CHAPTER 45

Anna rose, her eyes puffy and swollen, and followed Georges into the living room, wearing her flowing, lacy robe de nuit. Joe was cuffing him. He had puffy eyes too. He looked bereft. Wolf stood by looking pained. He wandered over to Anna. “Hello, honeybun.”

Anna tried to speak, but only made a sad little squeaking sound.

Joe wouldn’t look at her at all.

Georges said, “Good night Anna. I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t you worry. I’ll be all right.”

Anna’s jaw trembled. “Where were you four weeks ago on Tuesday? The day Samuel Grayson was killed?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Honeybun, you might want to get dressed first.”

Anna looked down at her robe de nuit. “Oh.”

Wolf said, “I’ll take Mr. Devereaux. Joe, you stay and wait for honeybun to get dressed. She’ll need an escort to the station.”

“I won’t go with him.”

“We’ll all wait,” said Joe.

Anna strode back into her bedroom and began to undress. She cursed her buttons, her hands trembling. It took her half an hour to don her frillies and change into a clean matron’s uniform. When she reemerged and saw Georges seated on the butterfly settee with his hands in cuffs, she ran to the bathroom and leaned over the sink. She thought she might vomit.

Joe came to the bathroom door. “Anna. Are you all right? Sweetheart, I’m sorry.”

She was horrified that he might hear her throw up, and she was horrified in general. Her words dripped with Gila monster venom. “Go away.”

He did.

Her stomach settled a little. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, and steeled herself. She retrieved Georges’s medicine from the medicine cabinet, because if anything would give him a fit, this would. Then, she strode into the living room with her head held high. “I’m ready.”

Joe put his hand softly on Georges’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Anna slept sitting upright in a chair outside Georges’s felony cell—that is to say, she didn’t sleep at all. Georges tossed and turned in his hammock, accompanied by three foul-smelling, criminal louts who swung in a row like worms in their cocoons. A fourth slept on a mat on the floor beneath the hammocks. They weren’t mere hoisters and hoodlums. They were murderers. Anna wanted to talk with Georges, but she didn’t know what to say and they had no privacy.

The following morning, the newspaper circus began. Georges’s picture and details of his arrest were plastered on the front page of both the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald. Anna wasn’t sure which patrolman had leaked the information to the press, but she said a silent prayer to Saint Roch, patron saint of the accused, that their lives would be forever devoid of love—like Anna’s would be if Georges were to hang.

The Herald especially was cruel in an article written by Mr. Tilly.

Would we really be surprised if the Blanc line proved to have criminal blood? Scores of Angelinos lost their savings when Blanc Bank failed. Why, then, is Georges Devereaux so rich? From prostitution? Or did Christopher Blanc hide assets with his son? Daughter Anna has certainly lived a dubious life, and it’s taken its toll. Many agree, she is losing her bloom . . .

It continued to excoriate for half a page. Worst of all, it included an unflattering picture of Anna dressed in her ugly matron’s uniform, her face still not fully recovered from her Gila monster bite. Her father would be livid.

The next week was a blur. Everyone at the station stayed hushed around Anna, who spent her days at the station learning to sew pillowcases with Matilda. Anna also sewed hers shut. She went downstairs to sit outside Georges’s cell and to make sure he took his medicine; but men were constantly having to use the chamber pots, driving Anna away. Thomas had meals delivered from the hotel, as well as clean clothes for Anna, who now slept upstairs in the matron’s quarters. Thomas took her dirty clothes away to be laundered.

Though Georges smiled and thanked Anna when she brought him his food, he wouldn’t eat or otherwise speak to anyone except his attorneys. His lead attorney, Earl Rogers, had brought in reinforcements in the form of seven more attorneys—Davis and Rush, Dunn and Crutcher, Norman Sterry, Oscar Lawler, and Samuel Hawkins. Mr. Rogers came daily, alone or with all or some of Georges’s counsel. They had private conversations with Georges in one of the station’s interview rooms. Anna wanted to be part of their conspiring, but Georges said no.

It didn’t matter. She couldn’t help. Her brilliant brain felt numb. If Georges were innocent, she couldn’t find the logical path to that conclusion. Neither could she believe him capable of first-degree murder.

She closed her eyes and tried to visualize what had happened that day in Griffith Park—what she had seen. She and Joe had gone there to make love, he with the pretense of hunting bank robbers, she with the pretense of hunting a truant.

He later did hunt bank robbers—bank robbers who had killed a bank teller. Murderers.

Anna took the defense attorney aside. “Mr. Rogers, the day Samuel Grayson was killed, Detective Singer was hunting for some bank robbers who were camping there. Later, he caught the bank robbers. They were in Griffith Park. Perhaps Samuel Grayson stumbled upon their encampment. Maybe he saw them counting money or heard them talking about robbing banks, so they shot him. At least one of them is a known killer.”

Earl Rogers raised his eyebrows with interest. “Really? Thank you, Miss Blanc. I’ll look into it.”

While Georges waited for his own hearing, Mrs. Rosenberg was indicted by the Grand Jury. Some thirty girls and women, ladies rounded up by LAPD patrolmen, testified against her. She pled guilty to having led girls astray, was sentenced to twelve months in county jail, and was fined a thousand dollars. The district attorney decided not to allow her to testify against any of the implicated men, as it would have given her immunity. He wanted her to pay for her crimes. Clearly punishing bad women was more important than punishing bad men.

The wealthy, weakly architect, Octavius Morgan, managed to elude indictment altogether when the Henry twins, the prosecution’s star witnesses against him, slipped out of the station one afternoon and were never seen or heard from again. In fact, the entire Jonquil Apartments had emptied. The girls—those who had testified against Mrs. Rosenberg—had scattered to other cities without a trace. W.H. Stevens was in Mexico and could not be reached to testify that he had paid Samuel Grayson on Morgan’s behalf. In a final blow to Georges, Joe verified that Morgan had indeed been in Fresno at the time of Samuel Grayson’s murder.

Georges went before the Grand Jury. Though no girls testified, he was indicted and would stand trial on three counts—kidnapping, degenerate practices with minor girls, and murder in the first degree. Earl Rogers assured Anna that Georges could escape the Black Pearl rap with the twins gone and the Jonquil empty, providing Allie Sutton didn’t crawl back out of the woodwork. Thus far, Joe had been unable to find her. Matilda was the only one to place Georges at the Jonquil Café, and she was not right in the head. She would never be allowed on the stand, and even if she were, she could only say she saw him there, and that was not a crime.

The murder rap, Earl Rogers said, would be difficult to beat because Samuel Grayson had tried to blackmail Georges, and Georges’s fingerprint was on the gun.

The mayor hated Georges because Anna’s father had lost the mayor’s money. He found the meanest judge in Los Angeles to preside over the trial, and the most cunning prosecutor. Deputy District Attorney Keyes was to prosecute Georges’s case. Anna knew Keyes by reputation. The detectives rejoiced whenever the district attorney assigned Keyes a case they had investigated. He almost always won. This time, the detective did not rejoice. In fact, the detective—Joe Singer—had lost weight. He never smiled or swapped stories with the other men, which wasn’t like him at all. A cloud hung over everyone at Central Station. All the men looked at Anna with pity in their eyes, except for Detective Snow, who sneered. Matron Clemens left cupcakes on Anna’s desk, possibly baked by one of her overabundant children. Anna ate only four, then selflessly gave the rest to the ladies in the cow ring.

Weeks passed, and Anna suffered. She returned to the street that was full of tailor shops and canvassed again with a photograph. “Please, do you know this man or why anyone would want to kill him?”

No one did.

She visited the Cock in the Walk, armed of course, and hung about the ladies’ lounge with the charity girls, hoping to hear something, some clue, that could lead to Georges’s exoneration.

She returned to the scene of the crime searching for some piece of evidence she had overlooked, but spring rains had washed the scene clean. Anna was out of ideas. She simply wished the trial would happen and be done with.

The evening before his trial, Anna sat outside Georges’s cell, simply turning her head and covering her ears when the men used the chamber pot. She stayed with him into the night, though Georges had little to say. He just sat, unshaven, in the dark, on the edge of his hammock in his striped jailbird clothes and rocked. The other men in the cell whispered stories about crimes their friends had committed and gotten away with—a bank robbery, a counterfeiting operation, a revenge killing. Anna suspected they were telling their own stories, thinly veiled for her benefit. They were men without conscience. Georges did not belong among them. Finally, the jailer came and ordered the men to be quiet.

At midnight, Georges stood. “Go to bed. You’ll need your sleep.”

She had become bored in their silent sorrow and agreed. She rose. He took her hand through the bars and squeezed it. “I’ve left everything to you, of course. All father’s wealth will be yours.” He smiled weakly. “He will be at your mercy. You won’t be too hard on him, will you?”

“You didn’t do it, did you, Georges?”

Georges face turned red and his voice betrayed anger. “Not you, too, Anna. Of course I didn’t kill Samuel Grayson.”

“Then father will never be at my mercy because you won’t hang!” Anna spoke with desperation. She pictured the man in Yuma swinging from the gallows, the crowd jeering. Her memory mated with fear, and then the man wore Georges’s face. He was Georges, now swinging, struggling at the end of a rope.