AHMM, November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  The next few weeks became a blur. DRS&C dropped the suit, becoming the friendliest big law firm that Pita had ever known. Which made her wonder when they'd realized that the engineers had committed murder.

  Either way, it didn't matter. DRS&C was willing to work with her to do whatever it took to “make Mrs. Hughes happy."

  Nan wouldn't be happy until her husband's killers were brought to justice. She snapped into action the moment the state coroner confirmed Shepard's hunches. Ty had been shot in the skull before he died, and then his body had been burned to cover up the crime.

  If Nan hadn't worked so hard and believed in her husband so much, no one would have known.

  The story came out slowly. The train had been speeding when Ty crossed the tracks. Williams's estimate of more than a hundred miles per hour was probably correct—enough for the railroads to have liability right there.

  But the engineers, both frightened by the accident itself and terrified for their jobs, had walked the length of the train to Ty's overturned truck and, finding him alive and relatively unhurt, let their anger explode.

  They'd threatened him with the loss of everything if he didn't confess that he had failed to beat the train. He'd made the call to satisfy them. But it hadn't worked. Somehow—neither man was going to admit how (not even more than a year later at sentencing)—one of the rifles had gone off, killing him. Then they'd stuffed him in the cab—whose ignition was off—poured some diesel from the spill on him, and lit him on fire.

  They watched him burn for a few minutes before going up the embankment to see if anyone had a fire extinguisher in his car. Fortunately, someone did. Otherwise, they planned to have someone drive them the two miles to the engine for the train's fire extinguishers.

  The engineers were eventually convicted, Nan got to keep her ranch and her husband's reputation, and the railroads kept trying to settle.

  But Pita insisted that Nan hire an attorney who specialized in cases against big companies. Pita helped with the hire, finding someone with a great reputation who wasn't afraid of a thousand boxes of evidence and, more importantly, would work on contingency.

  "You sure you don't want it?” Nan had asked, maybe two dozen times.

  And each time, Pita had said, “Positive. The case is too big for me."

  Although it wasn't. She could have gone to La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia as a rainmaker, someone who brought in a huge case and made millions for the company.

  But she didn't.

  Because this case had taught her a few things.

  She had learned that she hated big cases with lots and lots of evidence.

  She'd learned that she really didn't care about the money. (Although the ten thousand dollar bonus that Nan had paid her—a bonus Pita hadn't asked for—had come in very handy.)

  And she learned how valuable it was to know the people of her town. If she hadn't spent all those evenings in the cafeteria with Jessup, she wouldn't have trusted his story, and she never would have hired the forensic examiner.

  Her mom had been right, all those years ago. Rio Gordo wasn't a bad place. Yeah, it was impoverished. Yeah, it was filled with dust, and didn't have a good night life or a great university.

  But it did have some pretty spectacular people.

  People who congratulated Pita for the next year on her success in the Hughes case. People who now came to her to do their wills or their prenups. People who asked her advice on the smallest legal matters and believed her when she gave them an unvarnished opinion.

  Her biggest case had helped her discover her calling: She was a small-town attorney who cared more about the people around her than the money their cases could bring in.

  She wouldn't be rich.

  But she would be happy.

  And that was more than enough.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: SOB SISTER: A FOUR HORSEMEN STORY by Loren D. Estleman

  * * * *

  Ron Chironna

  * * * *

  Arabella Lindauer was the highest-paid sob sister on the staff of The Detroit Times. Her boss, William Randolph Hearst, had said that if you assigned Arabella to a fire with nothing worse than a singed dog for human interest five minutes before deadline, she'd pound out a story that would draw tears from a stone. Her five-part series on the Lindbergh kidnapping had failed to win a Pulitzer, but Walter Winchell had choked up while quoting from it on the air (which she said was better).

  A self-described spinster (although she had no shortage of suitors), she never left home or the office in anything other than her uniform: pillbox hat, print dress, chunky-heeled shoes, and of course white cotton gloves. She bought these by the box and seldom wore a pair more than once; red lipstick gravitated to them no matter how careful the wearer and didn't wash out. She carried clutch purses with just enough room for her pencil and pad, a roll of nickels for the telephone, her compact and rouge, and the keys to her Hudson on a ring attached to a set of brass knuckles.

  For a time, she'd been seen about town in the company of Lieutenant Max Zagreb of the Detroit Racket Squad, but when they'd exhausted all the ballrooms and picture shows and sat down to talk, they discovered that they lived at cross purposes. It was his job to jail predators with bullets and hers to free them with adjectives. They parted on grounds of self-preservation, but not with finality. When the two-burner range, the radio, and the post-nasal drip of the faucet in the apartment kitchen surrendered their charm, one would call the other and they would go out for Clark Gable and a Coney Island. A palpable lack of a social life was the one thing they had in common.

  This was a matter of career alienation, not unattractiveness. She was a handsome woman of thirty, with a trim waist and an abundance of auburn hair, he slightly older, whipsaw lean, large in the forehead—the sign of a thinker—and had a lazy smile like Dan Duryea. One knew them only briefly before realizing that his eyes didn't always smile when his mouth did, and that she spoke the way she wrote, with the main subject on top and all the other details following in descending order of importance, in the shape of an inverted pyramid. Satellites from outside their solar system didn't stay long in their orbit.

  On the day the marines landed on Guadalcanal, Arabella and Zagreb went to see Mrs. Miniver at the Broadway-Capitol, with a Betty Boop cartoon and newsreel footage of the Japanese in New Guinea, and lingered over coffee in the J. L. Hudson's cafeteria while waiting for their hamburgers to digest. Zagreb was first to break the comfortable post-prandial silence.

  "I ought to call in. Some Four-F shirkers might celebrate this Guadalcanal business by busting up a beergarden."

  "You've got uniforms for that.” She slid a Lucky between her lips.

  He snapped his Zippo under it. “Most of them are in Pearl and the North Atlantic. We all have to make do, isn't that the line?"

  "The only line I know is the one girls draw up the back of their legs to cover up the fact someone's using their nylons for a parachute."

  "That never makes sense to me. How do you show you're helping the war effort by pretending you're not?"

  "Nothing about this war makes sense. We've got Hitlers right here."

  "You better watch who you say that to.” He kept his voice light, but his gaze swept the nearly deserted room for junior J. Edgar Hoovers, gray men in pinstripes with notebooks.

  "I'm talking about that snake Frankie Orr."

  "What'd he do, sell you a bum set of tires?"

  "He can make a million off the black market for all I care. I interviewed a G.I. on leave from the Aleutians who said he helped set fire to a thousand gallons of gasoline just to de-ice a runway. Rationing's a joke."

  "When's the piece come out? I'll read it."

  "You already did, if you saw yesterday's paper, but you didn't see that bit. The old man blue-pencils everything that might remind people he was an isolationist before December seventh. The rest was columns of sludge about the G.I.'s tearful reunion with his teenage bride. They'd
been separated a total of six weeks when he got sent home with a nasty case of frostbite."

  "Well, that's your specialty.” He lit a Chesterfield.

  "I can do that in my sleep. I've gotten all I can out of kittens and car crashes and one-legged prom queens. I want to quit making people reach for a Kleenex and make them look for a stamp instead, to write their congressman. Frankie's made more widows locally than Tojo."

  "The war's young. Give Tojo a chance."

  "I want to write about him."

  "Who, Tojo?"

  "Don't play dumb, Zag. You know who I mean."

  "So write about him. Who's stopping you?"

  "He is. I can't even get in to see him at that restaurant where he hangs out, a public place. But you can."

  "You want I should ask him for an interview?” He put some Yugo Yid into it. He'd forgotten how much she amused him when she wasn't being exasperating.

  "You're planning to raid him soon. Take me along."

  He'd forgotten, too, how thin the line was between amusement and exasperation. “Who told you that?"

  "My hairdresser. She's dating a member of your squad."

  "Which one?” When she shook her head, he said, “There are only four of us. I'm not dating a hairdresser, Canal's saving himself for an Old Country girl, and Burke talks nookie like Cesar Romero speaks Spanish: No hairdressers recently. That leaves McReary. By the time that little mick takes off his hat and shows his bald head, it's too late. He's already charmed you half into the sack. It's McReary, isn't it?"

  "I'm not saying, but don't blame him. Women are smart and dumb, same as men. This one isn't dumb. She's spent enough time with him to know when he's strapping himself down for a rough ride."

  "Busting Four-effers’ heads on Woodward isn't a pleasure cruise."

  "You don't spend days planning those raids."

  He shook his head. “If that's true, I couldn't take the chance. If you got hurt, the commissioner would have my head. He's wanted it ever since he took the job."

  "I can take care of myself."

  "Then again, you might get one of us hurt. I'm short a dozen men as it is."

  "For old times’ sake,” she said.

  "Sorry. It's this job or storming some beach. Damn sand gets in everything."

  She said something uncomplimentary, dropped her cigarette butt into her cup, and left. He pushed the cup out of his line of sight while he finished his Chesterfield and his coffee. That brown floating debris could put him off nicotine and caffeine at the same time.

  * * * *

  McReary was in his twenties, fair and freckled, and self-conscious about his bald head, a souvenir of scarlet fever, or one of those other diseases that stalked children between wars. The rest of the squad called him Baldy only when they were sore at him. Zagreb, on the rare occasions the young man had his hat off, thought he looked sleek and predatory, like a hood ornament.

  He found Mac at his desk, tapping out a report with two fingers, his snapbrim tipped forward to shield his eyes from the glare of his gooseneck lamp. He struck a wrong key when the lieutenant spun a chair and straddled it backwards to face him. All his confidence in his abilities evaporated during close contact with the commander of the Four Horsemen, as the racket squad was known in the newspapers.

  "Anything?” Zagreb jerked a thumb at the loudspeaker mounted on the wall. It was connected directly with dispatch.

  "Not a peep, L.T. For us, anyway,” McReary added.

  "Some criminal genius busted a window in the A & P after closing and made off with a dozen cans of peas,” reported Officer Burke. “Went right past a display of Maxwell House to get to ‘em. Canned peas ain't rationed."

  "That's because it's unpatriotic to poison the troops.” Sergeant Canal, seated on one massive ham on a windowsill, exhausted cigar smoke out over Beaubien. The rest of the squad had petitioned him never to fire up one of his four-for-a-quarter specials without ventillation handy. Zagreb's second-in-command was a big man, as light on his feet as Oliver Hardy, but with muscle instead of fat. “Me, I'd go for the freezer."

  "That's because you can carry out a side of beef under each arm.” Burke, who was determined never to be second-in-command of anything, was big also, but not by Canal's standards. He'd made up for the disparity by cultivating a mossy growth of black hair that stuck out of his cuffs and grew above his collar, where it blended with his round-the-clock shadow.

  "I could manage six, seven capons,” McReary said. “I'm wiry.” He grinned nervously, aware of Zagreb's close attention.

  The lieutenant addressed the others without taking his eyes off the young officer. “Why don't you two boys get some air?"

  The two big men exited without comment. Every man on the detail knew Zagreb seldom disciplined a member in front of the others. This course of action was both diplomatic and practical: All four were armed.

  "How's your sex life, Mac?"

  McReary blushed, surprised. “Okay, I guess.” It would never have occurred to him to ask, How's yours?

  "I went out with a lady barber a couple of times. She talked the thing to death in the end. They sure can gab up a storm."

  "Agnes."

  There was now no trace of color in the young man's face.

  "Agnes, that's her name? Seems to me a blade like you can do better than an Agnes."

  "I didn't tell her a damn thing, Zag, just that I'm a cop. She saw the gun."

  "She'd know that anyway. We're good copy, we make the front page whenever there's nothing doing overseas. How'd she find out about Express?"

  Sound travels across empty space, and with most of the desks in the squad room vacant because of the war and a skeleton police force riddled with paid informants, the Horsemen had followed the lead of the U.S. military by assigning code names to their activities. On the street, Frankie Orr was known as “the Conductor,” for an old murder aboard a streetcar. Operation Express was in place to break up his black market organization.

  "I never said a word."

  Zagreb held his gaze six inches from McReary's face. “Ration-ing's a war priority. They shoot you for treason."

  The officer's freckles stood out. The rest of his face had faded to invisibility.

  "Some women can read a man,” Zagreb said. “If you can't learn to keep your nerves under your vest, you've got to at least stay away from gossips. The Times has it."

  "Holy smoke!"

  After a moment he sat back, breaking the spell. “It's all right, the reporter's a friend of mine. But just until this one's in the can, why don't you go to the pictures alone? Nobody cares what you do at home after you've been to see Betty Grable."

  "Okay, L.T.” Relieved, McReary tipped back his hat and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “L.T.? Would you really have me shot?"

  "Hell, no. Rationing's FDR's baby. It's just a job.” He stood and looked down at the young man. “I'd shoot you myself."

  * * * *

  When he came to Detroit at the height of the booze wars, Francis Xavier Oro had been touted as one of the new breed, applying modern business methods to the rackets, which mean quieter murders and a fairer system of graft. He'd expunged the Sicilian from his name and loud suits and silk shirts from his wardrobe, and expanded his activities to embrace gambling, drugs, labor unions, and other difficult-to-obtain goods and services after liquor resumed flowing legally. When America entered the war and the OPA restricted the traffic in meat, eggs, butter, gasoline, and automobile tires, Frankie Orr had absorbed the wartime black market into his territory without a single assassination. In Grosse Pointe, where Detroit auto money was put up in barrels to mellow, a porterhouse steak on the table or a set of new whitewalls in the garage became as much a symbol of status as a case of scotch served during Prohibition.

  He procured his inventory exactly as he had in earlier days, through hijacking, bribery, and midnight deliveries from Canada by way of Windsor Tunnel, the Ambassador Bridge, and boat landings in the city of Monroe and a flea-speck
lake community just north of the last, named Detroit Beach.

  On a crickety, mosquito-thick evening in August 1942, Officer Burke shoved the foot-feed to the firewall of the two-year-old Chrysler Royal, muttering curses like Popeye and twisting the wheel this way and that to keep the tires from snatching in the sand that had drifted across the highway from the beach. He'd disliked the heavy sedan from the day it was issued but was the only member of the squad who could get the best out of it.

  "Take it easy, Burksie.” Sergeant Canal gripped the ceiling strap in the back seat and took the cigar out of his mouth to scowl at the spot where he'd bitten through the wrapping. “They don't make new brakes for cars no more, just tanks and airplanes."

  "What are you beefing about? I ain't touched the brakes since Dearborn."

  "Once in twenty miles won't hurt,” said Zagreb, seated beside him in front.

  Burke took the hint and let up on the accelerator.

  He passed the turning, switched off the lights, and coasted to a stop on the gravel apron in front of a bait-and-tackle shop that had been boarded up since the Bank Holiday. The four got out and gathered at the trunk, where the lieutenant handed out flak jackets and heavy artillery: a sawed-off shotgun for McReary, a Thompson for Canal, and a flare pistol for himself. Squat-barreled police .38s rode on their belts.

  McReary watched the sergeant fitting a fifty-round drum to the machine gun. “Just once I'd like the Tommy."

  Canal grinned in the trunk light. “Not till you pack on the pork, junior. When this starts to spit, it'll jerk you around like a turd in a twister."

  "Who you calling a turd, you big piece of—"

  Zagreb whistled sharply between his teeth. “Save something for the enemy."

  They walked down to the beach, Burke cursing at the sand he shipped in over the tops of his wingtips. Between them and the spot where boats landed loomed a canvas-shrouded bandshell, once host to the Casa Loma and Les Brown orchestras but now a place for winos to shelter and teen couples to grope. Farther out, an ancient dock, landlocked by a receding waterline, decrepitated under a shoeheel moon. McReary took his large-caliber, short-range weapon into its cover along with Burke, while Zagreb and Canal ducked under the canvas of the bandshell, where the sergeant used his jackknife on the rotted fabric to create observation posts. This made a V-shaped firing perimeter with the landing in the middle and the two men under the dock closest to the action.