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

me, please.” To the three folks in line behind Tom, she said, “Have a seat, won’t you. This search might take quite some time.”

Tom hoped the others hadn’t noticed the twinkle in her eye. She led him to the first nook off the hall. “You wouldn’t take advantage of a girl, would you, Tom?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Well, can you?”

“Maybe not, but first I’ve got a serious question. About Florence.”

“Shoot.”

“Our mother.” Tom labored for the right words. They didn’t come. “She had peculiar ideas. One of them, for punishment, she’d lock me in the dark. Naked, in a closet, with nothing in it but me, no clothes, no hangers.”

Madeline’s lip quivered. A tiny dark pool appeared in the corner of her eye.

“Florence was a good girl,” Tom said, “and smarter than me, didn’t cross Milly as often. She was eleven when I came home from somewhere and called for her. Milly was gone. I saw the chair wedged under the closet door handle. Florence must’ve heard me yelling, but she didn’t call out. When I saw her, all still and curled up, I thought she was dead. I got her out, got her dressed, and we ran. Almost six years ago. As far as I know, she hasn’t seen our mother since.”

Madeline was gripping Tom’s forearm and staring hard at his chest, as though trying to peer inside him. “Poor baby,” she whispered. “Poor baby.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Now suppose, almost six years later, somebody lets on her mother’s played some part in a murder.”

“God no.” Her wet eyelashes fluttered. “I get the picture. Now what?”

“Is it going to make her crazy?”

“Geez, Tom. Is she tough?”

“Thinks she is.”

“How about this Milly? Does Florence talk about her? Ask about her? Dream about her?”

“Doesn’t talk, doesn’t ask. If she dreams, she doesn’t tell me. The thing is, in some ways, she’s too much like Milly for my comfort.”

“What ways?”

“Vain. Restless. Wild. Hot-tempered.”

Madeline let go of his wrist, then wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed. With her cheek pressed into his shoulder, she said, “The hug’s for Florence. Pass it on.”

“How about one for me?”

“I knew it,” she said.

“Knew what?”

“You wouldn’t let me out of here unscathed.” She squeezed again, even tighter.

After a minute, they released each other and Madeline led him out of the labyrinth.

Outside the courthouse, he stood toward the rear of the crowd thinking about his sister and Madeline until a loud woman nearby announced, “Some days they bring Sister out back.”

He was walking toward the corner, from where he could run to either exit, when he heard the first shouts and cheers. He hustled to the front entrance, noticed at the curb the convertible he had seen parked in the alley behind Sister Aimee’s Bible school. To get through the crowd would require bowling over a dozen people, at least half of them women. Instead, he dashed to head her off at the car.

He wasn’t alone. But as they approached, the crowd began to thin. Soon he knew why. Sister Aimee, though on her feet, looked so wretched, fatigued, and confused, even the hostiles and lost souls shied away. Tom imagined that if she had looked the same when she crossed the border last May and gave the kidnapping story, nobody would’ve doubted.

The men who had backed Emma Shaffer yesterday held Sister up, and met with threatening glowers everyone who wanted a piece of her.

Tom stood aside and peered over the crowd that surrounded the formidable Shaffer, who answered every query in a monosyllable while she parted the mob as if by sheer force of will. She never so much as threw an elbow.

Sister was already seated in the rear of the convertible between the two men. Tom waited until the front door opened for Emma Shaffer. Then he knifed between two clumps of reporters and laid hands on her bony shoulders. “A moment of your time, please?”

The woman shot a glance toward the back seat and must’ve gotten an okay Tom didn’t see. She nodded.

“Please,” he said in a voice so desperate it chilled him, “tell Sister McPherson I’ll be waiting under the hanging tree. If she could give me a few minutes, she might save a lot of people.”

Forty-two

DURING the two hours he spent in the shade of the oak, Tom imagined different ways Harriet Boles might’ve died, and different possible connections between her death and the murder of Frank Gaines. He had only started attempting to narrow them down when a whistle sounded. He looked toward the parsonage. A fellow waved him over.

Emma Shaffer met him at the foot of the half-circular stairs. “Only five minutes,” she commanded as they climbed. When Tom entered the sitting room, he wondered if Sister Aimee would last five minutes.

Over the past couple days, she had aged a decade. Her cheeks and forehead were pale gray, the thick hair damp and matted at the brow. Her eyes, he might’ve called timid. At least they lacked their former readiness to flash or challenge. Yet she sat up straight to greet him and point to the settee across from hers.

“Emma said you needed me.” Her voice was soft as a penitent’s.

He remained standing, hat in hand. “I’ll be brief.”

“Please sit. Don’t rush.”

He sat. “Last time, I sensed that when you talked about Milly you implied more than you said. I got the idea that Milly did something more wicked than you figured I should hear about, at least from you. I mean, who’d want to turn a son against his mother?”

“Surely not I.”

“Well, I’m asking for the whole truth, as you know it. Don’t spare my feelings. The stakes are way too big for that.”

She attempted a wan smile. “Lately everyone is asking me for the whole truth. You mention stakes?”

He told her enough about Socrates, Max Van Dam, and some colored folks out to hire tommy-gunners to support his concern that the Frank Gaines murder could lead to a blood bath, on both sides of the divide. The story carried him beyond the five allotted minutes. Emma Shaffer entered the sitting room but Sister raised her hand and fluttered her fingers. Shaffer backed away.

“Tom,” Sister said, “you’re a gifted observer of people. You see, I had a dream. I was sick, in the hospital much like the one at the end of my travail, in Douglas, Arizona. Milly came into the room, and a fright rushed through me. She gave me a bouquet. Though it was lovely, I knew very well it was no gift but meant to adorn my grave. In my dream your mother was a great beauty, an angel. But not, I’m afraid, an angel of light.”

Tom’s hands had knotted into a single tight fist. A tremor climbed up his spine. “Do you remember what color the flowers were?”

“A deep, vivid purple, darker than violet.”

Though Tom supposed her “dream” was actually a story based on what she knew, he saw no point in questioning. “Tell me about Kent Parrot? Is he behind the murder, or the cover up?”

Her eyes brightened a shade. “Why do you ask?”

“The parrot you preached to, the unrepentant sinner.”

“My goodness, am I so subtle and creative as that? Tom, you give me more credit than I deserve.”

If the grand jury summoned him as a character witness, he could assure them Sister McPherson wasn’t much of a liar. Emma Shaffer stood in the doorway. “Please, Mister Hickey.”

Tom stood and made a little bow. “A guy in the Temple choir, his real name’s Jack Chavez. Examiner reporter.”

Sister thanked him. He went to the door, then turned and stayed watching her long enough so she said, “Yes?”

“Could you tell me in advance, who’s the biggest liar in L.A.?'

All at once, she looked revitalized, with flushed cheeks and widened eyes. “I haven’t told my own dear mother, my darling children, or precious Emma. All of you must wait until Tuesday. Do come early, or ask Emma to reserve your seats.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Tom said as he backed out of the room.

On his way to the streetcar stop beyond the lake, he stood beneath the scarred branch of the hanging tree and made up his mind.

With a sizable wave of fear and trembling, he saw that his best chance of getting the truth was to squeeze it out of the biggest liar he knew.

Forty-three

ALL the way home and for an hour sitting in his dark parlor, Tom attempted to sabotage the apparent truth with doubts. He could’ve gone looking for Florence, but when he found her, he would need to come clean. He couldn’t go to Milly before he tried out his belief on Florence and saw how it changed her.

He turned on the lamp, fetched paper, a pen, and an architecture text. On the sofa, with the book and paper on his lap, he jotted ideas in a shorthand he developed during high school history and often used when writing notes for song arrangements.

Initials stood for people. Arrows pointed from murderer to murdered or boomeranged back to indicate suicide. He jotted possibilities in an order he realized amounted to wishful thinking. He meant to brainstorm, then read them over and rank them using whatever reason or intuition he could muster.

In the first scenario, Harriet killed herself. Teddy Boles blamed Frank for Harriet’s death. So Teddy killed Frank. Then Milly, to save her man and avenge herself against Sister Aimee for ousting her from the congregation, convinced Teddy to hang Frank in Echo Park. But she repented and, through Marion Davies, enlisted Hearst to engineer the cover up.

Or, Harriet died from a miscalculation in her Edenist pursuit of the heavenly kingdom. Then Teddy blamed Frank and so on.

Or, another Edenist poisoned Harriet, perhaps because she knew and threatened to reveal the fatal result of a cultish rite or experiment. Teddy, bereft, enraged, and knowing of Frank’s union organizing, rounded up a gang of Chandler's union busters and convinced them a colored Communist had killed a white gal. Teddy and the union busters killed Frank. One of them proposed laying the blame on the Klan with a staged lynching. But another, possessed by a trace of conscience, snitched to Chandler, who called Kent Parrot, who orchestrated the cover up to save Chandler’s thugs from a murder charge.

But if Chandler called the play, Tom wondered, why would Hearst go along? Then he recalled that even tycoons who squared off as political enemies could have common business interests. And business was their game.

The scenarios he scribbled only had one item in common. Teddy Boles killed Frank. In all but one, Milly helped with the cover up.

He slammed the architecture book onto the sofa beside him. He groaned, heaved himself up, and plodded to the bathroom, feeling the need to vomit and vaguely wondering if Milly or another Edenist had broken into and doctored the leftover bean soup he had forced himself to eat.

Afterward, he brushed his teeth and spilled tooth powder on his shirt. He peeled off the shirt and tossed it into the bedroom closet basket. Then he decided to lie down and wait a half hour before he went out to look for Florence. He kicked off his shoes and sprawled on the bed.

When he woke, Leo came into focus.

“Get ready,” Leo said. “You won’t like this.”

He heard Florence weeping. He rolled off the bed, onto his feet.

“Whoa, Tom. Let me tell you before you get up.”

Tom pushed back and leaned against the wall. Leo sat on the edge of the bed, rarely looking over while he spoke. “About ten, a guy calls to tell me Florence Hickey got picked up on a vice charge. Hold on, now. Here’s how it went. A couple detectives go into the Top Hat, right upstairs, not a word nor a look to the other gals, they go straight to Florence. One of them, just for show, reads out Van Dam, warns him from now on to give hookers the boot. Meantime, the other guy is dragging Florence. Only she’s not cooperating, which gets her a tumble down the stairs.”

Tom leaped off the bed. “Hear me out,” Leo said. “Nothing’s broken. Only, between the stairs and the car, she and the detective had another couple scraps. She’s beat to hell,” he whispered, “but I expect he got worse. And, knowing women, when you see her, I wouldn’t make much of her looks.”

“Can I go now?”

“A minute. See, it was a frame, pure and simple. The detective was Fenton Love. Now go on.”

Tom rushed to his sister. She had moved a wooden chair into the center of the