Devil's Garden - Couverture rigide

Atkins, Ace

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0399155368 ISBN 13 : 9780399155369

Editeur : Putnam Pub Group, 2009

Synopsis

Book by Atkins Ace

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

 

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

 

Acknowledgements

ALSO BY ACE ATKINS

Wicked City
White Shadow
Dirty South
Dark End of the Street
Leavin’ Trunk Blues
Crossroad Blues

G . P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

Copyright © 2009 by Ace Atkins

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Atkins, Ace.

Devil’s garden / Ace Atkins. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-02239-9

1. Arbuckle, Roscoe, 1887-1933—Fiction. 2. Rappe, Virginia, 1895-1921—Fiction. 3. Hammett, Dashiell, 1894-1961—Fiction. 4. Motion picture actors and actresses—Fiction. 5. Private investigators—Fiction. 6. Trials (Murder)—California—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3551.T49D’.54—dc22

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To Angel

The American public is ardent in its hero worship and quite as ruthless in destroying its idols in any walk of life. It elevates a man more quickly than any nation in the world, and casts him down more quickly—quite often on surmise or a mere hunch.

—ROSCOE ARBUCKLE, 1922

 

 

 

 

The Arbuckle case was the funniest case I ever worked on. In trying to convict him, everyone framed everybody else.

—DASHIELL HAMMETT, New York Herald Tribune, 1933

July 31, 1917

Anaconda, Montana

 

 

He’d shadowed Frank Little for weeks, from El Paso to Butte to Bisbee, and for days now along the wooden sidewalks of the old mining town, built at

 

the base of bleak hills where dusty workers made their way up a crooked path to the foundry and deep down into the earth. They’d started work on the furnace then, and half of the brick phallus rose from the city, towering above the buildings and hills, and would soon smelt the copper they’d sell for twenty-six cents a pound to make pots and newspaper presses.

The town smelled of acrid metal and burnt meat.

Anaconda was open all night. There were saloons and whorehouses and one good hotel and dozens of bad ones, rooming houses where Sam had taken a bed. In the off-hours, when Little would wobble up the staircase and get an hour or two of sleep, Sam would lay on the narrow bed and read the Butte newspapers about a possible war with Germany and a ragged copy of Dangerous Ground, a novel about a Pinkerton he’d had since he was a boy.

It used to be an adventure. Now it was just a reminder.

He’d asked for the room two doors down from Little, where he’d loosened a plank by the stairs so he’d hear a squeak when the union leader went on his rounds. Sam had heard most of the speeches before, Little talking mainly about the country only having two classes, one exploiting the other, and how International Workers of the World wanted to make the fat cats pay for strong backs.

Little said he’d once been arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence on a street corner.

He talked about that mining disaster in Butte in June and how the boys in Anaconda worked under even worse conditions. He called the furnace chimney another ivory tower where the wealthy burned up the common man.

The Pinkerton’s client was supposed to be kept under wraps, but Sam knew it was the Hearst outfit, which owned a piece of pretty much every mine in the country. He was told to tail Little, make notes on the speeches, type out a neat report, and send it back to Baltimore. It was a basic assignment that didn’t need much thought.

The food wasn’t bad. Now and then he could sneak a whiskey at the bars. And two nights ago he’d found a fine, full redheaded whore named Sally who worked overtime off the clock.

Sam heard a creak, put down the copy of Dangerous Ground, noting the Pinkerton standing on the hill shining a beacon of light down on a hooved red devil leading a virtuous woman away, and he followed Little down the stairs through the narrow lobby and out onto Main Street. There were horses and wagons and an automobile or two, the gas lamps burning all the way past the Montana Hotel, down to City Hall and to the dead end of mountain and mine.

Little was up on some wooden crates, talking again, waving his hands wildly to men in overalls and women holding up hand-painted signs. The women looked determined; the men looked scared.

The light was just going down in Anaconda, the shadows on the hills showing purple and black with bright yellow patches. As Sam jotted down some of what Little said, really just repeating a speech he’d heard two weeks ago in Bisbee about those miners shipped off to die in boxcars, he felt a soft hand on his shoulder and turned to see a man dressed in a three-piece black suit holding a gold timepiece in his hand.

“Has a lot of wind, doesn’t he, friend?”

Sam nodded.

The man clicked the gold watch closed and removed a pouch of tobacco from his vest pocket.

“He’s gonna keep going. How ’bout a drink?”

Sam thanked him but said no.

“You’re the Pinkerton, aren’t you? One of them anyway.”

Sam turned back. The man grinned and spit brown tobacco juice on the ground. “Let’s have that drink.”

They found a saloon called Kate’s just off Main Street filled with miners and whores and a back table where a sweaty Chinaman cooked T-bone steaks on an open grill. Sam Hammett, just an edge over twenty but nearly white-headed, leaned back in his seat and put a match to a Fatima cigarette.

The man removed the wad of tobacco from his cheek and tossed it below the table.

Men in the front room had gathered around a piano. A whore was singing “Buffalo Gals,” and the men yelled and thumped their boots on the wooden floors, and in all the action and laughter, Sam and the man were alone.

“I won’t waste time,” he said. “I have a deal to make.”

Sam nodded.

“I’ll put up five hundred dollars over your Pinkerton pay to shut Little’s mouth.”

Sam burned down the cigarette, nearly coughing on the smoke. He watched the man but didn’t say a word.

“That’s not my job.”

“The money all comes from the same place.”

“Hearst?” Sam said, smiling, confident he was right.

“I’m not at liberty.”

“But you are at liberty to hire me out like a goon.”

“Not a goon.”

“Go hire some palooka,” Sam said. “This isn’t my line.”

He stood. The man grabbed his arm, trying to stop him, and tried to crush great wide green bills into Sam’s hand. “I’m not talking about a beating.”

Sam looked down at him, at his jug ears and iron-gray hair and dark complexion, and walked away into the crowd, brushing by a fat whore who grabbed his pecker through his trousers the way some shake hands.

He could breathe on the street, and he walked the wooden planks southward, back toward the emerging smokestack of the mine, and found Little there talking to a dispersing crowd more about the boys in New Mexico, Mexes and Indians and negroes all carted off like animals with no food or water, some of them dying in the boxcars, and then let loose in the desert.

Sam checked his watch.

He made a note.

He followed Little to another bar, where the man drank until the early morning with two burly miners. The man never seeing him. Sam remembering everything he’d learned from his mentor in Baltimore: not to worry about a suspect’s face. Tricks of carriage, ways of wearing clothes, general outline, individual mannerisms—all as seen from the rear—were much more important to the shadow than faces.

But then, outside, he made contact with Little’s eyes and the man noticed him and walked away from two men he was talking to, crossing Main Street, and came over to Sam and simply said, “Don’t I know you, brother?”

Sam shook his head, embarrassed, admonishing himself for being caught.

Little thrust out his hand, well-calloused and warm, and told Sam that it was damn good to meet him, pumping his hand up and down, and left him with a fresh pamphlet from the International Workers of the World asking, WHERE DO YOU STAND?

The men broke up their party in the blackness of a deep night, smoke and steam pumping from the foundries, passing men in leather aprons on the way to work. Tired, pinch-faced women washed laundry in tin buckets while skinny, pasty children played in dry ditches.

Little headed back to the rooming house and Sam followed, waiting five minutes until the man disappeared up the stairs, and then returned to bed.

An hour later, he didn’t hear the creak of the board—what woke him was the muffled cursing and the thundering boots on the landing. Sam pulled on his pants, slapped his suspenders over his bony shoulders, and ran out into the hall, but they were gone, running down the stairs and into the street, where he spotted four men in burlap hoods, one holding a torch, throwing Frank Little onto the bed of a wagon and whipping the two lead horses away.

Sam followed them on foot, but returned back to the rooming house at day-break. He shaved, dressed in fresh clothes, and packed his saddlebag. He had an hour till Western Union opened its doors. He would cable Baltimore for instructions.

He waited on the porch of the offices, the sun rising over the hills and covering crevices in white, hot light. He smoked a cigarette and was nearly done as the sound of horses approached, and he saw the sheriff and some of his men as they gathered and whipped their bridles to and fro, and skinny young Sam ran out to meet them to ask what was going on.

They were headed to the train trestle outside town and Sam followed, riding in the back of a Model T flatbed with a newspaperman at the wheel. The little truck jostled and threw him and he held on tight for fear he’d be tossed out on the road.

A crowd had already gathered under the trestle and there was pointing and shouting and a couple boys standing under a twisting body covered by a white hood and swaying back and forth from a twenty-foot hemp rope.

FIRST AND LAST WARNING had been painted in white across Little’s chest.

A big black camera snapped. The sheriff yelled for someone to get up there and cut the damn man down. One of the boys boasted he’d found part of an ear in the dirt and said Little hadn’t gone down without a fight.

Sam searched his pocket for his notebook but instead found the IWW pamphlet. When he pulled it out, the fresh ink bled on his fingers.

1

San Francisco
September 1921

 

With his two best buddies and his movie star dog, Roscoe Arbuckle drove north in a twenty-five-thousand-dollar Pierce-Arrow that came equipped with a cocktail bar and a backseat toilet. Roscoe was a big man, not as fat as he appeared in those two-reel comedies that had made him famous in which he wore pants twice his size, but portly nonetheless. His eyes were a pale light blue, the transparent color of a newborn, and his soft, hairless face often reminded moviegoers of a child. A two-hundred-and-sixty-pound child stuck in all kinds of bad situations where “Fatty” Arbuckle, as he was known to America, would dress up like a woman, nearly drown, or sometimes get shot in the ass.

As they hugged the rocky, sunny coast of northern California, Roscoe had sweet thoughts of his new three-million-dollar Paramount contract and a weekend with ever-flowing Scotch and endless warm pussy.

His dog, Luke, who now earned three hundred a week, hung his head out the window and soon sniffed the fetid air off San Francisco Bay, while in back, Roscoe’s buddies Lowell and Freddie smoked cigars, played cards, and poured more whiskey for the chauffeur, who hadn’t touched the wheel since Los Angeles. And soon that big Pierce-Arrow glided down Market Street, passing cable cars on the way up the hill, and toward the Ferry Building, before curving with a light touch of the brakes into Union Square and the St. Francis Hotel.

Roscoe pulled up under a portico, honking the horn and tossing the keys to the doorman, and heard whispers of “Fatty” and “Fatty Arbuckle,” and he smiled and winked and took a few pictures with Luke for the newspapers before doffing his chauffeur’s cap and checking into the twelfth floor.

“Luke’s hungry,” Roscoe said, relaxing with a plop into a red velvet sofa. “Order up a steak.”

“For a dog?” Fred asked.

“For me and the dog. Make it two.”

“What about gin?”

“Use the telephone, have ’em send up whatever you like. And a Victrola. We got to have a Victrola.”

Crates and crates of bootleg gin and Scotch whiskey appeared in the suite as if by magic, carried in on the strong backs of bellhops, and Roscoe peeled off great gobs of money and placed it into their palms. The men ordered ice and table fans and opened up the windows as pitchers of fresh-squeezed orange juice arrived for gin blossoms. The Victrola was wheeled...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

San Francisco, September 1921: Silent-screen comedy star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle is throwing a wild party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel-girls, jazz, bootleg hooch...and a dead actress named Virginia Rappe.

The D.A. says it was Arbuckle who killed her- crushed her under his weight-and brings him up on manslaughter charges. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers stir up the public and demand a guilty verdict.

In desperation, Arbuckle's defense team hires an operative from the famed Pinkerton detective agency to investigate and, they hope, discover the truth. The agent's name is Dashiell Hammett... and what he discovers will change American legal history-and his own life- forever

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Putnam Pub Group
• Date d'édition: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0399155368
• ISBN 13: 9780399155369
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 354