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

her eyes. “You are truly stunning,” Sister said. “A masterpiece. Might I ask a favor?”

“Oh, yes,” Florence said.

“Use your beauty for good.”

“Okay,” Florence whispered then lifted her voice. “I’ll sure try.”

“After your mother chose Mister Boles, Fenton’s loyalty became ever more directed toward me. He even presumed to invite me on outings. I suppose his ardor, or my rejection of him, might have led to extreme behavior. And now, I’d best prepare for the service.”

They all stood, and Tom said, “I don’t suppose you’ll give us a preview?”

A smile appeared and broadened until it charged her face with a pearly glow. “You of all people should know the answer.”

Emma Shaffer appeared and led the Hickeys downstairs, out a back door, across an alley, and through the stage entrance to the sanctuary. She directed them to their reserved seats, on an aisle in the first row of the mezzanine balcony. Then she hustled away.

Tom and Florence took their seats and waited. While Florence observed the crowd in its rush to find places, Tom thought about Fenton Love, who probably hoped to win Milly away from Boles by foiling her wicked son’s plan to expose her.

A minute after Tom’s Elgin informed him the polls had closed, Sister Aimee floated down the ramp in her nurse outfit with its cape gliding behind, to tell the world who, among a legion of candidates, was the biggest liar in Los Angeles.

Tom doubted Sarah Bernhardt could have heightened the performance with voice and gesture any more dramatic than Sister Aimee's. She detailed the greatest of Biblical liars. Eve, Pharaoh, Joseph’s brothers, and Jezebel. She chronicled the supreme liars of secular history, from Ghengis Khan through Charles Darwin.

She worked the congregation into such ever deepening suspense, when she gave the punch line, announced that the biggest liar in Los Angeles was none other than Satan himself, Tom and Florence were hardly the only ones who let out audible groans. Several hundred folks joined them, Tom estimated. He supposed ten times that many groaned under their breath.

But afterward, as he and Florence strolled across the park beside the lake, he decided Sister got it right.

He thought back to a philosophy prof lecturing about a German whose name Tom’s overloaded mind couldn’t recall. The German claimed the key to what drove people was an unquenchable will to power.

Maybe, Tom thought, the devil was a demon from a fiery domain. Maybe he was the will to power, or some other need or delusion humans got possessed by. If you didn’t try to precisely define the devil, you couldn’t argue with Sister.

In some way Tom didn’t understand, Milly, the Klan, Reverend Shuler, probably Hearst and Chandler, maybe Sister Aimee herself got smitten by the devil and acted accordingly. No doubt the devil got into Fenton Love.

As they waited for the trolley, Tom began compiling his own list of the city’s great liars. Besides the devil, it included every reporter who wrote to do Hearst’s bidding or to promote the profiteering of Chandler and his cronies, and every booster who, for money, pitched California as the promised land

Sixty-one

AS far as Tom could remember, the last time he had slept through the night and until nearly 10 a.m. was before they ran from Milly. He brewed coffee, fixed bread with butter and jam, and was carrying his breakfast outside when he found the Forum wedged into the crack between his door and the jamb.

A note jotted above the headline read: “Tom, you need a brother, we go out on the town. Ernestine send her love. Oz.”

 

November 3, 1926 For the people:

An Unlikely Champion

Franklin Gaines may now rest in peace, considering his mortal life well accomplished, his goodness proven out by the loyalty of a friend. At Franklin's passing a young white man expressed his devotion by exposing the murderer at a nearly unimaginable cost, which this reporter is not at liberty to reveal.

The hero of our report, possessed by courage and conviction, by plunging into pitched battle against the police and the oligarchy, uncovered the truth of the Franklin Gaines murder.

The killer was one Millicent Hickey, a white woman. In a fit of passion resulting from a love triangle with its roots in the Azusa Street revival, Hickey murdered Gaines by stabbing. Subsequently, she masterminded hanging Gaines from an Echo Park tree in an effort to degrade even further the reputation of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, against whom she harbored a poisonous grudge.

 

Tom wasn’t given to weeping, yet he sat on the stump outside his cottage, and devoted some minutes to wiping his eyes.

CLERKS and salespeople jostled and collided along Temple Street and up Broadway, hustling to join the line outside the Boos Brothers’ cafeteria. Tom cut into the Hall of Justice parking lot, on his way to Boss Parrot’s office.

“Hickey,” a deep voice called.

Tom wheeled and saw Parrot standing beside a Chrysler Touring convertible. As Tom approached, the boss asked, “Come to see me.”

“Yeah. Can you give me five minutes?”

“I’m late for a meeting.”

“Where is it?”

“Brown Derby, up Wilshire. Have you been there?”

Tom shook his head. “It’s on my way home. Give me a lift?” Parrot rolled his hand, motioning toward the passenger seat. Tom went around, climbed in and sunk into cushioned upholstery that matched the lime paint job. “Some auto,” he said. Then he waited for Parrot to talk, to question or maybe confess. But the man only drove, his expression cordial yet earnest. Tom supposed matters of great import had nudged the lynching, cover up, election, and all out of his mind.

“You read today’s Forum?” Tom asked.

“I did. You have an ardent admirer, as well you deserve. You’re a rare one, Tom. If you ever need work, look me up.”

“And the Forum you jailed Socrates over, so it wouldn’t get out until after the election. You read that one, no doubt, in the author’s own hand.’

“I read them all. In my position, it’s essential.”

“So the cover up was about the election?”

For several blocks, the boss appeared to ponder. “Tangentially, perhaps. After all, Tom, one could speculate Sister Aimee controls at least a hundred thousand votes, should she care to exert her influence.”

“Doesn’t she stay out of politics?”

Parrot looked over and smiled. “You’d be mistaken to predict any move of McPherson’s, as she repeatedly warns us, by subtle means such as the announcement of last night’s sermon topic. Did you attend?”

Tom nodded. “Now it’s over and done, tell me, did she call for the cover up?”

Parrot made a smooth turn onto Wilshire, then jammed the brakes. He was a careful driver. Once the traffic got moving, he said, “No, in this case, your instigator was Fenton Love.”

Just the name caused Tom’s pulse to rise and a knot to grip his belly. But relief overcame all that. Something in him needed to absolve Sister Aimee. Maybe knowing the truth about Milly had shaken his faith in everybody. He might need a piece of it back. “Love got to the police,” he said. “What about Carl Calhoun, the Hearst reporter, alias Joe the custodian? What kept him from blowing the cover?”

“Ask Calhoun. My guess would be a roll of bills or a death threat. Fenton was capable of providing the one and making good on the other.”

A laughing gaggle of coeds caught Tom’s attention. They came prancing out of the art institute bequeathed by Harry Chandler’s infamous father-in-law. One of them waved. Tom sighed. “What about Chandler? What kept the Times quiet? Kept Chandler from scooping his rival?”

“Who says Harry knew?” Boss Parrot looked over with a fatherly expression. “Tom, nobody knows everything.”

A trio of slick, hearty fellows stood outside the Brown Derby waiting for the boss. Tom recognized the faces, probably from news photos. He didn’t know their names. Or wish to.

He accepted Parrot’s handshake, then turned away and let the swells be.

Sixty-two

LEO arrived before Florence left for school. He handed her an Examiner, Tom a Times.

“If you want me to be sorry,” he said, “I sure am.”

The front page of each newspaper featured a small article on the same topic. The Examiner headline read, “POPULAR SEAMSTRESS SUSPECTED DROWNED.” The story reported that Millicent Hickey, a seamstress employed by film stars, went to Ocean Park, accompanied by a friend, Elva Lister. To the very same beach next to Ocean View Hotel from which Sister McPherson had disappeared last May 18. Leaving her friend on the beach with a magazine, Mrs. Hickey dove into the first of a set of waves. By the time the last wave broke, she had vanished.

Mrs. Lister dashed to the shoreline and called out for some minutes then ran to the Ocean View Hotel and asked a desk clerk to summon the police. Until dark, a lifeguard boat had patrolled the coastline for a mile each direction. Finding no sign of the woman, the sheriff’s department deemed her a victim of drowning. A sheriff’s spokesman assured reporters the body would likely wash ashore.

While Florence read, she backed to the sofa and eased herself down. She finished the article, folded the paper on her lap, and appeared to stare out the window that overlooked the Ornelas’ vegetable garden.

Tom said, “Just like Sister Aimee.”

“Want me to look up this Elva Lister?” Leo asked.

Tom went to sit beside his sister and looped his arm around her shoulder. “What do you think, babe?”

“She drowned,” Florence said. Each of her wide blue eyes shed a single tear.

An hour later, on a westbound Wilshire coach, she said, “Tommy, do you think Sister Aimee got kidnapped, or is she lying?”

“Beats me.”

“Come on. What do you think?”

He watched a man hacking at a golf ball, trying to knock it toward the seventh green of the Los Angeles Country Club where he had spent a summer caddying, and wished for the means to cloister Florence somewhere green and orderly. “I’ll make a guess, as long as you promise not to tell anybody.”

“Promise.”

“Suppose Sister thought, ‘I’m done, I can’t be a mother and preach twenty sermons a week and contend with choirs and board members and take in motherless babies and run a Bible school and feed the poor.’ Suppose she thought, ‘Dear God, I was on the road twice as long as Jesus ever was. I’ve traveled farther than Saint Paul, reached as many lost souls as Martin Luther and Charles Wesley put together, at least during their life-times. Suppose she believes she can’t go on, and so she cooks up a scheme. She’ll disappear. Start a new life, say on the shore of the Snake River. A year or so down the road, she’ll figure a way to take back her kids.”

“Did she tell her kids?”

Tom shrugged. “Anyway, they’ve got Grandma and the indomitable Emma Shaffer to console and care for them. So she plays the vanishing act. But after a couple weeks relaxing, she comes around to her old self. She misses the kids, the adoration, the feeling of being called to a mission. She realizes she can’t become anybody other than who she is. So she cooks up the kidnapping story. And it’s true. To her way of thinking, it’s true. Just like the Bible.”

“You lost me.”

“I mean, what’s true is the story behind the story. Take Jonah and the whale. Suppose the real Jonah didn’t go into a real fish. What’s it matter, if the pain and anguish the guy felt couldn’t be described better than to say a big fish ate him?”

Florence looped her arm around her brother’s. “You’ve got strange ideas, Tommy.”

“That’s what college can do for you if you let it.”

“Maybe I can go to college.”

Tom felt his heart swell. “We'll make damned sure you can.”

From the end of the line they walked along the bluff, then down the path Hearst and Marion Davies had used to inspect the progress of their mansion.

On the way, Florence asked, “Say, do you love Madeline?”

Tom laughed and gently punched her shoulder. “Could be. Anyway, I'm sure going to try and figure that out.”

“She's a peach,” Florence said.

On the beach, they carried their shoes. Tom rolled up his cuffs. They walked ankle deep in the icy tide.

They walked under the public pier upon which tourists frolicked, lost souls sought their hearts’ home, and crazies wished for a tidal wave.

As they passed through the shadow of Casa del Mar, Florence said, “Tommy, what you guessed about Sister Aimee. I mean, if Milly was copying Sister, does that mean she’s not gone for good?”

Raising a beautiful sister might be hard, Tom thought, but he’d bet raising a smart one was considerably harder.

He didn’t