by Jon Talton
“And?”
“The good news is your fingerprints aren’t on it. You had the good sense to only hold it at the edges. Otherwise, nothing. No matches on file.”
“With criminals in our files.”
“That’s the point,” he said. “The individual who put that card in the girl’s purse hasn’t been arrested here.”
“And you won’t send it to the FBI?”
He shook his head.
“Ask McGrath!” I rubbed my stiff neck. “You could at least pretend to give a damn. What about fingerprints of cops?”
He took a long, thoughtful drag. “What are you getting at, Gene?”
“You know damned well. I think the killer might have been a police officer, with that expert blow to her temple. Kemper Marley and a college student also in the running. Neither of those two have been printed.”
He started to speak, then saw the badge on my desk.
“What the hell is this? Where did you get this?”
“The chief of Ds.”
“Jesus Christ, Gene. Are you back on the Hat Squad?”
“Not officially.”
He smashed out his smoke and immediately lit another.
“You’re investigating the girl’s death.”
“Murder,” I said. “And yes, it’s the only thing I’m investigating.”
“Oh, my fucking God.” His shoulders relaxed. “Well, walk me through it.”
I did.
After I was done, he lowered his head and looked me in the eye. “Your spy trick out at Marley’s place has Frenchy confess to killing Zoogie Boogie. Do you want to try getting the county attorney to prosecute a decorated police officer over a stool pigeon? The stupidest lawyer in Maricopa County could raise a mountain of reasonable doubt.”
I said, “Too bad Frenchy’s not Ruth Judd.”
He smiled and continued, “Greenbaum sounds like an interesting cat. This girl is full of secrets and trouble. Otherwise, everything you have is speculation and circumstantial. Jack Hunter’s an interesting lead, him knowing about the girl and ending up on the wrong end of a shiv. I like your sniffing out potential suspects by the butcher tools, but you’d need to find and match the actual ones. Ideally, you’d locate the place where the girl was dismembered, too. Then the man following you, or men, all the way to Prescott and outside your apartment. They might be related to the murder. Or they might be about the Marley-Greenbaum contest to throw weight. Or something else.”
This was my brother: He might be on the pipe, a cocaine snowbird, a drunk—but he never lost his penetrating intellect, never got lost in the woods, was a detective’s detective.
I remembered the time soon after I joined the Hat Squad, when Don and I were hanging out at Union Station one afternoon. Two men came in on the Santa Fe, unremarkable to me but not to my brother. He stopped them after they picked up a trunk at baggage claim. When they were confronted, they started stammering and sweating. They voluntarily opened the trunk, revealing gold ore. Don nodded at me to put them in handcuffs, and we took them to the shabby headquarters at old City Hall.
There he sweated them for six hours in the clubhouse, finally getting their confession to stealing the gold from a prospector near Bouse, a tiny railroad stop a few miles from the Colorado River on the Santa Fe line that branched off northwest from Wickenburg. He wired the sheriff in Yuma County, and learned the prospector wasn’t merely the victim of a robbery but dead, killed with pickaxes. Another six hours, and they crumbled under Don’s calm, focused questioning. They admitted to the murder, but claimed the mastermind was a third man. Don wired the police in Los Angeles, who picked him up. He took the bounce at Florence, and the two we arrested got off with life.
He stubbed out the third Lucky. “How can I help, Gene?”
“You could check these prints against cops.”
He sighed. “When a man joins the department, he gets fingerprinted partly so we can rule him out if he touches something on a crime scene. They go into his personnel jacket, and it’s locked up. Unless McGrath gives me permission, this will take a lot of time, and a lot of discretion.”
“That’s how you can help.”
* * *
After Don left, I arranged Carrie’s collection of love letters by date. The last one was dated two weeks before her death. It was typed.
C,
I’ve never begrudged you your freedom, your indiscretions. Our enterprise has made us all plenty of money. Me, your little friends, you most of all. All this has come thanks to my protection, don’t forget that.
But now your silence is killing me. I know I haven’t yet left my wife. It will happen I promise but I also have to think about our children. Your too young to understand how complicated these things are. They take time. I thought we had discussed this and you agreed to wait.
And have you been faithful to me, hardly. Yet I’ve stood by, knowing how you are. You and your older men. Trying to find father figures to make up for the drunk whose your real father. I get you baby girl. You tell me that your pregnant. How do I even know that the child is mine?
Now I hear nothing from you. Not one letter or call. Do you take me for a fool? I know your a little schemer, C. Don’t think I don’t. Don’t think you can cut me off and cut me out. Don’t say you weren’t warned. I’m watching you when you don’t know it. Write me. Call me at work tomorrow.
And this one had no signature. I couldn’t match the handwriting. It did contain misspellings like the “Admirer’s” note. But plenty of people spelled badly. One thing was sure: He was no longer her admirer. Something had radically changed in their relationship. What was the enterprise and who were the “little friends” involved? The note was a clear threat, even to murder. I carefully refolded it. My mind went to Navarre, of course. He was married. As a cop, he could offer protection. Now I needed to find a sample of his handwriting to compare with the love letters. If his fingerprints were on these notes, it would be compelling evidence that he was the killer.
But I would have to read more. I didn’t want my growing hatred of Frenchy to blind me to the possibility of other suspects. And the typed note used the term “baby girl,” which appeared in Carrie’s description of Big Cat, not Navarre.
If this was the trail that led to her murder, horrible as it was, it meant we weren’t dealing with a monster who would strike again. The man who had killed Carrie was monster enough.
Eighteen
I started to compare that final, nasty billet-doux with the last pages of Carrie’s diary. Skipping to the end of a book wasn’t usually my style, but I’d make an exception here. I could always go back through more methodically.
The intercom buzzed.
“A man is on the phone,” Gladys said. “He won’t give his name but said he needs to speak to you immediately.”
I told her to put it through and picked up.
“I’ve got your girl.” A gravelly tone. Someone disguising his voice. “If you want to see her again, go to the phone booth inside the Gold Spot Rexall at Third Avenue and Roosevelt. I’ll call you in ten minutes. Then I’m going to run you around, and I’ll tell you what I need for you to do to get the pretty photographer back. If I see any cops, she’ll be on the wrong end of my saw, just like Carrie. I’ll be watching you. Not all the time, but you won’t know when. Get moving.”
Then the line went dead. A cold spike of dread went into my gut as I checked my wristwatch. I fumbled Victoria’s number. It rang and rang. Fifteen times. No answer.
I grabbed my suit coat and fedora, checked the magazine in my pistol, and ran out of the office. Down on Washington Street, I turned north and sprinted. No car today. No time to wait for the Kenilworth streetcar. Dodging honking cars at Adams, Monroe, and Van Buren streets, then I was out of downtown pounding the sidewalk as hard as I could. Seven blocks and a half mile to go. My watch told me I had five
minutes. I was sweating by the time I threw open the door to the drugstore. The pay phone in back was ringing.
“Don’t touch that,” I commanded the old lady about to answer. She backed away and huffed off.
The same voice: “You got a workout, Hammons.”
“What do you want?” I said.
“So impatient,” he said. “Good things come to those who wait. Get over to the phone booth outside the Bayless market at Central and Moreland. I’ll give you five minutes.”
I said, “If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.”
“You wasted thirty seconds.” Then the line went dead.
This was an easier run, a long block along the narrow Portland Parkway, past my apartment. Then I crossed Central, again holding out my arm and causing angry motorists to stop. I worried that one might not see me—or wouldn’t care—and send me to the hospital or the morgue.
Bayless was busy. The phone booth was empty. I stepped inside, closed the door, and checked my watch. A minute to go. I pulled off my suit coat. Between the run and the sunny day, I was plenty warm. I checked my surroundings. Only shoppers, all women, coming and going with their groceries. They paid me no mind. No parked cars I could see through the windows, much less four-door Chevys.
Five minutes went by, and the phone was silent.
I lit a nail and leaned against the wall of the booth. Anybody who wanted to use a phone here was out of luck. I should have stayed with Victoria last night, should have accompanied her on the commercial shoot. Should have. Should have.
“The wrong end of my saw, just like Carrie.” It had to be the killer.
Ten minutes more passed and still silence. I looked at the pay phone, willing it to ring.
At fifteen minutes, I fed a coin in the phone, heard it fall into the machine, and called Victoria again, getting no answer. It kept my nickel. Damned Ma Bell. I flipped through the phone book. Banged the phone, inserted another coin, and I called the McCulloch Brothers studio.
“I’m looking for Victoria Vasquez,” I said.
In a moment the most beautiful sound in my life came across the wire: her voice.
“Victoria? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Eugene. What’s wrong?”
In the distance, I heard sirens.
“I think I’ve been duped. Do you still have that .38?”
“Right with me.”
“Good. Please be careful. I love you.”
I hung up before she could respond. I was afraid to know what she might say. Then I ran to my apartment, got in the Ford, and drove toward the Monihon Building.
Three blocks away I could see the fire engines and smoke.
By the time I got there and parked, firemen were setting up fans at the door of Boehmer’s drugs on the first floor. A plume of smoke was wafting as far as Kress. I found Gladys amid the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. She was wearing her cloche.
“They say someone set off a smoke bomb in the drugstore. We thought it was a fire.”
I cursed and ran for the stairs.
“I locked up!” she called.
But that wasn’t enough. By the time I reached our landing, I was coughing and out of breath, my eyes burning from the smoke. But I could see someone had used a pry bar to wrench open the old wooden door to the outer office. I pulled my M1911 and thumbed back the hammer. Then I slowly pushed the door open.
The outer office was undisturbed, and no bad guy awaited me. The accountant’s door was fine. The same could not be said for mine. The door to my inner office had received the same pry-bar treatment, with the knob and lock sitting on the wooden floor. Again, I carefully pushed the door fully open and traversed the room with the barrel of my gun. Whoever had been here was gone. The safe was undisturbed, while all the drawers of my desk were thrown onto the floor and given a quick shake. He didn’t have enough time to get in my filing cabinet, which was locked anyway.
But Carrie’s letters and diary were gone.
He was a cool operator, knowing I had taken the streetcar to work and was without a car, so he could run me around on foot, get me out of the building so he could set off the smoke bomb in the pharmacy, watch people evacuate the upper floors, then make his move. Crack open the doors, make a quick ransack of my office with the biggest prize sitting right on top of the desk. He might have made the call to me at the Rexall from right here, with firemen and bystanders down below. Very slick. Very nervy.
I holstered my gun and stared at the disaster that was my empty blotter. How could I have been so careless? If I had ten minutes to get to the Rexall, what difference would it have made to pause a few seconds and lock up this critical evidence in the safe? But at the time I was only thinking of Victoria, fearful she would end up dead and dismembered.
Now I was left with a good memory of the snippets I had read of Carrie’s last months. It was so little to go on, leaving far more questions. As I opened windows in the office to let the smoke vent, I imagined the burglar tossing Carrie’s love letters and diary into an incinerator. I tasted the ashes and cursed under my breath.
* * *
Angry and anxious to retake the offensive, I drove south across the tracks to where the Mexican part of Grant Park turned Negro. The individual houses were small and old, many going back to the 1890s or earlier, some on meticulously cared-for lots, others on weedy dirt. I knew some of their floors were dirt and outhouses were common. But given the age of the area, for most of the year it benefited from an abundant shade canopy.
At Hadley Street, I spun into a dusty lot before a tar-paper building with double screen doors. Don’t be fooled by the Barq’s root beer strips on the door handles—“Drink Barq’s, It’s Good”—this was a colored speakeasy and juke joint.
I could hear jazz coming from a jukebox and laughter, but when I stepped inside, all went quiet. Three pool tables, a jukebox, tables and chairs, a bar. Six young colored men stared at me. One started a military-like drill with his pool stick, while his friend tossed a cue ball in his hand. It was as white as he was black and would find an easy mark on my forehead, if the cat with the pool stick didn’t get to me first.
He said, “Lost your way, Officer?”
Suddenly the entire door behind me was filled with a giant. Cyrus Cleveland doffed his hat and stepped in the room.
“You boys stand down.” They sullenly went back to playing pool. He motioned for me to follow him. We went into his office in the rear, and he shut the door. With an expert spinning toss, he landed his homburg on the coatrack.
“They don’t mean any harm,” he said. “You smell like smoke.”
“You have amazing powers of observation, Cyrus.”
He smiled the finest dental work in the state. “The great Gene Hammons reduced to working as a private shamus. All because he would have told the truth about Ruth Judd.”
“Yeah, well, Ruth is going to hang, and I hung out my shingle.” I sat and he eased his bulk into a fancy leather executive chair behind an expensively appointed desk.
“I was actually coming to see you.” He slapped down a C-note on the leather-edged blotter. “I need to hire a detective. Somebody killed my boy Zoogie Boogie, slit his throat, let him bleed out like a pig. Can’t let that go unpunished.” He stretched out his arms. “As you know, I’m a preacher, among other things. And I believe in forgiveness and reconciliation, communion with the Lord, the New Testament. You still singing in the choir at Central Methodist?”
I said that I was.
“You sing well for a white boy. But, as I was saying, there are times, and this is one of them, when I go Old Testament.”
“An eye for an eye…”
“Exactly.”
Cleveland might or might not have been ordained, but from this tar-paper palace he had presided over the colored rackets in Phoenix for the past ten years. He hovered at the border
between crime and the city’s small Negro business and professional class, which included college-educated doctors, teachers, and ministers.
On the legit side, he owned a funeral home, was a member of the NAACP and Colored Masonic Lodge, and mediated disputes south of the tracks. He was an investor in the Phoenix Tribune, the Negro newspaper, until the Depression killed it. He was also a silent partner in the Rice Hotel and Swindall Tourist Home, which catered to Negro travelers who weren’t allowed to stay at white hotels.
His reputation for violence was enough that he rarely had to use it. The story where he staked a rival out in the desert atop a red-ant mound and covered him with molasses—it might have been true or not, but people believed it either way. And he was the richest colored man in town. I had a grudging respect for him because he was a veteran, too.
This was going to be the easiest hundred dollars I ever made, but I circled around.
“What was Zoogie to you?”
“He collected from my bookies.”
“Why use a white man for that?”
“Because the white man’s ice is always colder, Hammons. Zoogie was a mess, but when he got out of stir he came to me and I put him to work. I’m an equal opportunity employer. I figured my boys would show him more respect when he came calling, and they did. Send a Negro for that, and they’d know him, he might be hesitant. But send a white boy, and they’d cough it up.”
“Maybe one of them didn’t respect him.”
“No way. It’d never happen. Disrespecting him would mean disrespecting me.”
We fell silent. Somebody sure as hell had disrespected Zoogie.
Finally, I said, “I hear you’re Greenbaum’s man now.”
He tilted his head, amused.
“I’m nobody’s man but my own. I do have a partnership with Gus on gambling. It’s a new world, Hammons. The Chicago Outfit is losing out with Prohibition going away and Capone in the pen in Atlanta. He has the clap, you know. Anyway, the profits are going to be in consolidating gambling nationwide through the wire service. They gave me a nice cut.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “But why does Greenbaum give a damn about penny-ante bookies in Phoenix if he’s responsible for the whole Southwest?”
