City of Dark Corners

by Jon Talton

  I asked him if, in his experience, he’s ever seen a train create as well arranged a mess as that. He admitted that he hadn’t.

  “Then you called for the cops.”

  “I ran back to the yard office and called.”

  “See anyone else around?”

  He shook his head. But he hesitated. He was lying.

  I let the silence gather; sometimes that’s the best way to get the truth, make the person you’re questioning feel more uncomfortable. It’s one of the most important lessons you learn as a police detective. Silence topped a beating with a phonebook any day for extracting honest information.

  “Look, Gene, I’m a railroad bull.” This came after a full five minutes, with his cigarette turning to a long string of ash that finally tumbled into the glass tray on his desk. “I’m used to running bums and bindle punks off railroad property and looking for theft from freight cars. I’m no homicide detective. And this was…awful.”

  “I understand. But what makes you think she fell from the Sunset Limited?”

  “How else would that much damage be done to a person?”

  “She didn’t have a ticket in her purse.”

  He leaned back and forth in his chair, his hands out as if expecting some answer to fall from the ceiling. None did, for this or when I asked if he had questioned railroad personnel as to whether they had seen anything. I remembered that switch engine working the east end of the yard as we arrived. Did the engineer and fireman notice the body on the north side of the tracks? What about the conductor and Pullman porters on the Sunset—did a passenger go missing? Was anyone waiting here for a woman who didn’t arrive? I tried to keep my questions calm and conversational, but he became more and more agitated, lighting one cigarette after another, using the dying butt to start another. Each time, his answer was “No.”

  “I walked those tracks, Jimmy. They were clean. If she’d been sliced up by the train, there would have been blood.”

  More smoke blew toward the ceiling. “You know how many railroads are in receivership, how many railroad men are out of jobs? It’s a miracle the SP isn’t one of them. I’m lucky to have a job.”

  “Did you walk those rails, Jimmy?”

  He shook his head, and I tamped down my frustration.

  “Maybe you’d do me a favor?”

  “Sure, Gene,” he said, sounding relieved.

  “Maybe you could get the word out across the railroad to other special agents, find out if they have encountered anything like this?”

  He promised that he would. But I could see he didn’t like it.

  Afterward, I walked down the marble stairs to the main waiting room thinking it would be a while before he would seek out my company at the Legion hall.

  * * *

  Wing Ong stood at the ticket counter, and I waited until he completed his business. He greeted me with a broad smile. He wore a blue sweater-vest under his sports jacket.

  “I thought you’d left for China,” I said.

  “I did,” he said. “It was a mistake. I thought I’d find a country on its way up, finally. But things are in chaos. Warlords and communists are fighting the Nationalist government, and I’m not sure Chiang Kai-shek is up to the task of unifying the nation. He’s no Sun Yat-sen.”

  When he sensed I was interested, he continued: “Sun died too soon. Then there’s Japan. They’ve taken Manchuria, and it’s only a matter of time before there’s full-on war with China. So, I came back home last year. Even though I was born in China, I’m an American.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t stay in California, Los Angeles or San Francisco.”

  He shook his head. “California has a bad history with the Chinese. And in the Chinatowns, it’s very clannish. Phoenix is home.”

  I thought about the reasoning that brought me back here after the war.

  “I bought a ticket for my sister to take the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles tomorrow,” he said. “I didn’t want to risk the train being full.”

  “I’m not sure the railroad has that problem now,” I said as we walked out the east doors to the outdoor waiting room, shaded by the extended red-tile roof and open in three directions through open arches. We settled on a bench.

  “True,” he said, “but this is the railroad’s flagship train, the most glamorous. So now she’s set with a Pullman ticket. Going to visit our aunt, but she’s not staying. Things are better for the Chinese here in Phoenix. Chinese children get to attend public schools with the whites. It’s not like with the Negroes, who have to go to colored schools and can’t get service at so many stores, restaurants, and hotels. Better for them than in the Deep South. At least that’s what they tell me. No lynchings. No ‘whites only’ waiting room here.”

  He was right. Phoenix had been settled by many ex-Confederates, so it had the feel of both a Southern and a Western town. In the war, I had seen the 369th Infantry Regiment—the “Harlem Hellfighters”—in combat. That cured me of any notion that Negroes were inferior.

  Mexicans, like the Negroes, couldn’t buy property north of Van Buren Street, but they didn’t face the worst of the color line. Some Mexican American families, such as Victoria’s, had been here for generations. She was part of Phoenix’s small Mexican American middle class. Most Mexicans lived in barrios south of the tracks or farmed outside the city limits. Nobody liked or trusted the small enclave of Japanese farmers—I suspected some of this was jealousy because they had succeeded in places where Anglo farmers had failed. The Alien Land Law kept them from owning property in the state, so they cultivated farms nominally owned by sympathetic Anglos.

  Ong paused as the switcher, a squat black locomotive, rumbled past with two mail cars, its engine laboring, the sounds measured and distinct, as if angry steam monsters were chained to its insides and exhaling black curses. I braced myself, put my hands in the pockets of my slacks, ahead of what was coming. Out of sight, they coupled to more cars with a metallic boom. A pleasant breeze filled the space. I hardly flinched at all. After the two birds that were my hands stopped fluttering, I pulled them out and lit a cigarette. I was pretty good at concealing the little bag of shell shock I had brought home from France. Thunderstorms, car backfires, unexpected sharp noises—that was where I had to be careful. No one who has survived an artillery barrage can adequately explain it to a civilian—not only the sounds but the way it tears men to bits or buries them alive in shell holes. And the terrible helplessness.

  My companion didn’t notice. “Chinese people here who built the railroads are spreading out from Chinatown. We own grocery stores and restaurants all over the city. That’s not to say things are perfect. Any time the city fathers want to please the chamber of commerce, they raid the opium and gambling houses in Chinatown. They don’t touch the east side, where the action is controlled by the whites, city commissioners, so-called respectable businessmen. Even though those Chinese owners pay off the cops like everybody else.” He shook his head. “Then things go back to normal, because there’s demand. Who comes to Chinatown to gamble, smoke opium, buy cocaine? The whites.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Don Hammons was probably the perfect example, especially when he worked vice. You can’t pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Wing Ong was one of the smartest people I knew. If he wasn’t a Chinaman, there was no telling how high he might rise.

  “Sorry to go off on a tirade,” he said. “There’s corruption everywhere. One hand washes the other. And I didn’t mean to imply anything about you. You were always very fair with Chinese people.”

  I waved it away. “I have plenty of tirades in me, too. And just so you know, I left the police department last year.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’ve got better jokes than that,” I said, and explained my new private eye business without hanging out the dirty laundry that had caused me to lose my badge.

&nbs
p; “I like the freedom of being on my own,” I lied. It was time to change the subject. “You have a new store?”

  “The Golden Gate Grocery, Eleventh Street and Van Buren. Come by.”

  I promised him that I would. He was about to leave when I said, “Speaking of gambling, have you ever heard of a man named Gus Greenbaum?”

  Six

  The locomotive huffed away to the east, to the SP yard to find fuel oil and water, blowing its whistle as it crossed Third Avenue. Beyond the yard was the dumping ground of my cut-up blonde. I liked blondes who were cutups, but not this way. The silence was so pronounced we could hear songbirds from the tall oleander hedges to the north, separating Union Station from the Warehouse District.

  “If you go to Chinatown or the places on the east side, you can gamble,” Ong said. “But it’s small stuff. Craps, poker, slot machines. Sic bo or dominoes in Chinatown. Or you can go in the back room of a cigar store or a poolroom or a bar and place a bet with a white or colored bookie. Again, small-time and local compared to what Gus Greenbaum has going. I’m surprised you don’t know about him.”

  I explained that my time handling vice cases was mostly over by ’28, when Greenbaum arrived.

  “Just as well,” he said. “Gus is Chicago mob, sent to oversee the Southwest branch of their national wire network, the Trans-America News Service. Don’t be fooled by the name. It’s the latest thing and is going to put the old operations out of business. The idea is to use Western Union to get an edge, so the network instantly transmits the results of horse races around the country. It gives the gangsters a monopoly. It’s a vertically integrated business, same as General Motors. At the bottom is the average bookie, who once worked for himself or was part of local organized crime. They depended on the newspaper or radio for results on a race, a game, or a prizefight.”

  “Now they work for the Outfit.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What if the local bookie doesn’t want to?”

  “They pay him a friendly visit and tell him he can make more money as part of the national syndicate. If he refuses, the next visit isn’t so friendly. Broken arm. Burned-down shop. Stuck in a mine shaft out by Squaw Peak with a bullet in his head as an incentive for his compadres to understand things have changed.”

  “Nice people.” I smashed my cigarette butt in the ashtray beside the bench.

  Ong offered his shiny wide smile, like a sunny Phoenix day. It didn’t last. He shook his head. “On the other hand, the bookie who goes along gets protection from shakedowns.”

  “How does Greenbaum’s racket work?”

  “Trans-America News Service. Sounds like the Associated Press, right? Officially, it transmits sporting news by telegraph. Except the only news it actually carries is racing, especially the results. It doesn’t deal directly with the bookmakers but uses a distribution network. Trans-America’s news is the complete information on every race: the horses set to run that day, the jockey, weight of the horse, odds, all of it. The morning of the race, it wires out the track conditions and if anything in the lineup has changed. Have the odds changed? Has a horse been scratched? It wires the positions of the horses once the race starts, at the quarter and in the final stretch, then the finish.”

  “The sport of kings,” I said.

  “And the vice of commoners,” he said. “Now, the basic race information is available to the AP, United Press, and International News Service—they’ll send it to the Republic and the Gazette, the radio stations. But Trans-America is faster. At a lot of tracks, maybe half, it pays for the exclusive rights to use a direct wire from the press box. Other tracks, they have a spotter with a telescope or a wigwag artist who can signal the racing results to someone on a telephone. Whatever way they get it, Trans-America has exclusive Western Union circuits leased. The distributors are given what they call a drop—a receiving station with a high-speed ticker. The radio might carry an individual race. The syndicate covers them all, coast to coast, two dozen major tracks.”

  “I get the speed,” I said. “But where’s the money made, aside from the truth that the house always wins?”

  Ong leaned in. “For one thing, it lets a bookmaker keep taking bets as if he doesn’t know the race results. The AP hasn’t reported them yet, follow me? So when the bookie already knows a horse has lost, he’ll take the bets anyway. Or say it’s too late to bet if the customer wants to wager on the winner. Before the hour of the races, when customers line up, the early bettors don’t get the full information that the bookmaker has—so they don’t know, say, track conditions, things like that, and the bookie sure isn’t going to tell them. Easy money, even though most of it flows up to the syndicate. Local bookies have to pay a percentage of net daily receipts, plus a fixed weekly fee to receive the results.”

  “You know a lot about this.”

  “I’ve learned it. This is having a big effect on the older Chinese community, the one that depended on gambling. And I intend to become a lawyer.”

  “You’ll make a good one.”

  I asked why the cops couldn’t stop the operation, knowing it was a naive inquiry.

  “This is technically illegal in most states,” Ong said. “But so what? The police are bribed. No offense, Gene. And the syndicate contributes to politicians. It’s hard to find the big racing rooms anyway. It’s not illegal to sell the telephone and telegraph equipment. Western Union has fought every effort to shut the big gambling wire services down.”

  * * *

  After Ong left, I scribbled his background information in the notebook I kept in my suit coat pocket. Then I walked through the east arches of the depot and past the garden with its immaculate grass, hedges, and flowers to welcome travelers. Phoenix was always in bloom.

  To the east, most of the produce houses were dormant or working short-staffed. The big harvests began in the spring. I walked around boxcars spotted at warehouses and wholesale outfits along Jackson Street, making sure they weren’t attached to a locomotive and likely to move, with deadly consequences.

  Ong’s information was useful, but I knew the story went deeper. Chinatown gambling was hardly benign. It was controlled by the Hop Sing Association, one of the most powerful of the tongs that had set up chapters in cities around the country. The tongs presented themselves as benevolent associations to protect their people against anti-Chinese prejudice, and we had plenty of that to go around. But they were also organized-crime gangs that controlled rackets in Chinatowns. The bloody tong wars of the early century were over. But the gangs persisted, although much diminished.

  They had been especially quiet lately, after three tong soldiers were found dumped in the riverbed outside the city. This was around the time I was laid off from the cops last year. Each one had been tapped three times in the head. At the time, we wondered if it was retaliation from a Paris Alley gunfight in ’31 where the Suey Sing tong from L.A. tried to muscle in. We worried the assassinations could be a revival of the old tong wars. Now, especially given the manner of the latest killings, I wondered if they had been a message from the Chicago Outfit and Greenbaum, instead.

  The landscape became grimmer, especially when I crossed Second Street and entered the Deuce, our city’s skid row. Paris Alley, between Jefferson and Madison streets, was a dense collection of barely concealed bars and gambling houses.

  When I was a cop, it was a nightly cockfight, only with guns and knives, every hood a rooster until he was assuming room temperature on the cobblestones. The metal call box sitting at head level on a telephone pole, labeled POLICE TELEGRAPH and below it THE GAMEWELL CO. NEW YORK, made me feel strangely nostalgic. Every cop carried a key so he could open it and call headquarters for backup or a paddy wagon.

  In an emergency, a blue light on a pole above headquarters lit up, and a horn sounded. You were supposed to drop everything to reach the nearest call box, open it with the distinctive Gamewell key next to your handcu
ff key, and find out what was going on. That emergency might be a fight or shooting somewhere—or it might be a killer on the loose. You never knew until you opened the door to the box and picked up the phone receiver. Downtown, the police call boxes were mounted on their own pedestals, neatly painted blue. The department was starting to put radios in the squad cars, the first such system in the state. But the boxes were still essential, especially for beat cops on foot. I patted this shabby one affectionately.

  Walking on, I waved away the panhandlers, jive dealers, and flimflam men who frequented the alley. After dark, things got…interesting.

  On the Third Street side, I ducked into the restaurant supply store. The radio was playing Ethel Waters singing “Stormy Weather.”

  “Detective Hammons, it’s been too long.”

  He hadn’t gotten the memo about me not being a cop, but I let it go and greeted Carl Sims, a young Negro who stood behind the counter. With exotic friendly eyes and a widow’s peak where his hair met his forehead, he had arrived from Texas a few years ago. He turned down the radio.

  “This is my last day,” he offered. “I’m starting my own gardening and painting business.”

  “That’s good, Carl. Tough times, though.”

  “Don’t I know it,” he said. “But if I don’t start now, I might never have the guts. I’ve been saving.”

  “Not in a bank, I hope.”

  “No, sir.”

  Theories about the dead blonde were floating around in my head like debris that had yet to form a planet.

  “Let’s say I had a piece of beef,” I said. “How would I take a whack at it to separate it from the…” I hesitated, having never worked in a restaurant or slaughterhouse.

  “Like a T-bone? A strip steak and a filet. It’s separated by a bone.”

  “What if I want to cut through the meat and the bone?”

  Carl looked at me oddly, but let it pass.