by Jon Talton
“Can’t say I’ve heard the name.”
“You never heard the name? I thought you’d been a cop.” When I didn’t respond, he continued. “Well, the sign says private investigator. I assume you can investigate and keep it private.”
I asked him why I would want to do that.
He smirked. “When Prohibition is repealed, I’m going to get the first state license to distribute liquor. And it will be the best brands, thanks to Sam Bronfman. Seagram, you know.”
“But without Al Capone.” I smirked, too.
“Times change,” Marley said. “My distributorship will be totally legal. More than three hundred bars have already applied for liquor licenses since the state repealed its law last year, and I’ll be supplying them when the stupid Eighteenth Amendment is gone this year.”
“And why would the State of Arizona grant you this? You’re just a kid.”
He struggled to hide his irritation. “Because important people patronize the disorderly house I own on the east side. And they wouldn’t want their wives to know about it, especially about the pretty colored girls they consort with. I have photographs.”
He let out a high-pitched laugh like a girl’s, a sound I never wanted to hear coming from him again.
“I see.”
“And it will be in your interest to have me as a friend and client.”
I didn’t think Marley had any more friends than a Gila monster. The difference was that the big lizard was prettier and shy. Having him for a client seemed freighted with corruption and complications. When I said nothing, he pulled a wad from his jeans pocket and peeled off five C notes, slapping them on my blotter. I hated to admit it, but now he was talking more persuasively.
“Consider it a retainer.”
My considerations were these: Marley was a punk, a thug, maybe a killer. I saw that in action when his bully boys took baseball bats and gasoline to the Okies. On the other hand, I didn’t need him as an enemy, especially not with a dismembered blonde carrying my business card hanging over me. What if one of the clients of Marley’s “disorderly house,” as he called it, was the county prosecutor? I might end up hanging like Ruth Judd. That could disorder my life in a hurry.
Also, clients were sparse now that I had the wire that Samuel Dorsey had reached Chicago. I still needed to pay seven bucks a week for my share of Gladys’s resentful time, fifteen a month for the office, another twenty for rent at my apartment, plus some walking-around money for haircuts and shaves, shoeshines and newspapers, and taking Victoria dancing.
The bills were new and crisp. Benjamin Franklin regarded me distantly, offering no wisdom. I felt like Eve in the Garden of Eden with the snake in cowboy boots.
“I have faith in you, Hammons,” the snake said.
“That makes me feel peachy.”
He dug in his pocket and produced a coin, slapping it on the desk. “Just so you know I’m serious in these hard times.”
It was a shiny twenty-dollar gold piece, Lady Liberty beckoning me. I was always a sucker for a woman in a robe.
Pulling out a pad and pencil, I wrote “Gus Greenbaum” at the top and underlined it. In fact, I’d heard the name when I was a cop, not much beyond that. I asked him to tell me more.
Marley said, “Greenbaum runs a gambling wire for the Chicago Outfit that serves the entire Southwest.”
“I thought you were tight with the Outfit thanks to Capone and the liquor business.”
“Smart guy,” Marley said, his lips barely moving. “That’s the point. Times change, and I want a piece of Greenbaum’s action.”
“So, ask your friends in Chicago.”
He broke his glare and looked into his lap, suddenly appearing younger.
I said, “They refused?”
“Looks that way.” When he looked up again his face was hard again, full of pride. “That’s why I need some leverage to get my way.”
When I didn’t respond, he continued.
“That where you come in, Hammons. This is my town!” He paused. “This is our town, I mean. Phoenix had forty-eight thousand people in the 1930 Census, a hundred fifty-one thousand in the county. That’s more than double where we stood in 1920. Way past Tucson now. We’ve got thousands of acres under cultivation—we help feed the country. This city is going places, provided Roosevelt can save the country as his supporters believe. We’ve been losing population in the Depression, but that’s not going to last. Someday this will be a metropolis!”
I didn’t believe it. “I rather like it as it is.”
“Of course, you do. But change is inevitable and better to be on the right side of it. That’s why I don’t want some hood from Chicago to control our future.”
I didn’t want a local hood, either. Nor did I have anything against Chicago. Dwight Heard was from Chicago, although born in Massachusetts, and he had been one of our leading citizens. His death in 1929 was a calamity, seeming to presage the hard times to come. The Wrigleys were building a mansion on a knoll north of town. Everybody likes chewing gum.
“So, will you help me, Hammons? I can open doors for you.”
Suppressing a sigh, I pulled over the currency and wrote Marley a receipt.
“Plus expenses,” I said. “Of course, you’ll get a refund if I can’t get decent information. And this is a one-off. Don’t expect me to swing a baseball bat for you.”
“Of course not. You’re a gentleman. You have ethics. I respect that.”
I doubted that he did.
“You ever been hit with a horsewhip, Hammons?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“My father used one on me, you know. Sometimes he’d give me a beating in the morning, say it was for what I was going to do, not what I did.”
“He sounds deranged.”
“Not at all.” Marley drew himself up, the son of the father. “He was a fine man. Made me tough. Gave me what I needed in this world.”
“If you say so.”
We sat for another half an hour, Marley philosophizing about his visions for Phoenix as I tried to steer the conversation back to Gus Greenbaum. I was desperate for a cigarette. When he was gone, I lit up but also wanted to take a shower. Instead, I told Gladys that I didn’t want to be disturbed and went back inside my office. I locked Marley’s money in the safe I had inherited from the previous tenant—banks weren’t trustworthy now.
I called a former colleague, Detective Turk Muldoon, and asked him about Gus Greenbaum.
“Gustave, his given name,” Muldoon said. “He came up under the wing of Meyer Lansky in New York, then he started working for the Chicago Outfit. Showed up here in ’28 running a wire news service.”
“Why am I only now learning about this?”
Turk, given name Liam, immigrated from Ireland and still spoke with a brogue.
“You were the hotshot homicide dick, lad,” he said. “You had better things to do than us lowly vice cops. Anyway, he’s kept his nose clean in the city. Running the news service isn’t illegal. The other thing is, Greenbaum has made friends with some respectable locals.”
“So, he’s turned over a new leaf?”
“I seriously doubt that. He spreads money around to the city commissioners, so there’s no incentive for us to give him a good look. Why are you asking?”
“I have a client who’s asking.”
“Well, tread carefully, lad. He has friends, and he has the Outfit connections. I’d hate to find you with a bullet in the brain.”
I thanked him for that pleasant thought and rang off.
Then I lit another Chesterfield and spread out the murder photos that Victoria had taken.
She said it was the worst she’d ever seen, and Victoria had seen plenty. In addition to her work taking news photos, quinceañeras, weddings, and portraits, the police department paid her to shoot crime sc
enes. That was her biggest source of income.
She was at the murder house where Winnie Ruth Judd allegedly single-handedly killed Anne LeRoy and Sammy Samuelson. But it was only bloody—the bodies were gone, to be unpacked from trunks in Los Angeles. The photos before me now showed a dead woman in pieces, no trunks. They were among the worst I had seen, too—at least since the war—and my old job had shown me plenty of ways that humans can put an end to each other.
I pulled out the magnifying glass from my middle drawer and scrutinized the images.
The ones of the head showed that disfiguring scream mouth. No bruises were visible on the neck, which would indicate strangulation. But it was hard to tell, given the severed tissue. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot, a sign she had been suffocated with a pillow or a hand. The alternative was chilling: the girl had been tied down, gagged, and cut apart. Maybe he started with an arm or a leg, letting her bleed out while he watched.
I spread out other photos. Her limbs didn’t show signs of a tourniquet, which might indicate this path, where the killer amputated a limb but controlled the blood flow to keep her alive—and awake.
That left the possibility that the victim was restrained and killed by beheading. The sharp instrument had done the killing as she watched the preparations, then felt the first incision until the loss of blood caused her to pass out and die. The result was too rough to be a surgical bone saw or even a machete. Those left clean marks. I’d investigated a case of a hophead doctor who killed his wife in a fight, then used a bone saw to decapitate her, claiming some fiend had broken into their home. He might have gotten away with it if we hadn’t found the saw. Another time, a bar fight in the Deuce saw one participant pull a machete and whack the arm off his antagonist. Again, nice clean cut.
Not this time. It had to be an axe, but a sharp one. Her eyes were wide open, although the black-and-white picture didn’t capture their blue, or hair the color of a wheat field. The first blow happened here, severing her head from her body, I’d bet.
But that axe would have to be damned sharp.
More memories informed my thinking.
Back in ’24, when I was still a uniform, I caught a call to a house on Lincoln Street, south of the tracks. It was barely more than an adobe hovel, and the neighbor who called was inarticulate with horror. I drew my pistol and knocked, standing to the side of the entrance for safety’s sake. You never knew when somebody would shoot through the door.
When nothing happened, I turned the knob, announced myself as police, and stepped inside. I found a colored boy, maybe fifteen years old, holding a hatchet. He was beside a man who had been hacked to death. The boy dropped the hatchet and let me handcuff him. “He made me do it,” the teenager said over and over, trance-like. And that was pretty likely, given that neighbors told us the father mercilessly beat his son every day with a horsewhip. The kid could have run away. But who knows how you’ll react in the moment? A Maricopa County jury, not given to going easy on Negroes, let the kid off with a manslaughter conviction.
The point was that my dismembered beauty didn’t look like the father on Lincoln Street, either. His wounds were random, wider gashes to flesh, deep but still not fully detaching bones. That was a crime of passion, in the moment, sure. This was obviously calculated. But I had to consider that other tools were used. Unless the cops had found something after Don ran me off, the killer still had the murder weapons with him or had disposed of them elsewhere.
Next I examined the arms and the legs, severed at the middle of the upper arms and near the hips. Like the beheading, this must have produced huge sprays of blood, but little was visible where the body was found.
Her nylons were undisturbed and garters neatly disconnected. I would bet the killer murdered her while she was nude, or wearing other clothes, then wiped her clean with towels. Next, he would have dressed her, the stylish pink suit meant to button up to the neck and the pink shoes. All were nearly spotless. Then he drove her to be found by the railroad tracks and displayed her. It was hard to tell, but it didn’t appear that rigor had set in when we were there, so it was three or four hours from the killing.
I ran the magnifying glass across photos of her garments. Victoria took a close-up of a label on the suit: J.W. Robinson’s. That was a Los Angeles department store. Maybe she was from L.A. But plenty of Phoenicians took the train to California to shop. It wasn’t definitive, but Don ought to check with LAPD about missing persons or similar killings there.
Then I lingered on her face again. I had never seen this young woman before. She had no identification, no address book, no jewelry. Yet she had my card.
Five
I walked three blocks west, crossed Washington with its twin streetcar lines, and headed south. The Spanish mission–style Union Station stood at the foot of Fourth Avenue four blocks away, the roof adorned with red tiles. This route allowed me to avoid passing police headquarters on the southeast corner of the new City-County building, an imposing all-in-one civic structure that also housed the Maricopa County Courthouse and Phoenix City Hall.
Until ’29, headquarters was in the basement of the firetrap that was old City Hall. That was when prisoners were photographed in front of the town fountain as part of booking, and nobody bothered asking whether their frequent bruises and other injuries happened during the arrest and interrogation or beforehand.
Now headquarters was modern, spacious, and much more useful, including a first-floor section for the fifteen detectives and a soundproof interview room in the basement. That room also had a window for lineups, with an adjoining space where victims could sit in the dark and safely identify suspects. Stairs and an elevator led up to the male and female jails on the fourth floor. Nice digs. Too bad I had so few years to enjoy them.
Today’s route allowed me to tamp down whatever regret or bitterness I felt from leaving the department. A little, at least. Those feelings were never far beneath the surface. Don was probably right: I should have testified as my bosses wanted. But I was sore. And proud. Now it was too late. Don was the kind of man who could effortlessly do such a thing. He turned pages easily. Me, not so much.
As the sidewalk passed under my shoes, I couldn’t push away another feeling. It said I was being framed. The business card in the dead girl’s purse was a setup.
But by whom and why? I was a nobody now. Ruth Judd was set to hang and, after a sham of a trial, Happy Jack would be in the clear. I was no threat—the justice system, if you wanted to call it that, had spoken. The exculpatory evidence I had was of no value.
Who else would want me in a frame-up? It’s not as if I hadn’t made enemies as a police detective, but most of them were in Florence on ice. And it seemed like an elaborate piece of bloody theater to nail me for a murder.
The only other option was that the dead woman was on her way to see me and never made it. So, who referred her to a private dick in Phoenix?
Mail and Railway Express Agency trucks were backed to the loading docks on the west end of the long depot, with arches over the doors to the express section matching the architectural signature that marked every entrance to the building. Two cabs sat in front, drivers leaning against their bumpers trading gossip with redcaps. The double doors to the passenger entrance were open, and the waiting room was nearly empty, smelling of tobacco and dust.
Hat Squad detectives liked to hang out at the depot. We looked for single shady characters getting off the train. If they didn’t have a local address, job, or money, we told them to get back on board and leave town. It was a reputation the department cultivated: We solved crimes and captured criminals. Stay away. If the newcomer refused to get back on the train, we drove him to the city limits and applied rough persuasion to keep moving.
Today no cops were in evidence. A janitor with a mop was slowly making a dent in the dust, permanently stooped as if a sculptor had created him. I was happy that no detectives were hanging around looking f
or unsavory characters—I would qualify for that now. No trains were due for hours, and out the south doors a small locomotive huffed back and forth, switching mail and express cars. I got a shoeshine and considered my approach. Then I climbed to the second floor and found the SP railroad police office.
“Gene Hammons!” Jimmy Darrow, a railroad special agent, stood and came around his desk to shake my hand. “It’s been too long.” That was true. He was a veteran like me, and I hadn’t been to the Frank Luke American Legion Post Number One in at least a year.
Darrow was about my age, with dark hair and poor posture. At least part of that stance was from a bad wound he had sustained in France. It caused his left shoulder to permanently sag. He turned off the radio while Jack Williams was reading the news on KOY.
“What brings you to bull territory?”
He offered me a nail and lit us both from a table lighter embossed with the railroad’s sunset logo.
“It’s about the dead woman found east of the yard the other night.”
He went into a coughing fit. Darrow had been gassed by the Germans and the last thing he probably needed was a cigarette. Then: “Aren’t you gone from the police?”
“I am. But I’m private now and have a client who has an interest in the case.” That was somewhat true, if I considered my brother as the client. Maybe the real client was my skin that was on the line.
He sat on the edge of his desk and regarded me with momentary suspicion, but the look faded.
“I guess it’s okay to talk to you. I gave a statement to your brother.”
“So, you discovered the body.”
He nodded. “I was checking for bums when I found her. Assumed she fell off the Sunset, or maybe committed suicide. Both things happen. Plenty of people have been killing themselves thanks to the Depression. I only wish they didn’t use the railroad for it.”
“Did you touch the body?”
“God, no.” He flinched and walked behind the desk, sitting. “She looked plenty dead. No reason to even check a pulse, her head being severed and all. What a mess.”
