“THEY’RE CALLING FOR another witness,” McNab said, leaning over the table to talk to Roscoe. Roscoe was seated but turned around to tell Minta and Ma. Minta had on a blue dress and fringed hat. He’d never noticed that much about what she wore, but it sure was reported every day in the papers. Everyone wanted to know what the famous Minta Durfee wore to court as she stood beside her man. Roscoe decided he liked the blue, while watching Minta whispering in Ma’s ear. She had to whisper twice because Ma was deaf as a post.

“Who’s up?” Roscoe said, folding his hands over his stomach.

“Your pal,” McNab said, “Fishback or Hibbard, or whatever he calls himself.”

“Thought that wasn’t till later this week?”

McNab shrugged.

“That sick nurse gonna be okay?” Roscoe asked.

McNab shrugged again. “Do I look like a goddamn doctor?”

McNab approached the bench, and Louderback nodded and answered a few questions. McNab said hello to Brady and Brady just eyed him and turned on his heel. McNab laughed at that, walked back, and took a seat beside Roscoe, the jury trailing in as chipper as a funeral dirge.

“Do they always have to look so solemn?” Roscoe asked in McNab’s ear.

“Quiet,” McNab said and began a fresh sheet of paper for notes. “I didn’t call this son of a bitch.”

There were more whispers and loud talking. Jurors sat up straighter and notebooks appeared in their laps. Freddie was brought in from a side door and placed on the stand, where he stood and raised his hand. He was dressed to the nines-blue aviator jacket, crisp pleated trousers, and polished riding boots. His black hair had been oiled just so, and, as he turned, his profile looked like a silhouette from Photoplay.

Roscoe stared right at him. Fishback caught the stare and kept his eyes on Brady, who got the jury up to speed on who Fishback was, what he did, that he did indeed drive up to the city with Roscoe in September, all that business.

“And you directed Mr. Arbuckle in several moving pictures?”

“No.”

“But he is a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve known him for how long?”

“Since ’16, somewhere around there.”

“Where were you born, sir?”

“Romania.”

“And you took the name Fishback why?”

“I thought it was funny. It makes you think of the bones of a fish.”

The court laughed. Mainly women. Roscoe always kept Freddie around because his dark looks and athletic shoulders could pull some tail. Roscoe wrote on a piece of paper, “Why was he called?” He passed the paper over to McNab, who wrote back, “I am not of the psychic arts.”

Roscoe leaned back in his seat.

“Did you see Miss Rappe ill?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you think when you saw her?”

“I thought she’d had too much to drink.”

“So you tried to help her?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I placed her in a cold bath.”

“Were you rough with her?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Did you bruise her?”

“No, sir.”

McNab stood. “A person hardly knows when they’ve inflicted a bruise.”

Roscoe leaned into the table. His heart raced a bit. Ole Freddie wouldn’t look at him. If he’d just give him a quick glance, Roscoe could tell if he was still with him. But he was sitting there, erect, stiff, answering yes or no, like they’d never met, never shared a drink, a song at a piano.

“But this was not the first time you’d met Miss Rappe?”

“No. I had met her some years ago.”

“When you worked at the same studio with Mr. Arbuckle?”

“Mack Sennett’s.”

“The master of comedy?”

“That’s what Mr. Sennett says.”

The court erupted in laughter again, the crowd loving handsome Freddie.

Roscoe looked up at the ceiling at the fan breaking and spreading apart the heat and wind in the room. There was a strong odor of bad breath and old stale sweat around him. He folded his arms in front of him and straightened his navy vest.

“Did Mr. Arbuckle know Miss Rappe?”

Roscoe’s eyes shot back to the stand and then back to McNab.

Freddie was still, composed, reading off his lines, not moving his eyes except to punctuate his words with the jurors and knowing goddamn well how to perform, direct the play, move the herd.

“He did.”

“Were they friendly?”

“They had met,” Freddie said. “The film colony is quite small.”

“There was a time when Roscoe asked for some help getting to know Miss Rappe?”

“Yes.”

Roscoe took the slip of paper and scrawled in all-capital letters,

BULLSHIT.

“He said he wanted to play a joke on her?”

McNab got his ass halfway out of his chair, Brady catching the move and saying, “How was the introduction to be made?”

“He wanted a key to her dressing room.”

Roscoe underlined BULLSHIT four times. McNab’s big hand enveloped Roscoe’s and gripped his fingers to the point of pain, no expression on the hard old man’s face.

“A joke?”

“He wanted to sneak in her dressing room.”

“Did you get him the key?”

“No.”

“Was he angered?”

“Very.”

“I told him this is where the girls, the Bathing Beauties, shower and such things. It was not proper. But he was insistent.”

The son of a bitch shrugged. Freddie shrugged. A move of “What can you do?”

And he performed it so well for the jury.

If only he would look at him. But Freddie just trailed away as McNab took a stab at him, asking him questions that Roscoe could not hear with the hot blood wooshing through his ears. The final insult was McNab asking Freddie if he was sure that it was Roscoe Arbuckle who asked him for the key, couldn’t he have been mistaken for another person on a very crowded lot, another portly man?

Freddie calmly caught Roscoe’s eye then and Roscoe stared back at Freddie, time seeming to stop as Freddie pointed his long index finger-never being asked to-and shot it straight at Roscoe.

Roscoe did not move. He could not breathe.

He felt McNab’s disappointment as the old man falsely gathered his papers, making motions, actions while he tried to make sense of what had just happened, like a man in shock after being run over by a bus. Roscoe leaned in and said, “I want to see the Pinkerton.”

“There are a dozen Pinkertons on your case, Roscoe.”

“I want the tall one. The thin man. The one who came south.”

“May I ask why?”

SAM WAS BACK on the deck of the Sonoma, working in the heated bowels of the ship, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, only taking a break for a quick smoke, checking in with the other ops to see if they’d found anything. There was a commotion down below on the pier where flashlights worked around the dark green water and on the mooring lines. A man in a diving suit had been dropped a half hour ago, an air pump chugging away, the lifeline running down into the black depths. Sam checked his watch. It was past nine.

He hadn’t eaten since morning.

They’d found some of the coin, the robbers dropping the strongboxes over the side of the ship suspended from hemp rope. More coin was found in drainage pipes, raining down on the heads of sailors when an old salt unplugged them to lay down a coat of paint on the deck.

There was still twenty-five thousand somewhere, but Sam figured they were all going through the motions now. The money long gone. A seaman by the name of Ducrest having disappeared hours ago.

He returned belowdecks, the ops being paid by Seamen’s Bank to go room by room, slowly down each level. And now Sam was back near the engine room, grease on his hands and forearms, still smoking a cigarette, checking out ventilation ducts. He ran a flashlight into them and pinged them with a rusted wrench, duct by duct, room by room. He wanted to get home.