Free Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins Page B

long hand-polished mahogany bar that stopped serving whiskey only during the Quake.
    Sam winked at Phil and followed the big man down a curving wood staircase and past a big door with a sliding view and into a wide-open basement nightclub, where a gathering of negroes played trumpets and trombones, banjos and guitar, in the New Orleans style. The negroes all wore tuxedos and tails and played the wild music with such dignity that Sam thought the whites in the room seemed slovenly by comparison.
    Sam leaned against an ornate column, and Phil stepped up next to him as he took in the scene. A bar stretched from one end of the room to the other, with several oblong mirrors and an endless brass rail. Linen-covered tables filled the room. The dance floor a chessboard.
    “She sells cigarettes and is wearing a dress above her knees.”
    “How’s she look?”
    “Face like a horse. A body that would do Mr. Ziegfeld proud.”
    “You talk to her?”
    “Just found her, like you said.”
    “Good man.”
    Phil looked away for a moment, dead-eyed, and then turned back. “Now, there’s someone you’d write home to Mom about.”
    At the long wooden bar stood a tall blond woman, hair almost white, with bright-red-painted lips. She held her booted foot up off the floor on the brass rail in the manner of a man, her hair shorn above her shoulders and covering the right side of her face when she turned. She held a long fox coat across her arm.
    The woman looked over the room and then matched stares with Haultain and Sam and smiled a bit, and cocked a dark eyebrow, taking away the curtain of hair over her eye and turning back to face the bar mirror and wall of booze. The shape of her wasn’t unknown, as she turned back to the bar, the coat before her now, in her long black skirt that hugged her well-proportioned fanny and legs.
    “Sam?”
    “I’m here.”
    “Thought I lost you.”
    Sam noted a man in black tails and bow tie, thick black mustache and hair split and plastered to the skull and hard-parted with grease. When he laughed, you could see at least an inch gap between his big teeth.
    “H. F. LaPeer,” Phil said.
    “You know him?”
    “Biggest bootlegger in the city. How long you been in Frisco, Sam?”
    “Since July.”
    “That’s right, you came for that head-busting job on the docks.”
    “What’s the story with LaPeer?”
    “Most of the booze in town flows from him. Runs the good stuff from Canada and brings it ashore at Half Moon Bay. Cops here are well paid, and no one seems to want to stop his party.”
    “He looks like he combs his hair with olive oil.”
    “Doesn’t seem to bother the girl.”
    The blond girl stood against the long bar now, in the middle of an endless row of men in black suits getting drinks for their women. She smoked down a cigarette and made it look elegant the way she balanced the cigarette while holding the fox coat.
    Her eyes looked as soft as her lips.
    “That’s her.”
    “You bet it is.”
    “Sam? Over there.”
    Phil pointed out a girl wearing a white bodice covered in glinting toy gems flitting her way around the table with a cigarette box hung around her neck. The first image Sam had of Zey Prevon wasn’t of a horse but of a Boston terrier. The girl had a sharp nose and soft chin and large bulging eyes, the kind that seemed to be in fashion these days among the movie-picture types. But she was long-legged, with biscuit-colored skin and large round breasts that hung handsomely in the jeweled top when she would lean over the table and the laps of men to light their cigars and cigarettes. The men would guffaw and laugh, and then motion the little twirling girl onto the next gentlemen. Please repeat it, nice and slow, sister.
    “Why’d you say she looked like a horse?”
    “Horses are ugly.”
    “Horses are beautiful,” Sam said. “Don’t you go to the track?”
    “What kind of animal has big tits?” Phil asked.
    Sam waited for the girl to finish up, and he was going to