City of Dark Corners

by Jon Talton

  “Well, you could start with this.” He pulled down a meat cleaver, a medieval-looking tool with a wooden handle attached to twelve inches of stainless steel formed in a curved rectangle. He slid over a wooden cutting board and handed me the cleaver. I hefted it in my right hand, feeling its weight, then brought it down hard. The cutting board and counter shuddered. The impact left a quarter-inch crater in the wood.

  “A skilled butcher can do a lot with that,” Carl said. “But he’d still probably use this instead.” He moved through the store and came back with something that looked like a hacksaw. “Butcher saw, twenty-inch blade.”

  I held it closer, lightly running my fingers across the serrated edge. The blade was scary sharp.

  “Planning on doing some cooking?” he said. “It’s safer to go to a butcher shop and ask for the cuts of beef you want. An amateur could lose a finger or worse.”

  Or he could cut up a girl and dump her pieces by the railroad tracks.

  “Been selling many of these things?” I asked.

  Carl shook his head. “We haven’t been selling many of nothing. Mr. Johnson is worried about the store. The other restaurant supply, the one on Van Buren, closed last year.”

  He thought for a moment. “Last week, though, a man came in and bought both a meat cleaver and a saw. Nobody I knew.” He shook his head slowly, as if recalling the face or conversation or something more. “He gave me the fantods.”

  “Fantods?”

  “The creeps.”

  Learn a new word every day, as my pop said. I asked what he looked like.

  Carl hesitated. “I don’t want trouble, especially not now that I’m about to go out on my own.”

  “What would get you in trouble?”

  He sighed. “I wasn’t exactly honest. He was a cop, and I know him. You’ve always treated me real well, Detective Hammons. But you’re the exception. Colored folks don’t get an even shake from the police, not even from the colored officers.”

  “Hell, Carl, I don’t even like the cops myself.”

  He stared past me a long time. Then: “Frenchy.”

  “Frenchy Navarre?”

  He nodded. “Man scares me.”

  “Frenchy Navarre bought those butcher tools?”

  He looked me in the eye. “Yes sir, he did.”

  Seven

  I knew two men in Phoenix nicknamed Frenchy.

  One was Frenchy Vieux, real first name Marcellin, who made a fortune as a sidewalk contractor during the 1920s building boom. Walk down nearly any sidewalk in the newer parts of town and you’ll find his name stamped in concrete. He lived in a majestic Italian villa–style home with a sweeping veranda on Portland Street, a couple of blocks west of me in the swank Kenilworth district.

  The other was Frenchy Navarre, given name Leonce, a Phoenix Police detective. He was a few years older than me. We had never worked closely together, and I didn’t know much about him. But his custom-made suits and expensive silk ties from Goldwater’s and Hanny’s made me suspicious he was at least a little bit dirty. Perhaps had I misappraised the man, and not in a good way.

  I walked up to Jefferson Street and slipped into Jones Drugs in the new Fox Theater building, the city’s best movie palace—and with cool refrigerated air to boot. They didn’t need it today with the temperature hitting a tourist-pleasing 70 degrees. Past the soda fountain, I stepped into a phone booth, closed the door, and called Don at police headquarters.

  “Detective Bureau, Detective Navarre speaking,” came the unexpected voice.

  My paranoia meter shot up several notches, and I hesitated, tempted to hang up.

  “Hello?”

  I forged ahead. “Hello, Frenchy, it’s Gene Hammons.”

  “Geno!” The voice was friendly. “We miss you down here. I’m stuck on the dragnet for those escapees. It was the county’s fuckup. They didn’t get out of the city jail.”

  I contained my boredom and anxiety as he went on. The two jails were on the same floor.

  “How’s the peeper business?”

  “Ups and downs. Is my brother around?”

  “No. He’s checking a lead on that dead skirt. You hear about it?”

  “I read something in the paper.”

  “Well, she didn’t fall from a train. She was sliced up and dumped.”

  “Nasty business.” I fought the temptation to ask him if he’d been using a cleaver and saw lately.

  He agreed about the nasty business and was agreeable enough to give me the address where I could find Don.

  * * *

  I climbed in my Ford, put the top down, and drove north out of downtown on Central Avenue. The San Carlos and Westward Ho were busy because of players and spectators for the Pro-Am golf tournament at the Phoenix Country Club. What Depression?

  North of McDowell Road, the street narrowed and was lined with majestic mature palm trees and handsome homes on inviting shady acreages. Way beyond my budget. Construction of period revival houses that began a few years ago to the west had been stopped as if someone had pulled an emergency brake. No houses were being built anywhere.

  A couple of miles farther north, past Central Dairy, I turned right on a two-lane dirt road and was enveloped in citrus groves. It would be a couple of months before their blossoms perfumed the Valley and after that the harvest. It was the next big deal, with the lettuce harvest: 8,700 acres cut, washed, boxed, and loaded in refrigerated railroad cars destined for points back east, already completed. For now, my surroundings were a picture postcard green frame for the bare head of Camelback Mountain, which grew larger as I drove east.

  All the time I was in France, with muddy shell holes, shredded trees, and the overwhelming scent of death everywhere, I distracted myself by remembering views like this of our desert oasis so far away across an ocean and a continent, so at peace. Not too much distraction, mind. That could get you killed, especially by infiltrating stormtroopers.

  One night a German soldier dropped into my trench, not even seeing me at first. My rifle was stupidly propped too far away, and I ran my trench knife into his gut, twisting it. He wasn’t a stormtrooper but a lost boy who looked younger than me, blond and blue-eyed like me, terrified like me. He died hard. Later, when the adrenaline faded, the homesickness kept me sane.

  Now it was as lovely and peaceful as I remembered it. “American Eden,” the promoters called it, and rightly so, hundreds of thousands of acres reclaimed by the Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River, followed by four more.

  I was born with the century, so I had no memory of the terrible times in the 1890s, when another depression combined with drought and floods almost destroyed Phoenix, with no dam to catch the snowy runoff. But our parents told us. Roosevelt himself visited in 1911 for the dam’s dedication. I caught a glimpse of the Rough Rider in an open-top car with Dwight and Maie Heard. He doffed his hat to a cheering crowd. Now he’s been in the ground for thirteen years. And after I became a cop, I learned how many snakes populated this Eden.

  A little past grandly named but two-lane Chicago Avenue, far out in the county now, I saw Don’s car parked beside the road. Down a drive was a two-story hacienda surrounded by dense plantings of orange and grapefruit trees, walled off by tall oleanders. I pulled over and stopped, shut off the engine, stuck a nail in my mouth and lit it, and waited. After fifteen minutes, my brother came stalking out with that long-legged Hammons strut. If you saw us walking at a distance, you couldn’t have told us apart. He saw me and shook his head.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” He sat in the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.

  “Navarre said I could find you here.”

  “They reported their daughter missing two weeks ago. But they got a letter here a day ago. She’s in Hollywood. Wants to break into the pictures. She’s the only missing person on file who would fit the description of the gi
rl by the tracks. Pretty blonde. If they want somebody to bring their live daughter back home, I recommended you.”

  “Thanks, but how old is she?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Age of consent.”

  “Whatever. Like I said, her description matched our body, so I hoped I could clear this case in a hurry.”

  I didn’t like that it was “our body.” I said, “What do you know about Navarre?”

  He opened a new pack of Luckies—Al Jolson’s brand—and lit one, taking a long drag.

  “Frenchy’s a decent cop,” he said, exhaling out the open car. “He can be a hard cop. Tough on the nigg—.”

  I cut him off. “Why do you use that word, Don? That’s not the way we were raised.”

  “Okay, Mommy.”

  I shook my head. “Would you trust Frenchy to have your back?”

  He gave me a long appraisal, his eyes like a lighthouse fixed on a ship at sea.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “What if I told you he had bought a meat cleaver and a boning saw at the restaurant supply store in the Deuce? Those are exactly the tools that were probably used to cut up that girl. So maybe he’s a cook off duty. Or maybe he’s a thrill killer who wants to frame me.”

  “This is my problem, Gene. I pulled your business card from her purse. You’re in the clear, unless you really know her and gave her that card and you’re lying to me.”

  I shook my head. “Well, maybe you’ll help me with another problem,” I said. “Gus Greenbaum.”

  Don stared hard at me. “And why is he your problem?”

  I told him about being hired by Marley. He laid out what I already knew about the gambling wire service.

  I said, “Marley wants leverage over Greenbaum.”

  “There is no leverage,” he said. “You need to understand that Gus Greenbaum is a dangerous man. You’re an idiot to take that case, I don’t care how much money you need. You were an idiot in the first place to get kicked out of the department. You’re an idiot to have your business card found in the purse of our body. Goddamn, Gene, am I even related to you?”

  I used to idolize my brother. When he joined the Army in spring 1917, I lied about my age so I could go with him. We lived through it and joined the police department together. But I rose faster, made detective first, and was assigned to focus on the toughest murders. I cracked big cases, got plum assignments, and Don didn’t try to hide his resentment. He was especially angry that I was named to be Amelia Earhart’s “bodyguard” when she visited Phoenix in ’30 and gave me a ride in her aeroplane. These things and his drinking and cocaine use strained the relationship, made me see him in a new light. I loved my brother, but much of the time I didn’t like him. I did still get postcards from Amelia.

  After a long silence, I went back to the original order of business. “First it’s ‘our body’ and then it’s ‘you’re in the clear.’ So, which is it?”

  He ground out the Lucky in my ashtray.

  “When are you going to make an honest woman out of your Dolores del Rio lookalike?”

  “Victoria is prettier than Dolores del Río, and she’s already an honest woman.”

  “You know what I mean. All that churchgoing and you’re making love to that Mexican girl.”

  I chuckled. “Don Hammons, the paragon of marital fidelity, giving me advice. Look, I’m not a moralist. Stay out of my private life. Anyway, you’re avoiding my question. Here’s why I care about ‘our body.’ If somebody is trying to frame me for murder, then he might kill again once he learns that I’m in the clear. Find a way to point the finger at me more directly. In addition to not wanting another killing, I want to know who the hell is up to this and why. This girl was killed, dismembered, and arranged in new clothes after she bled out. Ever seen a crime like that in Phoenix?” I didn’t give him a chance to answer. “Me, neither.”

  When he next did the classic Don Hammons, withdrawing into silence, I went on. “When you picked me up the other night and took me to the murder scene, you said you wanted my help. I’ve tried to give it. She didn’t fall from the train. No blood on the tracks or the roadbed, which would have indicated she got chewed up by the wheels of the passenger cars. Too little blood around the body, telling us that she was killed and dismembered elsewhere, then dumped where we found her. No identification. And as I say, in death she was arranged, either to make a statement or because she was so despised by the killer. The wounds were severe but too precise to have been made by swinging a hatchet. They are consistent with a butcher’s tools, which were purchased before the murder by one Detective Frenchy Navarre. Who, last I knew, was king of vice cases. So why did he answer your phone just now? I’d say you’ve gotten pretty good value for your consultation so far.”

  “Sure.” He swiveled and faced me, his back against the door. “Have you been following the Halloran trial? Your girl’s testimony sounded crazy as a hoot owl. Judge put a stop to it. Happy Jack got off.”

  “Big surprise,” I said. “Don’t change the subject again. Can you get a fingerprint check on the business card without setting off alarms?”

  “Maybe.” He shrugged. “Give me time.”

  “What else do you know besides their daughter isn’t the dead girl?” I thumbed toward the hacienda.

  “Doc Iverson did the postmortem at St. Joseph’s. He estimated she had been dead for less than eight hours. The body parts were removed with a sharp instrument, then sawed off at the bones, likely while she was nude. Very little blood was on the clothes, which appeared new, from a Los Angeles department store. No scuff marks on her shoes at all. New polish on her finger and toenails.”

  “Raped?”

  “Unlikely. No bruising or scratches. No skin under her nails. But she’d had sex within the past week or so. No signs of restraints such as ropes. Doc drew blood, and we’ll see if drugs or anything interesting turn up. Stomach contents were a ham sandwich and some chocolates. We fingerprinted her, but so far no hits. She wasn’t some roundheels with a prostitution bust in Arizona.”

  “What about sending them off to the FBI?”

  He shook his head. “There’s no appetite for going to that much trouble.”

  “‘That much trouble?’ This is crazy. Murdered girl, no identification. Doesn’t anybody care?”

  “Officially, she probably fell from the train,” Don said.

  I shook my head in frustration. “Distinguishing marks?”

  “She had a small cloverleaf birthmark on the inside of her left elbow.”

  I fired another question: “Cause of death?”

  He hesitated, lighting another cigarette.

  “Blow to the temple. Makeup concealed it.”

  I was surprised, but why should I have been?

  “Like from a sap,” I said. “Like a cop did it. Falling from a train sure as hell didn’t cause that.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself, getting paranoid.”

  The image of the woman’s mouth, open in a scream, floated across my mind, something I would carry with me to the grave. I asked about it.

  “Iverson said the mouth was likely propped open that way,” he said. “She wasn’t conscious when she was sawed apart.”

  “Our killer is such a humanitarian. Why hasn’t this been publicly disclosed as a homicide? You should go to the press. The public might be able to help. Someone might know her.”

  “Because the city commissioners don’t want another Winnie Ruth Judd scandal making Phoenix look bad.” He held up his hand. “Don’t start on me, wasn’t my decision, wasn’t the chief’s decision. The chamber of commerce doesn’t want the city’s reputation further tarnished when they’re rolling out the new ‘Valley of the Sun’ marketing campaign.”

  “Sons of bitches.” Or more kindly: “You can always trace all devilment to a chamber of commerce.” Will Roger
s wrote it on the front page of the newspaper, so it had to be true.

  I preferred the old motto that had been bestowed on Phoenix: American Eden. But I supposed that wouldn’t attract tourists.

  “There’s something else,” Don said. He paused. “She was pregnant. Doc estimated it was about six weeks.”

  Before I could say that this was motive for murder, a man popped out of the groves thirty feet away. He was as big as a house, and his face was distinctive, with a long scar and jailhouse eyes that instantly lit on us. He had a revolver in one hand. With the other, he waved into the trees, and four other men stepped out and started our way.

  Don swiveled forward and said, “I hope all that choir practice hasn’t made you a pacifist.”

  “No.”

  I had just enough time to take off my fedora and use it to conceal me removing the M1911 Colt automatic from its shoulder holster under my suit coat. One round was already in the chamber. I thumbed back the hammer. Don’s black .38 Detective Special was out, too, concealed between his leg and the inside of the car door.

  By this time, the big man was beside my door, and his friends were converging.

  “Out of the car!” he screamed. “We’re taking this!”

  He waved his revolver upward.

  That was his second mistake. His first was coming here at all.

  I lowered my hat and fired. The heavy .45 caliber slug blew off his jaw, split open his scar, and kept going as the back of his head exploded in a geyser of blood, skull, and brains. The impact lifted him as if gravity had been temporarily suspended, and he flew up and back before gravity had its way again and he hit the ground with a hard thud.

  Out of my peripheral vision, I saw a sawed-off in the hand of a scraggly man coming toward Don. It never made it. Don fired twice into his chest, dropping him. Next, Don opened the door and rolled to the dirt prone, where he put two more shots into the third man, who had the added misfortune of having his gun snag in his waistband.

  By this time, I was out and using the door as a shield as a shot went wild. The shooter saw me take aim and panicked, turning to run as I squeezed the trigger three times, spinning him like a top until he landed in a red-stained heap.