Trask asked, mustache twitching.
“The booze crates you dropped at the three-mile limit.”
The captain’s eyes were very clear and very blue, and he soon blinked and simply said, “No. I watch that shipment myself.”
Trask pushed open the steel door and it groaned and clanged against the inside wall. The men waited for him outside as if their presence would taint his work. The strong room was oval and painted with a pink primer to stop the rust. Sheets of metal formed the curved corners, rivets driven in flush with each piece. Sam felt over the smoothness of the room, the gentle curves, and below him he could hear the humming and pulsing of the engine room, a woosh, woosh sound that was comforting.
The ten remaining chests lay in an orderly row, side by side. Everything else had been removed from the hold. Sam dropped to his knees and touched the blackened scars on the pink primer where chests had been dragged from the room. The black marks went straight for the steel door, and there were no signs that any other point of entry was possible, no ventilation ducts, no signs of drilling. Sam felt the tracks, gouging deep into the paint, where the gold was ripped from the room. He moved his hands along the path, feeling something wet and, smelling his fingers, knowing it was some really good Scotch.
The Scotch formed a very small puddle in a low spot in the steel sheeting. At some point, maybe this voyage or maybe one from years ago, a single rivet had been yanked away in the path. Most of the Scotch had drained out through the tiny hole and Sam wondered if there wasn’t a lucky crewman below who thought his prayers had been answered.
He stood in the room for a long time, hearing that gentle woosh, and cursing himself for not seeing the obvious.
“Sir?” asked the first officer.
Sam turned.
“We need to lock back up,” he said.
Sam nodded and stepped through the bulkhead. The door sealed and locked by all three men.
“Any clues?” Captain Trask asked.
“Your lock is brass, not steel like the others,” Sam said. “The thief or thieves changed out the captain’s lock before the trip and made impressions of the other two keys.”
The purser and first officer exchanged looks.
“It’s an inside job by someone who could get close enough to you two,” Sam said. “Now, let’s start with a list of the crew.”
The captain said he’d get a list, and they walked back through the mail room and out to a stairwell, and Sam told the men he’d like to snoop around a bit. He wound his way around the guts of the ship, through hallways of staterooms and offices. There was a barbershop and a shoeshine stand. An empty restaurant with tables changed out with fresh linen and crystal and silverware laid out for the cruise back to the Pacific. Daisy Simpkins was back by the kitchen with another dry agent. When she saw Sam, she said something to the agent and he bounded around Sam and headed up the stairs to the top deck.
“Your booze is gone,” Sam said.
“Half Moon Bay?”
Sam shrugged and Daisy followed him out to the dining room. “You know which way is up?”
She smiled. “You lost?”
He nodded.
They followed a long hall through the guts of the ship and then up a ladder to a level with passenger cabins. Everyone was up on deck, clamoring and pissed off at the search, doors wide-open into the little rooms with unmade beds and piles of linen. You could hear the feet above and the wind around the ship, portholes open, a biting cold coming through the halls in all that desolate space. As they walked, Sam was aware of Daisy grabbing his hand and pulling him into the next empty cabin, closing the door, leaving the light off, and kissing him full on the mouth.
“If they don’t find the gold, the office wants me to take this tub back to Australia.”
“How long?”
Sam shrugged. She kissed him again.
“What about Arbuckle?”
“Like I said, they pulled me off it. ’Sides, he’s too far gone anyway.”
“He’s gettin’ what he deserves.”
“It’s not that simple.”
They kissed for a while in the dark room. She smelled wonderful.
“The girl came up to The City with something,” Sam said. “She got hurt when it was taken from her. She was dying before she stepped foot in that party.”
“You want to talk straight?”
“I can’t, angel,” Sam said. “How ’bout you?”
“Shut up,” she said. “I hate talk. It’s all in what you do.”
27
Roscoe stood outside the courtroom in a little corner by the big staircase made of mottled marble. Reporters gathered by the doors as spectators already started to fill the seats. Word had spread about the masseuse from down south who was going to testify about Virginia’s condition, about her having fits whenever she took a drink. Roscoe leaned against the wall, the newsboys sensing a black mood, knowing he wasn’t going to bullshit with them like most days. Roscoe started a smoke, saying, “The way I figure it, it’s damned if we accept those prints as mine. They’re trying to say I screwed that poor girl against a door.”
“He’s a fraud,” McNab said. “The professor. That chambermaid woulda been out on the street if she didn’t clean that suite properly. That room was cleaned time and again.”
All of a sudden the newsboys were on their feet and chattering with each other, a gaggle of them running out of the courthouse, a few running upstairs to the police offices. Roscoe followed McNab to court, getting into the rhythm of the days there, not much different than being on-set, only he wasn’t called to do a damn thing but watch.
“Where’s the fire?” Roscoe said to a couple fellas from The Call.
“You don’t know?”
“I give up.”
McNab held the great door open for Roscoe, trying to move him along.
“Your witness, the Swedish broad, is in the hospital,” the newsboy said.
“Someone went and poisoned her.”
SAM PATCHED TOGETHER what happened to Irene Morgan from a stack of reports from the op who interviewed her and from reading the tale in the afternoon editions of both The Call and the Examiner, no one really knowing if the girl would live or not. The whole series of events piecemeal from fact and fiction, headlines from the newsboys and statements from Morgan, rumor and fact. But apparently the girl had grown bored that first night and snuck out of the Golden West Hotel with another Arbuckle witness, a woman named Leushay. The pair made their way to Geary on foot, hopped the streetcar to Pierce, and then walked two blocks up to the Winter Garden Hall, where single girls could always find a dance and men could take their pick from ’em clustered on long rows of church pews. The unattached would sit and wait, hand-painted slides projected against a cracked wall as an all-darkie band played love songs from the South. The last little bit of information came from Phil Haultain, who sat across from Sam at a partners desk, reading the same report, smoking and laughing and peppering the facts with little insightful and sometimes off-color comments.