Free Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins Page A

talk about it?”
    “Sure. They got me working on Fatty Arbuckle’s train wreck.”
    “That is big. What do they have you doing?”
    “Running down a couple girls who were at the party.”
    “Did he really do it?”
    “I don’t know and I don’t really care. Have you ever seen one of his films?”
    “I used to see him when I was still in Montana. He made a lot of films with Mabel Normand. I remember one where they went to the World’s Fair.
    They had these little motorized cars you could rent and go from exhibit to exhibit, and it always seemed like so much fun to me.”
    “I liked his dog.”
    “Luke?”
    “Yep.”
    “How do they say he killed her?”
    “He’s being accused of smothering her during rape.”
    “But she didn’t die till four days later. Did he break some ribs?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Sam smoked down some more of his cigarette and stood up, stretching up his stick-thin frame and peering down onto Eddy Street and a Model T parking down across from the Elk Hotel, a man strolling across the street to the corner market.
    He looked back to Jose.
    “You still hungry? I can run to the market.”
    She shook her head. “How’d he crush her? Did she suffocate?”
    “He is a big fella.”
    “The paper says he weighs two-sixty. Was her vagina badly torn?”
    “I love when you talk dirty.”
    “I’m talking like a nurse.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I thought you were a detective.”
    “I’m paid to interview a couple showgirls, not solve the case.”
    “And that got your attention. The showgirls.”
    “I like showgirls.”
    “Help me up,” Jose said.
    Sam reached down his hand and pulled her to her feet. Jose waddled to the edge of the apartment building roof and borrowed his cigarette for a puff and then handed it back.
    “I’ve treated girls who’ve been beaten and raped. That happens a lot in soldier towns.”
    Sam nodded.
    “Can you bring me the autopsy file?”
    “What ever happened to flowers?”
    The stairwell door opened and an old crinkly woman in a flowered dress walked out. She lived right below their apartment and made moonshine with her old crinkly husband in their bathtub. Sam had tasted better gasoline.
    “You got a call,” the old woman said.
    Bootleggers always had phones.
    “Okay.”
    “Said it’s important.”
    “Okay.”
    Sam took the call. It was Phil Haultain.
    “I got a bead on the Zey Prevon girl. She’s working at the Old Poodle Dog.”
    “I’ll meet you there.”

6
    T he fog rolled in before midnight, flooding in from the bay and along the docks and Embarcadero, sinking the lower maze of San Francisco in a fine mist. Hammett had his tweed jacket on, collar popped up around his ears, and his sporting cap down far on his head. He walked Leavenworth through the curving fog up to Bush, coughing a spot of blood into a crisp handkerchief, and then up Bush and over Nob Hill, passing the Hell’s Gate of Chinatown and smelling the garlic and cooked chickens and fresh-cut flowers, and then down a ways, his breath strangled again as he descended back into the static of fog, and toward Bergez-Franks’s OLD POODLE DOG sign, lit up with spotlights, and a line of cars that stretched from the front portico down Kearny to Market. Most of the men had on expensive suits with high collars and bow ties, and the women wore tight long dresses and furs and large hats that trailed large, expensive feathers.
    Sam tucked his cap into the side pocket of his coat and ran his hand over his white hair to smooth it down a bit. He just hoped no one noticed his laced boots, which could use a good shine.
    He walked ahead of the line of sedans and touring cars and little black Fords and into the restaurant. He soon found Phil Haultain back by the kitchen, most of the diners sitting behind curtains in honeycombed rooms where waiters responded to a buzzer to keep a bottle or a mistress private. Downstairs you’d find roulette wheels and blackjack tables and games of faro, and a