Night was full down by the time he left, but the moon was bright and Tom had no trouble making his way quickly back to the canyon road. Fifteen minutes later, he was on San Vicente, heading towards the city at a clip, thoughts turning over fast as the engine now. Had Sullivan been trying to protect him again? Their conversation earlier about Devlin’s old ally Mikey Ross had seemed confined to the realm of dreams and banter. But Leon Mazaroff’s vivid little mime had changed all that. So chillingly precise, it hadn’t so much persuaded him as knocked him off his feet.
Ross really could be in Los Angeles.
The more thought he gave it, the more it made sense. Sullivan had even put it into words earlier. Devlin and Ross. Rubbing together like two limbs of the same beast. Ross always worked under Devlin’s protection and instructions. A machine, a meat grinder. Because Devlin was the smarter, the stronger, you could see him moving away. Moving on. And where better than Los Angeles, booming bigger than any other city in America thanks to oil, land speculation and the movies? Compared with New York, mired in layer upon layer of competing corruption, this was virgin territory, ripe for the plucking. Devlin would never be dumb enough to think he could do it alone.
But what could be their link to Taylor?
The streets were no more than a blur now, his foot on the gas, the sparse late-Sunday traffic yielding to his urgency. Lights and streetlamps were liquid trails of color as San Vicente melted into Wilshire and the built-up boulevards and avenues of downtown beckoned. Tom’s thoughts surged, too. Mrs Ivers said Taylor told her he thought he was getting somewhere with Normand’s supplier, until someone bigger got involved. A bootlegger, she’d said. Tom assumed that was Cornero, and the man himself had seemed to suggest it out on the pier. Said he’d been forced to take matters in hand. But he also said there was a whole lot more to it, too.
What if Taylor had been talking about someone else entirely? Someone new on the scene, who had already stolen Normand’s custom away? Maybe she found herself a new supplier, even kept it from her driver, Davis, who she must have known was in Taylor’s pay already? Sure, it was a heck of a leap from there to a terrifying encounter with Mikey Ross in Griffith Park. But how many other explanations were there?
No more than a million or so, Tom reckoned, pushing the idea away. Ahead, he spotted the yellow swag-like chains of electric bulbs picking out the block-deep driveway leading in to the Ambassador Hotel. He checked his wristwatch and decided to drive on. He had thirty minutes to get back home and telephone Sullivan to tell him what he’d uncovered. Plenty of time left to freshen up and grab the note he took from J.J. Fine’s office, then double back to the Ambassador to meet with Sennett. Last time for a while, with any luck.
The thought of Sullivan’s jaw dropping to the floor on hearing Mazaroff’s story made Tom smile as he turned the Dodge on to Coronado. A grin wiped away in a trice when he spotted a Big Six parked outside his house.
What now?
He pulled in to the curb a couple of houses back, let his headlamps linger on the machine in front. Not one he knew – a shiny new Studebaker, canopy down, empty. He cut his engine, anger mounting as he became aware of a crack of light seeping through the drapes in his front window.
Someone was in his house. That auto was too good for a housebreaker. Not for the mob, though. Which could only mean Cornero had sent his trouble boys round for an update. Damn their eyes if they thought they could march into his home any time they liked.
Tom jumped down, ready to go in swinging. A touch of the Studebaker’s hot hood told him his visitor was recently arrived. Inside, there was nothing to give a clue to its ownership, but a heavy hickory ball bat in the rear footwell did not bode well. Tom stepped through the gate as quietly as he could, a colder kind of rage gripping his stomach when he saw the front door all stove-in and hanging from its hinges. Why the hell did they go and do that?
It was a move dumb enough to make him hesitate and put a clamp on his temper. Some nagging instinct of self-preservation made him hold back. If they hadn’t felt the need to smash his door down before, why would they now? When he had already agreed to work with them. It made no sense. He forced himself to cut away instead across the small patch of dirt that was his front yard and peer in through the crack of bright yellow in the drapes. The little he could see was enough to leave him dumbstruck.
Bent over the sideboard, searching with such concentration that the burned-out cigar butt between his lips stood almost erect, was not one of Cornero’s apes but a man he had seen just once before. In the same gray trench coat and trilby he’d worn at the inquest, it was Sullivan’s colleague from the detective squad, Gab Ramirez. Tom shifted position for a clearer view and saw the plundered contents of his cupboards strewn around Ramirez’s feet. Again, a pang of violation twisted his gut, but the impulse to protest was stayed when Ramirez glanced up in response to a shouted summons from elsewhere in the house. There were two of them in there.
‘You got something?’ Ramirez asked and got a muffled response.
Tom watched him turn as though someone else was entering the room. Shifting his position again, he peered from the other angle now and felt the blood slow in his veins. There in the parlor doorway, taking up most of it, was Al Devlin, all done up in his Port Inspector’s uniform.
Under one arm he carried the steamer trunk from beneath Tom’s bed, cradling it in the crook of his elbow like a toddler’s toy box. He thumped it down on the table and called Ramirez over as he flipped the lid open, dug a hand in and removed with the tips of his fat fingers a long-barreled revolver. The window glass was cheap enough for Tom to make out every word that followed, though he could probably have made up most of it himself.
‘The slugs they dug out of Madden were thirty-eights, right?’ Devlin said with conviction. ‘I’ll give you any odds this is the iron that fired them.’
As he watched Devlin hand the gun over to Ramirez, a glint of gunmetal under the parlor lamp sparked a memory of a long barrel poking out into the wet night from the rear window of a Packard. As set-ups went, it was a doozie. The gun was an old, six-inch Police Positive, just like the one Tom was issued with back in New York, and had handed back when he left the police department. There were tens of thousands of Positives in circulation, but Ramirez would believe the evidence presented before his eyes, even though the gun couldn’t have been in the trunk five minutes. He saw Devlin smirk as Ramirez snapped open the cylinder breach and held it up to his nose.
‘Couple of days, most, since it was fired,’ Ramirez said obligingly.
Sure enough, Tom was being trussed up like a turkey. At a guess, Devlin had contacted Ramirez and not only convinced him to have Tom picked up, but offered to help him do so, personally. Maybe he’d even bypassed Ramirez and gone straight to the DA’s office for a warrant, then forced Ramirez to execute it for procedure’s sake and ensure he had an unimpeachable witness to the discovery of the planted gun. But how had he convinced Ramirez, or the DA, that Madden’s murder was any of his concern?
Tom turned his attention back to the conversation, the subject now being where the fugitive Collins might be found. Devlin was taking a little too much delight in suggesting that Thad Sullivan was probably up to his neck in it and harboring his old pal.
‘Not a chance,’ Ramirez said, bristling at the suggestion. ‘Sullivan is straight as an arrow. One of the men in the squad we can absolutely depend on. If you knew him like I do, you’d know that already.’
‘That’s not how he was when we had Collins in custody,’ Devlin scowled, but said nothing about knowing Sullivan better than Ramirez knew.
‘Anything else in there might give us an idea?’ Ramirez asked, motioning towards the trunk. Devlin tutted dismissively and shoved it across the table to him. He’d never been one for paper trails. Words were too much trouble. Instead, he rumbled over to the disembowelled dresser, studying the framed old lady on the wall beside it. Then, with more interest, the inscribed portrait of Fay.
‘Any idea who the whore is?’ Devlin said over his shoulder. ‘Collins always fancied himself a ladies’ man.’
Ramirez glanced over at the picture, then at Devlin, his eyes narrowed as if there was something wrong with that remark.
‘You know him so well?’
Devlin, realizing he’d said too much, stared Ramirez down. ‘Do you know her or not?’
‘Some two-bit starlet, I guess,’ he shrugged. ‘Enough of ’em about.’
But Devlin wasn’t letting it go. He plucked the photo frame from the dresser, studying it closely. Tom felt the bile rise in his stomach as Devlin’s eyes greedily roamed the contours of Fay’s features, his spittle-flecked lips mouthing the inscription: ‘For my dearest Tom, forever yours, Fay.’
It wasn’t until Devlin flipped the frame in his hands, his fat stubs of fingers scrabbling to undo the pins and remove the backboard, that consternation set in. It was a publicity shot taken for distribution to the press, not adoring fans. Stamped on the back of the print were Fay’s name and studio details, the address of the Oasis and the telephone number of her publicity man should further interest be expressed. Further interest? No way could he let Devlin get sight of that.
To make matters worse, in that moment he saw Ramirez dig his fingers in the trunk and pull out the very papers he had come back to retrieve for Sennett. Surely they couldn’t mean anything to him? But with the Lasky studio letterhead on them, and a telegram from Adolph Zukor dated just a couple of days earlier, they were sure to grab Ramirez’s interest. And so they did.
He had to do something.
As Devlin’s fingers pulled Fay’s picture from the frame and Ramirez’s brow furrowed over the telegram, Tom cast about wildly for something – anything – with which to cause a distraction. But there was nothing, only dirt and weeds, within reach. All he could do was rap his knuckles on the windowpane and roar through the glass at the top of his voice, ‘Devlin, you’ve never been anything but a fat bastard crook, no matter what coast you’re on, or what uniform you wear.’
Inside, he saw the two men stiffen in unison, then react – Ramirez making for the window, Devlin for the door. Tom had barely made it out the gate before Devlin barreled out, bellowing like a bull moose, fragments of the smashed doorframe flying as his bulk burst through it, into the night.
Tom stood still, stared him dead in the eyes, just long enough for Devlin to cast the photograph aside as he went for his gun, fat fingers fumbling with the holster catch. Then he ran. Ran with Devlin’s apoplectic roars ringing in his ears. Ran like he’d never run before, with the zip and rip of a bullet whipping past, the crack of discharge sounding fractionally behind. He ran zigzag into neighbors’ gardens, vaulted picket fences, ducked behind shrubs, anything that would ruin Devlin’s line of sight until he was beyond the range of a dependably fallible police revolver.
As he ran, he lost all sense of what was real. His fear was replaced by something cold and lonely, yet ecstatic. Glancing back, he saw Devlin in the growing distance behind, arms out, steadying himself to take another shot. Saw Ramirez hurtle on to the sidewalk and deliberately careen into the fat man, knocking his aim off, screaming at him to lower his weapon and cease firing. All Tom felt was the night air cold on his face as he sped down the hill towards the park on legs oblivious to fatigue. All he heard was the blood pounding in his heart and in his lungs, and the living city rushing past his ears like a locomotive.
All he knew was he was running.