Corruption City
Page 14
After Nemo had been taken away, they all sat quietly for a moment. “Well,” District Attorney Fogel said at last, “I guess that is that.”
“Not quite,” John said. “There is still Eamon Harrigan.”
“I’ll have him picked up.”
John Conroy stood up. “No, that’s something I want to do myself. Come on, Max,” he said to Ansel. At the door he paused and looked back. “You see, he used to be a cop once. And my father’s friend.”
When John and Ansel got to the apartment on Caroline Street they rang the bell, but there was no answer. “Police officers!” Ansel shouted. “Open up!” But still there was no answer. They forced the door. The apartment was empty. From the bedroom Ansel called, “Hey, Mr. Conroy, come here!”
A window in the bedroom was open and John looked down in the alleyway. A man’s body was lying face down, among the garbage. They hurried downstairs. Eamon Harrigan’s broken face was covered with coffee grounds.
“Well,” John said slowly, “he was born on Caroline Street, and he died on Caroline Street—in the alley. That’s not exactly progress.”
In the reception room the workmen were busy tearing the photographs from the wall, reconverting the room to a sitting room.
In John’s office were Fogel, Walzer, Amanda, and Mrs. Conroy.
John was reading aloud a letter Fogel had handed him. It was from the State Bar Association. It said that Mr. Cicero Smith’s application for reinstatement had been favorably passed on and directed him to appear before a Supreme Court judge to be administered the oath.
When he finished, he was silent for a moment. Then he carefully folded it and put it in his pocket. “Thank you,” he said to Fogel. “Cicero would have been proud.”
“John,” Walzer said. “I’ll lay it right on the line. How’d you like to be governor?”
“You make it sound so simple,” John said, and laughed.
“I don’t think it would be too difficult.”
“Well, I have to finish my job as the governor’s special prosecutor first,” John reminded him. “There’s work to do before the trials come up, and then the trials themselves. That’s a lot of work. I don’t know.” He looked at Amanda and began to smile. “Then I thought I’d take some time off and perhaps go to Canada, go to Lake St. Peter and walk across on the backs of the fish.”
They all stared at him blankly. “Walk across on the backs of fish?” Fogel said.
“It’s a kind of shaggy dog story,” John said, and Amanda laughed.
A Biography of Horace McCoy
Horace Stanley McCoy (1897–1955) was an American author whose hardboiled novels documented Americans’ hardships during the Depression and post-war periods. His most famous work, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, was made into a film starring Jane Fonda and directed by Sidney Pollack.
McCoy was born on April 14, 1897, in Pegram, Tennessee, and grew up in Nashville. His father was a traveling salesman, and the family didn’t have much money. Although he was an avid reader, McCoy never finished high school. After a move to Dallas, Texas, he joined his father in sales at age sixteen.
McCoy worked as a traveling salesman through his teens, then joined the United States Army Air Corps. During World War I, he flew missions in France as a navigator and aerial photographer. He earned the Croix de Guerre from the French government after piloting a plane safely home despite suffering two bullet wounds. After the war, McCoy returned to Dallas and took up journalism. As a reporter, he exaggerated and invented details to make his stories more interesting, leading to frequent dismissals from Dallas papers. During this time he also met and married his first wife, Loline Sherer, with whom he had one son. He would later divorce and marry twice more, and had two children with his third wife, Helen Vinmont.
By the mid-1920s, McCoy’s interest in storytelling led him to publish his first fiction. Through the 1930s, he published more than a dozen crime and detective stories in Black Mask, a popular monthly pulp fiction magazine that was also printing the work of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett at the time.
In 1931, McCoy moved to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. Though he failed to gain much notice as a leading man, the author did have some success writing script scenarios for the big studios. One such project described characters participating in a dance marathon; that scenario became the basis of his first novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935). The novel distills many hallmarks of McCoy’s writing, including a tough style, wry observations of class disparity in the 1930s, and a hard look at the dehumanizing effects of poverty. They Shoot Horses fared better with European audiences than with American readers, a trend that McCoy would see throughout his writing career.
After the publication of They Shoot Horses, McCoy returned to screenwriting, churning out scripts for successful westerns such as The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and brooding noirs such as Persons in Hiding. He also continued writing novels, most notably Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), considered one of his best. That same year, McCoy suffered a mild heart attack. Though he resumed working, his health declined and in 1955, he died of a third heart attack while at home in Beverly Hills.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1952 by Paramount Pictures Corporation
Copyright © 1959 by Helen McCoy
cover design by Andrea Uva
978-1-4532-9203-7
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