Blue City

chapter 5

A faded sign in the window of Kaufman’s secondhand store stated: “We Buy, Sell, and Exchange Anything,” and the contents of the window supported the statement. There were old coats, cameras, military medals, an old fox neckpiece, which looked as if it had been gnawing itself to death, a Western saddle, a shotgun, a pair of Indian clubs, a rusty pair of handcuffs, a thirty-day clock in a bell jar, a complete set of the Waverley novels, a bird cage, a greasy truss. The strangest object in the window was a lithographed portrait of Friedrich Engels, surveying with a cold eye the chaotic symbols of the civilization he had criticized.

The store was dark, but a thin line of light shone under a door at the back. I knocked. The door at the back opened, and a bulky shadow appeared in the rectangle of light, walking not quite like a man. He switched on the store lights and hobbled towards me, through a junk heap of rusty stoves, baby carriages whose original occupants had long since graduated from high school, fly-specked dishes, and battered furniture – the detritus of broken homes and the leavings of people bettering themselves on the installment plan.

He was a heavy old man who swung one leg stiffly from the hip and rolled as he walked. He flattened his broad nose against the window in the front door and peered at me. Then he shouted through the pane: “What do you want? I’m all closed up.”

I shouted back: “Are you the man that writes the letters to the newspapers?”

“I’m the man. You been reading them?”

“Let me in. I want to talk to you.”

He unsnapped a key ring from his belt, unlocked and opened the door. “So what do you want to talk to me about? Ideas?”

The smile which swallowed his eyes was wide, bland, and simple, like the smile on a Buddha’s stone face. The naked crown of his head was level with my chin, but he was almost as wide as the door. He swung his stiff leg and moved back out of my way.

“What’s Engels doing in the window?” I asked.

“You know his face? Almost nobody in this godforsaken burg knows him. They ask me who’s that, is that your father? So I tell them who Engels was. I tell them what he stood for. I educate them without their knowing what I’m doing.” He sighed heavily. “The exploited masses.”

“A good many of the exploited masses must come in here. You’re in a good spot to spread your gospel.”

“You come in the back.” Without touching me, his right arm moved in the circular gesture of embrace. “I like to talk to a man who knows ideas.”

He led me down a narrow aisle to the back of the store, through a tiny office containing a high bookkeeper’s desk, into his living apartment. The room where he invited me to sit down was a combination of living-room and kitchen. There were a deal table, a few old leather chairs and some painted wooden ones, a bookcase in one corner, a gas plate on the shelf beside the sink. Above the bookcase there was an amateurish pencil sketch of Karl Marx.

“Why don’t you put Marx in the window?”

“Then not so many people would ask me who he was, because they know. I wouldn’t have a chance to educate them.”

“You’ve been in this town a long time, haven’t you, Mr. Kaufman?”

“Nearly all my life. I’ve been right here in this location for the last thirty-five years.”

“You should be able to tell me something about the municipal government. Where’s the real power in the town?”

“You a reporter? Or writing a book?”

“I’m gathering material,” I said.

He didn’t ask me what kind of material. He smiled more blandly than before, and said: “You want it the way they spell it out in the papers for the exploited masses? Or do you want it the way I see it? Sometimes I think, especially since they threw out the labor organizers in the rubber factories – I think I’m the only man in town who isn’t stone blind.”

“Spell it out your way.”

He leaned back in his wide chair and bent his good leg over his stiff one. “According to the city charter the city’s laws are made by a city council of twelve members elected annually by the people, voting according to wards. The mayor, elected annually by the people at large, is the head of the executive branch of the city government, and he administers the city laws as passed by the council.”

“Who runs the police?”

“A police board, of which the mayor is an ex-officio member. The other three members are appointed for overlapping periods of three years by the city council. All that is the way it’s written down in the charter.”

“And who actually runs the town?”

“Alonzo Sanford dominates the town. But you can’t say he actually runs it. For a good many years he had a working alliance with a man called J.D. Weather. Weather got hold of a slot-machine concession for this area, and over a period of years he developed into an old-fashioned city boss. He spent money in the right places and got his hands on the council and the police force. At the same time he was pushing down roots, staging political picnics, helping the little people out of jams, getting them medical care when they couldn’t pay for it, helping families to get on relief, contributing to campaigns run by the Poles and the Serbs and the Italians and the other minorities. It got so everybody in town knew him, and most of them liked him. They knew they could count on J.D. Weather in a pinch, and they voted the way he wanted them to. He never held any office himself, but the last fifteen years no mayor or councilman could get elected in this town unless he gave him the nod.”

“Where does Alonzo Sanford come into this?”

“For one thing, because a man like Weather couldn’t get away with corrupting the city government without help. The so-called better people would run him out of town. Sanford was his high-class protection.”

“I don’t see what Sanford got out of the deal.”

“Everything he wanted,” the old man said – “men in office who wouldn’t tax his real estate too hard, police who would help to keep union activity out of his plants. And, working through J.D. Weather, he could stay in the background and pose as a grand old citizen. As long as they didn’t touch him, the maggots could eat up the town.”

It was painful to hear my father talked about like that. I had never lost the conception of him that I had formed as a boy: leading citizen, square businessman, straight talker, everybody’s friend. “Was J.D. Weather that bad?”

“He was bad for the town. I don’t think he ever took direct graft himself, but he made it possible for others to take it. Once corruption starts, it always spreads, right down to the policeman on his beat, taking a cut from a floozie or protecting a petty thief. Personally, J.D. Weather wasn’t a bad man. He did a lot of good for individuals – that was one of his holds on the town. But he interfered with the democratic processes and corrupted this city from the top down – all so he could rake in a thousand a week from his slot machines, and feel generous and powerful in the bargain.”

“You didn’t like him much.”

“Why is this town twenty years behind the times?” he snorted. “Underpaid men and women in the rubber plants, working for fifteen-twenty dollars a week. They try to do something for themselves, and the cops take their leaders to the edge of town and give them a beating and send them up the road. Slot machines and poolrooms and whorehouses, instead of playgrounds and community houses to keep the juvenile delinquents from going delinquent. Some of the worst slums in the country, with Alonzo Sanford taking in high rents from them. Why do things stay that way? Because they conspired to keep ’em that way. I thought things might start to be different when Allister got in the year before last–”

“It’s funny,” I said. “I asked you about the town, and you give me past history. J.D. Weather’s been dead for two years.”

“But the melody lingers on, boy. That’s what I can’t understand about Allister.”

“He’s the mayor now, isn’t he?”

“He’s been mayor for nearly two years. He ran on a reform platform. He promised to clean up the town. He was a young lawyer out of the D.A.’s office, and he talked like a fighter, and I thought he meant it. So did a lot of other people; he got the support of the honest middle-class elements, and the workers that had any idea what was good for them. After J.D. Weather got killed, he practically swept the town. He knew the facts of municipal corruption, and he didn’t pull any punches. That was during his campaign for election. But when he got in, things went on as before. Last year he came up for re-election, and he toned down his talk a lot. He didn’t go in for facts any more, he went in for high-sounding generalities. But he got in by a whopping majority, because there wasn’t any opposition worth talking about.”

“How do you account for that? You’d expect Sanford to oppose him.”

“I think Jefferson was right,” the old man said gravely. “Power corrupts. Why should Sanford and the forces of reaction oppose a man if they can absorb him and use him? I don’t know a darn thing about it, but I’m suspicious Sanford is grooming him to take J.D. Weather’s place. All I know is this. Allister hasn’t moved a muscle in nearly two years in the mayor’s office. He rants about evil in the city, but he never seems to put his finger on any of it. He spends his time building up his political machine. I guess power corrupted him, or maybe Sanford’s money hypnotized him. I don’t know. Anyway, it’s an example of the difficulty of reform by constitutional methods. I’m not a gradualist myself.”

“I didn’t expect you’d be.” I glanced at the picture of Marx on the wall. “But anything else is pretty precarious, isn’t it? You’re liable to lose what freedom you’ve got while you think you’re fighting for more freedom.”

“What freedom have they got?” he demanded. “Freedom to slave in the factories, vote and think the way the radio and newspapers and political bosses tell them to vote and think, freedom to befuddle their brains in the taverns and the moving picture shows: freedom to be exploited and dispossessed. Let them stand up and fight for their rights!”

“I was wondering,” I said slowly, “I was wondering if J.D. Weather could have been shot by somebody who disapproved of him for political reasons.”

“You’re a cop!” He levered himself to his feet with a hoarse grunt. “I thought I knew all the dirty cops in the town, but you’re a dirty cop I didn’t know.” His face was massive and calm, and he was breathing heavily through his nose.

“Were you accused of killing him at first?”

“I said my say long ago,” he growled. “A dirty cop coming to me, pretending to be interested in ideas. You can get out.”

I stayed in my chair. “What I’ve seen of the cops here, I don’t like them any better than you do. I came to you for information.”

“Who are you then?” His key ring clinked on his belt with the angry heaving of his belly.

“John Weather is my name. We were talking about my father.”

He sat down heavily in his chair and blinked his innocent old eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me? I wouldn’t talk that way to a son about his father.”

“I guess I didn’t know my father very well,” I said. “I was only twelve when I saw him last, and, even then, I spent most of my time away at school. But I wanted information, and I got it. There’s some other information I want. The gun that killed him came out of your store.”

For the first time a glaze of cautious insincerity came over his eyes. “That revolver was stolen from my store. It was in the window, and somebody stole it from there.”

I said: “You talk a good fight, Kaufman. You rant about cleaning up this city. But when you have a chance to help catch a murderer, you back down. I didn’t think a man like you could be scared so badly.”

“Scared, phooey!” he exploded. “Why should I talk to a Cossack like Hanson? He put me in the clink one time for addressing a meeting. He drove some of my best friends out of town.”

“You’ve never seen me before tonight. You can talk now.”

“What are you doing in this town?”

“I came here to look for a job, and I found one waiting for me – the job of finding out who killed my father.”

“I can’t tell you that, boy. If you think it was me, you don’t know me. It’s the system I want to see destroyed.”

“You’re helping to keep things the way they are by clamming up.”

“Understand this, if I talked to you I’d be taking a chance. I’d be taking a chance on you. If you ran to the cops with your story, they’d have something on me, and they’ve been trying to get something on me all my life. I got too many ideas in my head. If you went to certain other people, maybe I wouldn’t live very long.”

“Maybe you won’t live very long anyway. You’re nearly seventy, aren’t you?”

“Seventy-five,” he said with a smile. “I’m old enough to take a chance.”

“I’m twenty-two – young enough to make trouble. You might be able to help me make a lot of trouble.”

“Joey Sault’s about your age. He used to spend a lot of time in this store before my granddaughter left.”

“Joey Sault?”

“He went to the reformatory for shoplifting when he was still a juvenile. I never thought he’d try it on me, though. He was going straight, and I thought Carla and him were going to get married.”

“If this Joey Sault took the gun, why didn’t you tell the police?”

“I already told you one reason. I don’t trust the police, and I don’t like them. There’s another reason. Joey could have got a long term in the pen for larceny. Maybe for accessory to murder.”

“Or murder.”

“Maybe so. But I happen to know he didn’t do it.”

“You seem sure of yourself. How do you know?”

“He told me he didn’t. I asked him.”

“And you believed what he told you?”

“He’s no good at lying,” the old man said. “If he had been lying, I would have known. He stole the gun and sold it. He refused to tell me where he sold it. What could I do?” He spread his thick hands.

“So you held up a murder investigation because a small-time thief wanted to marry your granddaughter.”

“You simplify too much,” he said with weary patience. “I tried to save him from the consequences of his own actions. They were more serious consequences than he deserved, at least that’s what I thought then. Anyway, he never married Carla. It turned out later all he wanted to do was ruin her and pimp for her. Maybe he’s pimping for her now. I heard she’s been out at the Cathay Club the last few months.”

“I don’t like the sound of Sault.”

“Joey is a product of conditions,” the old man said gravely. “His father was a cheap bookie, his mother left him young, the gangs in the south-side slums brought him up. His sister is a prosperous whore. Naturally he should want to be a pimp. What other use would he have for his good looks?”

“Where can I find this good-looking boy?”

“He used to live with his sister. Her name is Mrs. Sontag – Francesca Sontag. In the Harvey Apartments, on Sandhurst, three blocks south of Main.”

I got up and said: “You’re not taking a chance on me. I think some of your ideas are screwy, but you’re the first honest man I’ve talked to here. I won’t let you down.”

He reached out and took hold of my arm. “Wait until you’ve lived seventy-five years and tell me what you think of my ideas. And be careful of Joey. He carries a knife.”

“I have a feeling I’ll probably live to be seventy-five,” I said before he closed the door.