by Ross Thomas
“Why pay off the beat cop?” I said. “He’s not going to arrest anybody if they’re dragging in that much downtown.”
Croner gave me a pitying look, which he managed by manipulating his eyebrows. “Why pay off the beat cop, he asks. Well, all he has to do is stand out there for about three hours and the guy inside begins to hurt. Nobody’s gonna play numbers at a spot where a cop’s holding up the wall.”
“How many places like that in town?” Necessary said, mostly for my benefit, I thought.
Croner shrugged his bony shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe a couple of hundred, maybe more. I think they lose count in Niggertown. Last time I figured it out the total monthly payoff to the cops was around maybe half a million a month.”
“Nice,” Necessary said. “Real nice.”
“Why aren’t you still writing?” I said.
Croner shot quick looks at his two curved mirrors. “Like your buddy here says, I thought the dues were too high so I quit paying the beat cop. He stood outside my place for four hours a day for two weeks. I went broke. Then the people I banked with got mad and took it away from me and gave it to the guy across the street.”
“Seen enough?” Necessary said.
“I think so.”
“Thanks, Croner,” Necessary said. “I’ll be around in a couple of days with a little something for you.”
Croner nodded glumly. “You want anything to read?” he said and waved a hand at the racks of books and magazines. “On the house.”
Necessary shook his head firmly. “My wife don’t like me to read that stuff less I’m home where it’ll do her some good. How ‘bout you?” he said to me.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Croner nodded again, just as glumly as before. “Don’t blame you. It’s all a bunch of crap. You’d be surprised at who buys it though. Sometimes I think this whole town is full of freaks.”
We got the car out of the lot and Necessary drove down Fifth to Forrest and turned left. “How much cash you got on you?” he said.
“About eight hundred.”
“That’ll get you in.”
“Where?”
“I’ll show you in a minute.” He turned right on Sixth Street and went two more blocks. “Just to your left is the new municipal center and police headquarters where I spent last night,” he said.
It was new, about fifteen stories high, and with its parking lot took up most of a city block. It was built of precast concrete slabs and its windows were tinted almost black and recessed a foot or so into the outer wall. The black windows gave it a grim, forbidding air and that was probably the way that they wanted it to look.
“They got the criminal courts in there, too,” Necessary said. “The city and county jails are around back.”
Across Sixth Street from headquarters were the usual inexpensive restaurants, poolhalls, and bars frequented by those who have good and bad reason to hang around police headquarters. There was a lawyers’ building and a number of signs painted on windows in gold leaf advertising twenty-four-hour bail bond service. The block also had three pawnshops.
Necessary drove into another parking lot and we walked up Sixth Street and turned into the side entrance of a three-story brick building whose ground floor was home to the Bench and Gavel Bar. We walked up a flight of stairs and down a hall that was lined with the offices of bail bondsmen and one-man legal offices. A phone rang occasionally. The sound of electric typewriters was constant. Necessary pushed through a door with no lettering on it. Past the door was a regular reception room with a desk and a chair. Behind the desk sat a young, uniformed policeman who nodded at Necessary and stared at me.
“You gonna try it again, huh?” he said to Necessary.
“Try,” Necessary said.
“He okay?” the cop said, nodding at me.
“He’s okay,” Necessary said.
The cop reached under the desk and a buzzer sounded. We went through another door and into a room whose three windows offered a fine view of police headquarters across Sixth Street. There were two poker tables in the room, six chairs at each, and at least three of the gamblers wore the blue uniforms and the insignia of police lieutenant or captain. There were two chairs open at the far table and Necessary and I sat down next to each other. On my left was a police lieutenant with a small stack of chips in front of him. He nodded at me and I nodded back.
A young man of about thirty with green eyes and crinkly brown hair grinned at Necessary and said, “Well, Chief, you gonna try to get even?”
“I’ll take two hundred worth,” Necessary said and pushed ten twenties across the table. The man with the green eyes looked at me and said, “How much, friend?”
“Two hundred,” I said and gave him four fifties. We played draw for an hour and I won nearly fifty dollars. Necessary lost a hundred. The police lieutenant was the big loser. He dropped nearly a thousand during the hour to a pair of quiet thin men with careful faces whose conversation was limited to “in, out, call, up twenty, or check.” Whenever the chips in front of the lieutenant disappeared, he merely looked at the man with the crinkly hair, who shoved another two or three-hundred-dollar stack at him. The lieutenant was a bad player, a compulsive better, and an indifferent bluffer. At four o’clock he looked at his watch, cashed in forty dollars’ worth of chips, nodded at me again, rose and left. The two captains at the other table also cashed in and left.
The man with the crinkly hair sighed. “Thank God he doesn’t win often,” he said to nobody in particular.
“Free ride again, huh?” Necessary said.
“When they win, they win. When they lose, they put it on the tab and the tab’s never paid.” He looked at Necessary. “Hear you had a little trouble last night.”
“Just a misunderstanding,” Necessary said.
“Uh-huh,” the man with the green eyes and crinkly hair said, “that’s what I heard. A misunderstanding.”
“Deal,” said one of the men with a careful face. We played until five and I lost $125. Necessary was ahead a hundred or so. He shoved his chips in and the man with the crinkly hair cashed them without comment. I tossed him the couple of chips that I had left and he handed me $10.
“Come back,” he said, “now that you know the way.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I will.”
A different young policeman was on duty at the desk in the waiting room. He looked at us as we went out but said nothing. Halfway down the stairs, Necessary said, “That’s one of the six games that Lynch runs. It starts at nine every morning and runs till about five A.M. The headquarters’ brass play free, but they’re all pretty bad and don’t win much.”
When we were on Sixth Street, Necessary paused and said, “You want a drink?”
“Sounds good.”
We went into the cool, damp interior of the Bench and Gavel, sat in a booth, and ordered two gin and tonics. Necessary took a long swallow of his and said, “How’d you like the tour?”
“Educational.”
“Give you any ideas?”
“A few.”
“We only skimmed the surface today,” he said.
“What’s it look like underneath?”
“It’s not the looks so much, it’s the smell.”
“Pretty bad?”
“It stinks,” Necessary said.
“And the more it’s stirred, the worse it’ll get.”
Necessary finished his drink and waved for another one. “You figure on doing a little stirring?”
I nodded. “When I find a long enough spoon.”
CHAPTER 27
The evening paper, The News-Calliope, broke the story a week later with a screaming, eight-column banner. Skirting the libel laws by a legal pica or so, the publication charged that Mrs. Francine Sobour, prominent realtor and secretary of the Swankerton Clean Government Association, had stolen nearly a half million dollars from some Catholic nuns and had used the funds to get herself out of a financial hole.
To prove it,
the newspaper printed pictures of Xeroxed copies of various checks and documents that had been involved in the transaction. There was even a signed, front-page editorial by the editor and publisher himself, Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III, calling upon Mrs. Sobour to resign from the Clean Government Association “until these damaging and shocking allegations are explained to the complete satisfaction of concerned citizens, Catholic and Protestant alike.” He forgot to mention those of the Jewish faith, but that must have been an unintentional oversight.
The story pushed Washington and Southeast Asia back to pages four and five. The reform candidate for mayor, a prissy-looking attorney with rimless glasses, said that he was “deeply disturbed.” The incumbent mayor, Pierre (Pete) Robineaux, whom I had met at Lynch’s Victorian house, said that it was “shocking, but not surprising,” and Phetwick’s paper printed a picture of him saying it with his tiny mouth agape and his eyes bulging half out of their sockets. The law firm that handled Mrs. Sobour’s affairs issued a statement that in one paragraph made vague threats about filing a libel suit and in the next announced that Mrs. Sobour would “have no comment at present.”
The TV stations picked it up, of course, and showed pictures of the virtually completed luxury development that Mrs. Sobour was in hock for. They also ran some old film clips of her which showed a still attractive, dark-haired woman with a broad smile and a cheery wave. Some of the Sisters of Solace were also interviewed. They said that they were praying for Mrs. Sobour.
At nine o’clock that night, Mayor Robineaux bought a half hour of political time on all three television stations and used it to attack the Clean Government Association as “the spoiler of Swankerton.” He wasn’t a very good speaker and since he had preempted two of the top ten TV programs, he probably lost himself a few thousand votes.
It had taken me the entire week to get the information on the Sobour woman to Ramsey Lynch. I gave it to him piecemeal, an item at a time. Some of it was Xeroxed on different machines, some of it I had copied in my own scrawled handwriting on the backs of envelopes, and some of it was verbal stuff that Lynch could check out himself. Orcutt and I spent hours deciding what particular document or scrap of evidence Lynch should get on a particular day and what form it should take. Carol Thackerty had suggested that I use my almost indecipherable handwriting.
Lynch had been like a man who is given a jigsaw puzzle one piece at a time. He had a vague, general idea of its outline, but until I handed him the final damning piece of documentation, the picture had been of interesting composition, but inadequate impact. The final piece brought it all into focus and Lynch said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned go to hell, so that’s how she did it!”
“She’s good,” I said.
“Good, my ass, she’s damn near perfect. The thing is, she could’ve paid it all back in three months and nobody’d ever known the difference.”
“That’s right.”
Lynch looked at me carefully. “How’d you get tipped off?”
“I listen a lot,” I said. “And I remember what I hear.”
“You must have done some sneaking around late at night.”
I shook my head. “Early in the morning. Before cock crow.”
Lynch grinned and nodded his four or five chins. “That’s a good time all right.” He tapped the pile of Xeroxed material and scribbled notes with a forefinger. “You know what I’m gonna do with all this?”
“What?”
“I’m gonna get it all typed up neat with extra Xeroxed copies of everything and then I’m gonna wrap it up in a pink ribbon and send it over to old Phetwick at the Calliope with a note that says ‘for your information.’ “
“He’ll print it.”
“He might sit on it till it’s hatched,” Lynch said with a dubious look. “He’s one of the high muckety-mucks in the Clean Government crowd.”
“That’s why he’ll print it,” I said. “That and because he’s in the business of selling newspapers. Christ, The News-Calliope will be more outraged and hurt than the nuns themselves.” I didn’t mention that a reporter on the Calliope had dug up most of the material on Mrs. Sobour nearly two months before and that Phetwick had locked it away in a safe.
We were in my hotel room at the Sycamore, alone except for Boo Robineaux, the mayor’s disenchanted heir, who was reading a copy of Evergreen, or at least admiring the pictures.
“Boo,” Lynch said, “bring me my bag over here.”
Boo rose, not taking his eyes from the magazine, picked up the briefcase, brought it over to Lynch, handed it to him, and went back to his chair without skipping a word. He seemed totally disinterested.
“Got a little something for you,” Lynch said, unlocking the briefcase.
“Like money?”
“Like money. Sorry I’m a week late with it, but we wanted a look at the merchandise.”
He started taking it out of the briefcase and stacking it on the coffee table. Then he was done and there were ten stacks of brand new fifty-dollar bills.
“Twenty-five grand,” he said. “Want to count it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t even want to touch it.”
“What’s the matter? You said cash.”
“Tell you what you do,” I said. “You put the money back in the briefcase, give it to Boo, and tell him to go across the street to the First National and ask that nice vice-president over there, the one who’s so friendly, to change it into used tens, twenties, and just a few old fifties. You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you, Lynch?”
Lynch chuckled. “By God, I bet you think it’s queer.”
“No,” I said. “I just think it’s new and so are the serial numbers.”
Lynch tried to look gravely offended, but it was ruined by the twinkle in his eyes. “There’s not much Christian trust in that heart of yours, Brother Dye.”
“None at all, Brother Lynch.”
We had a drink while Boo Robineaux went across street to switch the new money for old bills. “What else do you think you might dig up?” Lynch said.
“You just named it,” I said. “Something else.”
“Just as good.”
“Better, I think.”
“You’re not sure yet?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m gonna have something for you to slip your friend Orcutt.”
“When?”
“You anxious?”
“I’m supposed to be working for him.”
“That’s right, I keep getting confused about who you really work for.”
“So do I.”
“I hope it’s nothing you can’t straighten out.”
“It’s not.”
“Orcutt pressing you?”
“He keeps asking.”
“Next time he does, tell him a couple of days.”
“It had better be good.”
Lynch smiled comfortably, as if well pleased with life and his place in the scheme of things. “It’ll be just dandy,” he said.
After I put the $25,000 in old bills in my safe-deposit box, I called an airline just for the hell of it, I told myself, and asked what flights there were from Swankerton to San Francisco and if there was a connecting polar flight from there to Geneva. When she said that there wasn’t, I thanked her and lied about how I would make other arrangements out of New York.
I’m still not sure what I would have done if I could have made connections. For a few moments I had been on my way, gone from Swankerton and heading west, the only way to go when flight turns into the final solution. It had happened too quickly, of course. That was most of it, if not all. The body went through its normal functions. It ate and bathed and talked and made love, but the mind still wandered around and waited for the key to turn in the lock and for the thud of the bolt as the guard slid it back. I went over to the mirror and took a good look at the man with the too pale face who only four or five weeks before had been dining on fish and rice and amusing himself by counting the number of lice he killed each day. It wasn
’t exactly a stranger’s face, it was just the face of someone whom I no longer knew very well and whose renewed acquaintance would require too much effort. I waved at him and he of course waved back. It was not a wave of greeting but rather of vague acknowledgement, one that admitted existence, but nothing else.
Gloomy persons like gloomy weather. They like foggy days and rain and sleet. They can understand those and cope with them. But it’s on those shiny, bird-singing days that they order up the two-fifths of vodka and take the sleeping pills down from the medicine cabinet, or crawl out on the ledge of the building, or go out to the garage with a length of hose and tape it to the exhaust. I went over to the window and stared down at the girls in their sunglasses and short summer dresses and wished it would rain. I waited five minutes for a bolt of lightning or a thunderclap or at least for a cloud to hide the sun, but when nothing happened I went over to the phone and called Carol Thackerty.
“I’ll buy you a drink,” I said when she answered.
“I thought you had company.”
“He’s gone.”
“You’re supposed to see Orcutt.”
“Not for lunch, I hope.”
“No. He’s having that with Phetwick the third and Doctor Warner Colfax.”
“Of the Colfax clinic?”
“The same. You’re supposed to give them a report after lunch.”
“When will that be?”
“A couple of hours.”
“Fine. I’ll buy you a drink and lunch.”
“Where?”
“My room.”
“Shall I bring Homer, and don’t say it’s not necessary.”
“Don’t anyway.”
“Just a cozy tête-à-tête with perhaps a nooner thrown in, right?”
“That did occur to me,” I said.
“Me too.”
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Make it twenty,” she said, “and order my lunch.”
“What?”
“Steak tartare with lots of capers.”
“And a raw egg?”
“Two,” she said.
“Chopped onions?”
