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

follow his orders, even if he tells you to cover up a lynching?”

“Some would do just that.” Leo waved the Forum. “According to this, police were involved.” Leo stood and plodded toward the kitchen. As he passed a small marble topped table with a chessboard laid out, a game interrupted in progress, he slid the Forum under the edge of the chessboard. “Tom, I work for the city of Los Angeles. I don’t run it. That’s other men’s job.”

Tom had followed, a footstep behind. He said, “And if you get uppity about it, you’ll soon be out selling cutlery door to door. I’m aware of that. I’m no freshman. The thing is, as you have told me on more than one occasion, every man’s got to choose sides. If you side with the rats just because they run the city, it’ll prove you’re not the guy I believed you were.” Tom choked down the lump in his throat. He wanted to say, And that would break my heart. But a look at Leo’s eyes told him he’d said enough.

They stood nose to nose. “You sound mighty righteous, boy.”

The word “boy” pinched a nerve. He couldn’t remember Leo ever calling him boy. He leaned on a wall and ordered himself to act civil. “Back when I was a churchgoing youngster, Frank Gaines and some other good folks pounded into my head I should do what the churchgoers say, not what they do.”

“And what do they say?”

“Seek the truth, for one thing.”

A smile broke slowly out of Leo’s stony face. “And where would you go to start seeking?”

Tom gave up the wall and stood straight. “Angelus Temple.”

“Why’s that?”

“Frank was lynched not fifty yards from the place, and I’ll bet plenty of his brothers and sisters from Azusa Street are among Sister Aimee’s flock. I could give you a few names. You can start there.”

“I’m not going to start anywhere, Tom. You’re the truth seeker. I’m just a cop.”

After a few speechless moments, Tom said, “I’ve got to check on Florence.”

Three

TOM’S day job was selling meat. He serviced restaurants, meat markets, and corner groceries from Pasadena to Santa Monica and south past Anaheim. He drove a 1921 Model T Ford with a tool-shed-sized icebox perched behind the cab. The route paid $38 weekly, more than what the butchers made. Because Tom signed new accounts and customers admired him for having been a USC fullback, even though he’d only lasted two seasons.

He’d started with Alamo Meat, six years ago, as a janitor, swabbing the floor, scraping blood and bone scraps off the cutting boards, scouring the knives and cleavers, and airing the place as best he could. The morning after he and his sister escaped from Milly, he’d gone there to give Bud Gallagher the news.

He’d known Bud as his dad’s best pal. After Charlie Hickey vanished, when Tom was barely six, Milly set out to find him, carrying baby Florence and dragging Tom. Charlie had worked beside Bud as an Alamo butcher. The rare evenings he arrived home late, Milly accused him of carousing with Gallagher.

She raged into Alamo Meat. The way Tom remembered his mother’s assault on Bud, if he hadn’t stood holding a cleaver, Milly might’ve snatched up one of the knives and run him through.

Gallagher swore he knew nothing about Charlie’s disappearance. Before Milly gave up, she paused for a dash into the ladies’ room, which gave Bud a chance to wrest Tom’s promise to come to him if troubles got bigger than even a tough little man could handle on his own.

A dozen times between Charlie’s disappearance and the escape from Milly, Tom had gone to Alamo Meat. At first he believed he only wanted to visit sights and smells that recalled his father. Later he admitted, only to himself, that Bud gave him strength and fortitude. Like Leo did. They were formidable men. Leo had taught him to box, and to throw, catch and hit a baseball. Bud coached him to sling a football, one of the skills that earned Tom entrance and a scholarship to USC.

Six years ago, Bud convinced the boss to hire the sixteen-year-old. Tom went to work as apprentice to custodian Seymour Asberry, the colored fellow who helped Tom and Florence rent the Jefferson Boulevard flat next door to his own, and whose wife Clara sat with Florence evenings while Tom worked. It was Clara, Tom believed, who convinced Florence her charms would one day fail, but her education wouldn’t. Wild as she had become, she made higher marks than Tom had.

Besides his wages, Tom found a measure of peace at Alamo Meat, even during his despair over leaving USC. And while swapping anecdotes and jokes with Bud Gallagher, he often got lifted by a distant hope that some offhand remark would provide the clue that might lead to his father.

 

THE day following his visit to Leo, Tom used his lunchtime to detour off his route. He turned from Hollywood Boulevard onto Ivar, then crawled the truck up the block past the Knickerbocker Hotel, enduring horns and shouts. All the curbside parking was filled. Sidewalk crowds spilled between the parked vehicles and into the street outside the Knickerbocker, a masterpiece of Spanish Colonial and Beaux Arts architecture with its Renaissance Revival Bar, a lair of stars, most notably Rudolph Valentino before his tragic death only two months ago. Tourists and newcomers stood on tiptoes, leaned on cars, or paced up and back, likely awaiting the appearance of Valentino's ghost. According to common rumor, that bold spirit visited frequently.

As a native, to make sense of newcomers, Tom grew up sorting them into types. Aside from the few who had found their pot of gold in films or finance, he classed them as: regular folks, lost souls, and crazies.

Regular folks had found something here, maybe a tract home with a driveway for their Flivver, or faith in a God, raw food, a rite, or a regimen. Lost souls roamed the streets, desperately seeking a glimpse of some movie idol or other grand vision that might renew them, and in danger of joining the crazies. As a rule, the crazies were dreamers whose dreams had gotten so viciously trampled all they had left was outraged vanity that sent them on a hunt for revenge.

Tom hadn’t come looking for stars, but to chat with Raleigh Washburn, who shined shoes outside the Knickerbocker, remembered the Azusa Street revival as well as anyone, and never wearied of talking about those days.

As always, Raleigh looked weary but glad, as if he’d just finished a race. His hands were restless, so his trousers and red and green checked vest bore smudges of brown and black polish.

Tom didn’t mention the lynching. He only asked, while Raleigh buffed his brogans, “You remember Frank Gaines, used to preach now and then at the mission?”

Raleigh gave him bug eyes, then shook his head and commenced a nervous titter. No doubt he’d read the Forum and wasn’t apt to trust his thoughts to anybody white. Tom, assuming an offhanded manner, shifted the topic to the disappearance and resurrection that, every day since summer, claimed the headlines. “How about Sister Aimee? Do you buy her kidnapping story?”

“Hush,” Raleigh said. “That gal been two months out on the town, is all. You know, Tom, ain’t nobody pure holy.”

Tom nodded. “Say, you’ve been to any services over at Angelus Temple?”

“Yessir. Quite a number of us from the mission find our way to the temple on occasion. Say, Mister Tom, you heard about a lady coming to town, a magician, she claim to be. Going to hold one of them seances, on the night of Halloween, call on poor Mister Rudolph Valentino. Mister Rudolph, he been a generous friend to me. Lady oughtn’t to call on him. Ought to let him rest in peace.”

A seance to contact Valentino would collect a sizeable mob, Tom supposed, rich as the city was in suckers. He would’ve bet on Milly’s being part of the mob.

He said, “Raleigh, those Azusa Street folks going to Angelus Temple, how about a few names?”

Raleigh supplied a half dozen names, which Tom memorized and jotted down upon his return to the meat wagon.

Approaching the intersection of Ivar and Hollywood Boulevard, he pulled over and considered options. He could turn right, go downtown, barge into the police station and demand of whichever cop he encountered an explanation: why no investigation of the Frank Gaines murder. But then he might let slip how he knew they weren't investigating, which would risk big trouble for Leo.

He turned left toward Hollywood to deliver a crate of prime filet mignon and ribeye to Musso and Frank's.

At the end of the workday, he ran from punching the Alamo time clock to catch the 5:14 red car at Eleventh and Central into downtown. As he descended beneath the Subway Terminal Building to meet the Glendale Boulevard line, he listened to the low, polite voices of colored folks around him. He caught no mention of the lynching, nor any hint of a lead. He noticed more than a few wary glances.

 

 

Four

MOST of what Tom knew about Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, he had learned from his sister. Whenever Florence came home wearing a dark and petulant expression, instead of tuning her bedroom radio to songs, she tuned to Sister Aimee’s broadcasts.

He knew Sister Aimee was decidedly younger and prettier than most evangelists, and that her gospel was gentle, with hardly a taste of the Billy Sunday hellfire. He knew she had arrived in Los Angeles the same year Tom and Florence escaped their mother, after years of road show crusades in tents and rented halls. Still, she often toured the country and Europe, healing, baptizing, and raising loot. Upon returning from her journeys, she got met by larger and louder crowds than did President Coolidge or visiting monarchs.

Five months ago yesterday, on May 18, she went swimming at Ocean Park Beach and vanished, presumed drowned. Millions mourned. So when she staggered into Agua Prieta, on the Mexico side of the Arizona border, most of Los Angeles and much of the nation rejoiced, almost as though at the Second Coming of Christ. But District Attorney Asa Keyes and a boss of Leo’s, Herman Cline, Chief of Detectives, didn’t buy her kidnapping story. Now she faced a grand jury inquest.

Tom had spent delightful afternoons across the street from Angelus Temple, rowing on Echo Park’s lake. Twice with Florence. Once with a USC coed he entertained thoughts of courting until she balked at the notion of competing for fifth place behind Tom raising his sister, making music, earning a living, and playing college football,

He admired the temple, with its round coliseum face and wide beckoning doorways. He had heard about the plush and ornate interior, wondered what magical charms Sister Aimee must wield to enlist the army of devotees and star chasers who filled the five thousand seats three services daily. He had often thought of going to witness her in action. But he’d yet to venture inside. Even six years after he and Florence escaped, he avoided places that boosted his chances of running into Milly.

He turned from Angelus Temple, gazed around the park for the scene of the lynching, and saw what he imagined was the hanging tree. A live oak, squat and broad, its trunk about a foot across, its lowest limb perhaps nine feet above ground.

He remembered Frank Gaines as a small man. Around five foot seven. Add to that height some inches of rope above and his feet turned down below. In the picture that came all too clearly, Frank’s toes reached the tips of the highest grass. Tom stared at the hideous image until it faded.

Worshippers and tourists poured off buses and trekked across Echo Park from their Chevys and Flivvers, and crowded the sidewalk outside the Temple. Even in October, after three weeks of rain, tourists appeared to outnumber the locals. The tourists shuffled, gawked, and wore summer clothes on the edge of winter. Tonight, though drizzly, felt pleasant compared to the recent stormy weather. Especially the deluge that pounded the rooftops and flooded the streets for three days beginning the day before the lynching.

Tom circled the tree. He scuffed his feet through clumps of grass. He scraped the dirt, his eyes keened for any object or morsel the police might’ve overlooked in their haste to cover up.

After the ground provided no clues, he looked above. He studied the branches and spotted a line a half-inch wide. Standing on tiptoes, he saw it as a groove, a semi-circle around the high side of the lowest limb, about three feet out from the trunk. A rope burn, he believed.

He leaned against the trunk and hoped somebody