Blue City

chapter 21

The voices I could hear through the thin door of Francie Sontag’s apartment told me that I was in time.

“I won’t keep quiet!” her bitter voice was saying. It was like a key speech in a play I had heard before. “You can’t make me.”

“But you must,” the man said. “You’re making too much noise now. Somebody might hear you.”

“I want everybody in town to hear me.”

“Be quiet.” His voice was small and tight. “You’re hysterical. You’re forgetting that you’re in this as deep as I am.”

“Oh no, I’m not. I never knew what went on. You didn’t even tell me they were killing my own brother last night.”

“I didn’t know–”

“You sat on your bony rear and let them kill him. You wanted him dead, didn’t you?”

“Listen to me, Francie.” The grim patience in his voice was wearing thin. “How could I know it was Joey?”

“You could’ve gone to the Wildwood when this boy called you. You were Joey’s last chance, and you didn’t lift a finger to help him.” Her voice had begun to rise and fall in a gasping rhythm.

“I had nothing to do with it. He meddled with things that were too big for him, and they killed him. Anyway, what’s a gorilla like him compared with you and me?”

“Mr. Fine-Gentleman Allister!” she cried viciously. “You got your gall talking about gorillas. His little finger was worth five of you. He was a man, and he didn’t drool at the mouth with words. I’d rather hear him say hello to me again than listen to you jabbering all night.”

“I thought you loved me.” Allister’s voice was softened by a dangerously unstable humility which could change suddenly to anything at all. “You always said you loved me.”

“I was crazy, wasn’t I? How could I love a murdering hypocrite like you? But I’m not crazy any more.”

“Maybe you’re crazy today for the first time.” His voice was dead and monotonous now. “You’re the only one left who knows about me.”

“Kerch knows. Garland knows.”

“Kerch and Garland are dead. You’re the only one left alive, Francie.”

“You killed them?” Her voice had lost its scornful stridency and had become little and tinny with fear. “I don’t believe it.”

“Believe what you like. I’ve given you your chance and you have failed me. Everyone has failed me.” His voice vibrated with an unnatural timbre, as if he was approaching the emotional level where murder would be possible again.

I tried the door. It was locked. The doorknob rattled slightly when I removed my hand from it.

“What was that?” he said.

I stepped back across the hallway and took the lock away with my shoulder. They were facing each other in the middle of the room, in stiff attitudes, like children caught at forbidden play. He turned on me with his hand in his coat pocket, his face and his whole body fumbling for his gun. Before I reached him the woman stepped behind him and seized his arms. He struggled in her grip, but she was a big woman and her hold was strong. She got the gun and he stopped struggling.

He tried to organize his face in a smile, as if they were playing games together. “Hello, Weather,” he said without conviction.

I didn’t like to go near him. I had a notion that his tense body would be giving off a sour-sweat odor of depravity. But I moved close up to the wretched smile and took the envelope from his breast pocket. He winced and jerked as if I was trying to tickle him. I had an impulse to hit him then, but I held it back. Violence might destroy the remnants of human dignity that kept him erect and smiling, and turn him into something queer – so queer that I wouldn’t want to look at it. Another violence might do something to me, too – make me howl like a dog or cry like a baby or plait daisies in my hair.

The woman stepped back from us both, with the heavy automatic in her hand. The long minutes with Allister had given her skin a greenish patina of fear, and her eyes had a belladonna stare.

“You better go out in the kitchen and get a drink of water,” I said.

She looked questioningly at the gun in her hand.

“Don’t worry. I can handle him.”

I never saw a convict walk off the scaffold when the trap failed to work, but she showed me how they walk. With slow, incredulous steps, and a backward glance at death.

I opened the envelope with Allister’s name on its face. He moved suddenly to snatch it from me, but with only half his heart. I thrust him back with the flat of my hand. He lay down on the chesterfield with one knee dragging on the floor and his face hidden.

Nearly all the letters in the bulky envelope were addressed to Francie Sontag at a Chicago hotel. March 24, 1944 – “Francie My Dear One: Your letter was very sweet.…” March 25, 1944 – “My Sweet Love: I lay awake for hours thinking …” March 26 – “Darling Francie: Today is the birthday of our love. One year ago today …” March 27 – “Flesh of My Flesh …” March 29 – “My Only Love …”

The last letter, typed in duplicate on heavy bond paper, was addressed to Judge Ernest Simeon. Both copies were signed “Freeman Allister,” but neither was dated. “Dear Judge Simeon,” it began:

Before I finished the letter, Mrs. Sontag came out of the kitchen. She moved hesitantly like a visitor in a sickroom and seemed surprised by the tranquillity of the atmosphere.

“What are you going to do with him? Aren’t you going to call the cops?”

I put the letters on the table behind me. “Are you in a hurry?”

“He was going to kill me, wasn’t he? I spend three years massaging his personality, trying to build him up into some kind of a man, and he ends up trying to kill me.” She seemed to be spitting the words at the inert man on the chesterfield.

“I’ll get around to calling the police. It says in the letter that he wants to be tried and punished for his crime.”

“All right. I was just wondering. I can wait.” She screwed a cigarette into a long red holder, lit it with a table lighter, and sat down in a dim corner of the room. Her color had improved, but she was still looking a little faded. She gulped hard on the cigarette.

Allister sat up and faced me. “I wrote that letter under duress. It will never be admitted in evidence. I wrote it from dictation on my typewriter and signed it at the point of a gun.”

“It sounds quite a bit like you. Maybe you and Kerch have similar styles, at that. You both use words without any real feeling for what they mean.”

“That letter is worthless to you. As a lawyer, I know what I’m talking about.” He spoke with authority and I was surprised at his comeback. I wondered what he had done to himself while he lay with his face turned away.

“You killed to get this letter,” I said. “Backed by Mrs. Sontag’s testimony, it will do you a lot of harm. And the bullet in Kerch’s head is going to correspond with the rifling on the gun you used.”

His answer was glib. “I performed a public service in shooting Kerch. He resisted arrest, and, as chief magistrate of this city, it is my duty to enforce the law.”

“Was Garland resisting arrest when you strangled him – unconsciously resisting arrest?”

“You have no evidence that I killed Garland. You have no usable evidence against me at all. Francie will never testify against me. If she tried to, her evidence could be invalidated on moral grounds.”

“Moral grounds!” she yelled from her corner. “There’s only one thing in my life I’m ashamed of, and that’s you. I’ll sing you into the chair, Mr. Morality.”

The superficial calm of his face cracked wide open and let his teeth show. “If I go, you’ll go with me. You can’t talk about me without convicting yourself as an accessory.”

“Because I knew you got that revolver from Joey? Don’t kid me!”

“Maybe you should study the tabloids, Allister. Any jury will recognize her right to protect her brother, at least to refrain from handing him over to the police. Especially now that he’s dead.”

He adopted another mood, with the speed of a quick-change artist and the same effect of artificiality. “Look, Weather, the woman doesn’t matter. She won’t do anything by herself. Now I understand you intend to stay here, and take over your father’s interests–”

“No sale. I’m going to run them clean.”

“Of course.” He shifted again. “That’s what I mean. If my name is dragged in the dirt, municipal reform will suffer an irreparable setback. Last night we agreed to work together, John.”

“Don’t call me John.”

“Sorry. I’ve done wrong, I admit that. But it was my means that were at fault, not my ends. I killed your father – it’s a terrible thing to have to say, isn’t it? – but I did it because I sincerely believed that it was for the general good. I have sincerely regretted my crime, as that letter proves–”

“You wrote it at the point of a gun.”

“Please let me finish. I have learned my lesson, Weather. I have learned that ends must never be subordinated to means, because the ends come to be determined by the means. Can’t we still work together for a good purpose?”

He spoke clearly and rapidly, enunciating his phrases with athletic movements of his mouth and nostrils. They meant no more to me than words read in alphabetical order out of a dictionary.

“Save your eloquence for the jury,” I said. “In a few minutes you’ll be believing that story. That’s why your type is so dangerous, Allister. You can make yourself believe anything.”

“I told you I’ve seen my mistakes–”

“Listen to me for a change. You identify yourself with a cause, and all that means is that your ambition acquires a flavor of sanctity. You can convince yourself that you’re working for a higher purpose, a purpose so high that it places you above the law. You kill a man, but you’re not a murderer. You’re a political assassin killing in the interests of good government with you at the head of it.”

“You’ve got him pat,” the woman said. “When he does it, he thinks it doesn’t stink.”

“Do I have to sit here and listen to her recriminations?”

“Tie a can to it, Mr. Allister-Pallister. You can’t go to bed with a woman without pretending that you’re kneeling at the altar in a bloody church.”

His body jerked towards her. “You’d throw filth on every dream I ever had.”

“Filth!” she spat. “You filth!” The gun moved slightly in her hand, and for a moment the room stopped breathing and became as silent as eternity.

“Maybe you’d better go out in the kitchen again,” I said. “We’ve got things to talk about.”

“I got a right to be here, haven’t I? It’s my house.”

“Go out in the kitchen. And you’d better give me that gun.”

“No you don’t. I’m hanging on to this.” She got up slowly and walked out of the room with a contemptuous weaving of her hips.

“That’s what you get for trying to kill people,” I said. “She doesn’t like you any more.”

He turned and watched her through the doorway, as she sat down in a kitchen chair and laid the gun on the table in front of her. When he spoke again, it was in a hushed and altered voice. “It seems impossible,” he said, “that I should try to kill anyone. And I’ve killed three. It isn’t any use, is it?”

“Murder?”

“Murder, or anything. I’m finished. I was finished four years ago, if I’d only known it. I should have killed myself then, and been done with it.”

“What happened four years ago?”

He looked up and tried to smile, but his face wouldn’t function properly. “I can’t even be sure of that. You wouldn’t understand if I tried to tell you. I suppose it was the war.”

“We’ve all been in a war.”

“I wasn’t. I didn’t get in, and that’s the point. I tried for a commission after Pearl Harbor, but I couldn’t pass the medical. They classified me as a psychoneurotic. Then my wife cut me off.”

“Skip it.”

“But it’s important. She has weird ideas of heredity, and she said she wouldn’t take the risk of bearing me any children. We’d only been married two years – I married late – and I loved my wife.”

“But you don’t any more?”

“I don’t love anyone,” the empty voice said. “Least of all, myself. You’d never believe what I used to be, Weather. I was a good man according to my lights. I believed in truth and justice, and I fought for those things, by God!” But the words came out with an unreal accent, like fragments of a language he had almost forgotten. “For ten years I fought for them, and then it all broke down. I discovered that I didn’t like people any more. Nineteen forty-two was the year they squelched my report, too. I was Assistant D.A., and the D.A. assigned me to investigate the police department here. I and my staff spent eight months on the job and turned in fifteen hundred pages, documenting the abuses and blueprinting the reforms that were needed. Only three men ever saw that report. The D.A., Sanford, and your father. It seemed to me that I was always on the losing side, and I was sick of it. Ten years I had worked for other people, for the public good, and got nowhere. I decided to work for other things – for myself. I decided to become the governor of this state.

“I resigned from the D.A.’s office and ran for the council in 1943. I had a reputation for honesty, and they were afraid of me. They voted unborn babies against me, unnaturalized citizens, two generations of graveyards. They threatened and beat my ward workers, and punched holes in the gasoline tanks of their cars. Your father laughed in my face when I met him after the election. He told me I could never be elected dogcatcher in this town. But he was afraid of me.”

“He had reason to be,” I said. It was strange to be sitting here talking with the man who killed my father, and stranger still to feel no strong emotion one way or the other. They were simply two men, a cheerful cynic and a solemn cynic, each of them partly good and partly evil, and the more dangerous one had killed the other.

“Not then,” Allister protested. “Not in the way you mean. I had no idea of killing him then. I was simply a political threat to him. There are good people in this city, Weather, and they supported me. I was never stronger than the day after the election, when they saw how badly I had lost, and the lengths to which the machine had gone to beat me. The next year the clean government faction drafted me to run for Mayor against Sanford’s and your father’s candidate. He was a nonentity, but he had the machine behind him, and it was a close campaign. I had a better than even chance of winning, I think, until they got hold of my relation with – her.” He twitched his head towards the kitchen. “I made a terrible mistake when I became involved with her.”

“Blackmail?”

“Not exactly that – political blackmail. Your father got hold of some of my letters to her.” He had lowered his voice so that she wouldn’t hear him. “I think her brother stole them, or she may have sold them herself. Anyway, your father was going to publish them, and that would have ended my political life. Don’t you see?”

“I see,” I answered flatly. “So you ended his instead.”

“I’m not trying to justify myself. I’m trying to explain how it happened. It wasn’t just the letters. It was the cumulative effect of years of frustration, and they were the last straw. Whenever I moved, he blocked my path. With those letters he was going to shame me before the whole city, the whole state. I couldn’t face it.”

“You postponed it for a while. Now you have to face something worse, something really final. What happened to the letters after you shot him?”

He glanced at the table. “Those are the letters. I don’t know how Kerch got them.”

“I think I do,” I said, thinking of Floraine Weather. “You thought you built a trap for J.D., but you were really building one for yourself.”

“I realized that the night I killed him. It’s been pressed on me every day since then–”

“Yeah. But let’s get down to details. You’re a good shot, so you probably have your own gun. But you were careful not to use it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“All right. I’ll talk. You got hold of a gun that couldn’t be connected with you, an old Smith and Wesson revolver, which Joe Sault had picked up in a secondhand store. His sister got you another gun last night, didn’t she? It took me a long time to see the connection, but it finally clicked. Once you had the gun, there was the problem of place and time. You studied J.D.’s habits, and found out that he passed the Mack Building every night about the same time. You didn’t know that a couple of Kerch’s gunmen were making a study of him, too. You laid an ambush for him by breaking into an empty office in the Mack Building. You opened a window above the sidewalk where he always passed, and waited with your gun ready. At that point your plan went wild and the trap for him turned into a trap for both of you.”

“Yes,” was all he said. His words had run out.

“Kerch’s man Garland saw you at the window. Maybe he thought you were somebody my father had hired to gun for him and Rusty Jahnke. Whatever he thought, he came after you. He beat it around the corner to the Mack Street entrance and entered the building to catch you from behind. You must have killed my father before he got to you. Rusty Jahnke, who was driving for him, was still within earshot when the shots were fired. Garland caught you in the office with a smoking gun.”

“In the hall. It was a terrible moment–”

“Yeah. A terrible moment that stretched itself out into two years and isn’t over yet. Because Garland had a sharp eye for possibilities. He knew who you were and what you had done. He took you to his boss and explained the situation. It must have sounded very lovely to Kerch. He was rid of my father without dirtying his own hands, and he had you and the town where he wanted you. When you won the election and moved into the city hall, you were Kerch’s man at the head of Kerch’s administration.”

“I couldn’t help myself,” he said in a strangled voice. He looked from side to side of the room as if every door he had passed through in the last two years had shut and locked behind him.

“You didn’t have to go through with it. You could have withdrawn from the election. After you won, you still had a chance to resign.”

“No. I had to do what he told me. He had the letter he made me write to Judge Simeon. The police found my revolver in the sewer where he planted it. He had Joe Sault and Francie to swear that they had procured it for me–”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it!” Mrs. Sontag had come quietly out of the kitchen and was standing in the doorway.

Allister turned on her. “Joe did! He was working for Kerch then.”

“Is that why you let him be killed last night? Is that why?”

“I tell you I didn’t know–”

“All right,” I said loudly. “Kerch had your confession and two witnesses. They weren’t good witnesses but they were enough to frighten you badly and permanently. It explains why you were so co-operative with me last night. If you could get somebody else to shoot Kerch, you’d be halfway out of the mess you were in. But you were in too much of a hurry and you repeated your first mistake. You went back to the same source for a gun – to Mrs. Sontag and her brother.”

“Try and prove it!” the woman said.

I disregarded her. “For a while after that the situation seemed to be working out in your favor, but all you could do was wait. You were afraid to act until you knew what was going on. It must have been hard to wait and do nothing when Mrs. Sontag gave you my message from the Wildwood Inn.”

“Hard on him!” the woman said. “I saw Joey in the morgue a little while ago. He was a handsome boy, but you should see him with dirt in his eyes.”

“I saw him.”

“And this man let him be killed, didn’t you, Allister-Pallister? This morning he had the gall to ask me not to tell you that I gave him the message.”

“You were being careful, weren’t you?” I said. “You thought you saw a chance for yourself. When I told you Sault was dead, the chance brightened. You beat it out to the Wildwood and found Garland there where I left him, unconscious on the kitchen floor. He was the last witness against you, or the second-last, and you strangled him. Then you came back to town and picked up Hanson and went out there again to discover his body.

“That left Kerch. He was the hard one. He had the evidence to burn you locked in his safe at the Cathay Club. Even if you killed him, you couldn’t get at the evidence. No wonder your nerves were jumping when I saw you at the police station. When I gave you the combination of that safe, it must have seemed like manna from heaven. It gave you back your confidence, didn’t it?”

“Too much,” he said dejectedly. “I went too far.”

“You went too far years ago. When you went out there to shoot Kerch, you were so far out of touch with the human norm that no living person was safe with you. They were all your enemies. Kerch had to die one way or another, and nobody’s going to grieve for him, but after you killed him you made another bad mistake. Carla came downstairs to see what the shooting was about. She was a friend of yours, but all that meant was that she had to die too. Killing people was getting easier and easier – almost enjoyable by now–”

“I don’t want to hear any more.” There was genuine anguish in his voice, and, for the first time, I felt almost sorry for him. His dream of power had fallen away completely, leaving him naked and pitiful.

“I’m nearly finished,” I said, “and so are you. Carla didn’t die, Allister. She’ll be on the stand at your trial. But you didn’t notice that your aim was wild. You gathered up your papers and got out of there. The bullets left in your clip were burning a hole in your pocket. Nearly all your enemies were dead, but Francie was still alive, and she knew enough about you to pin you down. A slug could fix that, though. It was beginning to look as if a slug could fix anything – any problem at all under the sun. So you came to pay a final visit to Francie.”

“It’s a final visit, all right,” she said, “but it isn’t final for me. I’ll be reading the papers the day you go to the chair. I’ll be reading them for laughs.”

He was sitting bolt upright, and fits of trembling passed over him in waves which crescendoed and decrescendoed. “Take me away from her,” he said.

“When I get ready.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. You shouldn’t touch things I care about. If Carla is dead, I’m going to make you suffer.”

“I’m suffering now. I’ve suffered for two years.”

“Listen to him!” she jeered. “He used to come crying in my lap like that.”

“Shut up!” I realized suddenly that I couldn’t do anything to Allister. Nobody could do anything more to him but end his life, and that would probably be doing him a favor.

“This is between him and I,” she said.

“I don’t think so. But shut up anyway!”

“Aren’t you going to call the police?”

“In a minute. Where’s his gun?”

She took it out of her pocket and held it out of my reach. “I’m keeping it. I feel safer.”

“Keep it, then. Can you handle it?”

“What do you think?”

“Hold it on him. Where’s the phone?”

“Beside the kitchen door.”

I left them together and called the General Hospital. After some delay Hanson was brought to the phone.

“Weather speaking. I’m in the Harvey Apartments, in Mrs. Sontag’s flat. I’ll wait here for you.”

“Why the hell–?”

“Your man is with me.”

“What man?”

“Allister. He’s ready to confess my father’s murder and a couple of others.”

I heard his breath rush into the mouthpiece. “Not Freeman Allister? There must be some mistake.”

“There’s no mistake. Are you coming? I’m getting bored with his company.”

“Right over,” he said quickly.

“Don’t hang up. How is the girl?”

“I been waiting for her to be able to talk, but she hasn’t come to. The doctor says she will any minute. She’ll be all right.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, we’re taking good care of her.”

“What kind of a room is she in?”

“Semiprivate.”

“Listen to me! This is important, and I want it done now. Have her moved to a private room with a special nurse–”

“I can’t do that. You got to be a relative.”

“Do it for me. I’m a relative.”

“The hell–”

“I’m going to marry her, see?” I hung up.

The receiver came down with a crash like an explosion. No, the explosion was in the other room. I ran in, and saw Allister on the floor and the woman standing over him. He too had grown a Cyclops eye, a dark red socket in his forehead weeping tears of blood.

I looked from his empty face to the woman’s. Her black eyes were burning with triumph. “Well?” she said.

“Murder is as catching as typhoid, isn’t it?”

“Self-defense isn’t murder,” she started to say.

I turned from her abruptly. I felt as if I had already spent hours in the room with the dead man on the floor and his ex-mistress standing over him with the dangling gun in her hand. Five were enough, and six were too many for me. I was sick and tired and old.

I flung open a window and leaned out over the sill. The sickness I had was more than physical, a spiritual sickness that turned the real world crazy at the edges. The street below the window, bare of everything but the dirty leavings of the last snowfall, was undeniably real and solid. But if an army of rats had turned the corner and marched down the street in front of the Harvey Apartments, I would have watched them without a word.

It was an ugly city, too ugly for a girl like Carla. Too ugly even for the men and women that made it what it was, for Kerch and J.D. Weather and his wife, and Allister and Garland and Joe Sault. If Carla and I wanted to make anything of each other – and that would be hard enough – we’d have to get away from this city. When her shoulder healed, I knew she’d be ready to go.

But then I couldn’t be sure that I’d be ready. I had a chance to stay and stick in the monster’s crop. I was hardly the man for the job, and I couldn’t do it alone, and you couldn’t build a City of God in the U.S.A. in 1946. But something better could be made than an organism with an appetite for human flesh. A city could be built for people to live in. Before I decided to leave or stay, I’d have to look for the good men who lived here, the J.D. Weatherses who still respected the people, the Kaufmans who lived in the real world and not in a stiff old European dream, the Sanfords who had learned their lessons from history, the Allisters who hadn’t broken down. Men with a hunger and a willingness to fight for something more than filet in their bellies, women in their beds, the champagne bubbles of power expanding in their egos. Ten rounds by myself had beaten me down, but with good men in my corner I could last for seventy-five.

Far down the street a black police sedan roared into sight and hearing. I put both hands on the window ledge and pushed myself back into the room. The woman was still standing by the body.

“He was a strange man,” she said. “I often wanted to kill him. Now I’ve gone and done it.”

The gun fell out of her hand and gleamed on the carpet. A set of brakes shrieked at the curb outside and a car door slammed. When I looked at her face, it was beginning to work with grief, or with some other passion.