by Ross Thomas
Necessary rose, walked over to the chair that the mayor had indicated, and settled himself into it. He wore the easy, attentive expression of an expert about to be questioned by amateurs. I decided that it wasn’t the first time that Homer Necessary had appeared before a board of inquiry.
Merriweather leaned forward in his chair. “Mr. Necessary, why did you leave police work?”
“To make money.”
“And have you?”
“Yes. I have.”
“May I ask how much your present salary is?”
“You can ask, but I won’t answer. I think that is privileged information and I have high respect for the privacy of the individual.”
“Could I safely say that your present salary is higher—much higher—than what you’d earn as Swankerton’s chief of police?”
“Yes.”
“I know I’m interested in the answer to my next question and I guess most of us are. What I’d like to know is if you’re making a real good living now, then why do you want to get back into something that doesn’t pay half or even a third as much?” Merriweather looked around the table at his fellow councilmen. A couple of them nodded. “Now that’s what I’d like to hear from you.”
Necessary didn’t hesitate. “Because I know police work, because I’m good at it, and because I like it. It’s my profession. I’m a cop, and without bragging, I think I’m a good one. I also think the salaries paid policemen are a disgrace and if I’m appointed Swankerton’s chief of police, then you’re going to get sick of seeing me right in this room arguing for higher pay for police and that means from the newest rookie right on up to the top, and the top includes the chief of police.” It was a small joke and it got a small laugh.
There were some more questions, perfunctory ones, which Necessary answered with short paragraphs or shorter sentences. When he thought a single word would do, it did. The last question came from Merriweather and I suspected that Lynch had told him to ask it.
“If you’re appointed chief, Mr. Necessary, what changes do you foresee under your administration?”
“None.”
“None?”
“That’s right. You asked what I foresee. I don’t foresee any changes. I don’t condemn or condone what’s gone before because I haven’t studied it. When I have made a thorough study of it and get to know the men, there’ll be some changes, but I’m not prepared to say right now what they’ll be. But there is one thing that’s got to be made clear. If I think changes are needed, administrative changes, then I’ll make them. I plan to run the Swankerton Police Department. If you don’t want me to run it the way I see fit, then you’d better find somebody else. I intend to run an honest, efficient department. Law-abiding citizens will like it. The only ones who won’t are the crooks and the thieves.”
It was the longest answer he had given yet and when he finished they voted to give him the job. The mayor swore him in and the city clerk held the Bible. When Necessary said the final “so help me God” there was a ripple of applause and then the mayor asked him to say a few words.
Necessary stood at the end of the table near Robineaux and looked down its length to the man who sat several feet removed in space, if not in power, from its far end. He stared at Ramsey Lynch. Necessary cleared his throat, acknowledged the mayor and the distinguished guests, and still staring straight at Lynch delivered a close version of what Carol Thackerty had written for him: “I really appreciate your confidence and trust. While I’m police chief, I’ll be police chief in fact, as well as in name. I’m beholden to none and I’ll never become so. I promise you only this: an efficient, honest, police force dedicated to the preservation of law and order and the maintenance of justice. I’ll bow neither to influence nor pressure from any source regardless of its office or power. I’d now like to perform my first official act and announce the appointment of a special investigator who will also serve as assistant to the chief of police. He is a man of talent, dedication, experience, and total honesty. He happens to be in the room now and I wish to introduce him. Mr. Lucifer Dye.” The television cameras panned until they found me and I stood up, a little awkwardly, I hoped, and let them all look at me. There were a few smiles of greeting and encouragement from those who didn’t know any better. I nodded, sat back down, and glanced at Lynch. He was staring at me and it was difficult to read the expression on his face, but there was nothing that said, “best of luck in your new job.”
The mayor asked for a motion to adjourn, got it along with a second, and all of the councilmen crowded around Necessary to congratulate him. The ranking police officials gathered at one side of the room, talking among themselves and shooting glances at Necessary. None of them seemed quite sure what to do or where to go.
Phetwick turned to me and said, “Congratulations, Mr. Dye.”
“Thank you.”
“A most interesting maneuver,” he said. “I must say that I look forward to the events of the next few weeks with what only can be described as keen anticipation.”
I told him that I hoped he wouldn’t be disappointed. We both left the tier of seats and moved toward the small crowd that was still formed around Necessary. A young policeman hurried into the council room, looked around as if he wanted to tell someone something important, but couldn’t decide who it should be. He finally settled on the mayor and whispered into his ear. The mayor popped his eyes and gaped his mouth at the news. He then shook his head and looked more indecisive than usual. He burrowed into the crowd, got Necessary by the arm, and drew him to one side. I moved over to where they stood, but Lynch beat me there. He didn’t miss much.
“Terrible news, Mr. Necessary—I mean Chief. This is just terrible news.” He drew the uniformed policeman into the small circle. “Now tell him just what you told me,” the mayor said.
“It’s Chief Loambaugh,” the young man said as if that explained everything. He waited until someone asked what about Chief Loambaugh and I got the feeling that the young man would never make sergeant.
“He shot them,” the young man said.
“Who?” Necessary said.
“His two kids.”
“Dead?”
“Yessir.”
“When?”
“His wife too.”
“When?” Necessary said again.
“About thirty minutes ago or an hour ago. Around then.”
Necessary sighed and then smiled at the young man. “Just tell it,” he said in a curiously reassuring voice. “Just start where you want to and tell it.”
The young man took a deep breath. “He shot his two kids and his wife and they’re all dead and he is too because he shot himself three times in the—” He stopped while he searched his mind for a word. “In the groin.”
“Jesus!” Lynch said and turned to Necessary. “Could he do that?” he demanded. “Could he shoot himself three times?”
Necessary kept on with his role in the play. “Who’re you, mister?”
Mayor Robineaux rushed in as the reporters began crowding around, sensing something had happened, something that needed telling. “I don’t think you two’ve ever met,” the mayor said. “Mr. Lynch here is one of our—our—” He stumbled in his search for a word or phrase that would describe Lynch. He finally settled on, “our civic leaders.”
Necessary nodded to show the mayor that he understood what a civic leader was. “Well, that’s fine,” he said and turned to leave.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Lynch said and put a large, fat hand on Necessary’s shoulder. Swankerton’s new chief of police stopped quite still and then turned, not with the hand, but away from it, so that Lynch either had to remove it or trot around in a circle after Necessary. He dropped the hand.
“What question?” Necessary said after he had turned fully around.
“I think it sounds fishy. Shooting himself three times.”
“You think it might not be suicide, huh?” Necessary said and examined Lynch as if for the first time. He took in
the tentlike suit and the ill-fitting white shirt and the stained tie and the big round face that wore its best smile, the one that didn’t show too many teeth. Necessary studied it all with his blue and brown eyes and nodded slightly, as if confirming some long-held suspicion.
“That’s right,” Lynch said, returning the stare. “I think that maybe it might not be suicide.”
Necessary cocked his head slightly to one side and nodded again, as if he were giving Lynch’s comment a great deal of serious thought. Finally he said, “And what makes you believe I give a goddamn what you think, mister?”
He said it loudly enough so that the reporters could make a note of it, turned and walked rapidly from the City Council chamber, still coming down hard on his heels, as the newly appointed assistant to the chief of police hurried after him.
PART 3
CHAPTER 33
Carol slept while I dressed, quickly as always, but more quietly than usual. I could dress quietly now because my clothing was hung neatly on hangers or the backs of chairs and I no longer had to make a muttering search for an odd sock or the missing tie. The neatly hung clothes indicated the stage that we had reached by the first week in October. We no longer left them on the floor in what Carol called rumpled piles of passion. Instead we undressed in stages, taking our time, talking and perhaps drinking a final Scotch and water, comfortable in our knowledge that passion would arrive on schedule, or perhaps a few minutes early, but that there was no hurry. In fact we enjoyed each other’s company and I’m still not sure which of us was more surprised at the discovery.
I was buttoning my button-down collar when Carol rolled over in the bed, opened her eyes, gazed at the ceiling, and said, “If I go out that door, Vincent, I’m never coming back. Never.”
“There was a woman here to see you this afternoon, Countess,” I said. “An old woman. She said that she was … your mother.”
“That medical degree doesn’t give you the right to play God, Doctor,” she said and then yawned as prettily as anyone can. “Okay, I’m awake. Where’s the coffee?”
“Roger should be knocking on the door any minute, which will make him only twenty minutes late.”
“He’s improving,” she said.
The knock came three minutes later and I opened the door for Roger, the defeated room waiter. He smiled grumpily, if that can be done, and said, “Right on time this morning, huh, Mr. Dye?”
“On the dot,” I said.
“How you, Miz Thackerty?”
“Fine, Roger.”
“Gonna be a nice day,” he said, pouring the coffee. “Shouldn’t get no more than ninety, maybe ninety-two.”
“In October,” I said.
“Nice day.”
I signed the check and added his usual dollar tip. He looked at it glumly and said, “Might rain later though.”
“Thanks, Roger,” I said.
“Might even storm,” he said, moving toward the door. “Even some talk about a hurricane, but that weatherman’s a liar.” He took another quick peek at Carol, but found nothing interesting, mumbled something else about the weather or the state of the world, and left.
I handed Carol her coffee. “You should walk around naked for him just once,” I said.
“Not really. If I did he’d have nothing to anticipate. An occasional glimpse of breast and thigh keeps him stimulated and interested.”
I finished my coffee and put the cup down. “Who am I this morning? It’s slipped my mind.”
“You’re Special Investigator Dye from nine until ten,” she said.
“Him, huh? He’s the one who always thinks he should have known what lay behind the sealed tomb’s door.”
“His reports are good, too,” she said. “They all begin, ‘Chief Homer Necessary and his faithful assistant, Lucifer Dye, moved cautiously through the fog-shrouded night.’ From ten-thirty this morning until eleven-thirty you’re back being Triple Agent Lucifer Dye. You meet Lynch at his place. At noon you revert to your original role as Orcutt’s number one skulk.”
“What’s a skulk?”
“It’s what Orcutt wants to meet with at noon in his suite.”
“He likes meetings,” I said.
“He needs his audience.”
I leaned over the bed and kissed her. “I’ll see you at noon.”
“After it was over—really over,” she said, “I never actually believed that I would come back here to Venice.”
“I’ve never once asked for your love, Myra,” I said. “Only for your respect.” It was a harmless enough way to say goodbye.
I only needed a glance to tell what he was and who had sent him. He stood in the center of my room, his hands carefully in sight, but well balanced on the balls of his feet in case I tried to throw him out before he said what he had come to say. I nodded at him and tossed my room key on the dresser.
“How’s Carmingler?” I said.
“Fine.”
I pointed at the bathroom door. “I’m going in there and shower and shave and probably take a shit. I’ll be fifteen minutes. You can make yourself useful in the meantime by ordering up some coffee. I’ve only had one cup this morning and I’d like some more. Okay?”
“All right,” he said.
He was still standing in the center of the room when I came out, but he now held a cup and saucer. I went over to the dresser and poured myself a cup. Then I sat in the room’s most comfortable chair and looked at him.
“You know what somebody else and I call you?” I said.
“What?”
“We call you ‘just a guy.’ “
He nodded as if he didn’t care what I called him. He was young, probably around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, wore a sleepy expression and a faint smile, as if he thought I was just a little quaint or old-fashioned. Maybe I was.
“I’ll make two guesses,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You sent a couple of punks up here about a month ago to see how nervous I was. That’s one guess. The second one is that your name is Mugar and that you’re Section Two’s young man of the year.”
He walked to the dresser and put his cup down. He moved well and had a deft way of pouring a cup of coffee. He drank it black, I noticed. He turned and looked at me, taking his time. His ash blond hair fitted his head like a bathing cap except for a few curly locks that wandered partway down his forehead. It gave him a slightly tousled look that must have cost him fifteen minutes before the mirror each morning with comb and brush.
The rest of him was regular enough, about five-eleven, a hundred and sixty pounds, regular features except for his dark hazel eyes, which I thought were a little too confident for his age, but I may have been jealous.
“Carmingler wants you to pack it in,” he said. It was his first complete sentence and it came out Eastern Seaboard from somewhere south of Boston and north of Baltimore.
“All right,” I said and watched his reaction with pleasure. He started slightly, but recovered well enough.
“You’ll do it then?” he said.
“I’ll take the third flight out. If Carmingler had said, ‘please,’ I’d take the first one.”
“They told me to expect some smart answers.”
“Anything else?”
“He wants you out of here next week. Friday.”
“And you’re to see to it?”
“That’s right. I’m to see to it.”
“He wanted me out a month ago and you made a half-hearted attempt that didn’t work. Why wait till now to try again?”
“The first was just a precautionary move,” he said. “Now we’re certain.”
“Carmingler’s never been certain of anything,” I said.
“He is of this.”
“You’ve waited long enough for it so I’ll say what?”
“Gerald Vicker.”
“Old Gerald.”
“He’s got to Senator Simon.”
“That’s not quite news,” I said.
“It will be wh
en Simon makes his speech next Friday.”
“You’re a born tease, aren’t you?”
“You want it all?”
“Most of it anyway.”
“All right. Vicker got to Senator Simon and told him all about the Li Teh fiasco and how you’d spent three months in jail. The Senator’s not too happy with Section Two anyway, but I won’t go into the rea sons unless you insist.”
“I don’t.”
“So now he’s going to make a speech on the Senate floor about the Li Teh thing and about how Section Two is messing in domestic politics where it’s not supposed to be. And you’re the goat. That’s bad enough, of course, but Simon’s also working with a top magazine that’s going to run a muckraker’s delight on you and this crew you’re working with here in Swankerton.”
“They’ve got two sources, I’d say. Gerald Vicker and his brother, Ramsey Lynch.”
“That’s right.”
“Carmingler’s worried about his appropriations,” I said.
“That and he just doesn’t like publicity.”
“Well, you can tell him that I think he’s got a real problem.”
“You’ve got until Friday,” he said.
“Your name is Mugar, isn’t it?”
“Franz Mugar.”
“If I don’t bow out by Friday, what happens then, Franz?”
“You’ll bow out one way or another.”
“A promise, I take it?”
“If you like. If you don’t, it’s a threat.”
“What about my associates?”
“A little scummy, aren’t they?”
“Not for me, but then I bet you and I don’t travel in the same crowd. I know Carmingler doesn’t.”
“We don’t care about them,” Mugar said. “We just don’t want anything of ours around that can tie us into this mess when it breaks.”
“And I’m the anything?”
“That’s right.”
“And if I don’t go quietly, then I’ll go however you decide’s best?”
“That’s right,” Mugar said again.
