by Jon Talton
“I’m needy,” I said, touching her skirt.
“You’ll have to wait, young man.” She paused. “I can’t get that Margaret Bourke-White photo out of my head. There’s got to be more to life than photographing crime scenes and quinceañeras. If she can get on the staff of a major magazine…wow.”
“I said you could do it. Maybe you’d let me tag along. I’m sure New York needs another shamus.”
“I need to build a better portfolio than I have, or nobody will take me seriously. In the meantime, please be careful, Eugene.”
I walked her to her car, where we enjoyed a long kiss. Then she drove around the parkway and headed east toward Central Avenue. I stepped into the shadows of the porch to watch her go. That was when I saw a dark car sitting across the slim linear park come to life, headlights on, pulling out and driving in the same direction.
I ran to my Ford and swung around, headlights off, and followed him. It might be a coincidence, but I wasn’t taking chances.
Out on Central, I marked his taillights going south, the same direction as Victoria. He caught the green light at Roosevelt Street, then it turned amber and red. I ran it and kept my headlights off until there was enough traffic that I could turn them on and blend in. A quarter mile farther south, with neon decorating the business district ahead, he turned right on Van Buren Street. This was the same route Victoria would take to reach her bungalow, which doubled as her photo studio.
I hung back, watching his taillights as we crossed Seventh Avenue. When he turned left on Tenth Avenue by Woodland Park, my gut tightened. Victoria’s house was close. I turned off my lights again and cruised slowly down the darkened residential street.
In quick succession, I saw Victoria park, unload her equipment, and walk past the trunks of palm trees to her bungalow. The dark car waited for her to go in, shut off his lights, then crept past. I parked at the curb fifty feet behind them.
Then he pulled a U-turn at Adams Street and came back. He pulled into a spot south of Victoria’s house far from a streetlight. And sat there.
I gave it fifteen minutes, then climbed out on the passenger side of my Ford, gently closing the door and walking south, mostly concealed by palm, olive, and pepper trees on the narrow parking lawn between the sidewalk and the curb. I left my apartment without my regular pistol, as well as a coat, and the cold penetrated uncomfortably. But I had the .38 Detective Special from the glove box. Now I held it in my right hand, keeping it down against my leg.
The street was quiet except for train noises from the tracks a few blocks south, locomotive whistles and cars coupling, then silence. He stayed in the car, a dark four-door Chevy, so I took my time. With the temperature around freezing, fog wafted from his tailpipe. His engine was on.
Then I was parallel to him, concealed by the lazy fronds of a lush, low Canary Island date palm. Ideally, I would have liked to keep walking, then approach him from a blind spot to his rear. But the tree cover didn’t extend down the street. A nail glowed through the driver’s window but not enough to show a face. The four-door Chevy looked similar to Frenchy’s, to Don’s, to a thousand cars in Phoenix.
I walked fast, stepping off the curb, coming straight at him. But it wasn’t fast enough. He saw me and pulled out. I grabbed the driver’s door handle with my left hand, but he gunned it. The door was locked. For a second, I thought about hanging on and trying to make it up to the running board. But I couldn’t get my foot up in time, had only the barest grip on the door handle, and would have been dragged down the street. The next thing I knew, I was spun around and deposited on the cold pavement. When I looked up, he was a block away and moving fast, lights off, no chance to catch a license plate.
Then he was gone. Who knew the trick of camouflage by driving with your lights off? Cops and criminals. In my mind, the two were rapidly blending together.
Another thing about that Chevy sedan: It had the spare tire outside on the running board. Jimmy Darrow, the railroad bull, said the car he saw pulling away from where Carrie’s body parts were dumped had the same feature. He said it might be a Packard. But what if he were wrong? Hell, even my two-door ragtop had the spare placed that way.
I walked to Victoria’s house to tell her what happened. She tended to the bloody scrape on my left hand.
After I left, I stayed in my car for an hour, watching. Her light went out. I walked through her alley. Sat in the car again. Nothing stirred.
This was familiar terrain beyond the fact that Victoria lived here. North of Van Buren was the University Park neighborhood. At one time, the Methodist Church planned to build a university there. It never happened, but the name stuck as it became a residential subdivision. It had been the center of the murders that became my most famous case. They happened on quiet nights.
Now, no one else came down her street. I finally gave up my watch and drove the empty drags of Phoenix, half aimlessly, half chasing four-door Chevys. Finally, I went home, put on a Duke Ellington record, and started to read some of the material Victoria had retrieved from the college.
As a homicide detective, I often imagined the victims speaking to me. I would talk to them in my head, sometimes out loud: “Tell me how you died. Tell me what happened. Who did this?” It was a useful mental exercise in the investigation.
This time, Carrie was speaking to me through entries in the two-inch-thick diary, written in blue ink, feminine cursive. I would soon realize that some of the contents were more personal than I expected. I picked some random diary pages to get a flavor.
* * *
CARRIE DELL’S DIARY 5/15/32
Tonight K was giving her dewy smile as “Edward” laughed, his cigarette holder at a jaunty angle. P was blowing smoke rings, projecting disinterested bravado. She is all sardonic irony. I caught two lovebirds in the hallway outside the kitchen. The party was only getting started.
This is so easy it’s scary! We’re up and running like my wild palomino when we raced through the woods in autumn. Dad always said I should run my own business, work for myself. But I bet he never had this in mind. With the right connections, Prohibition makes everything possible. People are such hypocrites. The biggest moralists are the biggest libertines. Scratch that prissy, churchgoing surface and there they are. Revealed! Naked as can be. Someday I’ll make them characters in a novel. Times are hard, but big money is to be made from this crowd, with the right partners. I think I’ve got them. Now if I can keep trusting them. My bet is that money will ensure that.
So far, the business is operating as I intended. We’ve started with a core of a dozen regular clients. I checked out each one myself, made sure the connection was right and tight. You wouldn’t believe who some of them are, and Cynthia’s not telling. Confidentiality is what we’re selling. Am I a poet and don’t know it? The Biltmore job is the perfect cover. Better than that, really. My business actually complements theirs.
Carrie Dell is a long way from Prescott and not going to end up as a teacher. I can feel the sidewalks of Greenwich Village under my feet, being on the arms of handsome beaux in the jazz clubs of Harlem. But…must not get uppity, girl. Always watchful. Always on guard.
CARRIE DELL’S DIARY 9/20/32
He tells me to call him Frenchy. But I love his real first name. Leonce. It has music to it. My Frenchman. My Cajun lover. The appeal of an older man, and, no, I’m not looking for a daddy. His forty years vs. my nineteen. So I call him Leonce and he always laughs.
He’s so much more interesting than the college boys who want me. He’s worldly, dangerous. I always went for the bad boys. But his bad side is real, earned. He’s a real detective, too.
He tells me about the police, and it’s exciting. His fellows on the “Hat Squad,” he calls it. I sit in the car and watch them. The ones he talks about the most are Turk Muldoon, Don Hammons, and his brother Gene. That’s the detective who caught the University Park Strangler. Leonce is envio
us. Gene is also tall and handsome, and Leonce is envious of that, too. It’s an itch my Frenchman can’t scratch. I know the advantage that good looks convey. I wonder how Gene uses his?
We go to fancy dinners and speakeasies, and he introduces me as Cynthia. It’s a name I found in the newspaper women’s page. I like it. I can tell he’s worried, though, that people might see us together and tell his wife. He hates her. She hates him, at least to hear him tell it.
My group is envious. They want to know who this man is. And he’s interested in them. It makes me proud and territorial, a little jealous.
Tonight we got a hotel room and he finally took me. I didn’t resist. He likes his love rough. I acted as if it was my first time. He wondered about that because it didn’t hurt, no bleeding. Maybe all that horseback riding already “broke me in.” Ha! I was barely drunk and remembered every second. How his muscles flexed and tensed. He told me he loved me. How the tables turned as we went on. He doesn’t know that he isn’t my first affaire!
The taker became the taken.
Afterward, when I told him I was a virgin, he didn’t believe it. He was wondering what lovers—mythical Adonises in his head—had me before him, were handsomer and more skilled than him. I could tell. And I ain’t telling. It showed me I could make him jealous, too. Oh, if he only knew the truth.
I’ll wrap him around my thumb.
CARRIE DELL’S DIARY 11/1/32
Big Cat is my best lover and my biggest risk. Tonight he exploded on me, slapped me. I punched him in the nose and I thought he was going to kill me. I’m not making it up. I could see the murder in his eyes, and I know he’s capable of it. He could do it and nobody would ever know, he’d get away with it. But I was able to play sorry girl and cry and pretty soon we were in bed. “I’ll make you laugh instead of cry, baby girl,” he said. I’m nobody’s baby girl.
Big Cat has muscled in to take a bigger share of profits. I don’t like it. This isn’t the agreement. But, as he said, “What are you going to do about it, baby girl?” For the first time, I feel over my head. How will he react if I tell him that I’ve missed my period?
Seventeen
The next morning, I woke up with Carrie’s diary on my lap and the phonograph needle scratching. As I bathed, shaved, and dressed, I thought about the diary. Navarre was mentioned by name. But who was Big Cat, a man Carrie was afraid of?
Carrie-Cynthia wrote with a tone far beyond what I expected from a nineteen-year-old girl. But Pamela said she had literary aspirations. Maybe I’d known the wrong nineteen-year-old girls.
I stuffed the letters, journal of writing, and diary in my briefcase and headed to work.
Downtown, people were talking about it on the street before I got to the newsstand outside the Monihon Building. Two black decks in capital letters on the front page of the Arizona Republic:
ROOSEVELT ESCAPES DEATH
AS ASSASSIN SHOOTS FIVE
The president-elect was visiting Miami when an Italian bricklayer opened fire at the Bay Front Park. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was expected to die. Four others were wounded, including a detective shot in the head.
I had never been to Florida. The attempted murder of Roosevelt, and a sidebar about the Secret Service detail at the White House being doubled, added to the sense of dread as the Depression worsened. Even Will Rogers’s pithy two paragraphs didn’t ease the feeling.
This wasn’t the only news. Outside Los Angeles, a bandit boarded the eastbound Sunset Limited and robbed passengers until he faced an armed conductor. Both men exchanged fire, with the robber killed and the conductor badly wounded. The story said the Southern Pacific would combine the Sunset with the Golden State and the train would arrive in Phoenix at 7:15 a.m. today—old news, because it was already past nine. Crime was down in the Great Depression.
It was a good thing the national morticians’ group was going to hold its convention at the Hotel Westward Ho. At least the cold wave was easing, with Phoenix forecast to hit 72 degrees today.
Upstairs, Gladys nodded toward my office.
“Your friend is back.”
I doubted it was a friend, and sure enough Kemper Marley was pacing around the room, fussing with the safe combination. He showed no contrition when I caught him.
“Going into the safecracking business, Kemper?” I put my hat on the coatrack and sat at my desk. “Phoenix is notorious among safecrackers. The detectives interrogate them with blows from phone books. Hurts like hell. If you do it the right way, it never shows a bruise. Safecrackers avoid Phoenix.”
He barely heard me before launching into a lather. “You hear about that damned Frank Roosevelt? Almost got himself killed. Then where would we be? I’m telling you this country is on the verge. Immigrants like the assassin in Miami. Communists everywhere. Fascists. At least fascists believe in free enterprise. You watch how Herr Hitler turns Germany around, cleans up those Reds and Jews. It might come to that here, you know. Blood in the streets. We’re closer to it than most people realize.”
The ball-peen hammer sat in the client chair. He was in his come-to-town outfit of a black suit, vest, and tie.
“I want to get some private investigating from my retainer, Hammons.”
“How’s that?”
“Frenchy Navarre. What do you know about him? Is he trustworthy?”
I leaned back and considered my approach. How about straight on?
“Frenchy, huh? I hear he’s Greenbaum’s man, collecting from the bookies in Darktown. One of his runners got his throat slit yesterday, body dumped in a junkyard by the tracks. Was that your work, Kemper? Send Gus a message?”
Navarre had killed Zoogie Boogie. I wasn’t feeling charitable. And I was armed with the information I picked up while listening to Kemper lay into Frenchy yesterday.
Marley was momentarily thrown off-balance. That gave me time to light a coffin nail, as much to irritate him as for my pleasure.
He finally said, “What if I wanted to hire him?”
“To do what?”
He waved the smoke away with his hand. “Errands.”
Errands, my ass. “I’d say you’d be playing a dangerous game by hiring an untrustworthy, dirty cop.”
His lips curled up. “I like dirty cops.” The smile didn’t last. “But I don’t want somebody who would play a double game, give Gus Greenbaum intelligence about me. Or do something stupid like killing Greenbaum’s line rider and making it seem like I ordered it.”
“Well, there you have your answer.”
“Tell me about the dead girl. Carrie’s her name?”
I leaned forward. “What makes you think that’s her name?”
“I’ve already told you I have my sources.”
“Then what do they tell you?”
“They say she was meticulously cut up, head, arms, legs, and laid out by the railroad tracks at Sixteenth Street, south of Eastlake Park. There wasn’t enough blood there, so she was killed and sawed up somewhere else, then taken to be dumped. Nineteen years old. Pretty. A student at the teachers’ college. And she was pregnant.”
I exhaled a plume of smoke, considering the depth of his information, who might have told him these things, most of which I had discovered. The only things he didn’t mention were her being from Prescott with a drunken father, working last summer at the Arizona Biltmore, and setting up a tourist business. Those were details in my report to Captain McGrath.
He also didn’t know about my business card being in Carrie’s otherwise nearly-empty purse. And he didn’t mention the Hamilton railroad watch I found in the Hooverville that his gang laid waste. Was he capable of ordering a prison hit on Jack Hunter, who had information for me? You bet.
“You know, Kemper, if I was still a police detective and heard all that, you’d be my prime suspect. First, I’d put you in the interrogation room for a tumble. And I’d have a search warra
nt by this afternoon and we’d go over every inch of your property looking for evidence. Who knows what we might find out there? We’d search your whorehouse, too. You couldn’t buy your way out of it, either. Not murder of a pretty white coed.”
I’d started this to feel him out, but the more I talked the more plausible he actually became as a suspect. Sure, Carrie mentions Navarre in her diary. But who the hell knew where her adventure was going, the men she was attracting? Was Marley the man named Big Cat?
Marley’s eyes started blinking quickly. But he managed that reptilian smile.
He said, “Then I guess it’s a good thing you’re no longer a cop, Hammons.”
I slapped my badge down on the desk. “Guess what, kiddo. You were misinformed. And I have one assignment. Find the monster who killed this girl.”
The face froze.
“You know things that only the murderer would know.”
“But my sources…”
“Save it,” I interrupted, standing and walking to the safe. I spun the dial and opened it. Then I came behind him and roughly slid the envelope containing his money into his coat pocket.
“Now get the hell out of my office. The next time we meet things might not be so friendly.”
* * *
Marley bumped into Don while exiting the office. Don watched him go, then closed the door.
“What’s with Kemper Marley?”
“A little attitude adjustment.”
My brother chuckled, sat down, and used the tallboy lighter on my desk to get his Lucky Strike going.
“Roosevelt was one lucky son of a bitch.”
“Let’s hope that luck lasts,” I said.
He tossed an envelope on my blotter. Looking inside, I saw my business card with powder revealing prints. The card he had removed from Carrie’s purse, which was part of the stage dressing at her death scene.
“As you can see, I got it dusted,” he said, stretching out his long legs.
