“Zey,” Sam said. “Answer the door.”

“Please, Zey,” Alice said.

“Really?”

“Really. I can’t breathe here. Ma Murphy with her corsets and hot-water bottles gives me the creeps. Tell her to take her corset and stick it.”

More banging. A click. The door opened. The copper called out.

Zey walked into the hall and told the cop there was no trouble, none at all, but the man wanted to check the rooms, make sure everything was on the square. And Zey said everything was just beautiful, peachy in fact, and asked him if he’d like a drink. The man asked again to see the rooms and Zey said she had something better to show him, saying it real sexy and slow.

Phil helped Alice out the window. Sam slid out himself and down to the ground. Phil stood there in the full moonlight holding the big suitcase and listening. He walked slowly to a side window, peeking in, and Sam touched his shoulder.

“Phil?”

“Do you see what she’s doing to him?”

“She’s saving us.”

“She’s naked.”

“No, she’s not,” Sam said, peeking in and then turning back to Phil.

“Guess she is.”

“She dropped that robe to the floor and started biting his ear. That was supposed to be my ear. She said she only did that for me.”

“Come on.”

“Goddamn women.”

Sam looked back inside and the man’s hands were on Zey’s naked white backside, squeezing her butt cheeks, while Zey crooked one of her legs around his legs. The cop turned his head to the window and Sam ducked down.

When Sam looked again, the man was headed back to Alice’s room.

Phil, Sam, and Alice found the path around the springs and heard someone yelling from the open window, curtains billowing about the cop’s head, the cop yelling, telling them to halt, the word halt seeming kinda comical coming from a boy. They ducked down behind some hedge as the cop, a young kid with freckles and jug ears, came barreling out yelling, and Zey followed moments later, back in her robe, and catching the young boy at the hot springs. The boy saying “goddamnit” at least fifteen times before she reached her arms around him and planted one right on his mouth.

He still had the 12-gauge out in his hand, over her shoulder, and was waving it around all crazy like he might start shooting at the bushes.

“Alice went for a walk,” Zey said.

“With her suitcase?” asked the boy.

“Not much you can do now,” Zey said. She grabbed the young boy between the legs and started to rub. The boy was saying, “Hold on, Miss Prevost, hold on,” but Zey kept working him like a piston and kissing his neck. Behind the shrubs, Alice had her hand over her mouth, snickering, but Phil turned his head in disgust. The cop was now begging for Zey to stop, please stop, but calling her “Miss Zey.” Zey just kept kissing and rubbing, the boy standing taller and more rigid and breathing hard until his body convulsed, the shotgun clattering to the rocks. The boy said, “See what you done? I was savin’ it.”

He kicked at his gun and walked back to the cottage, his head down.

Alice snickered so hard she about fell over. As the three followed the moon-lit path back to the gassed-up flivver, Phil said, “I thought she loved me.”

“Oh, go give yourself a good slap,” Alice Blake said as they piled in the car.

She checked herself in a compact mirror, rubbed some more paint on her lips, and, satisfied, clicked it closed. Sam smiled and Phil started the machine and pulled off, dust trailing behind them in the red glow of the taillights just as they heard the screaming and yelling and profanities of a woman.

For a moment Sam thought Zey had changed her mind, but behind them he saw an old woman in a housecoat, Ma Murphy, trailing like a stray dog, trying to keep up and shaking her gnarled fist at the moon.

MAUDE DELMONT STARTED THINKING something was truly wrong with this picture when she turned that final corner on the first floor of the Hall and began to follow the policeman down a marble staircase into the basement. She got to the first landing, well in sight of the bottom floor and a long caged storeroom where they held court files and mug shots and bullets and fired pistols and some of the recently dead. She stood there on the landing, halfway upstairs or halfway down, and waited and listened to the masses of men and women being called for jury selection for ole Fatty. She could hear their feet above her that morning shuffling like horse hooves.

Soon another policeman came to the landing and shouted down that Miss Eisenhart had been called as she’d requested. Kate would understand. Big Kate would get to the bottom of all these snobs in Brady’s office giving her the high hat.

Maude yelled back up the dimly lit stairs, but the cop was already gone.

When Big Kate finally arrived an hour later, Maude leaned against the wall of the landing and smoked a cigarette, confessing it must be her feminine assertiveness that scared Brady. Eisenhart leaned against the wall, too, dressed in her woolly blue uniform, and scratched her head, listening. The silver badge on her chest seemed tiny and strange, like a toy pinned on her big fat bosom.

“Scared him to death,” Maude said, pointing a closed parasol as a cane.

“Men don’t know how to take an assertive woman. They find it threatening or, at the least, offensive. He doesn’t want me in that courtroom because I’m a woman, a powerful woman with a mind of her own, who will do everything in her being to make sure her dear friend’s last words are heard.”

She squashed the spent cigarette under her pointed boot.

“Dearest, District Attorney Brady doesn’t want the jury to hear about your past,” Kate Eisenhart said, her frown turning her fat face into dough. “In the eyes of the law you are a bigamist. You’ll ruin his case.”

“Good gracious me,” Maude said, holding her chest as if expecting a heart attack.

“You must divorce a man before you marry another. Or didn’t you learn that in Wichita?”

Maude narrowed her eyes at the fat policewoman.

“This is all a slow boat of slanderous lies because I’m now a known person,” she said. “My former husbands who treated me terribly can’t stand that I am now a public darling. They seethe on it. Did you know I’ve had offers to tell my life story on film? On film!”

“Truly?” The look she shot at Maude was that of a schoolmarm questioning a whopper told to her from the back of the room.

“Miss Eisenhart, is there something you wish to say? I’ve been waiting on this landing for more than an hour. I thought we were sisters.”

“And how did you figure that?”

“I know how you feel.” Maude adjusted her big black hat and smiled a bit. She touched the edge of Kate’s badge, rubbing her fingers across the emblem.

“Who are you?” Eisenhart asked, crooking her head to get a better angle at Maude’s face. “Really? Because the trusted friend of Virginia Rappe doesn’t work for me anymore. Or the divorced wife of Cassius Clay Woods. I do believe you could be the woman who tried to bamboozle a young actor type in Los Angeles who, as it seems, prefers the company of men. Just why were you and Mr. Semnacher at that party with Mr. Arbuckle? What was your angle? I guess Mr. Semnacher has jackrabbited from here, but you still stick around waiting to be heard. What is in it for an aging grifter like you?”

“Good Lord, you fat old bitch,” Maude Delmont said, turning and raising her hand to slap Kate Eisenhart. But Big Kate caught Maude’s hand in midstrike and held it there. She looked Maude in the eye for a long time and then muscled her arm down, using her thick man muscles and man ways to control her. There was a slight sheen of perspiration on Eisenhart’s upper lip.

Maude adjusted her big hat.

“I think you like it,” Kate said. The smile wasn’t smug but knowing, which pissed off Maude all the more.