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

world to me.”

Tom watched the cab pull away before he entered the Top Hat. At the foot of the stairs, he asked Abe to go fetch Max.

The little man hustled up the stairs and disappeared into the speakeasy. A minute passed, then he poked his tall hat and his head out and waved to Tom.

The upstairs combo was jumping and swaying to “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Abe held Tom by the arm, escorted him around the dancers and into a closet-sized room between the front windows and the bar.

Tom hadn’t met Max Van Dam, though folks said he owned half the neighborhood. He sat behind a glossy cherry wood desk, a cigar stub between his ruby lips. The pearl buttons of his cowboy shirt glimmered. “Pull up a chair.” He rasped a smoky laugh, no doubt because he occupied the room’s only chair.

When Tom tried to introduce himself, the man waved him off. “Hey, I don’t miss a Trojan game. What do you need, Tom?”

“Some answers is all.”

“You want to give me the questions?”

“Frank Gaines, a colored fellow, got hanged from a tree in Echo Park.”

“Yeah?”

“Rumors have got him working for bootleggers.”

“And you’re saying I associate with bootleggers . . .. Smoke?”

Tom shook his head. “Any truth to the rumors?”

“What’s your angle?”

“Frank did me plenty of favors, that’s all. Look, Mister Van Dam, I’m not asking much here. Only for a clue whether I’m snooping in the right direction.”

Out of nowhere, Max produced a match. He reached down and scratched it on something then lit the stub. “What’s in it for me?”

“I’ve still got pals on the team. Say a halfback turns his ankle, steps on a nail, say I deliver the news and you adjust your bets accordingly, should you be a betting man.”

Max reached across the desk for an ashtray and flicked his stub. “I place a bet now and then. Look here, Tom, about this colored chum of yours, you appear smart enough to put together, if Two Gun Davis don’t want the news getting out, he don’t want you snooping.”

“Stands to reason.”

“Maybe you read, a couple of Davis’ bulls chopped down Sid Fitch, a rum runner, and three of his boys. In a alley over by Broadway and Figueroa.”

“I got told about it.”

“S’pose the coppers want rid of a bootlegger they can’t get the goods on.”

“They lynch him and hush it up?” Tom asked.

“Who’d put it past them? Not me.”

“Where’s the hush up get them?”

“Just keep it in mind what I say,” Van Dam grumbled. “Give me a few days, come on back.”

Tom thanked the man, hustled out of the office, past the dancers, down the stairs and outside. In hopes of catching Florence before she slipped out again, he loped all the way home.

He found her waiting in the parlor, wearing slacks, perched on the edge of a wooden chair flanked by an army duffel bag she had packed so full it looked bloated. Beside it lay a small leather case he bought her for a weekend in San Francisco, the only vacation he had managed to afford since they ran from Milly.

He turned the other wooden chair to face hers and sat close enough so he could reach her if he decided to. “Leaving?”

“Think you can stop me?”

“No. Look, Sis, I believe you’ve got my intentions all wrong. I’m not anybody’s jailer. Matter of fact, I’ve been thinking, we ought to pal around. I mean, soon as we get home from work, where I go, you go.”

“Yeah? What’s so delightful about where you go?”

“Well, tomorrow I figure we ought to catch Sister Aimee. I hear she puts on a show Buffalo Bill couldn’t top.”

Florence allowed a smile. “Did you hear about her bringing a camel on stage, testing whether it could squeeze through the eye of a needle? She’s a cut up.”

Tom chuckled, while his sister turned sober. “Tommy, you know darn well, we go there, we’re liable to run into Mama.”

“Suppose we do,” he said, “it could mean livelier action than either of those dives you seem to favor.”

“More blood and guts, anyway.” She gave him a mischievous grin.

“Day after tomorrow,” Tom said, “the band’s in Santa Monica, booked at a swanky new beach club.”

“Casa Del Mar?”

“You bet. Come along, I give you a tambourine and a share of the kitty.”

“Casa Del Mar,” she said. “Place like that’s full of swells. Suppose I walk out of there with Fairbanks?”

“Miss Pickford’ll chase you down and neuter the both of you.”

“Okay, so much for Fairbanks. Suppose I fancy a nasty old oil man, maybe a Sinclair or Doheny, ask him to be my sugar daddy?”

Tom reached for her hands but she drew them back. He said, “Then I do to him like Pickford did to you and Fairbanks in the previous scenario.”

She laughed from deep in her belly, then grabbed his waiting hand and pinched it with her sharp, crimson nails.

Ten

ON Thursday, before he loaded the morning’s orders and the block of dry ice into the box on the rear of the Alamo Meat truck, Tom went inside past the butchers already hacking and the sides of beef hanging from meat hooks, and into the offices. The secretary and bookkeeper had yet to arrive. The door to Mister Woods’ office stood open.

Sam Woods was granddad old, barrel shaped, tall in torso and short-legged. His face at rest was rose-hued. When angry he turned crimson. Over six years now, he had treated Tom well, rewarding him with ever better jobs. Tom supposed the old man felt an affinity to him through Charlie Hickey. Like Charlie, Sam Woods apprenticed in the meat business as a Texas cowboy. All over the walls hung framed photographs of horses and rodeos.

He folded and laid down the Times, invited Tom to sit, and leaned back to listen, hands behind his thick neck. “How’s the kid?” He meant Florence.

“Something of a hellion,” Tom admitted.

“How old?”

“Seventeen next month.”

“If she’s like my offspring, the worst is yet to come.”

“Boss,” Tom said, “I’ve got to tell you, something’s come up has me making a stop now and then on the route.”

“So I reckoned, from the complaints.”

“Complaints?”

“Don’t take it hard, son. Only a couple. Go on, about this something?”

Tom pondered a moment and decided to trust the boss, at least half-way. “An old pal of mine got killed. I’m helping locate folks who might afford clues to the murder.”

“I see. And this pal got murdered is?”

“Colored fellow, used to keep me out of harm’s way when Milly brought us to Azusa Street and went carousing with the Holy Spirit.”

Sam Woods leaned forward, palms down on the desk. “Fella’s name was?”

“Frank Gaines,” Tom said, and noticed the flush of the old man’s cheeks and forehead. “You heard about him?”

“Where’d you say this murder happened?”

“Here in Los Angeles.”

“That so? How’d I miss reading about it, when I go through the Times each day?”

“Didn’t show up in the news,” Tom said. “I got wind of it from a broadside I picked up.”

Mister Woods shifted his jaw back and forth, a trick Bud Gallagher contended the old man picked up from cows. “Who puts out this broadside?”

“Beats me.”

“Why believe it, then?”

“Good point,” Tom said, although had he cared to argue, he might’ve asked the boss why he believed Harry Chandler’s Times.

“Best left to the police.”

"Sure," Tom said. The boss’ narrowed eyes warned him to reveal no more. “I ought to get on the road. What I meant to tell you, I’m going to buy any gas I use up, work early and late to make up any time. You can count on me, no more complaints.”

The man’s jaw still shifted, and his eyes remained narrowed. “I’m counting on it.”

“One more thing, I’d like to take Florence to a hash house tonight. If you could authorize a draw against my paycheck, just a few dollars, we’d be mighty grateful.”

Woods reached for a pen and scrap of paper and scribbled on it. As he handed it across the desk, he said, “Give it to Ruby. And mark my words, this town’s got three first-class dailies with dozens of reporters looking for a scoop, none of them likely to pass up a murder. This colored fella, he’s gone for a holiday. I expect right about now he’s sitting on the bank of a stream, bare feet dangling in the water. Now, who’d you say you’re helping out, rounding up clues for?”

Tom attempted to make his answer sound congenial. “He wouldn’t want me to say.”

“Well, that’s no business of mine. On the other hand, fact is, you’re a talented youngster, with a football, and that instrument you play, so I hear. But you’re no policeman.”

“Yes sir. I certainly am not.” He heard a chair roll in the lobby behind him. “Ruby came in. Thank you, sir.”

Tom went to the front office, gave Ruby the note, took the five dollars and hustled around the building to load his truck. After loading, he sat in the cab for some minutes and reviewed thoughts that rose during the talk with Sam Woods.

One, the task he had take on was madness. He could imagine no answer that excluded the Times, the Examiner, or the LAPD from the cast of conspirators.

In a modern history class he learned that William Randolph Hearst had instigated, and Harry Chandler championed, the Spanish American War. Without their prodding, Roosevelt wouldn’t have launched it.

The police had their tommy-guns. The news tycoons had the power and voice. Tom had nothing and nobody. He might as well be a fresh recruit in the army of some banana republic who was trying to single-handedly orchestrate a coup.

 

Eleven

ALL morning, Tom stewed about Mister Woods. At first, he couldn’t quite decipher why the meeting with his boss turned his stomach queasy, but soon enough he reasoned it out. The only men he had ever looked to as substitutes for Charlie Hickey were Frank Gaines, Leo Weiss, Mister Woods, and Bud Gallagher. Now Frank was gone. Two of the others, when he asked for help, instead tried to unnerve him. Leaving only Bud.

If he needed to choose between hunting Frank’s murderer and selling meat, Tom would be out of a job. Which meant living broke. He could find work, but none that would pay enough to keep Florence in school, or earn her respect, without which he could never persuade her to give up playing vamp.

He decided to make only one extra stop that day.

In place of a lunch break, he drove downtown. From Pico, he followed the roads less blocked, but still found the need to swerve, jump on the brakes, and inch his truck between double-parked wagons and terrified Nebraskans who never gained the bravado daily traffic taught. As he inched past a horse-drawn cart, the way the horse whinnied and bucked, Tom feared he had scraped the poor beast’s foot.

From Figueroa, he swung left onto Sixth then cut up Olive, which he followed past Pershing Square, where he sometimes enjoyed meandering among the folks clustered around the bronze cavalryman. He had observed that most of them came to the square to seek the elusive California promise by sampling the rants of raw food worshipers, advocates of universal nudity, prophets declaring the drift of the southland toward its earthquake-wrought destiny as a Pacific Island, and boosters offering shares in oil property, or hawking residential lots along some projected road or rail artery for ten or twelve dollars a month.

He turned on Fourth then on Broadway because he held fond memories of his trips, researching for a term paper, through the Bradbury Building. With admiration, he recalled its sky-lit central court, cage elevators surrounded by grillwork, and floral-patterned wrought iron once displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair.

His destination was the Hall of Records at Broadway and Temple. On his first trip around the block he noticed a police truck discharging escorted prisoners in front of the courthouse. Next trip around, the police were pulling away, leaving a space for Tom.

Beyond the lawn with its bushes cut to spell “Court House,” he climbed the steps and entered the Hall of Records. Such a bedlam of noise filled the main corridor, he wished the architect had studied acoustics at USC under Professor Korngold. He passed lines of heavy-footed builders carrying plans, shopkeepers grousing about license fees, and cooing mothers, some of whom cradled their infants as if they feared an official would snatch them away.

When he found a door lettered “Archives,” he went in.

Tom enjoyed the smell of old paper, in libraries,