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

right to you coming clean on the lynching.” He pointed across the street at the hanging tree.

The man rocked back and forth, heel to toe. “You’re talking crazy,” he said.

“Hey, let’s go over by the tree, jog your memory.”

The bouncer eyed him up and down, no doubt looking for his weakness. “That’s the way you want it.”

As they stepped off the curb, Tom saw Leo striding toward them, rounding the temple from the Glendale Boulevard side. He stopped and waited. As Leo neared, Tom saw he had Florence in tow.

He didn’t notice the bouncer leave. But he was gone.

Tonight, Leo looked sober and on the alert. When he reached Tom, he let go of Florence and squared off. “What’s with bringing a kid along when you go out looking for trouble?”

Florence tapped Leo’s arm. “Trouble? We’re at a church for Christ sake.”

Tom moved to her side. “Shhh.” To Leo he said, “You just happen by? Or did you come to get converted?”

“Maybe I’m watching your back,” Leo said.

“Yeah, well then you saw the mug I was chatting with, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So who is he? Why’d he beat it when you showed?”

Leo shook his head and put his arm around Florence’s shoulders. “She’s going with me, Tom. Are you coming?”

“Hold on,” Florence said. “I’m going to stand here and scream bloody murder unless one of you jokers lets me in on the secret.”

“Fair enough,” Tom said, his eyes fixed on Leo’s. “I’m helping the cops solve a murder.”

After Leo glanced around and scratched his chin, he nodded. “Tom’ll tell you all he’s allowed to, once we’re in the car.”

Thirteen

TOM often took his Friday lunch break on a bench near the entrance to the new Central Library. He ate while gazing up at the pyramid tower with suns on either side, and at the severed hand holding the Light of Learning torch. The bold design of the place made him dream of a windfall so he could return to college and finish the architecture degree.

After a cheese or meatloaf sandwich and an apple, he always entered the wondrous building and checked out books. History, biography, novels. Or something Florence requested or he hoped might pique her interest, maybe keep her home some evenings.

Today, he hustled through the rotunda with its glossy chessboard floors, passed beneath the solar system chandelier, and rode the elevator to the spacious reference room. The high ceiling crossed by heavy beams and the mahogany tables, each with a lamp of its own, made him feel as if he had earned a scholarship to the university of his dreams.

He found a table devoted to dictionaries. He sat and picked up a Webster’s, turned to the C pages and searched for “conviverous.” No citation. An Oxford proved no more useful. Three others also failed him. He might’ve spent all afternoon, there were that many dictionaries. Besides, he wanted to scan every newspaper of the past few weeks for clues about why the Times and Examiner, meaning Hearst and Chandler, would conspire on a cover up. From what he knew about those tycoons, he would be less surprised if one shot the other in a duel.

But he was due to deliver a tub of ground round to El Cholo cafe. Anyway, he had studied Latin at Hollywood High School and at USC. It didn’t take all of that to decipher a meaning for “conviverous.” He translated the word to mean “inclined to live in harmony with all.” In the context of the Civil War anthem, it meant welcoming and respecting all races. So the lines, “as you deal with my conviverous soul with you my grace shall deal,” warned that God’s grace got meted out to those who fought for the good of all, and got withheld from those who kept others enslaved.

Which accorded with a Sister Aimee story he had read, about a service during which dozens of Klansmen trooped in. Sister watched until they were seated. Then she announced that God had just given her a story to tell, and she gently related a tale about an old negro who passed by a church from which glorious music streamed. The old fellow walked in, stood in the rear, and soon found himself ushered back outside. He sat on a step in dejection. A stranger came and sat beside him. “Don’t feel sad, my brother,” the stranger said. “I too have been trying to get into that church, for many, many years.”

Of course, from her description of the stranger, everyone knew he was Christ. The Klansmen rose and filed out of the temple.

Not long afterward, several men in work clothes arrived and seated themselves in pews the Klansmen had vacated. And the next morning, hoods and sheets were found littering Echo Park.

As Tom re-stacked the dictionaries, he wondered about the Klansmen who had left the temple after Sister's story but hadn't shed their hoods and returned. Sister might’ve turned them from fans into enemies.

He determined to make the preacher’s acquaintance, and judge for himself if her heart was as big as she let on. Maybe he could learn whether, while her passionate contralto belted “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” she was sending a clue about the lynching. Or a message to the murderer.

Fourteen

A BOOKING in the Colonnade Ballroom at Casa del Mar in Santa Monica made Tom feel like a celebrity. With its ocean view balconies, Venetian chandeliers, and dance floor waxed to a glittery sheen, the club only catered to the high and mighty. As Tom informed his sister, anybody might come strolling in. Chaplin, Pickford, Keaton, even Hearst. Though Tom was no fan of big shots, he wouldn’t have felt any prouder if they got a call to play New York's Roseland.

He couldn’t recall Florence ever looking quite so wide-eyed and enchanted. The hours spent on her hair and makeup somehow caused the powders, oils, and paints to vanish. Now they only served to highlight her mysterious eyes and luscious complexion. Tom had let her wear a snug item of blue velvet, sleeveless and cut to exhibit shoulders and too much chest, and hemmed above the knees with tassels. She had created and stitched a head wrap out of a swatch from her dress where she lifted the hem. A triangle, pleated and starched, waved out on one side, like a flag. Not one of the debs in attendance caught men’s eyes like she did.

Archie the drummer asked Tom if he and Florence had the same mother. Rex the pianist said, “She got the looks, you got the what?”

“The hair,” Tom said. “Mine’s wavy, hers is straight as a straw, before the curlers.”

Oz and Ernestine came strutting in through the lobby, probably against house protocol. Tom smiled at their moxie, even while a few of the swells shot indignant glances his way.

Oz split off from his gal and came directly to Tom, rummaging in his pocket. “You going keep this a righteous secret, between you and me and nobody. You hear?”

“I sure do,” Tom said.

“Nobody. Not Ernestine. Not that sweet baby you try and make all us believe be your sister.” The note he’d pulled out of his pocket he held at his side.

Tom vowed, “Nobody.” Then Oz slipped him the note.

It read, “Sugar Hill Barber Shop. Ask for Socrates.” Tom felt a rush of exuberance. Finding the broadside publisher would lead him somewhere, at least.

He returned to the stage and suffered the usual anxieties. Half the horn section slinked in at the last minute, straightened their shirts, kicked sand off their shoes, and snickered as though to boast they’d been down on the beach sharing a flask.

He had built the evening’s repertoire around numbers whose melodies everybody heard at the movies. He waved his baton and kept one eye on his sister. Through “Rockaway Baby” and “Ain’t We Got Fun,” she glided around the ballroom like a trout circling a feast of lures and flies. By the fourth number, “It Had to Be You,” she let herself get hooked.

The fellow was younger than most of the crowd, though twice Florence’s age. From his hair, sandy colored and shiny, Tom suspected he dropped by the barbershop every morning for a trim and scalp rub. He sported a Fairbanks mustache, a boater’s tan, a Gabardine suit, and patent leather shoes. He danced like a prince and floated Tom’s sister around the floor through “Just Because You’re You,” and “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise.” Whenever he cut her loose for a shimmy, Tom got tempted to leap off the bandstand and throw his coat around her.

With the last verse of “It’s Up to You,” she appeared to hang limp in the fellow’s arms. Tom called an early break.

Even so, even while the couple turned and watched Tom’s approach, the fellow’s arms stayed looped around her shoulders.

Tom caught a glimpse of three men in black and white coming in from the ocean view balcony. He supposed they were waiters, and that they would fan out to serve club members and guests the tonic and soda waters they could fortify with the Scotch and Cuban rum members smuggled in.

He didn’t suspect foul play until, when he was a few steps short of Florence and her Romeo, he felt sharp pressure on the small of his back.

A reedy voice said, “Need a word with you, Hickey.”

The men stayed behind where he couldn’t see even by crooking his head around. Since the blade kept jabbing his back, while somebody’s hands steered him toward the balcony exit, he expected at least a couple musicians to notice and come running. Nobody came.

A few steps outside the French doors, a flight of twenty-some stairs led off the balcony to a wide sandy beach. As they started down, two of the men came alongside and grabbed his arms. The guy on his right had a jutting chin and gray streak in his hair. Tom didn’t recognize him. The one squeezing his left arm kept his face angled away. All Tom could note of him were a bull neck, a peculiarly small ear, and glossy black hair.

At the base of the stairs, two guys in all black stood waiting.

Tom lunged ahead and to his right, hoping to dive over the rail, but the graying guy held on and got plowed into the rail, which cracked and gave out. The two of them pitched over the edge and caromed off a stone wall before they hit the beach. Tom scrambled to find his footing. One knee buckled. Then the two guys in black appeared, between him and the open beach.

One of them looked bigger and tougher by half than any team’s lineman. The other held a pistol. His arm was cocked, the gun barrel up, alongside his shoulder.

The big one threw a punch at Tom’s head. He ducked, but an uppercut caved his belly. And something harder than a fist whopped him in the left temple. He folded.

A half dozen feet took shots at his ribs, kidney, and neck. But Tom’s eyes never shifted off the pistol.

 

Fifteen

TOM knew his sister's scream. It came accompanied by clacks and clomps on the wooden stairs. The men in black and the ones dressed as waiters fled north, running as though desperate to reach Malibu, kicking up flurries of sand.

Florence took charge. She sent somebody to alert the musicians then stooped, helped Tom to his knees, softly demanded to know what hurt, and petted his cheek and hair.

When some of the boys came running, she took Rex the pianist aside. Knowing Rex had stood in for Tom before, she asked him to lead the band and explain to whomever cared that a sudden, severe stomach pain had sent her brother to the hospital. Probably a result of his football career.

Her dancing partner, who called himself Pablo, proved strong enough to keep Tom upright and serve as a crutch all the way up the path that led from the beach to the sidewalk. He delivered Tom into a car like none he had entered since he moonlighted as a bell hop at the Ambassador and a valet sidekick took him for a spin. The upholstery reminded Tom of a certain USC co-ed, especially the flesh of her neck, beneath her silky hair.

Florence sat in back where she could cradle her brother’s tender and throbbing head. Once they got settled, she explained she had thought Tom followed the men to the balcony to talk business. She said Pablo insisted he and Florence tag along, because he wanted to meet her brother before the music called him back, let him know he was on the up and up. “See, Tommy,” she said. “We better thank Pablo, on account of