The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

  “Anyone prominent?” I asked.

  He shook his head again. “Run of the mill guys; nobodies.”

  “So it’s a three-way race now,” I said.

  “Three-way,” Necessary agreed and stared out the window. “You know something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The little fellah would have liked all this.”

  “Orcutt?”

  “Yeah. He’d of wanted us to report in with color Polaroid shots of all of them. Then he’d of started plotting and figuring what to do next.”

  “You miss him, don’t you?” I said.

  He nodded again. “Sort of. Don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said and then tried to determine whether I’d lied. I decided I hadn’t.

  “He had a head on him,” Necessary said. “You got to give him that.”

  “I don’t think it’s hard to figure out what he’d do now,” I said.

  Necessary turned to me and I’m sure he was totally unaware of the look of relief that spread across his face. He needed a new Orcutt and he thought he’d found him in me, but he was wrong, of course. I was intuitive where Orcutt had been coldly logical. I made it up as I went along while Orcutt already had the next two paragraphs polished in his mind. Orcutt had been a genius and I was just barely smart enough to knot my own tie. I didn’t want to play Orcutt for Necessary. I wanted to tag along and now and then say, “That’s right, Chief.”

  “What do you think old Orcutt would do?” Necessary said.

  “Where’s Nick the Nigger?” I said.

  “In a private home over in Niggertown.”

  I sighed. “I think that Orcutt might remind Schoemeister of that, in case he didn’t already know.”

  Necessary stared at me for several moments. He shook his head slowly and then smiled, but there was nothing pleasant in it. “Orcutt never would’ve said that.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Necessary said. “He was damned cold-blooded, all right, but never that cold-blooded.”

  We went calling on Frank (Jimmy Twoshoes) Schoemeister in his four-room suite on the top floor of the Lee-Davis Hotel, which was in a ho-hum race with the Sycamore for the title of “Swankerton’s Finest.” We had to go through three of the suite’s rooms before we were ushered into the one that Schoemeister occupied. He was alone, but the three rooms that we passed through had contained young and middle-aged men in quiet suits. They had looked at us with flat, expressionless stares and then gone back to whatever it was they had been doing, cleaning their Thompsons, I suppose.

  Schoemeister smiled at us with his ruin of a mouth and I checked the morning’s shoes. They were made of soft-looking brown mottled leather and when Schoemeister caught my glance he said, “Ostrich,” and I said, “They’re nice.”

  He turned then to Necessary and said, “Out early this morning, aren’t you, Chief?”

  Necessary nodded as he gratefully accepted a cup of coffee that was brought in and silently served by a slim, fit-looking man in his late twenties. “Not as early as some,” Necessary said, after a sip. “Not as early as Luccarella.”

  “A real early riser,” Schoemeister agreed, watching the young man pour my coffee. After serving it, he sat in a chair in the farthest corner of the room. Necessary looked at him and Schoemeister said, “Don’t let Marvin bother you. He’s my nephew. My oldest sister’s kid.”

  “What’ve you got in those other three rooms?” Necessary said. “Cousins?”

  Schoemeister smiled terribly again. “Just some friends.”

  “I counted eleven of them.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “Did Luccarella count them?”

  “I don’t know,” Schomeister said. “He didn’t stay very long.”

  “What’d he want?” Necessary said.

  “He wanted me to catch a plane.”

  “To St. Paul?”

  “That’s right. He seemed to get a little upset when I told him that I didn’t know anybody in St. Paul. Not even in Minneapolis.”

  “The Onealo brothers do,” I said.

  “Is that a fact?” Schoemeister said, trying to make it sound as if he were actually interested, and succeeding fairly well.

  “They caught that plane,” I said. “So did Tex Turango and Puranelli.”

  Schoemeister nodded at the information. “What about Nick the Nigger?”

  “He doesn’t know anybody in Minneapolis either,” Necessary said. “Or St. Paul.”

  “Nick’s still here, huh?” Schoemeister asked, trying to make it casual, and again almost bringing it off.

  “He’s staying with friends,” Necessary said. “About twelve of them over on Seventeen Thirty-eight Marshall in Niggertown.”

  Schoemeister glanced at his nephew who nodded. “I always liked Nick,” he said, “but that Luccarella’s something else. He’s buggy. I wonder if they still call him Joe Lucky?”

  “I think the newspapers do,” I said.

  Schoemeister locked his hands behind his head and gazed up at the ceiling. “Somehow,” he said softly, “I don’t think they will any more.”

  When we were in the Imperial again, Necessary stared at me and I saw that the chill was back in his eyes. “Okay,” he said, “you’re calling it. Now what?”

  “We pay another social call.”

  “On who?”

  “On Nick the Nigger.”

  “Yeah,” Necessary said softly and smiled a little. “Orcutt would have done that, too.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Sergeant Krone parked the car on 47th Street, around the corner from 1738 Marshall. We were in the heart of the upper middle-class section of what everyone called Niggertown—even its residents—and it looked very much like its white counterpart across the tracks, except that the blacks’ lawns seemed to be a shade better tended, if that were possible. They also used more imagination when it came to trimming their shrubbery. I spotted a dog, a cat, and what must have been a giraffe that were all carved or trimmed out of thick, hedge-like plants.

  Krone stayed with the car and the sports page as Necessary and I walked to the house at 1738 Marshall. It was a large gray brick rambler with a graveled roof and a picture window that boasted the inevitable decorator lamp with a scarlet shade and a yellow ceramic base. The house belonged to William Morze, a plump, sixtyish Negro with gray hair, a number of young girlfriends, and a fondness for yellow Cadillacs. He had two of them parked in his garage, a convertible and a sedan.

  Morze, sometimes referred to as Saint Billy, ran the black section of Swankerton and had done so since the end of World War II. He distributed what little political patronage there was, operated his own charity, oversaw the flourishing numbers business, conducted a profitable loanshark operation more or less as a sideline, ran a thriving burial, life and auto insurance agency, and contributed steadily, if not heavily, to the Democratic party. It was Morze who opened the door to Necessary’s knock. There was a bell, but I’d never known Necessary to use one when he could pound on a door.

  The black man wore a yellow silk dressing gown, maroon pajamas, and fur-lined leather slippers. His brown eyes flicked over Necessary and me and registered dislike, even contempt, before the big white smile split his face and he slipped into his Southern Darkie role. He did it well enough.

  “Why, I do b’lieve it’s Chief Necessary and Mr. Dye,” Morze said, mushing it all up. “You gentlemen’s out early this fine mawnin.”

  “We’re looking for Nick Jones,” Necessary said.

  “Nick Jones,” Morze said thoughtfully, as if he might have known someone by that name a long time ago, but wasn’t quite sure. Then he gave us his brilliant smile again. It was also brilliantly meaningless. “Now I do b’lieve Mistah Jones is up and receivin. Come right on in.”

  Nick the Nigger could have passed if he’d wanted to. In fact, he had at one time when, fresh from Jamaica, he had used his English accent and tall, lithe blond good looks to hustle rich widows along Miami Beach. They
could be of the grass or sod variety, and they could be thirty or sixty; it didn’t matter to Nick as long as they could pay his stud fee which, some said, ran as high as a thousand a week.

  Jones, a living embodiment of at least one American dream, saved his money and when he thought he had enough he deserted the glitter of Miami Beach for the squalor of Miami’s black ghetto. He shot his way into the rackets against competition as bitter and ruthless as could be found anywhere. He also invented his nickname, insisted that it be used, and if it wasn’t when his picture appeared in the Miami papers, which it did often enough, he’d call up the city desk and raise hell. I remember somebody once telling me that the Jamaican had even considered changing his name legally to Nick the Nigger Jones but, for one reason or other, never got around to it.

  Jones waved at us lazily from the far end of Morze’s thirty-five-foot living room which could have been copied from a 1954 edition of House Beautiful. It was that kind of furniture and that kind of taste. He was sprawled on a green divan, dressed in a cream polo shirt, fawn slacks and brown loafers. He wore no socks.

  “Help yourself to some coffee, Chief,” Jones said, not rising. “You look as if you could use it. You too, Dye.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “I will.” I poured two cups from an electric percolator and handed one to Necessary who sipped it noisily. Nobody asked us to sit down so we stood in front of the picture window.

  “How was Luccarella?” Necessary asked Jones.

  “Luccarella,” Jones said softly and then said it again. “Pretty name, don’t you think?” He turned to Morze who sat slumped in a green easy chair that faced the large window. “Do we know a chap called Luccarella, Bill?”

  Morze grinned and this time looked happy about it. “I b’lieves he was with the gentlemens who came callin earlier this mawnin,” he said, still talking mushmouth.

  “Ah,” Jones said. “That Luccarella.” He was silent for a moment and then gazed directly at Necessary. “He’s quite insane, you know.”

  “So I hear,” Necessary said and sipped some more coffee.

  “He kept raving about some plane or other that was scheduled to leave at six-forty-five this morning or some such ghastly hour. He even seemed to think that I should be on it.”

  “He thought a lot of people should be on it,” Necessary said. “Some of them agreed with him.”

  “Really?” Jones said. “Who?”

  “Puranelli’s on it,” Necessary said. “He’s a little busted up, but he’s on it. So are the Onealo brothers. Tex Turango caught it, too.”

  Jones nodded thoughtfully. “I think,” he said after a moment, “that it may be far more interesting to learn who’s not on it.”

  “Schoemeister,” Necessary said. “He’s not on it.”

  Jones once again nodded his tanned face with its cap of tight golden curls. His eyes, I noticed, were dark brown with long thick lashes. He had a thin, straight nose and a broad mouth that smiled easily above a neat chin. Nick the Nigger was almost pretty.

  As he picked up his cup and headed toward the percolator, I turned toward the window and saw them. There were two of them, two Ford Galaxie sedans, and they came much too fast down Marshall Street. I shoved Necessary hard and he went reeling away and crashed into a small table some fifteen feet from the window. Jones turned quickly, holding his cup in his left hand and the percolator in his right. I dived at him and the hot coffee spilled over my neck as we tumbled and twisted down behind the far end of the green divan. I could see Morze start to rise from the green easy chair that matched the divan. He was halfway out of it before the picture window shattered and one of the bullets slammed him back in the chair. It seemed to press him deep into its cushions. There was another burst from the submachine gun, or they could have had two of them, but the second burst hit nothing other than three framed prints of some Degas dancers who were dressed in pink and white.

  I could hear one of the cars roaring off and I wondered how deep its rear wheels churned into Morze’s finickly kept lawn. I stared at Morze who leaned forward now, his mouth open as he tried to gasp big gulps of air. My peripheral vision saw the first one as it arched through the broken picture window. I tightened up quickly into a ball as the grenade’s explosion blasted through the living room. I didn’t see the second one; I had my eyes squeezed shut, but it sounded louder than the first and underneath me Jones screamed and jerked violently.

  The grind and roar of the second car as it dug its wheels into Morze’s lawn was all I could hear for several moments after the second blast and I couldn’t hear that too well because I seemed to be partially deaf. Then there was nothing, only that godawful silence that I’d heard once, a long time before, if you can hear a silence, on Shanghai’s Nanking Road.

  I opened my eyes and rose carefully. The room was a mess and William Morze huddled in the remains of the green chair, whimpering, a blinded mass of black flesh that was covered with strips of torn yellow silk and patches of dark red blood. Nick Jones writhed on the floor and screamed once more. I bent down and saw that the left leg of his fawn slacks was soaked with blood just below the knee. I ripped the slacks open and looked at his calf. It was bleeding all right, but it wasn’t serious. I tapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll live,” I said.

  “It feels like the goddamned thing is gone,” he said and managed to sit up. I turned and looked at the opposite end of the room. Necessary was already on the phone, talking into it from around one of his Camels. He hung up and moved toward us.

  Suddenly the room seemed full of tall, broad-shouldered blacks who poured into the living room from the rear of the house. Some of them held revolvers. They advanced on me threateningly until Jones waved them away. He sat on the torn and shredded divan and stared at his bleeding leg. Then he looked up at the blacks and said, “One of you motherfuckers go see if the bathroom’s got anything to bandage this with.” A chunky tan man hurried away and then they all began talking at once.

  Necessary was bending over Morze. When he got up, he shook his head. “Dead?” Jones asked.

  “He’s alive, but I think he’s blind,” Necessary said. “If the ambulance ever gets here, they might keep him alive. Maybe. He’s a mess.” He turned to me. “You all right?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Morze was whimpering again in the remains of the green chair. Jones stared at him. “He was a very good old man,” he said softly. The six or seven Negroes were quiet now, looking at Morze with a kind of horrified fascination. The chunky tan man returned with a roll of gauze and knelt down by Jones and started to bandage his bleeding calf. He wasn’t very good at first aid.

  Necessary drew close to me. “You saw them,” he said.

  “Just two cars. Two Fords. That’s all I saw.”

  “You couldn’t tell who it was.” Necessary wasn’t asking questions; he was merely stating the facts as he understood them.

  “They were too far away,” I said.

  Necessary nodded and then looked at me with his brown and blue eyes. “Thanks for—” He never did finish thanking me for whatever favor he thought I’d done him, probably the hard shove that had sent him reeling down the living room, because the siren screamed outside. We looked through the shattered window and it was Sergeant Krone and the Imperial. Krone was out of the car now and running toward the house, his .38 revolver drawn. He kept swinging the revolver from left to right and back again and the crowd of blacks opened and then closed behind him. There must have been five hundred of them and they stared at Krone and at the house and at its shattered window.

  “Where the Christ did they come from?” Necessary asked.

  One of the blacks opened the door for Krone and he bounded through, waving his .38 around. “Will you put that goddamned thing away,” Necessary snapped. Krone gazed around wildly before he put the revolver back in its holster.

  “What happened?” he asked. “They called me on the radio with an OIT here.”

  “Well, they were right,” Necessary said.
“An officer was in trouble, but he’s not now so you can take all these people into the rear of the house and get their names and find out if they saw anything.”

  Just as Krone was herding the last of the blacks through the door that led to the rear of the house, we heard another siren. A red-and-white ambulance edged its angry way through the black crowd and two white attendants got out and started rolling a stretcher toward the house. Two squad cars, their sirens also moaning, arrived just after the ambulance. Four white cops spilled out of the cars, took a look at the sullen crowd which must have grown to 750 by then, and started edging toward the house, their hands on their holstered gun butts. Necessary, watching, shook his head in disgust. “Christ,” he said, “all we need is for one of those rednecks to shoot some nigger.”

  I let the ambulance attendants in and they frowned when they saw what was left of Morze who still whimpered and squirmed in the green chair. The older of the two looked at me and grimaced. “I reckon we’ll have to take him all the way down to Charity emergency,” he said and frowned again as if he didn’t much care for long rides.

  Necessary tapped the attendant on the shoulder. “What’s the closest hospital?” he demanded.

  “I suppose the Colfax Clinic is, but—shit—we can’t take a nigger there.”

  Necessary shot out his right hand, grasped the attendant’s shirt front, and jerked him close. Their faces were no more than six inches apart. “You’re going to take two niggers to the Colfax Clinic,” he said softly, “and they’re going to get the best treatment there is by the best doctors there are. You understand?”

  The attendant nodded—a little vigorously, I thought.

  “And if you get any static from anyone at the Colfax Clinic, you tell them that unless these two niggers get the best treatment there is, then Chief Necessary’s gonna get whatever kind of court order he needs to close that place down tight by six o’clock tonight. Now you got that?”

  The attendant nodded again, even more vigorously than before. “Yessir,” he said. “I understand.”