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

and her disappearance. He hadn’t studied enough to form an opinion about whether she’d gotten kidnapped or done a vanishing act. But as he believed she knew facts he didn’t about the lynching and the cover up, he needed to decide before their next interview if she was honest or was herself the biggest liar in Los Angeles.

Even aside from the latest news about clues she had left at some Carmel getaway, the case against her was a cinch to argue. No amount of searching turned up the shack where she claimed the kidnappers held her. Her decent condition when she arrived at the Arizona border saying she walked in the blistering heat all day indicated she was either superhuman or feeding them a tall tale. And as millions could attest, she possessed a supreme gift of imagination.

She was bombastic and a master of melodrama, but something so warm and soft showed through, Tom couldn’t feature her sticking to her story under pressure of knowing her lies had cost two lives. A young fellow thought he saw her outside the breakers, and swam to his death in an undertow, and a diver lost his way in the undersea wreckage of the old Ocean Park pier.

Tom wasn’t ready to convict her. Maybe this afternoon she would change his mind.

“Hey.” Pablo nudged Tom and pointed at the approaching limousine.

The Phaeton, which passed them and pulled to the curb thirty yards ahead, hadn’t quite stopped when a husky young man in slacks and the kind of long coat a reporter might wear sprang out of the front passenger seat. He opened the rear door and offered his arm to Marion Davies. The lady climbed out, brushing at her skirt. Hearst came right on her tail.

Tom hadn’t seen either of them except in pictures. Although Hears had imagined.

Pablo called out, “Mister Hearst.”

The couple turned and stared. She was a beauty, lithe and all blonde with luminous skin and rose-tinted cheeks. Whoever mistook Hearst for her father would’ve needed to presume her grace came from the mother’s side. He looked neither handsome nor powerful. But the way his sharp eyes roamed clued Tom that he saw, assessed, and drew conclusions in a heartbeat.

As they neared, Pablo said, “Mister Hearst, my friend Tom Hickey, maybe you heard the name. USC fullback.”

Hearst only watched and studied. Marion Davies gracefully offered her hand, which Tom found warm and gentle.

“We came out this way on business,” Pablo said, “and Tom happened to express what an honor he’d consider meeting you and Miss Davies in person.”

Tom accepted Hearst’s belated handshake. Their hands had barely touched when Hearst let go and turned to walk away.

“You want the truth?” Tom asked.

Hearst turned back.

“Truth is,” Tom said, “I came to learn what you know about Frank Gaines.”

The tycoon met Tom’s gaze with something just short of a smile, the kind of expression often worn by a fellow answering a challenge he doesn’t for an instant doubt he’ll win. “Suppose you tell me what you think I know about this Frank.”

“Sure,” Tom said. “You know Frank Gaines got found hanged from a tree in Echo Park. And you know why your newspaper and the Times and the rest didn’t print a word.”

Marion used a small mirror and touched up her lipstick, while Hearst attended to Tom.

“If we didn’t report it, it didn’t happen.”

“Except it did.”

“Then write your story. Give it to Pablo. Perhaps it will appear in the Examiner under your byline. Now if you’ll excuse us.”

“First let me tell you something you may not know.”

“Another time.”

“Honey,” Marion Davies said, and petted his arm. “If there’s something you don’t know, I’d like to know what on earth it is.”

Hearst frowned and Tom said, “You might not know it wasn’t a lynching, only staged to look that way. And you may not know who did the killing, or why.”

The man stood still, perhaps while the journalist in him, wanting answers, consulted with his conniving self. “And you know?”

“You tell me all about the cover up, I’ll give you the murderer.”

While Tom stood marveling at the nerve he’d summoned, Hearst took a minute to gaze at the choppy ocean. Then he said, “Write your story.”

“Will do,” Tom said. “Miss Davies, that’s a lovely scarlet dress Milly made for you.”

With the girlish smile her public adored, she said, “Oh, is it ready?”

Hearst whisked her off. Over his shoulder, he called to the chauffer and the stocky reporter, “Keep that fellow away from us.”

Forty

WHEN Pablo dropped him off at the corner of Sunset and Glendale, Tom meant to use the blocks walking to Milly's duplex to ease the burning in his chest. The last time he had felt such a pain, he and the helmet of a Cal linebacker had collided straight on.

He meant to stride into Milly’s presence and demand to know which Edenist poisoned Harriet Boles. Before her screaming reached its crescendo, he would assure her Teddy Boles murdered Frank and convince her he had found all he needed to prove she arranged the cover up by getting to Hearst through her pal Marion.

On his way up the hill on Fargo, he changed his mind. He wasn’t afraid of Milly, he told himself, though he respected her ability to confound and set his mind spinning. Around anybody else, or facing a crowd, Tom usually felt able to think and choose his words before saying them. With Milly, he felt like a wicked, clumsy, dimwitted boy.

Besides, he couldn’t separate Milly from Florence. Whatever happened to Milly happened to Florence as well. He imagined grief or fury knocking his sister out of the shadows of speakeasies and flirtations into far deeper darkness.

He returned to Glendale, caught the next streetcar downtown, transferred to the Central Avenue line, and rode to Jefferson.

On the sidewalk, he studied faces and eavesdropped for any clue about whether colored folks appeared more wary of a white fellow than before the Forum reported a declaration of war against the Klan.

At the barbershop he leaned against the wall just inside the door and waited while the barber shaved a man in spats and a worsted suit. All through the shave, the customer chewed a toothpick and scrutinized Tom.

The barber finished the shave, rinsed and stropped his razor. The customer slapped a dollar into the barber's hand, for a two-bit haircut and shave. He fetched a cashmere coat off the rack, slipped into it and went out, all the while eyeing Tom.

The barber said, “Your pretty hair do not look washed.”

“Ask Socrates to come find me at the Smokehouse?” Tom handed over two quarters.

As Tom neared the Smokehouse Barbecue and the aroma got richer, he promised himself a decent meal. Otherwise he would need to stab a notch in his belt on account of Pablo’s report about Florence’s temper having ruined breakfast.

He entered the Smokehouse, sat at the counter, and picked up a menu. As he read, he calculated that soon, maybe tomorrow, he would need to pawn his Selmer clarinet. He chose a snack instead of a meal. Two pork ribs and coleslaw. When it arrived, he began with the slaw and was soon breathing fire and hailing the waiter to beg for water, when Socrates appeared on the next stool.

The publisher said, “Smokey learned to cook in New Orleans.”

“Good slaw,” Tom gasped.

“You going to finish it?”

“Naw. Full.” He shoved it in front of the publisher.

“I assume you brought me a story.”

The water arrived. Lukewarm. Tom swallowed some, let the rest slosh in his mouth until he could speak without panting. “I’m betting the Klan didn’t play much of a part, if any. How about calling your concerned citizens, suggesting they dismiss the tommy-gunners.”

Socrates only raised his eyebrows, giving Tom to wonder if he might know more than the publisher did. “I’ve been putting some clues together,” he said, with no mention of his fervent hope that what he had fit together would prove dead wrong.

“You can provide evidence with which I could negotiate?”

“One thing I know about investigating,” Tom said, “you don’t let on what you’ve got until it all fits. What I’m asking for is a reason to hope time won’t run out before then.”

“Tom,” Socrates said, like a landlord to a renter in arrears, “you’re asking me to tell these citizens, who in all likelihood couldn’t between them think of a single reason to trust a white man, to change whatever plans they may have on the basis of vague report coming secondhand through me provided by a white man about whom I know nothing except what concerns his music and his record as a football player. Give me the evidence.”

“How about a Chevrolet parked across the street the night before they found Frank.”

“Says?” Socrates reached into his vest for a note pad and pen.

“A neighbor.” Tom checked his own notes and gave the woman’s name and address. “Frank didn’t die from the rope. He got stabbed first, hanged later.”

The publisher’s eyes lit. “Says?”

Tom shook his head, unwilling to risk trouble for Madeline’s friend. “Sister Aimee’s going to preach about the biggest liar in the city, the evening of the election.”

“So I read. Does that make her part of the cover up?”

“It’s something to think about,” Tom said. “Look, suppose I say all you’ve got to do is tell me who saw Frank Gaines hanging and the cops take the body away and I’ll find the murderer in two days. What’ll you say?”

Socrates reached for a clean spoon and made short work of Tom’s slaw. Then he said, “No names. A woman. Blonde and attractive.” Tom gulped. For a minute he stared at the counter. He shoved the ribs to Socrates. He stood and dropped a quarter on the counter.

As he walked outside, he told himself the woman didn’t have to be Milly. She could be Marion Davies, or Mary Pickford, or Florence, or any one of ten thousand Hollywood beauties.

Forty-one

THE courthouse, Tom imagined, got designed as a Gothic structure in dark and solemn stone to make visitors feel reverent in the presence of high authority. He cut a path through the crowd of reporters, tourists and lost souls craving a glimpse of Sister and hotheads demanding either her exoneration or her slow and miserable death in San Quentin.

He slipped past a marshal at the door but got halted by another at the base of a wide staircase. “Sorry, bub. Too much ruckus in the hall. Unless you’ve got a subpoena or your mother’s the Pope, nobody gets up there today.”

“Aimee’s a friend of mine,” Tom said.

“Half of L.A. thinks she’s a friend of theirs.”

“Go ask her. Name’s Tom Hickey.”

Either the man didn’t follow USC football or he favored Stanford or Cal. “Not on your life. Now move along, bub.”

Tom went peaceably. Outside, he asked a guy with a press pass slipped under his hatband, “Any idea what time the show lets out?” The reporter said, “Most days, not much before 3:30, unless Sister faints again. You got anything for me?”

“News?”

“What else?”

Tom looked again at the press pass and decoded the top of the letters whose bottom halves the hatband covered. Times. He said, “You’ll write what I give you?”

The reporter crooked his lips. “What’s that supposed to mean?"

“Think about it, Shakespeare. You’ll come up with an answer.” He walked away hoping he’d made the right choice by declining to steer the white public toward what the colored folks knew. One piece of wisdom life had taught him was, before you turn anything loose, calculate how it might come back to bite somebody you don’t want bitten.

He thought about waiting on the courthouse steps and eavesdropping. But worries about Florence left him unfit to wait for anything. Besides, the Hall of Records was next door.

He stood in line while Madeline coached an old gal item by item through a request for a death certificate and spent minutes convincing the next fellow that she had no more access to the property map of some parcel in Massachusetts than he did, and that his best course was to inquire of Bristol county by telephone. The man huffed away.

Tom leaned on the counter. With his index finger hidden from behind, pointing toward the labyrinth, he said, “You see, Miss, Uncle Winslow staked a claim, way back, on a parcel down Compton way, and now the Canfield-Midway Oil Company says they own it, and they sent a gang to start drilling. I’ve got to stop them, and the lawyer won’t budge without Uncle Winslow’s deed.”

“This is an emergency.” She came through the gate at the end of the counter. “Follow