Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins

front page. He said he couldn’t come to San Francisco to claim the body because he was worried what he might do to me. Pathé? Now, that’s a laugh. The Examiner had a picture of him showing off a pair of cuff links that he sez Virginia bought for him. Hell, he probably had them engraved himself. ‘With Love Always, Virginia,’ ” Roscoe said, tossing the paper near his hat on the jailhouse floor. “That girl was nothing but a receptacle for him.”
    “The grand jury is meeting right now, Roscoe.”
    Roscoe began to shuffle a deck of cards in his hands, bare feet on concrete. Dominguez leaned against the bars, his neckerchief loosened in the heat.
    Roscoe began to absently toss cards into his driving cap.
    “What haven’t you told me about the party, Roscoe?”
    “I told you everything, Frank. Ten times I told you.”
    “You never told me about the Coke bottle.”
    Roscoe tossed a joker onto the brim of the hat.
    “It works better with a bowler.”
    “We need to talk about everything.”
    Roscoe felt his face flush and he hated the feeling of it. He stood and straightened his Norfolk jacket on the wire hanger and smoothed down the lapels. He adjusted his shoes by the commode.
    “It was just a test. I’d always heard that when a person was knocked out that ice would bring ’em to. If a person was just faking it, you could tell.”
    “You thought she was faking it?”
    “One minute the girl is on my lap calling me snuggle pup and the next she’s screaming bloody murder.”
    “Did you touch her with the bottle?”
    “It wasn’t a goddamn bottle, Frank. It was an ice cube.”
    “I got a copy of an interview with this fella Al Semnacher. He says he saw you put something on her lady parts. Who the hell is this guy?”
    “I just met him. He said he was an agent.”
    “He work for Miss Rappe?”
    “I never saw him when she was with Sennett,” Roscoe said. “Listen, I just put the ice on her to wake her up.”
    “Did it work?”
    “Not really.”
    “Where did you put it?”
    Roscoe sat down on the creaking bed, shuffling out more cards, from one hand to the other, and then eyeing the hat from across the room.
    “I put an ice cube from my Scotch on her.”
    “Where?”
    “On her snatch,” Roscoe said. “Okay. I put some ice on her snatch. Don’t tell me that killed her.”
    “Did you ever place a bottle into her?”
    “Is that what Semnacher said?”
    “I don’t know. We’ve heard things. I don’t know if the D.A. is going to present this or not.”
    “A Coke bottle. Jesus.”
    “Other things may come out, too. I want you to know that. They may say the bottle was a substitution for masculinity.”
    Roscoe flipped a steady stream of a dozen cards and then moved his eyes up to Frank. He could not stop shaking his head, feeling the shame being directed on him. The worst part about feeling the shame was that it felt like an old friend that he had abandoned long ago.
     
    THE PREVON GIRL LEFT the grand jury room at eleven-seventeen, red-faced and tear-streaked and on the arm of Griff Kennedy, who held up the girl with one hand while slipping into his slicker and hat and pushing past the newspapermen and the camera flashes. Sam stood from the bench where he’d been parked since five and slid around back to the car pool and waited for Griff and Zey, holding up his hand to stop them.
    The girl wiped her eyes with a starched white handkerchief and snorted into it when they stopped and looked up at the big red-haired detective for her next order. But Griff didn’t say a word to her or Sam, only pushed Sam away with the heel of his hand and pushed the girl into the back of his black machine.
    “She’s a witness,” Sam said. “Not your property.”
    Griff Kennedy hoisted up the waistband of his pants and spit on the ground before starting his automobile and pulling back around to Portsmouth Square. The girl watched Sam as the machine glided in a wide circle, her big, sad eyes searching out the