Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins

meet her before she hit the next big table. For just two seconds the negro band stopped on a pin and then launched into “Fidgety Feet,” and the girl moved on, counting out cash into her hand and then tucking a few bills into her brassiere.
    Two steps forward, Sam moved on her.
    But then two large men in flowing overcoats stepped between Sam and Zey Prevon, and he could see only the men’s broad backs and then the girl pleading and smiling in profile and then turning down her mouth and sauntering away, one of the beefy men grabbing her arm. The other showed his silver badge. Tom Reagan.
    H. F. LaPeer was there now, talking to the policemen and falsely smiling. He pulled out a silver cigar case, offering the men a smoke, but the men obviously declined and instead told LaPeer a few things. LaPeer dismissed them with a wave of his hand, in the thick cigar smoke, the band launching into the first few bars of the “St. Louis Blues,” the men and women drunk and going wild with it. A little girl in a flowered dress bumped into Tom Reagan’s partner and he tried to strong-arm the girl before she leapt up a good two feet, wrapped her arms around his ox neck, and planted a kiss on his sizable forehead.
    “Having fun?” Sam asked.
    Tom turned and nodded. “Hammett.”
    “When you’re through, we’d like to talk to Miss Zey here, too. Is it Prevon or Prevost?”
    “The papers call me both,” the big-eyed cigarette girl said. “I guess you can put one of those things between the two.”
    “A hyphen?” Sam asked.
    “That’s it.”
    “Who’s this?” Griff Kennedy, the other cop, asked, finally pushing off the little girl and wiping lipstick from his forehead.
    “Pinkerton,” Tom said. “Helped me out on that Southern Pacific job last month.”
    Griff Kennedy nodded. His hair looked to be the color and fiber of copper wire.
    “Beat it, Pink,” Kennedy said. “We got business with this little lady.”
    “You gonna arrest her?”
    “Does this have a damn thing to do with you?”
    Kennedy struck his two fattened fingers in Sam’s sternum, moving him a foot back. Sam just smiled at him but didn’t turn, only held the gaze, till about the time LaPeer joined the little group again and told them if they had business with Miss Prevon that was their business but they were making his customers nervous.
    “You want us to bust open this whole place?” Tom Reagan said.
    “Chief O’Brien sends me Christmas cards.”
    “Har,” Griff Kennedy said.
    Zey seemed to shrink a little bit as she unstrapped herself from the cigarette box and sat down in a nearby booth, lighting a cigarette she’d taken from the case, and she smoked it, exhausted and bored, her great bulging eyes flashing back and forth between LaPeer and the two detectives.
    Sam sat down across from her.
    “How’d you like to come with me?”
    “I don’t think you’re any better than those two.”
    “I’d disagree.”
    “You’re a cop, aren’t you?”
    “I’m a Pinkerton. I work for the attorneys representing Mr. Arbuckle. You’d like to help out Mr. Arbuckle, wouldn’t you?”
    She shrugged and laughed, the cops and LaPeer starting to yell and point now but being drowned out by the trumpet player barking out the lyrics to “Bow Wow Blues” and the smart set at the tables and on the dance floor screaming.
    Sam turned back to the bar and noticed it was all men now, all dressed in that identical black, the blond woman with the nice shape and the fox gone.
    “I don’t know a thing,” Zey said.
    Sam spotted the woman by a door near the stage, pushing away that piece of hair from her eye and readjusting the fox as if it carried a great weight. She had the most wonderful shoulders.
    “Alice said you heard Virginia say she’d been hurt?”
    “How many times have I got to be asked this? I wish I’d never even gone to that stupid party, but Alice dragged me there because she wanted to meet Lowell Sherman ever since she saw him in that picture