“What did you do?”
“I placed her in a cold bath.”
“Were you rough with her?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Did you bruise her?”
“No, sir.”
McNab stood. “A person hardly knows when they’ve inflicted a bruise.”
Roscoe leaned into the table. His heart raced a bit. Ole Freddie wouldn’t look at him. If he’d just give him a quick glance, Roscoe could tell if he was still with him. But he was sitting there, erect, stiff, answering yes or no, like they’d never met, never shared a drink, a song at a piano.
“But this was not the first time you’d met Miss Rappe?”
“No. I had met her some years ago.”
“When you worked at the same studio with Mr. Arbuckle?”
“Mack Sennett’s.”
“The master of comedy?”
“That’s what Mr. Sennett says.”
The court erupted in laughter again, the crowd loving handsome Freddie.
Roscoe looked up at the ceiling at the fan breaking and spreading apart the heat and wind in the room. There was a strong odor of bad breath and old stale sweat around him. He folded his arms in front of him and straightened his navy vest.
“Did Mr. Arbuckle know Miss Rappe?”
Roscoe’s eyes shot back to the stand and then back to McNab.
Freddie was still, composed, reading off his lines, not moving his eyes except to punctuate his words with the jurors and knowing goddamn well how to perform, direct the play, move the herd.
“He did.”
“Were they friendly?”
“They had met,” Freddie said. “The film colony is quite small.”
“There was a time when Roscoe asked for some help getting to know Miss Rappe?”
“Yes.”
Roscoe took the slip of paper and scrawled in all-capital letters,
BULLSHIT.
“He said he wanted to play a joke on her?”
McNab got his ass halfway out of his chair, Brady catching the move and saying, “How was the introduction to be made?”
“He wanted a key to her dressing room.”
Roscoe underlined BULLSHIT four times. McNab’s big hand enveloped Roscoe’s and gripped his fingers to the point of pain, no expression on the hard old man’s face.
“A joke?”
“He wanted to sneak in her dressing room.”
“Did you get him the key?”
“No.”
“Was he angered?”
“Very.”
“I told him this is where the girls, the Bathing Beauties, shower and such things. It was not proper. But he was insistent.”
The son of a bitch shrugged. Freddie shrugged. A move of “What can you do?”
And he performed it so well for the jury.
If only he would look at him. But Freddie just trailed away as McNab took a stab at him, asking him questions that Roscoe could not hear with the hot blood wooshing through his ears. The final insult was McNab asking Freddie if he was sure that it was Roscoe Arbuckle who asked him for the key, couldn’t he have been mistaken for another person on a very crowded lot, another portly man?
Freddie calmly caught Roscoe’s eye then and Roscoe stared back at Freddie, time seeming to stop as Freddie pointed his long index finger-never being asked to-and shot it straight at Roscoe.
Roscoe did not move. He could not breathe.
He felt McNab’s disappointment as the old man falsely gathered his papers, making motions, actions while he tried to make sense of what had just happened, like a man in shock after being run over by a bus. Roscoe leaned in and said, “I want to see the Pinkerton.”
“There are a dozen Pinkertons on your case, Roscoe.”
“I want the tall one. The thin man. The one who came south.”
“May I ask why?”
SAM WAS BACK on the deck of the Sonoma, working in the heated bowels of the ship, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, only taking a break for a quick smoke, checking in with the other ops to see if they’d found anything. There was a commotion down below on the pier where flashlights worked around the dark green water and on the mooring lines. A man in a diving suit had been dropped a half hour ago, an air pump chugging away, the lifeline running down into the black depths. Sam checked his watch. It was past nine.
He hadn’t eaten since morning.
They’d found some of the coin, the robbers dropping the strongboxes over the side of the ship suspended from hemp rope. More coin was found in drainage pipes, raining down on the heads of sailors when an old salt unplugged them to lay down a coat of paint on the deck.
There was still twenty-five thousand somewhere, but Sam figured they were all going through the motions now. The money long gone. A seaman by the name of Ducrest having disappeared hours ago.
He returned belowdecks, the ops being paid by Seamen’s Bank to go room by room, slowly down each level. And now Sam was back near the engine room, grease on his hands and forearms, still smoking a cigarette, checking out ventilation ducts. He ran a flashlight into them and pinged them with a rusted wrench, duct by duct, room by room. He wanted to get home.
Two hours later, there was a sound. A solid dull thud instead of a ping.
He used the flashlight to look into the shaft. Nothing. He reached deep into the grimy, oily shaft, stretching with his right arm and fingers until he touched the brass top of a fire hose and grabbed hold, pulling it out.
Sam was alone. Two levels down from the main deck.
The hose was heavy and full. He unscrewed the nozzle and found a continuous trail of loosely packed gold coins that jangled with heft in his hand.
When he glanced back up, he could see an image of himself in the glass of a porthole. Grease covered his face like war paint. He used a handkerchief to clean himself off, some of the white cloth spotted in blood. He looked back at himself and then lifted the hose back into the shaft, pushing it far back into the pipe and screwing it tight with a pocketknife.
He was back on deck when he saw a man he recognized as one of Arbuckle’s lawyers, the young one, Brennan. Brennan nodded at another nameless op and the op pointed over toward Sam.
Sam met Brennan halfway on the deck, still wiping grease off his hands. “Mr. Arbuckle would like to speak with you.”
“It’s a little late.”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
Sam checked the time again. Below, men were helping the fellow in the diving suit out of the water, a great brass helmet on his head that they had to remove with wrenches. The man had been out of air and took in great lungfuls when the helmet was removed.
“Where is he?”
“Waiting in the car.”
“What’s this about?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“I’ve been reassigned.”
“This is important to Mr. Arbuckle,” Brennan said. “He’s having trouble sleeping.”
“Tough day in court?”
“The worst.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Lead the way.”
28
Minta thinks you’re a good egg,” Roscoe said. “Minta is a sensible woman.” “That she is.”
There was a long silence between the two men in the rear of the Pierce-Arrow limousine. Roscoe was dressed in pajamas and a robe. He rolled another cigarette, fumbling around with the paper and tobacco until he got the thing made. The leather inside the cab reminded Sam of a fine saddle; it all smelled rich and oiled.
“Now we got that settled,” Sam said, “I need to get back to work.”
“I read about that gold,” Roscoe said. “They said it was a ‘Mystery at Sea.’ ”
“Not much of a mystery,” Sam said. “We found most of it.”
“You found the robbers?”
Sam shook his head.
“Can I call you Sam?”
“Sure.”
“Sam, I was set up.”
“I know.”
“Fred Fishback directed the whole thing. He arranged the trip, called the girls, and brought the booze. The son of a bitch blindsided me. All that crap he said on the stand about me asking for the key to the ladies’ changing room is a bunch of hooey.”
“Why?”