by Ross Thomas
“I don’t like threats. They make me nervous.”
“You should take something for it.”
I rose, walked over to the phone, and picked it up. “Chief Necessary’s room, please.”
Mugar stared at me. I beckoned him over to the phone. “I’ll hold it so you can hear,” I said. He moved over so that he could hear.
When Necessary came on I said, “How much room do we have in that new jail of ours?”
“Plenty,” Necessary said.
“There’s somebody in town who calls himself Franz Mugar. I think he’s our old friend ‘just a guy.’ ”
“You want to cool him off?”
“I think so.”
“You want it legal and all?”
“No.”
“We can keep him a while on one thing or another. Where is he?”
“Right here in my room.”
“Will he stay put until I send somebody around?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll ask him.”
Mugar was backing toward the door. “You sonofabitch,” he said.
“I don’t think so, Homer,” I said.
Necessary chuckled. “Well, tell him we’ll pick him up inside a couple of hours or so.”
“I’ll see what he says,” I said and told Necessary that I’d ride to headquarters with him. He said he was leaving in fifteen minutes and I said that would be fine. I hung up the phone and turned toward Mugar who was at the door, his hand on the knob, a look of angry disbelief in his eyes.
“You’d do it, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“You can call Carmingler and he’ll have you out in an hour, but then we’d have you back in another hour. It can go on for quite a while. In and out two or three or four times a day. Of course, you could sue, couldn’t you?”
“You’ve had it, Dye. I swear you have.”
“Tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “I’ll give you an hour to get the first plane out of Swankerton. After that, well—”
Mugar shook his head slowly from side to side. “You are through, Dye. You just don’t know how through you are.”
“You are catching that plane, aren’t you?”
“Sure. Sure, I’m catching the plane, and when it lands and I get through doing what I’m going to do, maybe I’ll even have time to feel a little sorry for you. Maybe. But I don’t really think so.”
“You know,” I said in what I hoped was a thoughtful tone, “there is one thing you can do for me when you see Carmingler.”
“On top of everything else that I’m going to do,” he said, a little of his confidence coming back.
“That’s right. On top of everything else.”
“What?”
“Tell Carmingler I said that if he’s still set on it, and can’t spare the experienced help, he’d better come himself.”
“That’s all?” Mugar said.
“That’s all. You won’t forget, will you?”
“No,” he said, still keeping most of the bitterness out of his voice, “I won’t forget.”
“I didn’t think that you would.”
CHAPTER 34
The second thing that Homer Necessary did after he was sworn in as chief of police was to order a specially equipped Chrysler Imperial which had arrived only a few days before. It was black, not much longer than a pocket battleship, and had a hotted-up engine with a four-barrel carburetor to make it go fast. In its air-conditioned rear, where we now were, it had leather upholstery, a TV set, a telephone, a bar of sorts, an AM-FM radio, a police radio, and a sawed-off shotgun which went by the euphemism of riot weapon. Necessary’s driver was Sergeant Lester Krone, the sponsor of a local hot-rod club whose members called themselves the Leaping Lepers. Sergeant Krone was fond of the car’s red light and siren and used them at his discretion, which meant most of the time. Necessary didn’t seem to mind.
“What happened to your friend?” Necessary said.
“You mean ‘just a guy’?”
“Yeah.”
“He left town.”
Necessary grinned. “You roust him?”
“He might call it that.”
“Was he bad news?”
“Bad enough. I’ll tell you about it at noon when we meet with Orcutt and after I see your friend Mr. Lynch.”
Necessary pushed a button that rolled the glass up between us and Sergeant Krone. “Old Lynch is getting antsy.”
“I know,” I said. “He called you three times yesterday for a meeting. He wants to know what the hell you’re up to.”
“His weekly take’s down,” Necessary said and smiled comfortably.
“By about three-fourths, he claims.”
“That’s about right.”
“He’s getting pressure from New Orleans.”
“He’ll be getting some more after our meeting this morning.”
“More reorganization?” I said.
“The last one.”
“Who?”
“Henderson.”
“He’s vice squad,” I said.
“That’s right, he is, isn’t he?”
Necessary liked me to be present when, in his words, he “rattled the box and shook ‘em up.” The sessions never lasted more than twenty minutes, were highly educational, often emotional, and those who had been summoned often left white-faced and visibly shaken.
“New uniform?” I said.
Necessary looked down and ran his hand over the blue summerweight worsted uniform’s gold buttons. “Yeah, three of them came yesterday. What do you think?”
“Becoming. It matches your left eye.”
“You want one?”
“Not unless it has a Sam Browne belt.”
“We can put in a special order.”
“Let me think about it,” I said.
Necessary’s office on the twelfth floor of the new municipal building was richly carpeted, contained a large desk and some comfortable chairs, two flags on standards, the stars and bars of the Confederacy, and the stars and stripes of the U.S.A., a country to which Swankerton’s allegiance was nominally pledged. The room also had a small bar, an autographed photograph of the mayor, and an unsigned one of the President. Through the black-tinted windows there was a gloomy view of the Gulf of Mexico.
Necessary had quickly recruited himself a staff of young, able persons who handled the paperwork and left him free for “standing at the window and nodding yes or no,” as he put it. His secretary was a young Negro girl whose appointment had stirred up considerable comment, none of it favorable, and when anyone even vaguely alluded to it, Necessary would smile, slip into his best mushmouth drawl, which wasn’t bad, and say, “I sho wouldn’t have hired her either if she wasn’t my wife’s youngest sister.”
Captain Warren Gamaliel Henderson was born in Ohio the year that they elected his partial namesake President. His family moved to Swankerton the following year in 1921, switched quickly to the Democratic party, and started calling their youngest son by his initials.
Now somewhere past his fiftieth birthday, W.G. had run the Swankerton vice squad for a dozen profitable years and it had rubbed off on him. He was a big man with a red, rubbery face and neatly cropped, thick gray hair. His nose was purpling at its blunt tip and there were networks of deep lines at the corners of his eyes that had all the warmth of old pieces of slate. His big bony chin, freshly barbered, underscored a stubborn mouth that seemed frozen halfway between a smirk and a snarl. He also had gaunt, sunken cheeks whose insides he liked to suck on when he was thinking. He didn’t carry any spare fat that I could see and his uniform had cost him more than the city paid him in two weeks. He looked exactly what he was: tough, mean and nasty, and none of it bothered Homer Necessary in the least.
“Time we had a little private talk,” Necessary said, leaning back in his high-topped executive chair.
“I like private talks in private,” Henderson said and stared at me.
“You mean my special assistant bothers you?”
“If that’s what you
call him.”
“I call him Mr. Dye and I have a lot of confidence in his judgment and I think you should too.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
It was a bleak and wintry smile that Necessary gave Henderson. “Mr. Dye calls me Chief Necessary, Captain Henderson, and I think you’d better call me that, too.”
“Whatever you say, Chief Necessary.”
“How long have you been head of the vice squad?”
“Twelve years.”
“Now that’s a long time, isn’t it?”
“I like it.”
“I’m sure you do,” Necessary said, “but didn’t you ever get just a little sick of all those whores and the pimps and the fags and the rest of the lot?”
“It’s my job,” Henderson said. “I never thought about getting sick of it.”
“Well, maybe you’re a little sick of it, but just don’t know it.”
“You got a complaint?”
“I don’t know if you’d call it a complaint or not,” Necessary said and turned to me. “You got those figures, Mr. Dye?”
“Right here, Chief Necessary,” I said, the way an up-and-coming special assistant should say it.
“Read off some of the highlights for Captain Henderson. These are statistics, Captain, that tell how our crime rate’s going. They only deal with the past month. Go ahead, Mr. Dye.”
“Armed robbery, up seventeen percent,” I read. “Auto theft, up twenty-one percent; homicide, up sixteen percent; assault, up twenty-seven percent; extortion, up nine percent, and what’s generally called vice, down four percent. These are only percentages as compared with the previous month’s figures.”
“Vice down four percent,” Necessary said. “And everything else up. You seem to be keeping on top of things, Captain.”
“I do my job,” he said.
“Now I’ve had talks with just about every ranking officer in headquarters except you and they’ve all agreed to cooperate one-hundred percent and I think these figures reflect that cooperation. Our crime rate’s up about fourteen percent and I call that progress, don’t you?”
“No.”
“That a fact?” Necessary said. “Well, I thought that everybody thought that getting at the truth was progress and that’s just what these figures are, Captain Henderson. The truth. All except yours.”
“You calling me a liar?” Henderson demanded, his tone thick and phlegmy.
“That’s right, I am. You’ve been lying about the number of vice violations and if you want me to prove it, I will. That’s why the crime rate’s gone up. The rest of the squads have quit lying, all except yours. They’re reporting actual figures—or near actual. I expect they’re still fudging a little, but that’s to be expected. But Jesus Christ, mister, you’re giving yours six coats of whitewash.”
“I report the figures as they’re given to me,” Henderson said.
“Sure you do. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I’ve got some more figures down pretty good. A fag can buy himself off for fifty bucks. A whore, ten. Gambling’s fifteen for each player and a hundred for the house. A pimp’s not good for much more’n fifty and a disorderly house will bring a hundred. I can go on.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Henderson said.
“You’re surprised?”
“Yes.”
“Shocked?”
“Sure.”
“You’ve heard of the Sarber Hotel?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“You know it’s a wide-open whorehouse?”
“No.”
“Did you know that a police private, Benjamin A. Dassinger, badge number two-four-nine-eight is regularly on duty there from seven P.M. till three A.M. to keep order and to make sure the customers pay up? You know that?”
“No,” Henderson said, “I didn’t know that.”
“For a vice cop you don’t know a hell of a lot, do you, Captain?”
“I do my job.”
“Well, if you do, maybe you know that the Sarber Hotel is owned by one Mary Helen Henderson and this Mary Helen Henderson is the wife of Warren Gamaliel Henderson who happens to be a captain in the Swankerton Police Department. Now, goddamn it, tell me you didn’t know that?”
Henderson said nothing and sucked on the insides of his cheeks.
“There’s a crap game that’s been running in this town for seven years. It used to float, but it doesn’t anymore. It’s the oldest crap game in town and it’s open every night from nine till two on the second floor of a bakery at two-forty-nine North Ninth Street. You know about that?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s funny, since the guy that runs it says he pays you five hundred a week to let him alone and, God knows, that’s cheap because it’s a hell of a big game and it draws the high rollers from as far away as Hot Springs and Memphis, but you wouldn’t know about that either, would you?”
“No,” Henderson said and sucked on his cheeks some more.
“The last count I got was that there are thirteen regular table-stakes poker games going on in town with an off-duty patrolman playing doorkeeper at each one. That’s on this side of the tracks. God knows what goes on in Niggertown, but you don’t know anything about those thirteen games or about the three hundred dollars-a-week payoff that each of them makes, do you?”
“No.”
“You ever heard of John Frazee, Milton Sournaugh, Joseph Minitelli, Kelly Farmer, or Jules Goreaux?”
“No,” Henderson said.
“Well, they say they all know you and that they’ve been shaking down fags and pimps and whores for you, some of them for as long as three years. They work on a percentage, they tell me; they get twenty-five and you get seventy-five. What you got to say about that?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you kick back to Lynch? I hear it’s up around two-thirds now.”
“I don’t know anything about kick backs.” Henderson said. “I just do my job.”
Necessary leaned back in his chair and stretched and yawned. “How long would it take to draw up charges against Captain Henderson here, Mr. Dye?”
“A few hours,” I said.
“What do you think?”
“Perhaps you might take into consideration his claim that he was only doing his job.”
“That’s a thought,” Necessary said. He leaned over his desk toward Henderson and nodded in a confidential, you-can-tell-me manner. “How much you really knocking down a year, Henderson? Sixty? Seventy-five?”
“I don’t knock down anything,” Henderson said.
“You think I should bring you up on charges?”
“That’s up to you, Chief Necessary.”
“It sure is, isn’t it? Probably get your wife, too, for running a whorehouse, come to think of it. Be a real mess, but you could probably get off with—oh, say—five years, maybe ten.”
Henderson cracked then. Not much, really; just enough. He looked down at his shoes. That was all. “What do you want?” he said dully.
“A list,” Necessary said. “Break it all down, where it comes from, who gets it, and how much. And I want your name at the bottom of it. I want it on my desk by five o’clock tonight.”
“All right,” Henderson said.
“I want your resignation, too.”
Henderson looked up quickly and his mouth opened, but no words came out. “Undated,” Necessary said, and Henderson closed his mouth.
“What do you think, Mr. Dye?”
“Well, he can’t stay in vice. As you said, he seems a little sick of it.”
Necessary nodded judiciously. “He sure does, doesn’t he. You got any suggestions?”
“There’s always the Missing Persons’ Bureau,” I said.
Henderson looked at me, and if he was afraid of Necessary, he wasn’t of me. The snarl came back to his mouth. “There ain’t any Missing Persons’ Bureau.”
Necessary smiled. “There’ll be one tomorrow and you’ll be in charge of it. How
much help you think he needs, Mr. Dye?”
“At least one man,” I said.
“Maybe a rookie?” Necessary said.
“A rookie could learn a lot from Captain Henderson.”
Henderson rose slowly from his chair and half-turned toward the door. “Sit down, Henderson,” Necessary snapped. “I’ll tell you when you’re dismissed.” Henderson sat down again.
“You don’t have to make a dash for the phone,” Necessary said. “Lynch’ll have a full report on this from Mr. Dye inside of an hour. And don’t get any funny ideas about appealing either. You’re in real bad trouble, buster, and the only thing that’s keeping you out of the state pen is me, so don’t forget it. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” Henderson said.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir, Chief Necessary.”
“Take off.”
“Yes, sir.”
He didn’t hurry to the door. He seemed too tired to hurry.
“That was the last one,” Necessary said, going down a list on his desk.
“At least he didn’t get down on his knees and beg like Purcell did,” I said.
“I’m gonna transfer Purcell to head up the vice squad,” Necessary said.
“Jesus Christ.”
“We’ve sort of shuffled them around this last month,” Necessary said happily. “None of them knows whether to shit or go blind. They’re scared to take their payoffs. Christ, I’ve had some punks even call me at the hotel at night and ask me who they should pay.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Sit tight and don’t worry. That the lid’s off.”
“I hear that the word’s getting around,” I said.
Necessary nodded. “It doesn’t take long. Listen to this. It’s a list of what Lieutenant Ferkaire calls ‘distinguished arrivals.’ He’s that young cop outside there.”
“I know who he is,” I said.
“Listen to this. These are just the ones who’ve flown in during the past three days. Edouardo (Sweet Eddie) Puranelli, Cleveland; Frank (Jimmy Twoshoes) Schoemeister, Chicago; Arturo (Tex) Turango, Dallas; the Onealo brothers, Roscoe and Ralph from Kansas City; Nicholas (Nick the Nigger) Jones from Miami; and a whole delegation from New Orleans. They came to see Lynch.”
“What are the rest of them doing?”
