Sam asked the driver of the wagon, “What gives?”

“Filthy communist scum,” the man said. “Wobblies.”

“What did they do?”

“Nest of ’em,” the driver said. “In our city organizing, stewing up all that red bullshit for a family parade. I’m proud to give them a ride to San Quentin.”

“Not the Hall?”

“San Quentin, brother,” the man said. “Filth like that doesn’t deserve a trial. It’s goddamn Armistice Day.”

Sam continued watching another cop walk from the flophouse with a metal printing press hoisted in his thick arms. He threw it in the road, where it cracked and broke like a dismantled engine, and the cop dusted off his hands on his trousers with a big smile. One of the Wobblies broke free from the cop pushing him along and the big man caught him by the arm and began to beat him about the face and neck and back with his nightstick.

Sam yelled for him to stop and the sound coming from him felt odd, like it hadn’t been his own.

He ran for the cop and grabbed his arm, but the big cop just jabbed Sam in the stomach with the nightstick, squeezing every ounce of breath from him, and dragged the man into the Mariah, where the back door closed with a hard click. The wagon started and disappeared, and the circle of people grew smaller and smaller until there was nothing but people walking around Sam as he sat on the ground trying to find some air and his feet.

Sam could hear the crowds and noise and music down the hill at the Center and he staggered toward it.

“THIS is A NICE CAR, ROSCOE,” Gavin McNab said.

“Glad you like it.”

“It’s like sitting in your own living room.”

“Glad you like it.”

“You don’t like me much, do you?” McNab said.

“I’m tired, my ass hurts from the drive, and I’m not exactly thrilled about visiting San Francisco again.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry,” Roscoe repeated, staring out the wavy glass of his Pierce-Arrow at the endless pastures and hardscrabble little gardens. The engine hummed and purred and vibrated the limousine carriage in a fine, even way.

McNab was a big man, with a balding, closely shorn gray head and a pair of tremendous black eyebrows. His face was craggy and weather-beaten, his eyes a light blue, not as soft as those Roscoe found in the mirror but washed out and penetrating. They’d been out of Los Angeles for four hours and his new lawyer had yet to take off his black suit jacket, buttoned up over a black vest and tie, with his boiled shirt pinned tight to his thick neck. Most of the trip so far had been McNab telling tales of how he’d made it from bellhop to law school, and what it was like being right in the center of the city in ’06. He laid it on real thick about all the stone rubble and fires and smell of dead horses cooking. Gavin McNab was a hard guy all the way around.

In the bench seat across from them, the young attorney Brennan made a pillow from his jacket and leaned against the window, slack-jawed and sleeping, as the California nothingness rolled by. The driver, Harry, separated by glass, blissful and unaware, worked the wheel up a straight leg north. Good ole Harry.

“Don’t let one bad thing ruin Frisco for you,” McNab said. “It’s only after those old bitches got the vote has it been like this. Christ, they have a bull’s-eye drawn on every set of testicles they see. They won’t be happy till they turn us all to geldings.”

“Good to hear.”

“Hey,” McNab said. “I hear you have a shitter in here. Where is it?”

“Under your seat.”

McNab got up, bent at the waist, and removed the leather cushion from where he was seated. “So it is. Genius.”

“And a bar?”

“It’s empty.”

“Good. Good.”

“I’m on the wagon.”

“Good. Good.”

McNab rubbed his craggy face and stared for a moment at the sleeping young Brennan. He reached for a lever that brought down a skinny tabletop before him and opened a briefcase made from the skin of a crocodile. There was a silver flask inside and he took it out for a moment before taking a long sip. He offered it to Roscoe and Roscoe shrugged and then grabbed it and took a long pull.

With glasses on the end of his nose, McNab made small checks on lists of names and occupations.

“The jury?”

“Potential names.”

“Where’d you get that?”

McNab glanced over at Roscoe, shrugged, and then turned back to the sheets of paper.

“I didn’t kill her, you know.”

“I don’t care if you did.”

“But I didn’t.”

“So much the better,” McNab said. “I think you’d like knowing we’ve located two witnesses in Chicago and three in this state who will testify that Miss Rappe suffered serious ailments before.”

“What kind?”

McNab reached into his briefcase and pulled out another file, using the tip of his empty pen to find a few names and check over notes from a neatly typed report. “Apparently the girl had spells like this before. Whenever she drank alcohol, she’d become agitated, frustrated, begin to tear at her clothes. This happened quite often, and she wouldn’t find release from the pressure until she was very nude.”

Roscoe looked at him and then rested his head on his knuckles. They passed oil wells now, little herds of them in the flat, grassland earth pumping in a mechanized rhythm.

“You’re not happy?”

“I’m sure it took a lot.”

“One of the women, a Mrs. Minnie Neighbors, attended a hot springs with Miss Rappe and saw her under one of these spells. Another,” McNab said, checking his list, “another is a Harry B. Barker. He’d apparently gone with Virginia for five years before she moved to California. He said Miss Rappe suffered from enough venereal ailments to kill a sailor.”

“She was lovely,” Roscoe said.

“Of course she was, Roscoe.”

“She had soft brown eyes.”

“And a warm, wet pussy, too, I bet. But let’s not get nostalgic. We have hours till San Francisco and there are things you must know.”

“Invented things.”

“Facts.”

“How much?”

“How much?” McNab asked.

“How much will this cost me?”

“It’s not your tab.”

“Unless you lose.”

“I never lose, Roscoe,” McNab said. He didn’t turn to Roscoe when he said it, just said it like he was talking about a box score or the weather, a certain fact. “We’ll make sure of that.”

“With facts.”

“Call ’em what you like,” McNab said.

Roscoe’s driver, Harry, hit a pothole, and all their asses jimmied around for a second, slugging Brennan’s head against the window frame, startling him, perking him right on up.

He rubbed a hand over his face and opened his eyes wide: “Did I miss something?”

THE ENTIRE BREADTH of City Hall and the Civic Center was crammed with people. People brought their babies to see Harding. Immigrant people-Chinese, Italian, Japanese-came to wave little American flags on sticks. More people, Gold Star mothers, who came in tribute to their dead sons. People who’d fought in the war, even some old ones who’d fought the Spanish or the aged ones who’d fought each other in ’65. Box cameras were set atop of cars. Ragtag bands played Sousa. Men sold hot sausages from makeshift grills and sacks of popcorn for pennies. By the time Sam got to the park before City Hall, he saw it, what the Examiner called the largest American flag ever on display. The Stars and Stripes hung from high under the rotunda-modeled to a larger scale than the Capitol in D.C.-covering the columns and bleeding down and swaying at the top of the steps.

A large path had been cut between the people and the steps, and in the center police dressed in their most crisp blue stood ready to march. Sam figured almost the entire San Francisco Police Department was there on foot and horse, all the top men up front to lead the parade near the band. He saw Chief O’Brien and the white-haired D.A., Judge Brady, and behind them stood Matheson, talking and smoking with detectives Reagan and Kennedy. The horses nervously skirted the edge of the regiments, waiting for the damn mass of blue to get moving.