The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, his voice tight, fast and low.

  “Do we carry him or drag him?” I said.

  “We leave him. Let’s go.”

  I could hear an engine start in the alley. A car trunk lid slammed closed, then two car doors thunked. Tires squealed in high-pitched protest for what seemed to be a long time but could only have been less than a second. Thieves’ getaway, I thought. It was an idle, almost lazy thought.

  “We can’t leave him,” I said because it seemed to be the thing to say.

  “He’s dead, goddamnit,” Necessary said and headed for the door. I could think of nothing better to do than follow. We went down the stairs to the long hall much faster than we had come up. I felt or sensed that Necessary turned right instead of left.

  “Where the hell you going?” I whispered, a little frantically, I suppose.

  “Out the alley entrance. They’re around in front by now.”

  As if to prove it, something large and heavy crashed against the front door of the old house. Something about the size and weight of an archless foot encased in a number eleven shoe. It crashed again as Necessary thrust the camera into my arms and started to fumble with the lock and bolts on the rear door. On the third crash I could hear the front door splinter open. Necessary got the last lock undone and swung the rear door wide. We went through it and down four steps. I stumbled on the last one, almost falling, almost dropping the camera. I recovered and ran after Necessary, who had turned right, heading for the squad car that was still parked in the alley, just beyond the pool of light that came from the bulb above the furrier’s still-open door.

  Necessary opened the left door of the squad car, reached inside, and came out with the keys. He threw them as far as he could into the darkness. Then he fumbled his hand in again. Once more the spotlight on the driver’s side blazed on. I looked up and saw the too-white faces of the cops through the hole in the broken second-story window. They closed their eyes against the glare and I saw why it had been an easy shot for the cop who’d killed Soderbell. It would be hard to miss.

  Necessary was off and running down the alley. I followed, the camera cradled in my arms. When we reached the end of the alley, Necessary stopped and peered around the corner. He was breathing even harder than I was, great, harsh, lung-filling pants. That pleased me.

  “Let’s go,” he said or croaked, and we darted across the deserted street, went another block down the alley, only trotting now and barely that. We came out of the alley, turned right, and walked to Necessary’s rented car. He opened the trunk and I put the camera inside it.

  We pulled out sedately and drove down Forrest at twenty-five miles an hour. A squad car roared by, headed in the opposite direction. Its siren was off, but its red-and-white dome light spun angrily.

  Necessary slammed the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “It just doesn’t make any goddamned sense,” he said.

  “That’s probably what Soderbell thought, too, if he had the time.”

  Necessary glanced at me and shook his head, a little impatiently, I felt. “I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the cop turning on the spotlight. Christ, I never knew one of them who’d look up even two inches above his head.”

  I could have said something like “you do now” or “there’s always the first time,” but I didn’t. I just sat there and looked for something that I didn’t see.

  After a moment or two, Necessary said, “It was a lucky shot. That cop was just lucky.” I could have argued that, too, but I didn’t. I just sat there and looked some more.

  “Funny about Soderbell though,” Necessary went on. “He goes all through Vietnam twice and winds up getting shot in some back alley. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it does that all right.” I found what I was looking for and said, “Here’s one.” Necessary stopped the car beside the lighted telephone booth. I got out, dropped in a dime, and dialed a number. It rang for a long time before someone answered with a gruff hello.

  “This is Dye,” I said.

  “Yeah … Yeah,” Lynch’s sleepy voice said.

  “Homer Necessary was up to something tonight. I just found out about it.”

  “What?” Lynch said and sounded less sleepy.

  “I hear that some cops were in on a fur burglary. Homer Necessary got the whole thing down on film. The cops shot somebody. I don’t know who yet.”

  “When’d all this happen?” Lynch said, and his voice was crisp and wide awake now.

  “I just heard about it.”

  “You didn’t know about it before?”

  “I just heard about it,” I said again. “I thought you might want to wake up Loambaugh.”

  “Shit,” Lynch said just before he said goodbye and hung up.

  I got back in the car and Necessary said, “What’d he say?”

  “He said shit.”

  Necessary chuckled a little. “Can’t say that I blame him,” he said. “Can’t say that I blame him at all.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Necessary and I spent a long, predawn hour with Victor Orcutt in his Rickenbacker suite when we returned to the hotel. Orcutt listened politely while we told him how Soderbell had died. When we were finished he said, “Well, I suppose those things are bound to happen,” and never mentioned him again, except indirectly, when he made sure that we had brought back the camera, if not the cameraman.

  I spent five minutes telling Orcutt what I thought should be done with the film. He listened attentively, said, “Good. I agree,” and then launched a twenty-minute monologue which instructed me how to carry out my suggestion. “You do understand?” he said.

  “Does that mean do I agree with you?”

  “That isn’t important,” he said. “It merely requires understanding so that you’ll be able to function properly.”

  “Since it was my idea, I understand well enough not to blow it.”

  “But you don’t agree with my method?” he said.

  “As you mentioned, that’s not important.”

  Orcutt turned to Necessary. “Homer?”

  “Oh, I understand everything just fine,” he said, “and I like it even better. I like it so much that I might even have a drink to celebrate.”

  Carol Thackerty came away from the phone that she’d been using since we arrived. “There’s no ice,” she said to Necessary, “and your plane will be standing by in fifteen minutes. The lab in New Orleans already has a rough cut of what Soderbell previously filmed. As soon as they process what he shot last night, or rather this morning, they’ll make a print and splice it on to the rough cut.”

  “I don’t need any ice,” Necessary said and poured himself a drink from a bottle that he’d found on a table near the door. “Did you tell the lab that the new stuff’ll need special processing?”

  “They know all about it,” she said. “Soderbell had already filled them in. They’ll be able to deliver a completed rough cut to you by one o’clock this afternoon. The plane will get you back here by two-thirty. You should be able to turn over the rough cut to Dye by three.”

  “What kind of plane?” said Necessary, the detail stickler.

  “A Lear jet.”

  Necessary finished his drink. “See you around three,” he said and left.

  I stood up. “I need some sleep,” I said.

  “Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said, also rising, “I dislike to harp on this, but I do very much hope that you will follow my instructions as closely as conditions permit.”

  “You want it in writing, Orcutt?” I said, the testiness in my voice stronger than I had intended.

  “I don’t particularly care for that tone.”

  “Neither do I, but it’s the only one I have left at five in the morning. I’ve had a bad night. I always do when somebody gets killed. It makes me irritable. Even surly.”

  “It wasn’t your fault that—”

  “Nothing’s ever my fault,” I said. “I just do the job I�
��m paid to do and if somebody dies along the way, well, as you say, those things happen. So quit worrying. I’ll do it just the way you told me to and for all I know, it may work. If it doesn’t, you can always fall back on contingency plan R-twenty-three.”

  “You’re teasing again,” Orcutt said. “I’m so glad. That means you’re in a better humor.”

  “Ah, Christ,” I said and went out the door, slamming it behind me. I finally went to sleep around six and Ramsey Lynch didn’t call until seven-thirty and when I picked up the phone there was no trace of jolly fat man in his voice.

  “You’d better get your ass over here,” he said.

  “I’m busy.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I and I’m still busy.”

  “I might send somebody around for you.”

  “Who? A pair of those moonlighters who got their pictures taken last night?”

  “It’s an idea,” he said. “They know all about it now, and if I told them that you were kind of involved in the whole thing, they’d volunteer to go fetch you.”

  “Do that and you’ll never see it.”

  “Have you got it?”

  “I can get it.”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon about three.”

  “What’re you going to do with it?”

  “I thought you might like your own private preview before it goes out over the airwaves and into the living rooms of Swankerton.”

  “You got an idea how to kill it?”

  “Maybe. It’ll cost a little.”

  Lynch was silent for a moment and I listened to his heavy breathing. “You bring it out here.” He almost managed to make it sound like a polite request.

  “Around three or three-thirty. You’ll need a sixteen-millimeter projector.”

  “I’ll get one.”

  “You’ll need something else, too,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Your chief of police.”

  At three-ten that afternoon, about the time that Gorman Smalldane was supposed to be landing at the airport, I was driving out to Lynch’s Victorian home in a newly rented Plymouth Roadrunner which had a hot engine under its hood and a brown, round can of 16mm film on the seat beside its driver whose nerves, some might have said, were shot.

  I parked the car at the curb with its bumper about a foot from the driveway so that if a hurried departure were called for, there would be nothing to stand in its path. I put the can of film under my arm, plodded up the brick path to the screened-in porch, and knocked on the door, trying in vain for the confident rap of an aluminum-siding salesman.

  Boo Robineaux, His Honor’s son, opened the door and took his eyes off a copy of I.F. Stone’s bi-weekly Weekly long enough to say “hello” and “they’re in the dining room.” He didn’t offer to lead the way, but followed instead, still deeply engrossed in the latest machinations of the military-industrial complex. One of these days, I promised myself, I would ask Boo how he’d got those scars on his face.

  I opened the sliding doors to the dining room. Lynch was on the right side of the long table; Loambaugh was on the left. At one end of the table rested a 16mm projector. At the other end was a portable screen.

  “Howdy, there, Lucifer,” Lynch said, once more the professional country boy and jolly fat man, but spreading it on a little thicker than usual. I decided that he was also nervous, just like me. Loambaugh merely nodded and went back to biting his nails.

  I said, “Gentlemen,” and put the can of film on the projector.

  Lynch yelled for Boo, who came in and threaded the film through the projector in an offhand, practiced manner and asked only one question, “Is it sound?”

  “Parts of it,” I said, and he nodded and adjusted the sound controls.

  “When you want it to start, just flip this button,” he said to Lynch and then left, closing the sliding doors behind him.

  “You seen it?” Loambaugh said to me.

  “What the hell difference does that make?” Lynch said. “You want him to give you a goddamned movie review?”

  “I just asked, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Well, don’t. This ain’t the only copy, I suppose?”

  “You suppose right,” I said.

  “Another dumb question,” Lynch said. “Do any good to ask you how you got your hands on it?”

  “No.”

  He nodded somberly and said, “Well, we might as well look at it. You want to get the lights?”

  I switched the room lights off and Lynch turned on the projector. I found a chair next to him and settled down to watch. It was all there in black and white cinema vérité just as Necessary had described it. Even from the rough cut I could see that Soderbell had style. He got a cop picking his nose as he came out of the dry cleaning numbers’ joint, zooming right in on the exploring forefinger. You could count the pores and blackheads on the faces of those he had bribed to tear up his traffic tickets. I listened to the rasping tease in the voices of the two punks who had beat up the old man in the grocery store and then watched them spray shaving cream over the cold cuts in the meat case. I watched as the blows landed and listened to the old man scream and stared as he fell behind the cash register. Lynch said nothing during the films, but Loambaugh grunted and cursed every time he recognized a cop. The last episode featured the fur thieves and because I’d been there, I watched with special interest to learn how Soderbell had seen it through the lens of his camera. There was an establishing shot of the alley, dark, gloomy, and deserted, perhaps even forbidding. The first squad car crept along, shining its spotlight on the steel door of the furrier’s. The camera followed the car, zooming in close on its number and then cutting to the sign over the door that read Bolberg & Son. He got the entire theft: the cops standing guard while the thieves did for the lock; the cop carrying out armloads of furs and dumping them into the trunk of the car, and finally the cop moving over to the squad car, and reaching inside. Then there was a blinding light for a second or two, and the film racketed through its sprockets and guides, signalling that it was ended. Lynch reached over and switched off the projector. I moved to the room lights and turned them on.

  “The guy who filmed it, the cameraman,” Lynch said. “He’s the one they shot over on Forrest last night, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He had a nice style.”

  “A keen sense of mood,” I said.

  “There were a few more episodes than I’d been led to believe,” Lynch said. “About four more.”

  “Five really,” I said. “I found it a gripping portrayal of the Swankerton Police Department in action.”

  “Don’t ride me, Dye,” Loambaugh said. “I’ll just tell you once. Don’t ride me.”

  “That’s twice already,” Lynch said. He pulled a cellophane-wrapped cigar from a pocket and took his usual three minutes to get it lighted. When it was burning to his satisfaction, he blew some smoke at Loambaugh and said, “As a citizen of Swankerton I was shocked by what I’ve just seen. Shocked. What was your reaction, Chief Loambaugh?”

  “Somebody got dumb,” he said, “and I’m gonna have their ass by six o’clock tonight.”

  “That what you going to tell the wire services after this thing goes on TV?” Lynch said.

  “What do you mean when it goes on TV? That’s why you’re juicing him, isn’t it?” He jerked a thumb at me. “He’s the bright boy. Let him figure out a way to cool it off,”

  “What happened to Soderbell’s body?” I said to Loambaugh.

  “It’s in the morgue. For autopsy.”

  “I want it shipped back to his family.”

  Loambaugh bent toward me and the now familiar flush started rising from his neck. He didn’t shout this time. His voice was low and almost toneless. It was far more effective than a shout. “I’m getting goddamned sick of you telling me what to do, buster. I don’t care who you got for friends. Don’t do it again.”

  I looked at him for a time and then smil
ed. “I want his body shipped back to his family. I think they’re in Cleveland. I want it escorted back by one of your cops. A lieutenant, at least.”

  Loambaugh jumped up from his chair and headed around the corner of the table. I assumed that I was the goal line. He got all of two feet before Lynch cracked out his order: “Sit down, Cal, and shut up!”

  Loambaugh hesitated, stopped completely, turned and went back to his chair. “Don’t ride me,” he whispered, not looking at anyone. “Don’t do it again.”

  Lynch’s fat round face was wreathed in smoke and smiles now. “I reckon we can take care of that fella’s remains okay, Lucifer. No big problem that I can figure. What really concerns me is this little old film we’ve just seen. Film can lie just like words can. I mean pictures don’t always tell the full story. Now if you was taking a picture of a barrel of apples and you had a thousand apples in that barrel and you just picked out six or seven rotten ones and took pictures of those and then showed ‘em to somebody and said, ‘Hey, here’s what apples look like,’ why, they wouldn’t really know what a good apple looked like, would they?”

  “Jesus, that’s vivid,” I said. “I never thought of it in just that way.”

  The wreath of smiles on Lynch’s face disappeared and was replaced by a sour, puckered look. “Okay, pal, you came here with a proposition. A deal. Let’s have it.”

  “That was just a rough cut you saw. Wait’ll they edit it, throw in some background music, write the narration, and then get somebody like Cronkite or Brinkley to narrate it. Of course, they’d have to interview the chief here. Or if he didn’t want to go on, then they’d have to talk about that for a while and about his reasons for being unavailable. Then, too, what you’ve seen is only what they have on film. They must have a couple of file cabinets of other evidence lying around. Still pictures, sworn statements, witnesses, even victims. They’d all make nice little vignettes that would round out the film— give it breadth and scope and depth, if you follow me.”