The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles by Ken Kuhlken (speld decodable readers TXT) 📖

grabbed a handful of the dresses Tom had slung out of his way. She stood, fell, and crawled a few steps before pushing herself up and hobbling out of the room and across the hall. She slammed the bathroom door behind her.

Tom stuffed dresses into the closet, shut the closet door, and went to the living room where Leo stood gazing out the back window at Milly’s garden.

“You’d think it’s springtime,” Leo said and rubbed his nose. He turned and sat in the stuffed chair beside Milly’s sewing machine. His hand swept around, calling Tom to notice the jungle of ferns, trailing vines and flowers. “Makes a guy want to go live in the desert. She all right?”

“Maybe,” Tom said. “Milly didn’t put her in there.”

Leo raised his eyebrows.

“Fancy knots,” Tom said.

“Maybe she’s taken up boating.”

“Florence wasn’t naked. Milly didn’t put her there.”

He listened to her sing the fee fie fiddle-ee-i-oh part of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” another piece, like “Polly Wolly Doodle,” that Charlie Hickey used to cheer them with. Often after one of Milly’s whippings or tongue-lashings.

When her song turned to moans, Tom rushed to the bathroom door and knocked. “You okay, Sis?”

“Okay?” She croaked a laugh so sinister, he worried she might be toying with Milly’s razor.

“Are you decent?”

“Decent?” Again, she moaned.

Blindsided by an eerie fear that somehow Milly had taken charge of his sister’s brain, Tom didn’t bother to use his foot, only dipped his shoulder and crashed into the door. As it flew open and slammed the sink, Florence screamed, as though possessed, “Hey, bud, get out of here.”

He turned his eyes to the floor, backed a step and waited.

“Is that you, Tom?”

“Yeah. Can I look?”

“Okay.”

She stood with her back against the tub, wrapped in the yellow rose shower curtain.

“Need anything?” he asked.

“Well, panties or something.”

She cast her eyes down, wept until tears dripped onto the floor, then turned, bent into the tub, and started bath water running. She sat on the edge of the tub and wrapped the curtain tighter around her middle. “Good thing Milly wasn’t home. She would’ve stripped me, wouldn’t she, Tom? And to do it, she would’ve had to kill me, wouldn’t she? 'Cause I sure wouldn't let her do it.”

“Get your bath,” Tom said. “Make it nice and hot.”

He backed out and went to Milly s room, rifled through her dresser until he found underwear that didn’t have a pattern of flowers. He tossed it onto the bathroom sink-board.

In the living room, Leo sneezed, rubbed his nose, and sneezed again. He reached into a side pocket of his coat, pulled out a cigar, slipped off the band and lit up. “Nothing like a Havana to clear the air.”

Motioning for Leo to follow, Tom went to the front porch. Leo came out carrying a book, which he laid on the porch rail. “What now?”

“Depends on Florence.”

“We take her to my place. Vi’s the best nurse since Miss Nightingale."

“From here on out,” Tom said, “my sister’s giving the orders.” As he stepped inside to check on her, he mumbled, “I mean about what she's going to do and what she isn't . . .. I mean, providing she’s able.”

The bathroom door was open. Florence, in the panties Tom had brought, stood adjusting her bra and drying her hair with a towel. When she turned toward her brother, she said, “Take me to Mama.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” she snapped. He noted the fierce glint in her eyes and looked away. The eyes made her a ringer for Milly.

He waited while she brushed her hair and slipped into a white sleeveless dress covered with tiny gardenias. Then he ushered her out front. Always before she greeted Leo with a hug. Today she didn’t shake hands, say hello, or thanks, or give him a smile.

Tom said, “I don’t figure Milly’ll be coming home soon.” Leo nodded and stubbed his cigar on the porch rail.

“The man,” she said, “what’s his name?”

“Teddy Boles?”

“That’s it. Teddy Boles told me they were going far, far away.”

“Not yet,” Tom said. “Milly wouldn’t go to Pasadena without packing her suitcase full of dresses, potions and perfume.”

“We could stake the place out,” Leo said.

“While Socrates rots in jail and nobody else is likely to stop the tommy-gunners from strolling into some klavern?”

The way the others stared at him made Tom remember he had been working alone and tight-lipped. He said, “First, where do we start looking?”

Leo reached over his stubbed cigar and picked up the book he had set there. “What do you know about Sherlock Holmes?”

“I know he’s not here,” Tom said, “so you’ll have to do.”

Leo held up the book. “The History of Spiritualism. By his Lordship Arthur Conan Doyle.” He opened it to a page marked by a newspaper clipping. “Here’s some hoopla about a gal that talks to the dead. And here,” he held up the clipping, “is headlines. This same gal’s here in town, and tonight she appears at the Knickerbocker to lecture about ghosts and such and choose out of the audience a crew that’s allowed to assist her in a seance. See, tomorrow at midnight, the onset of Halloween, she’s going to summon Valentino’s ghost, if it takes her all night, all day, and right up to the witching hour.”

"Our mama will sure be there," Florence said.

Forty-nine

IN the Packard, after Tom related all he knew about Socrates and the tommy-gunners, he watched Florence in the back seat. She wrapped wisps of her hair around her finger, as if the task were serious business. He was deciding not to ask her to revisit the events that landed her in the closet when she said, “What’d Mama do?”

“Let’s ask her.”

“You think she killed somebody.”

“Maybe.”

Leo drove using one eye, while the other shot glances at Florence. “Mind telling me what sent you to Milly’s place?”

“Tommy left notes so I was helping.” She returned to curling her hair. After a mile or two, she said, “Or, you know, she’s mean all right, I remember that much, but still she’s my mother. I should give her a chance to prove Tommy’s wrong, shouldn’t I? But she wasn’t home. Tommy, is Teddy Boles a killer?”

“Maybe.”

“He didn’t act like one.”

Tom said, “Isn’t he the guy that tied you up?”

“Okay.” Her fierce eyes drilled Tom, as if she didn’t find much distinction between him and Teddy Boles. “And he said if I didn’t let him, he’d have to knock me out and do it anyway, and I asked, well, are you going to make me strip, like Mama did. He said, ‘She did?’ I don’t think he knew. And he said he was going to put me in there for safekeeping.”

She turned sideways in the seat, and gazed out the window. When she turned again toward Tom, she looked bewildered, as if she had fallen asleep in Los Angeles and awakened in Shanghai.

“Safe from what?” Leo asked.

“That’s what I said, a couple times, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

Leo followed Sunset to Hollywood Boulevard, and drove west along the base of the hills to the Knickerbocker.

Only last year, Tom remembered, his sister came home in a fit of ecstasy from having seen Valentino here in the lounge dancing the tango. Now, months after their heartthrob swashbuckler died in a shamefully prosaic manner, from complications of an ulcer, millions of women still mourned.

Tom only caught a glimpse of Raleigh Washburn. His station out front of the hotel was encircled by men probably using a shoeshine as a respite from the melee inside.

The crowd awaiting the chance to partake in the Valentino seance made the place reminiscent of Angelus Temple, only the Knickerbocker congregation wore jewels, feathers, lace, silks, and hand-woven shawls from the orient. But finery couldn’t disguise desperation. Even among the prosperous, Tom spotted more than a few lost souls.

Leo blazed a trail through the lobby to the front desk. Instead of waiting in line, he flashed his badge. He showed it again to the clerk, a svelte young man with oiled and perfumed black hair. A spit curl danced on his forehead with his every move.

“Room for three,” Leo said.

“But I fear not,” the clerk said. “You see, we booked the entire weekend the day the lecture and seance were announced. You’d be amazed at the number of, shall we call them believers, and I only refer, of course, to those with the means to partake of our superb accommodations. You see.” The clerk leaned closer as if to give Leo a prized secret. “Each of the good ladies dreams that, should she fail to be one of the chosen, Signori Valentino will return from the great beyond but find his sense of direction skewed by the journey, and appear by mistake in her own boudoir.”

Leo pointed to a leather-bound volume on the counter beside the clerk. “That the register?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Open it, to today.”

The clerk’s face pinched into a censuring frown, but he complied. “You can see for yourself, every line is taken.”

Leo reached out and placed the tip of his index finger on a mid-page line. “What’s this name?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you.”

Leo grabbed both sides of the book and stared at the clerk while he turned it around to face him. “Alvin Whitney,” he said, “as I thought. Alvin wants to cancel.”

The clerk’s eyes moistened while he slid the book out of Leo’s grasp and folded it shut. He gave a swift bow and retreated, opened a door, entered an office, and shut the door behind him.

Tom was about to suggest they could forget the room, plan on intercepting Milly and Boles in the lobby or lounge and marching or dragging them out to the Packard. But the clerk returned, smiling. Tom imagined he told the manager all about the tough cop with an even bigger guy and a wild-eyed doll backing him, and the manager knew better than to cross the minions of Two Gun Davis.

The clerk scratched Alvin Whitney. After Leo signed for Room 216, he spent a minute or so scanning the registrants for a Milly, or Millicent, or a Boles. Over his shoulder, Tom looked for Milly’s flowery handwriting.

“No dice,” Tom said.

Leo closed the book and slipped the clerk a five.

As a football player, Tom had roomed in a few swank hotels, but none with a bed so long, wide, and soft as what the Knickerbocker’s Room 216 provided. The quilt was blue satin, finely embroidered. Persian tapestries decorated the walls.

“I’m paying for all this,” Tom said to Leo.

“How's that?”

“Somehow.”

“Going to sell your soul to the devil, are you?”

“I’ve got prospects.” He imagined bringing homemade cookies to Sam Woods.

“Sure you do,” Leo said.

Tom expected his sister, a lover of the elegant, to lounge on the bed. But she passed it by, went straight to the window, parted the satin curtains, cranked the window open wide, and peered down at Hollywood Boulevard, where a cop with a bullhorn shouted orders the crowd ignored.

Tom signaled Leo to join him in the hallway. He left the door open a couple inches so he could watch Florence. “Don’t let her jump out the window.”

“You think she’s apt to?”

“Look at her eyes. Maybe we should keep her away from Milly.”

“Your call.”

“Yeah. I’ll see what kind of help we can find.” He turned and walked down the hall, considering and rejecting his idea that Raleigh would make a reliable lookout. Not only was he surrounded by customers, his job required looking down at shoes.

Tom was on the stairs when a bellhop hustled past. “Whoa,” Tom said.

The bellhop’s looks might’ve won him a role as an aging jockey. “At your service, Chief.”

“Keep an eye out for a blonde, pushing forty but still could double for Marion Davies with the lights down. She might be with a curly haired guy, thick neck and a tiny right ear. Come to 216, tell me what room she checks into, I’ve got a sawbuck waiting for you.”

“I’m your man,” the bellhop said and hustled down the stairs.

On his way back to the room, Tom wondered how he could hope to keep an eye on Florence in the heat of the game, once they caught up with Milly and her man. An idea came. He asked Leo for his car keys.

“Nothing doing.”

Tom said, “You’d rather run an errand, it’s all the same to me. See, I’ve got a bellhop on the lookout for Milly, but he’s in and out, up and down. What we need is a scout, somebody Milly