Sam leaned against an ornate column, and Phil stepped up next to him as he took in the scene. A bar stretched from one end of the room to the other, with several oblong mirrors and an endless brass rail. Linen-covered tables filled the room. The dance floor a chessboard.

“She sells cigarettes and is wearing a dress above her knees.”

“How’s she look?”

“Face like a horse. A body that would do Mr. Ziegfeld proud.”

“You talk to her?”

“Just found her, like you said.”

“Good man.”

Phil looked away for a moment, dead-eyed, and then turned back. “Now, there’s someone you’d write home to Mom about.”

At the long wooden bar stood a tall blond woman, hair almost white, with bright-red-painted lips. She held her booted foot up off the floor on the brass rail in the manner of a man, her hair shorn above her shoulders and covering the right side of her face when she turned. She held a long fox coat across her arm.

The woman looked over the room and then matched stares with Haultain and Sam and smiled a bit, and cocked a dark eyebrow, taking away the curtain of hair over her eye and turning back to face the bar mirror and wall of booze. The shape of her wasn’t unknown, as she turned back to the bar, the coat before her now, in her long black skirt that hugged her well-proportioned fanny and legs.

“Sam?”

“I’m here.”

“Thought I lost you.”

Sam noted a man in black tails and bow tie, thick black mustache and hair split and plastered to the skull and hard-parted with grease. When he laughed, you could see at least an inch gap between his big teeth.

“H. F. LaPeer,” Phil said.

“You know him?”

“Biggest bootlegger in the city. How long you been in Frisco, Sam?”

“Since July.”

“That’s right, you came for that head-busting job on the docks.”

“What’s the story with LaPeer?”

“Most of the booze in town flows from him. Runs the good stuff from Canada and brings it ashore at Half Moon Bay. Cops here are well paid, and no one seems to want to stop his party.”

“He looks like he combs his hair with olive oil.”

“Doesn’t seem to bother the girl.”

The blond girl stood against the long bar now, in the middle of an endless row of men in black suits getting drinks for their women. She smoked down a cigarette and made it look elegant the way she balanced the cigarette while holding the fox coat.

Her eyes looked as soft as her lips.

“That’s her.”

“You bet it is.”

“Sam? Over there.”

Phil pointed out a girl wearing a white bodice covered in glinting toy gems flitting her way around the table with a cigarette box hung around her neck. The first image Sam had of Zey Prevon wasn’t of a horse but of a Boston terrier. The girl had a sharp nose and soft chin and large bulging eyes, the kind that seemed to be in fashion these days among the movie-picture types. But she was long-legged, with biscuit-colored skin and large round breasts that hung handsomely in the jeweled top when she would lean over the table and the laps of men to light their cigars and cigarettes. The men would guffaw and laugh, and then motion the little twirling girl onto the next gentlemen. Please repeat it, nice and slow, sister.

“Why’d you say she looked like a horse?”

“Horses are ugly.”

“Horses are beautiful,” Sam said. “Don’t you go to the track?”

“What kind of animal has big tits?” Phil asked.

Sam waited for the girl to finish up, and he was going to 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 where he played a king. You know he’s not even English?”

From across the bar, the tall girl with the legs and the snow blond hair scanned the room and nodded. Sam looked over the dance floor that resembled a chessboard and saw a man in a long raincoat and flop hat nod back to the woman and then nod again to another fella dressed just like him by another door. Sam put his hand across the table and held Zey’s long fingers.

“What’s the idea?”

“We need to go.”