The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles - Ken Kuhlken (funny books to read txt) 📗

verdant patio. Had he known where to find Hearst’s office in the labyrinthine maze, he would’ve bypassed the checkpoints and gone straight there. Lacking a map or knowledge, he chose to stop at the switchboard. On his way, he noticed a gallery of photographs. Portraits of Examiner employees. He inspected a couple dozen of them and recognized no one. But when he reached the end of the second row from the bottom, he said, “Bingo.”

Either the guy who appeared to stare back at him or his twin sang in the Angelus Temple choir. Jack Chavez. Reporter. City beat.

A few strides up the shiny-tiled hall, a harried gal ignored him for minutes though he leaned over the switchboard close enough to savor her lilac perfume. When at last she glanced up from stabbing the key ends of phone cords into jacks and yanking others out, he said, “Ring Mister Hearst, would you? Say Tom Hickey needs a few minutes.”

“Huh?”

Tom repeated his name. The girl rolled her eyes, made a poof sound, and jabbed a key into a jack. She twirled a lock of her hair and listened. “Tough luck,” she said, and returned to yanking and stabbing.

He might’ve persisted except his next destination promised a more agreeable female.

He hoofed Broadway from Eleventh to Temple Street, cut across the lawn, and entered the Hall of Records. He dodged the builders, architects, petitioners of all sorts lined five or more deep at a dozen counters, and ducked into the quiet of the Archives. Madeline stood behind her counter, reaching across to pat the shoulder of an ancient fellow who looked so grieved he might expire any instant. While Tom was leaning against the wall beside the entry door, she glanced over and winked at him but withheld her comely smile, which might’ve belittled the old fellow’s sorrow. Soon enough she sent the man away with a gentle promise of some clerical duty she would perform.

As Tom approached, she raised her eyebrows. “You again?”

“I mean to stop by every day.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“Take your pick.”

“You’re the business before pleasure kind, unless I’m all wet.”

For an instant, Tom let himself wonder what she would look like all wet. “Any word from George?”

“Sure. He doesn’t like you. You’re too big, too handsome, too smart.”

“He said that?”

“Men don’t need to talk. A girl can read their minds.”

“Did he give you, or think so you could read his mind, anything about Harriet Gaines?”

“Buy me lunch?”

Tom felt a wave of shame. “If you know a place that takes IOUs.”

“So happens, I do. Come on back at eleven. Meantime, I’ll talk to George.” The office door opened, a petitioner entered, and Madeline whispered, “Now scram.” She reached out and gave his shoulder a pinch and a shove.

With most of an hour to kill, he walked to a newsstand and spent a couple dimes on today’s issues of the Times and the Examiner. Then he found a Hall of Records patio bench under a palm and beside a patch of desert rose and agave. He searched the Examiner city section for a Jack Chavez byline but found none, though most every section carried the latest on Sister Aimee. Local and national ran disclosures of evidence linking Sister to a Carmel hideaway her radio engineer had rented. Fashion described the outfits found in a trunk said to belong to her. Sports ran photos of Aimee on horseback.

With the rumble and toots of cars and trucks, the clangs of girders from the site of the new City Hall, and Madeline’s stealth, he didn’t hear her coming until she was beside him, saying, “Wait till you hear what I’ve got for you.”

He folded the Examiner. “Yeah?”

“Oh no,” she said. “Not yet. I tell you now, you’ll run off to play Sherlock and leave me eating lunch all alone.”

“What if I promise?”

“How do I know you’re a man of your word?”

"Read my mind."

"You're mind's a mess. Too much thinking."

Tom resigned himself to waiting. They walked side by side while he followed her cues, going down Temple and up a few side streets to a grocery on the corner of Olive and Third. As they entered, the fellow behind the counter said, “Good girl, Maddy, bringing me another customer.”

The fellow was her cousin Bruno, she explained, a big guy with a smashed nose and a mop of black hair. She said, “Tom’s a detective.”

Bruno scowled. “As in police?”

“Private.”

The scowl darkened. “You work for Burns?”

Tom knew of the Burns detective agency, which Harry Chandler's union busters kept in their pockets. “Not on your life.” Florence added, “Simmer down, Bru. He’s one of the good guys.”

She led Tom through aisles of canned goods to the meat counter, where she grabbed a salami, then to produce for green apples. Back at the counter, when she told her cousin to add the purchase to her tab, Bruno said, “Your pal ain’t paying?”

“So what?”

“Man oughta pay.”

“You calling Tom a deadbeat or me a tramp?”

Bruno groaned and turned to other business.

Tom followed Madeline out and around the building’s corner to a staircase. As they started up, Bruno appeared and said, “I’ll give you twenty minutes up there.”

Madeline unlocked the door to her flat, stepped inside, and held the door open for Tom. Her place was a single room about the size of a Cactus Court parlor. A table with a hot plate, a few pans and a stack of dishes, a small ice box, a sink and a toilet stall filled one side. A wardrobe, two wicker chairs, and a Murphy bed she had made but not bothered to lift crowded the other side.

She ordered Tom to sit, went to the table and wielded a butcher knife the size of a machete to hack the salami and apples into chunks. Then she fetched a jar of lemonade from the icebox and filled two brandy glasses. She delivered Tom his lunch and turned the other chair to face him. “What do you think? Could the Biltmore do any better?”

“No ma’am.” Tom pointed to the framed sketches on the walls. He’d recognized Paul Whiteman, Bessie Smith, Al Jolson, and Gene Austin. “You draw those?”

“There’s a guy uptown I save up and buy them from. Drawing’s not my talent.”

“What is?”

“I can sing like nobody. You want to hear, Mister Bandleader?”

“You bet.”

She stood, placed her lunch on the chair, caught a few breaths and belted a verse of “Yessir, That’s My Baby,” complete with the swaying hips and come-over-here smile, in an alto as strong as Ernestine’s.

While Tom applauded, she curtsied, picked up her lunch and sat. “Now, you ready for the secret?”

Tom nodded.

“Well, George got the lowdown on your Harriet. She went by Gaines, but her actual name was Harriet Boles.”

The news struck Tom like a tackle from behind.

“Hey, you look like Dempsey socked you below the belt.”

“I’ll live,” Tom muttered.

“Husband’s one Theodore Boles. What’s it mean?”

“Give me a minute.” Tom rubbed his temples, then sat up tall and looked her in the eye.

She said, “And George got more than that. Anytime you’re ready?”

“Go on.”

“Want to guess what she died of?” She frowned. “Naw, don’t bother. You wouldn’t guess in a million years. I never even knew the stuff was poison.”

“What stuff?”

“Belladona. Purple nightshade. The only thing George couldn’t get out of anybody is what made the cops so sure it was suicide.”

Thirty-four

THEY hadn’t eaten half of what Madeline prepared when Tom’s Elgin clued him time was up. “Let’s get you out of here.”

“Aw, Bruno’s all bark.”

“Got a sack?” Tom asked.

She packed the apple slices and salami. He meant to walk her back to work, but she asked where his next stop would be. When he mentioned the library, she insisted on walking him there.

She let him carry the sack. With her arm looped into the crook of his, she now and then nudged a reminder to hold the sack open and let her grab a slice of salami. After each bite, she licked her lips, which gave Tom the shivers.

On the bench he frequented, with its view of the library pyramid tower and “Light of Learning” torch, he nibbled an apple wedge and asked himself once again what Frank Gaines’ woman being the legal wife of Teddy Boles should tell him. About Frank. And about Milly.

Madeline took a gentle hold on his wrist and rotated until she could read his watch. “Last thing I’d want is to interrupt this exhilarating chat we’re having, but duty calls.”

“Sorry.”

“Or, I could stay while you tell me what’s the story on Teddy Boles?”

Any talk about Teddy Boles would lead to Milly, about whom he wasn’t ready to talk. Besides, he’d vowed to tell nobody anything beyond what he needed to. And nobody included redheaded beauties with silky legs and moist cherry lips. On the other hand, she was helping and for all he knew might’ve risked her job. He said, “Boles and some pals of his jumped me, roughed me up.”

“What for?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Did you ask?”

“It slipped my mind at the time.”

She stood waiting, in a cocked-hip pose with a knowing smile, as though she believed if he gazed at her long enough, he’d break and come clean. After a minute or so, she shrugged. “Keep the salami.”

He watched her walk away, with a swivel like Florence’s only subtler. A few other men stopped and joined him, until a glance from Tom sent them on their way. Once she turned the corner, he entered the library, passed through the rotunda and beneath the solar system chandelier, and caught the elevator. In the reference room, he waited his turn to inquire of the librarian, a silver-haired gal with a child’s faultless posture. Her mouth looked toothless when closed, but Tom caught a glimpse of shiny white teeth when he asked for a lead to the facts about belladonna. Not a smile. More of a grimace. She requested his name, scribbled on a pad, pointed to the nearest of the mahogany tables, and invited him to sit.

She rushed off, holding Tom’s name, and vanished behind rows of stacks. He wondered if she might return with police, or whatever a library called a bouncer.

Ever since his meeting with Milly, he couldn't disengage his brain from his heart, which made him the last man on earth worthy to investigate a murder, challenge the high and mighty, and find the truth that might stop a gang of concerned citizens from delivering a massacre.

The librarian returned alone, balancing a pile of books, magazines, and leaflets that reached from her waist to her ribs. Tom met her and offered to relieve her of the pile. She curtly declined, brought them to his table, and sorted them into three stacks. Books. Magazines. Pamphlets.

First he tackled the pamphlets and learned the deadly secret of mistletoe berries, and discovered that he might’ve died a hundred times in the back yards Milly populated with such killers as hyacinth, narcissus, daffodil bulbs, buttercups, and wisteria. On nightshade, belladonna, he found plenty. Every part of the plant and its flowers, especially the un-ripened berry, was deadly as hemlock. When eaten, used as an extract, or drunk in a potion, belladonna seized the digestive and nervous systems, inflicting torture that concluded in death.

He turned to the window and sat gazing at the wintry branches of an elm and a sky streaked in brown and tried to imagine a Harriet Boles who loathed herself enough to add torture to her suicide. He tried to convince himself he had misjudged Frank Gaines so fundamentally that Frank could’ve killed his woman in such a way.

Neither effort succeeded.

He returned to the pamphlets and shuffled through a half dozen without discovering anything beyond what he already learned. Then he came upon a tract from the Eden Now Society. One of the subjects of Milly’s peripatetic beliefs.

As Tom recollected, she joined the group a year or so after she left Azusa Street, and attended the society’s meetings every Saturday for months, leaving Tom at home to watch after Florence. He remembered she called them the Edenists, sometimes with a smirk he didn’t understand on account of his seven-year-old vocabulary. Neither did he know, back then, what they were up to. The pamphlet spelled it out.

Each of the thirty or so plants, fungi, and herbs the tract mentioned lifted the knowledgeable partaker into one condition or another of higher consciousness. Belladona, taken properly as a tincture blended into any of a long list of herbal teas, unlocked the gate to the heavenly kingdom.

Thirty-five

THE Glendale Boulevard line carried Tom,