The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Chapter 21

Victor Orcutt didn’t like my idea and he was telling me why not as we sat there in the living room or parlor of the Rickenbacker Suite on the top floor of the Sycamore Hotel. Only three of us were sitting really, Carol Thackerty, Necessary and I. Orcutt glided about the room, picking up ashtrays and putting them down, straightening pictures that weren’t crooked, and talking endlessly.

“They just won’t believe you,” he said for what may have been the fifteenth time. I had lost count.

“They won’t or you don’t?” I said.

“Oh, I have perfect faith in you.”

“That’s why you’ve been tearing it to pieces for the past thirty minutes.”

“It just won’t work,” he said.

“Sure it will,” Necessary said.

“It’s all conjecture,” Orcutt said. “Sheer conjecture.”

“All right,” I said. “You get me inside if you’ve got a better way.”

Orcutt walked over to a gold-framed mirror and admired himself for a moment. He patted a stray curl of blond hair into place.

There are those who sneak furtive glances at themselves in every mirror that they pass and most seem afraid of being caught in their act of self-love and admiration. They look quickly and even more quickly look away, either reassured or disappointed. Orcutt liked what he saw and he didn’t care who knew it.

“Suppose we do it your way,” he said. “What’s your first move?”

“I accept their offer for twenty-five percent more than you’re paying me.”

“They won’t believe you.”

“But they’ll pretend to. They may even pay me some money, which would be something of a novelty.”

Orcutt spun around and when he spoke his voice was small and tight and mean. “Carol, write Mr. Dye a check for twenty thousand dollars.”

“No checks,” I said.

“Pay him in cash.”

“Tonight?” she said.

I shook my head. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Orcutt said to her and turned once more to me, smiling as nastily as he could. I thought he did well at it. “Will that be satisfactory?”

“Perfectly.”

“After you count your money,” he said, “what do you do next?”

“What do we do,” I said, correcting him only because I knew that he didn’t like it.

“Very well. We.”

“We establish my bona fides.”

“How?”

“We give them something.”

“What?” Orcutt said.

“Not what, but who.”

“Ah!” he said. Orcutt was with me now. For a time there I thought he’d been slowing down. “A pawn,” he said.

“No. More of a knight or a bishop.”

“Who?”

“Someone on your list of advocates. Someone important. Preferably someone popular.”

“And what do they do with him?”

“They ruin him,” I said, “If your conscience bothers you, pick somebody who needs ruining.”

Orcutt’s eyes were glittering now as he stood before me, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his yellow silk smoking jacket. “Then what?”

“We — or I — give them somebody else to ruin, again somebody who’s closely linked with our side. And again he’s got to be well known and well liked.”

“Of course,” Orcutt murmured. “Of course.”

“Lynch and his people will be suspicious the first time. They’ll suspect it’s a trap; that I’m lying. But the second victim I hand over should establish my reliability. I expect that they’ll begin feeding me phony information to feed to you. You’ll act on it. Or seem to, but you’ll also take countervailing measures. As far as Lynch and friends are concerned, you’ve swallowed it. I’ll be with them, on the inside, passing their spurious information to you and the real stuff from you to them.”

“It might work,” Orcutt said. “It just might.”

“It’ll get me inside,” I said. “That’s all. The Lynch people will never quite believe me, not even after I’ve helped them ruin a couple of persons. They’ll still suspect my — oh, hell, my loyalty, you might say. But they’ll play along because they think they’re smart enough to spot any cross I might try. I’m betting they’re not and all I’ve got to back that up is eleven years of nasty experience along similar lines.”

Orcutt tapped his lower lip with his right forefinger. “You would be, in effect, a double agent.”

“No,” I said. “I’d be a triple agent and that’s the trickiest kind. There aren’t many around. Not ones who’re pushing forty.”

“Triple agent,” Orcutt said in a soft low tone and then said it again. He almost seemed to run his tongue over it. “Oh, I like that! What do you think, Homer?”

Necessary nodded slowly. “It’s good,” he said. “Like Dye says, it’ll get him inside. What I want to know is who gets set up?”

“You mean whom do we ruin?” Orcutt asked.

Necessary nodded again, even more slowly. “Just so it’s not somebody in this room, I don’t care.”

“You wouldn’t care if it were, as long as it’s not you,” Carol Thackerty said.

Necessary smiled at her coldly. “You’re right, sweetheart, so long as it’s not me.”

Orcutt giggled. “Then whom shall we pick?”

“Not we,” I said. “You.”

“Ah,” Orcutt said and tapped his finger against his lower lip. “I see. They must be prominent, but not so prominent that it will ruin the reform slate’s chances, correct?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said patiently. “If you do it early enough, it’ll be forgotten by election day. It’ll be old news. People will be tired of it. They’ll want something else.”

“Something just as juicy, maybe more so,” Necessary said.

“You’re right,” I said. “And that’s why I have to get inside.”

“Do you think we can find something like that?” Orcutt said and started pacing again, silently this time. He straightened another picture, gave himself one more approving glance in the mirror, fiddled with the knot in his tie, and then turned toward me. “This — this — well, whatever it is that you’ll look for in the Lynch camp, or manufacture or whatever. Do you have any idea of what it might be?”

“It’ll be slimy,” Carol Thackerty said.

“The slimier the better,” Necessary said and smiled comfortably. It seemed to be his kind of meeting.

“I don’t know what shape it’ll take,” I said. “Not yet.”

“And my immediate task is to select two persons of this community to be ruined by Lynch and his associates? Two of our more prominent supporters?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you mean by ruined?”

“Scandal,” I said. “Public ridicule and scorn. Shattered reputations. Jesus, you know what ruined means.”

“Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, I do. And you want me to select these two persons or families or however it works out?”

“It’s your job.”

“There should be a number of choices,” he said.

“There always are.”

“They won’t be innocents, of course.”

“If they were, you couldn’t ruin them.”

“It’s really a little like playing God, isn’t it?”

“I’ve known some who’ve grown to like it,” I said.

“What is it — power?”

I nodded. “That’s part of it.”

“It should create quite a stir,” Orcutt said.

“You mean stink,” Necessary said.

“Yes,” Orcutt said and looked at me. “But not as great as the one that you’ll create.”

“No.”

“I trust, Mr. Dye, that you haven’t forgotten your ultimate role.”

“No,” I said. “When it’s all over I still get ridden out of town on a rail,”

“The citizenry will need a catharsis then — something that will purge them of their emotions. It’s all very much like a Greek tragedy, don’t you think? Everything is so inevitable.”

“Somebody’s got to play God, Victor,” Carol Thackerty said. “It may as well be you.”

Orcutt tugged at his lower lip, frowned, and then brightened. “You know something,” he said, “I really think that I’ll like it.”

“I thought that you might,” I said.

I bought Carol Thackerty and Homer Necessary a drink in the Sycamore Hotel’s Shadetree Lounge. We had left Victor Orcutt in his suite going over a list of names of persons to ruin. He seemed to enjoy his work.

“How’d you like the way he took the news that his hunch was right and those punks wanted to beat up on you?” Necessary said.

“Disinterested, if not bored,” I said and signed the check.

“That’s because it didn’t happen to him,” Carol Thackerty said. “He’s only interested in things that touch him personally. Or that inconvenience him.”

“If they’d put me in the hospital, he might have been inconvenienced.”

“But you weren’t, so he dismissed it,” she said.

Homer Necessary took a gulp of his Scotch and water, wiped his mouth as usual with the back of his hand, and grinned at me. “Tell me something,” he said.

“What?”

“You ever work for somebody that was younger than you before? I mean that much younger.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Me neither. Christ, I’m almost old enough to be his father and I sit there and he tells me what to do. It’s funny. I mean he’s smart as hell and all, but it’s still kind of funny.” He took another gulp of his drink and wiped his mouth again. “Listen,” he said and bent over the table toward me. “You know he and me are sitting there talking sometimes and I’ll mention something, I mean something that once happened, and suddenly he’ll get a blank look on his face like he hasn’t got the goddamnedest notion of what I’m talking about. And he doesn’t because I’m talking about something that everybody knows about, but something that happened maybe fifteen years ago when he was maybe eleven years old and he just doesn’t remember.”

“You don’t have that trouble with me,” Carol Thackerty said.

He looked at her in much the same way that the village wives probably had looked at Hester and her scarlet letter. Necessary had some curious standards. “Hell, you’re a broad. Besides you’re older than he is.”

“Three months older.”

“Well,” Necessary grumbled, “you act older. You remember things.”

“You mean I’ve read a lot,” she said.

“Yeah, you read a lot. Between Johns.” He paused for another swallow. “But you know what about Orcutt? You tell him something that he doesn’t know about and he’ll get that funny look on his face and then he’ll stop talking about whatever you were talking about and make you tell him everything that you know. I mean, he’ll milk you dry and then a couple of weeks later he’ll bring it up and use it to make a point to you just like you hadn’t told him about it in the first place.” Necessary shook his head.

“Any other complaints?”

“I wasn’t complaining, Dye. I was just talking about working for somebody who’s younger than I am. I never did it before.”

“Homer was chief of police at twenty-seven,” Carol Thackerty said. “He’ll never get over it. He still expects to be the youngest man in the room.”

“Like Peter Pan,” I said.

“Who?” Necessary said.

“Just somebody else who took a long time to grow up,” Carol Thackerty said.

“I don’t know him,” he said. From his tone it was plain that if Necessary hadn’t heard of them, they weren’t worth bothering with.

“You want another drink?” I said to Carol Thackerty.

“All right,” she said. She was drinking Campari.

“Homer?”

He looked at his watch and shook his head. “I got to go.”

“Where?” Carol said.

“I’d better start looking for that ‘just a guy.’ ”

“You need any help?” I said.

He shook his head again. “I’ll sort of nose around.”

“They know you’re doing it,” I said.

“You mean Lynch and his crowd?”

“Yes.”

“I want them to. You going to see Lynch tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Ask him about ‘just a guy.’ ”

“I plan to.”

“You think Lynch set it up?”

“Maybe,” I said.

He rose and leaned over the table, resting his weight on his fists. “There’s one thing I’m pretty sure of. Maybe a couple of things.”

“What?”

“One is that I’ll find out who ‘just a guy’ is before you do, and two is that Lynch didn’t have anything to do with him.” He winked one of his eyes at me, the brown one, and left.

Carol Thackerty stared into her fresh drink after Necessary had gone. “We make a lovely crew, don’t we?” she said.

“Since you put it that way.”

“The crooked ex-cop, the ex-whore, the ex-secret agent — that’s what you were, weren’t you?”

“That’s close enough.”

“I should say the cashiered ex-secret agent and the boy wonder boss who’s not as swish as he sounds or looks.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I know,” she said.

“You know what?” I said. “That I didn’t ask or that he’s not swish?”

“Both. He’s indifferent to sex. It just doesn’t exist for him.”

“You found out, I assume?”

“You assume nothing. I just know. As Homer would say, I’ve had enough Johns to know whether they can, can’t, or just don’t care about it. Orcutt just doesn’t care about it.”

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He may be lucky.”

“Do you think he is?”

She stopped staring into her drink and looked at me. “I was wondering how you were going to bring it up.”

“Now you know.”

“It’s not especially innovative.”

“I’m not trying.”

“You’re not interested?”

“I didn’t say that.”

She blew a thin plume of uninhaled smoke at me. I waved it away. “Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“Do we romance each other for a while or do we just go up and fall into bed?”

“It’s been more than three months. I can skip the romance.”

She finished her drink, gathered her large purse into her lap, and said, “Let’s go.”

“Your room or mine?” I said.

“Mine. I don’t like the walk home.”

She had a room on the ninth floor, 912. It could have been the twin of mine on the floor below. There was a bed and some chairs and a dresser and a writing table. The floor was carpeted with a synthetic fiber. The pictures on the wall looked synthetic, too. She put her purse on the dresser and looked into the mirror and did something to her hair, something imperceptible that never changes it but which they all do anyway. “How kinky are you?” she said. She could have been asking if I thought that the United Nations had adjourned too early.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“On how you like it.”

She turned and leaned against the dresser so that both her pelvis and her breasts arched out, thrusting against the fabric of her dress. She threw her head back slightly and opened her mouth letting her tongue play around her lips. It was an excellent parody of all of those film star pictures of the late fifties and early sixties and she knew it. Then she threw her head back even farther and laughed. I found myself laughing with her for what must have been the first time in more than three months.

Her hands went behind her neck to the fastener and she slipped out of her dress. She left it lying on the floor. Her half-slip followed it. She moved over to me and put her arms around my neck. She ran her tongue over her lips again. “Any fetishes?” she said. “High heels, wet towels, or the like?”

“I’ll think of something if you need it,” I said, skillfully undoing her bra, pleased that I hadn’t lost my touch. She lowered her arms to slip out of the bra and let it fall to the floor in a slow practiced movement. “You like them?” she said, fondling her breasts. She was good.

“Very much.”

Her hands went to the zipper on my trousers and then the belt. Then her hands went exploring. As I’ve said, she was very good. “It feels more like a year than three months,” she said and stepped back and slowly slid her bikini panties off. She was about to display the feature attraction and she didn’t want to rush it. When they were off, she explored herself there too, her head back again, her mouth slightly open. “You like it?”

“It’s fine,” I said, the words coming thick and a little phlegmy. “You sure you wouldn’t really rather do it yourself?”

She caught my hand and guided it home. Then she started working on my tie and shirt, moving her hips langorously against my exploring hand. The tie came off, then the shirt, and she worked my shorts down to my ankles, where they joined my trousers. “Your shoes,” she said and knelt slowly to undo them. She didn’t rise for quite a while and when she did we decided to try the bed.

Chapter 22

Mischief arose early in Swankerton and it was afoot and pounding on my door at seven-thirty the next morning. The pounders were the chief of police, Cal Loambaugh, and Ramsey Lynch himself, with the remains of his breakfast on display between the crevices of his upper teeth. I though of offering him a toothpick, but merely shuddered instead, averted my eyes, and opened the door wider. They came in.

“I think he was still asleep, chief,” Lynch said.

“Just wasting his life away lying in bed like that,” Loambaugh said and winked at Lynch. “Of course, that’s unless you got something pretty to do your lying with. We’re not disturbing anything are we, Mr. Dye?”

“Just my disposition,” I said and headed for the phone. I picked it up, got room service and ordered coffee. “You’ve already had yours, haven’t you?” I said to Lynch and Loambaugh. It wasn’t polite, but I have yet to be complimented on my morning manners.

“Well, I wouldn’t say no to another cup, would you, Cal?” Lynch said.

Cal said he wouldn’t say no either so I ordered coffee for four on the chance that somebody else might decide to turn neighborly. If they didn’t, I’d drink it myself.

“You don’t mind if I get dressed?” I said. I had no pajamas and for a robe I was using the topcoat furnished by Carmingler.

“Take your time,” Lynch said. “Cal and I’ll just sit here and jaw a while.”

“Would you like a toothpick?” I said.

Lynch said, “Huh?” and I said, “Never mind,” and headed for the bathroom, taking some fresh clothes with me. I showered, shaved and dressed before the coffee arrived. The Sycamore prided itself on leisurely service. The room-service waiter served the coffee, slopping only a little of it into my saucer. Nor did he neglect the saucers of my two guests. Lynch poured the spilled coffee back into his cup; the chief of police ignored his, while I soaked mine up with a napkin.

“We like to be up and doing in Swankerton,” Lynch said after the waiter had gone.

“I noticed,” I said.

“I ran into the chief here at the coffee shop so we had breakfast together.”

“I’ve heard a lot of nice things about breakfast at dawn,” I said.

“I bet you were sneaking down the hall, carrying your shoes in your hand about dawn, weren’t you, Mr. Dye?” the chief of police said, winking at me over the rim of his cup. I winked back and thought that he seemed to have all the makings of a dedicated voyeur. Or he could have been one of those who merely likes to talk about it.

“Well,” Lynch said, “since the chief’s a bit interested in what your decision’s going to be about that little proposition we made you yesterday, and since I’m damned interested, and since the chief already had a piece of business to do with you this morning, we figured we’d drop by together and maybe get everything settled with one visit.” Lynch leaned back in his chair and nodded his head in satisfaction over the way he had explained things. His chins bobbed up and down and I noticed that his shirt was too tight around the collar and that a roll of fat oozed down over it. He had on a different suit that morning, a wash and wear cord that fitted him like a tent. Perhaps he hoped to grow into it.

“What business?” I said to Loambaugh.

He put his cup down on the writing desk and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, a concerned look on his face. I had the feeling that he practiced the look at night in the bathroom mirror with the door locked. “We got your friend down in the tank, Mr. Dye.”

“What friend?”

“Homer Necessary.”

“Have you charged him?”

Loambaugh shook his head. “Maybe yes, maybe no. I thought I’d better talk to you first.”

“Why’d they bring him in?”

Loambaugh shrugged. “He was drunk.”

“That all?”

“Disorderly.”

“What else?”

Loambaugh sighed and shook his head in what I interpreted as a regretful manner. “Well, it’s pretty hard to ignore resisting arrest.”

“Where did all this happen?” I said.

“The Easy Alibi, across the street.”

“That belongs to Fred Merriweather,” I said. “Your pet city councilman.”

“That’s right!” Lynch said, trying to work a little astonished recall into his tone, but not doing very well at it. “You met him yesterday.”

“What time did they pick Necessary up?” I said to Loambaugh.

He looked up at the ceiling for inspiration. “Midnight or thereabouts.”

“What’s the leeway?”

“Quarter till, quarter after.”

I lit my first cigarette of the day. It tasted good, as only the first one did anymore. I’d be smoking my habit the rest of the day. “No buy,” I said.

Loambaugh smiled faintly. “Now why’d you say that, Mr. Dye?” He sounded humble, almost hurt.

“It was a roust.”

“We don’t make it a habit of—”

“You don’t roust drunks in this town. I know that. You take them home and pat them on the head and tuck them into bed. You never throw them in the tank unless they’re winos with no place else to sleep. When Necessary left me at eleven-fifty last night, he was sober. I’ve seen him drink and he could have gone on all night and into the morning. But you say he got drunk in twenty-five minutes and I say you’re wrong. Chloral hydrate might have worked that fast, but then you couldn’t have him on a resisting arrest charge, could you?”

“Well, chief, Mr. Dye seems to have come up with some pretty good points,” Lynch said, smiling and bobbing.

“He’s been booked,” Loambaugh said. “He can post bond and get out or he can sit there and await trial. That might take a week or so. Maybe more.”

“How much is his bond?”

“Five hundred.”

“Has he got it?”

“He didn’t have a dime on him,” Loambaugh said with a straight face.

“I want him out of there in fifteen minutes,” I said.

Despite his tan, a flush spread up the sides of Loambaugh’s neck. It hit his face and raced to his ears, which turned a dark rosy shade. He had that tight, controlled tone back in his voice, the same tone that he’d used when I’d met him the day before. “Nobody,” he said, spacing his words, “nobody tells me how to run my—”

“Shut up and listen, Cal,” Lynch said, no longer the jolly fat man. He looked at me and there was nothing jolly in his eyes either. “I don’t know what you’re used to, Mr. Dye, but folks don’t talk to the chief of police in this town like you just did unless they got a mighty good reason. Or some mighty good friends.”

“Like you?” I said.

He nodded. “Like me.”

“I was in this fine community of yours for less than eight hours before a couple of punks tried to jump me in this room. I thought you might have sent them.”

“No.”

“All right, you didn’t. Somebody else did and Homer Necessary was around to help keep me out of the hospital. I want him around so that he can keep an eye on me and, for that matter, so that I can keep an eye on him. I think you follow me.”

Lynch turned to the police chief. “Tell them to get him out of there.”

“He’s already on the blotter,” Loambaugh said.

“Well, now, that’s just too goddamned bad, ain’t it, Cal? I don’t reckon anything can be done if he’s already on the blotter. I mean that’s just like holy writ engraved in stone. But maybe if you just picked up the phone and told them to hunt around for that old bottle of ink eradicator they just may be able to make that blotter read the way it should rightfully read, and when they’re done doing that they can just get one of those fancy, new air-conditioned Ford squad cars and carry Mr. Necessary back to his hotel with your apologies.” The phrasing was the phrasing of the South, but the accent was that of Newark. Or Jersey City.

“While they’re hunting around for the ink eradicator,” I said, “tell them to look behind the rear seat in the squad car. That’s probably where they’ll find the money that fell out of Necessary’s pocket.”

“Probably is,” Lynch said, nodding agreement. “Probably is at that.”

We sat there and listened to Loambaugh call in the new instructions. He did it crisply and no one on the other end of the phone seemed to give him any argument. When he hung up, he didn’t look at either of us.

“So, Mr. Dye, that make you any happier?” Lynch said.

“Much,” I said.

“About that proposition we made you yesterday. You had enough time to study over it?”

“Quite enough.”

“What’d you decide?”

“I’ll take it.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Just like that.”

“That sure is good news,” Lynch said, but without much conviction.

“I hoped you’d like it.”

“Well, now,” Lynch said again and reached into a coat pocket and brought out a cellophane-wrapped cigar. He examined it carefully, stripped off the cellophane, wadded it into a neat ball, and flipped it at the wastebasket. He missed. He sniffed the cigar and then licked it carefully with a gray-coated tongue. He bit off one end, rose, and walked into the bathroom. I heard him spit the end out into the toilet and then flush it. Back in his chair he searched through four pockets before he found a book of matches. He lit the cigar with one of them and blew out a heady plume of inhaled smoke. I didn’t time it, but he must have taken three minutes to light his cigar. Time was cheap that morning.

“Well, now,” he said yet again. “You sure didn’t take much time in deciding to take us up on our offer.”

“You said you were in a hurry.”

“I did say that, didn’t I? But you know, Mr. Dye, a deal like this is something like courting a gal. You want her to spread her legs for you all right, but if she does it too quick, you start wondering who she spread ‘em for half an hour ago. Sort of takes the bloom off the romance, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he said, which could have meant yes or no or even maybe. “It merely ‘pears to me that you’re awful anxious to say yes. If you was a gal and I was asking you to marry me and you said yes like that, why I’d maybe suspect you were pregnant and looking for a daddy for your child. You ain’t pregnant, are you, Mr. Dye?”

“No,” I said.

“Not even a little bit?” he said and laughed his fat man’s laugh, which caused him to choke and splutter a bit on some of his cigar smoke.

I smiled, but it was my old joke smile. “Not even a little bit,” I said.

Lynch turned to the police chief. “What do you think, Cal?”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to. I thought you did all the thinking.”

“Why, Cal, you know I value your opinion most highly.”

“Shit.”

“What do you think?”

Loambaugh looked at me. He took in the black shoes and socks; the new dark green cavalry twill suit; the white shirt, and the terrible tie. He examined my face with its gentle hazel eyes, firm chin, and resolute mouth. He didn’t like anything.

“You want to know what I think, huh?” he said to Lynch while still examining me.

“Most certainly do.”

“I think he’s a fucking plant.”

Lynch shook his head and chins up and down several times, not so much in agreement, it seemed, as in appreciation for a frank opinion, succinctly delivered. “That’s a real interesting observation, Cal. Real interesting. You care to comment on it, Mr. Dye?”

“Not at all,” I said. “He’s right.”

Lynch threw his head back and whooped. Then he cackled for a while and finally he even slapped a knee. The right one. I wondered if he and his brother, Gerald Vicker, had really shared the same parents. The physical resemblance was apparent, if somewhat bloated, but their personalities had almost nothing in common, unless avarice and malevolent drive can be considered inherited traits.

Lynch stopped whooping and cackling, wiped his eyes for effect, if not for tears, and gave me another chance to inspect the scrambled egg remnants that were tucked away between his teeth. “So you’re a plant and you come right out and admit it before God and everybody? That right, Mr. Dye?”

“I wouldn’t be worth a damn to you unless I were.”

“Explain yourself, sir. Not so much for me, but for Chief Loambaugh here. I think I’m beginning to sort of get the drift of things.”

“It’s simple,” I said. “Victor Orcutt knew I was going to meet with you yesterday. When I got back, I told him about your proposition. It took a while to convince him that I should take it, but he finally agreed,”

“Ain’t that something, Cal?” Lynch said, again smiling hugely. “You ever hear of anything like that before? Mr. Dye here tells Orcutt about our meeting and then tells us that he told him and that Orcutt says to go ahead and join up with us. So what you’re really going to do is work for us while Orcutt thinks that you’re really working for him.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Lynch said. “Brother Gerald said you were a tricky one, Mr. Dye. Mighty tricky.”

“I learned a lot from him.”

“Bet you did at that. Of course, I never had all of Gerald’s advantages. I was sort of the simple one in the family. But it does occur to me that you could really be working for Orcutt and just play like you’re working for us.”

“That’s what Orcutt said, only he thought it might be just the other way around.”

Lynch found that really funny. He chortled and snuffled deep down in his belly and nodded his head rhythmically in time with the fist that he pounded against his knee. This time the left one. When he was done he said, “How you expect us to make sure that you’re really looking after our best interests, Mr. Dye? By the way, you mind if I call you Lucifer? We’re not too much on formality down here.”

“Lucifer’s fine,” I said. “You’ll know your best interests are being looked after by what I produce. That’ll be your only gauge. I’ll provide information and suggestions and that’s all. You can check the information out and decide for yourself whether to act on my suggestions. If you don’t like what I suggest, you can ignore it.”

“What do you think about that, Cal?” Lynch said, turning to the chief of police, who still stared at me as if I were the newest brand of archfiend whose unspeakable speciality was yet to be codified.

“I think he’s a fucking liar,” Loambaugh said.

“Course he is, Cal. Man has to be that in the business he’s in. Question is, does he lie for or against us. That’s the real nut-knocker, don’t you agree, Lucifer?”

“That’s it,” I said.

“And I suppose it’s all based on price.”

“You’re right again.”

“I offered you twenty-five percent more than Orcutt’s offering you, didn’t I?”

I only nodded.

“I hear he’s paying fifty thousand.”

“Twenty thousand of it this morning,” I said. “You owe me twenty five thousand.”

“You aim to collect from both of us, of course. Can’t say I blame you for that.”

“No, I didn’t think you would.”

“Now if we got a little information up within the next few days, you wouldn’t mind slipping it to Orcutt, would you, as something you’d sort of wormed out of us, so to speak?”

“That’s part of the services,” I said. “After I’m retained, of course.”

“Wouldn’t do it on spec just so we can take a reading on how well you perform?”

“That’s a dumb question, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Lynch shook his big head glumly. “I suppose it is,” he said. “Suppose it is. When can we expect some results?”

“In a few days. Less than a week.”

Lynch was silent for almost a minute while he inspected his half-smoked cigar. Then he looked up at me and there was an expression on his face that I’d seen often enough before, but on other faces. It was a mixture of contempt and curiosity and suspicion and a dash of grudging admiration. I’d probably worn it myself when doing a deal with a double agent. Carmingler, I recalled, had often worn it. “We got a deal, Lucifer,” Lynch finally said. “It’s not one that we have to shake hands on ‘cause I just as soon shake hands with a cottonmouth. But we got a deal.”

“No we don’t,” I said. “Not until I count the money.”

“You think you’re a pretty hard nosed son of a bitch, don’t you?” Loambaugh said.

“When it comes to getting paid I am.”

“We’ll get a check up to you this afternoon for twenty-five thousand,” Lynch said and rose from his chair. He moved easily for the weight he carried.

I sighed. “No checks. No checks from you and no checks from Orcutt. Cash.”

“When do you expect the rest of it?” Lynch said.

“I’ll let you know.”

“I bet you will,” Loambaugh said.

“We’ll get it to you in the morning,” Lynch said, moving toward the door, hurrying a little as if the air had grown slightly foul. It probably had. Loambaugh followed him.

At the door, Lynch turned and said, “Better bank that money, Lucifer. It’s a tempting bundle to leave around loose in a hotel room.”

“I intend to,” I said. “Any particular bank that you recommend?”

He grinned at me with his breakfast-decorated teeth. “So happens I’ve got a little interest in the First National across the street and we’d be proud to do business with you.”

“Fine.”

He paused again, ducked his head, and rubbed the knuckles of his right hand across his nose. It seemed to itch. “By the way, those two punks who tried to bounce you around.”

“What about them?”

“I didn’t send them.”

“Okay.”

“Well, if I didn’t send them and Orcutt didn’t send them, I was just wondering who might have?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Since we’re in business together so to speak, maybe we’d better find out.”

“Their names were Frank Smith and Joe Carson, or so they said.”

Loambaugh nodded. “I know who they are.”

“Check ‘em out,” Lynch said. “We don’t want Mr, Dye to have any more trouble or enemies than he needs, do we?”

Loambaugh gave me one of his bleak stares that again classified me as the town horror. “Something tells me that before he leaves Swankerton he’s going to have plenty of both.”

I couldn’t think up much of a rebuttal to that.

Chapter 23

It was only nine o’clock in Swankerton when I placed the call to New York, which meant that it was ten o’clock there, but that was still too early for Smalldane Communications, Inc. I could hear the firm’s receptionist assuring the operator that Mr. Smalldane never arrived before eleven. I left word for him to call.

Carol Thackerty arrived at nine-thirty, a few minutes before room service decided that it was time to send up my breakfast now that the eggs and bacon were cool enough to have congealed the grease. The toast wouldn’t burn any fingers either.

Carol Thackerty sat in a chair across the room, her legs crossed, her large purse in her lap, and an amused smile on her lips as the waiter lifted up the lids of various silver salvers to let me inspect what the Sycamore’s menu fobbed off on the world as “Southern cuisine.”

“You forgot the asbestos gloves,” I told the waiter.

He said, “Sir?” so I let it pass. He was around fifty with a squeezed-up face, a bad limp, and the look of someone who’s realized that he’s gone as far as he’ll ever go and now wonders why he ever made the effort. He was also white, which the hotel management apparently felt compensated for any laxity in service.

“Heah yo grits,” he said and displayed a cold wad of them as if he were showing off the Christmas turkey, “and heah yo aigs and bacon. Toast righchere. I got an extra cup for the lady case she wants some cawfee.” He left out a few verbs now and then — to save time, I suppose.

“You shouldn’t have run all the way,” I said as I signed the check and added an overly generous tip.

“I dint run,” he said, and I apologized for accusing him of it.

After he left I asked Carol Thackerty if she would like some coffee and she said that she would so I poured her a cup and served it to her. It was still hot by grace of its sterno burner.

“You look quite pretty this morning,” I said as I handed her the cup.

“Thank you,” she said, either for the cup or the compliment or both.

“I enjoyed last night,” I said, trying to smear some cold butter on some colder toast.

“You’re full of compliments.”

“Simple courtesy.”

“You’re not fishing, are you?” she said.

“For what?”

“I just hope you’re not leading up to the one that they all like to ask.”

“Which one?”

“Did I enjoy it, too?”

“I really don’t give a damn,” I said. “All I know is that I’d like to try it again.”

“When?”

“You have anything against mornings?” I said.

“Not a thing.”

I decided that I didn’t really want the cold breakfast after all. I took a final sip of the coffee, rose, and walked over to where Carol sat. I remember thinking that I should call her Carol now. She put her coffee cup down and held out her hands to me. I pulled her slowly to her feet. I recall that she still had that faint smile on her face. It was almost quizzical. “No hurry,” she said, just before we kissed. “No hurry,” I agreed. We tried one of those long, exploratory kisses in which the tongue ventures forth, encounters token resistance that turns quickly into surrender and then into active collaboration. It was a nice girl’s kiss after she’s decided that she’s tired of being nice.

Unlike the night before, we undressed carefully, helping each other when it might prove interesting. There was nothing frenzied about it this time and in bed we stroked and caressed each other with our hands and mouths and words which, if not endearing, were harshly erotic. It went on like that for what seemed to be a long time, her dark red, almost brown nipples taut and erect, her hips thrusting against whatever touched them, sometimes in a smooth and languorous motion, but more often frantic and demanding. And after a look or a moan or a twitch, or whatever it was, we both knew that it was time and I was inside her and she moaned about the ecstasy of it all and we tried to make it last, did make it last, until we damned well couldn’t anymore and accepted it, with no regrets, and plunged into that final frenzy of oblivion.

There is, of course, always an afterwards and some are far better than others. This one was at first. We lay there in the tumbled sheets, not speaking, just breathing deeply while we each listened to the pound of our pulse. Finally, Carol stirred, rolled over on her side, and ran a fingertip down my chest. “I knew a girl once,” she said, “who was terribly afraid of dying until someone told her what death really was.”

“What?”

“One long orgasm.”

“So she killed herself?”

“No. She just took up parachute jumping, scuba diving, things like that. She’ll probably live to be a hundred.”

The phone rang and I reached for it. “Is this Mr. Lucifer Dye?” the operator said.

“Just a moment,” I said, crossed to the closet, slipped on the topcoat, and came back to the phone. “This is Mr. Dye.”

“On your call to New York, we have Mr. Smalldane for you.”

There was some more chatter while Smalldane’s secretary wanted to make sure that Mr. Dye was on the line and the long distance operator kept assuring her that I was. Smalldane came on in his usual style.

“What do you want with an old fart like me?”

“You’re not so old, Gorm,” I said.

“I’m sixty-five and don’t you ever write?”

“I’ve been in jail.”

“Good or bad?”

“Not bad. Not as bad as Bridge House.”

“How long?”

“Three months.”

He asked where and I told him.

“What for?”

“I made a mistake.”

“You still with the spooks?”

“They fired me.”

“Good. You need some money? You want a job?”

“I’m on a job.”

“In Swankerton? That’s a horseshit town.”

“So it seems.”

“You know what it hit yesterday. It hit seventy-nine and it’s going up again today.”

“Don’t rub it in.”

“I told you to hang on to it. Hell, with that two-for-one split you’d have been worth almost a quarter of a million today.”

“I was never intended to be worth a quarter of a million.”

Smalldane switched to Cantonese. “Truly, you were destined to collect the wastes of cockroaches and turtles.”

“It is unfortunate that old age is too often accompanied by the wisdom of a child.”

“Huh,” Smalldane said and was silent for a moment. “That’s what they seem to think around here. You know what I am now? I’m chairman of the goddamned board. They booted my ass right upstairs. You sure you don’t want a job? I think we can use someone in the mail-room.”

“Keep it open,” I said. “I may need it, but right now I need something else.”

“What?”

“You still run that executive check service for your clients?”

“Sure.”

“I need a few people checked out. I’ll even pay for it.”

“You got something going down there that might be fun?”

“I think so.”

“You want some help?”

“I just told you what I wanted.”

“Shit, I’ll take care of that. I mean do you want some sage advice and wise counsel? I’m bored stiff.”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe.”

“I can be there in six hours,” Smalldane said.

“How long will it take you to run a check on these names?”

“Forty-eight. We’ve got the FBI beat by twelve hours, but that’s because old man Hoover’s not sure that computers are here to stay. There’s one thing about him though that I like.”

“What?”

“He’s older than I am.” Smalldane’s tone changed. “Okay, Lucifer, just read off the names and I’ll get the rundown to you in forty-eight hours. What do you want, a full check?”

“As much as you can get.”

“Just read ‘em off.”

“You’re taping?”

“I’m taping,” he said.

“First, Victor Orcutt, Los Angeles. President of Victor Orcutt Associates. Second, Homer Necessary.” I spelled it and gave the city where he was formerly the chief of police. “Third, Ramsey Lynch, Swankerton, that’s an alias. Real name is Montgomery Vicker. Spent some time in Atlanta. The Federal pen. Fourth, Cal — probably for Calvin — Loambaugh. I’ll spell it.” After I spelled it, I said. “He’s chief of police, Swankerton. Fifth and last, Miss Carol Thackerty, who’s from the same city that Necessary’s from.”

“You son of a bitch,” Carol said.

“What’s that — what’s that? You got a girl there, I can hear her.”

“Her name’s Carol Thackerty.”

“Well, you must have just screwed everything up royal,” Smalldane said.

“I’d already done that.”

“That’s all the names?”

“That’s all.”

“Forty-eight hours. I can either telex it to our New Orleans office and have somebody fly it over to you or I can call you back.”

“Call me back and then we’ll decide.”

“What do you have down there, Lu, something political?”

“Partly.”

“If you want an old fart’s help, let me know. I’m bored.”

“I will.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

“Fine,” I said and hung up.

Carol Thackerty was sitting cross-legged on the bed and smoking a cigarette when I turned to her. She smiled at me, but all it contained were some very white teeth. “The fucking you get’s not worth the fucking you get, is it?”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Most have. Who was that?”

“An old friend.”

“So you’re checking us out?”

“What you really mean is that I’m checking you out. You don’t give a damn about the others.”

She shrugged and it made her breasts jiggle in an interesting manner. “You almost said that you would.”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t trust Orcutt?”

“About as much as he trusts me. He didn’t pick my name out of the Yellow Pages.”

“I’d be interested in what it will say about me. Have you ever seen one of those government reports that they write about people who they’re thinking of hiring?”

“A few,” I said.

“They throw in everything. Rumor, speculation, lies, conjecture, intuitive leaps — what have you. They’re all neatly typed up on little green-lined forms, although the typing’s not always so neat. Sometimes it looks like hunt and peck.”

“Where did you see any?”

“I had a friend once who was going after a government job. Federal. It was a presidential appointment. The FBI ran a check on him and this FBI type passed it to someone who passed it to me. Or a copy of it.”

“How’d you know it was a green form?”

“I don’t remember. He must have told me. But I remember what it said. It’s a wonder he got the job. It said he drank too much and played around and owed a lot of money.”

“That’s called the raw, unevaluated report. It’s the FBI speciality. They don’t pass judgment, they just go out like a vacuum cleaner and sweep everything up and then dump it out.”

“I wonder if they have one on me?”

“Probably.”

“Carol Portia Thackerty, twenty-six, born July 22, 1944, daughter of Lieutenant and Mrs. Ernest Thackerty of San Francisco. Lieutenant Thackerty killed in action, June 8, 1944, Omaha Beach. Mother proprietor of a fancy house, Monterey, California, 1946–1955. Known narcotics user. Died of cancer, July 4, 1955, Monterey General Hospital. Carol Portia Thackerty educated in private schools. Tuition paid by aunt, Ceil Thackerty, sister of late Lieutenant Thackerty. Aunt died, September, 1961. Niece, Carol Portia Thackerty, worked way through college, first as a call girl, second as owner of small motel specializing in teenage whores until joining present firm of Victor Orcutt Associ ates. And that’s how a bad girl like me and so forth. Like it?”

“I didn’t ask,” I said.

“No. There’s that about you. You didn’t. Why?”

“I don’t care.”

“You mean that I was a whore or why I did it?”

“I don’t care about either. You wanted to go to college. You just didn’t want to go the hard way.”

“And you think I should have?”

“I don’t think anything. You haven’t got much of a white slave story, so the only thing I might be curious about is what you studied.”

“Home economics,” she said, rose, and started to put on her clothes.

I watched her dress. “You’ll find that Victor’s just what he says he is.”

“Probably,” I said.

“Then why all the bother?”

“It only took a phone call.”

“Why the topcoat?”

“The what?” I said.

“You were naked, but before you’d talk over the phone, you put on a topcoat.”

“I never answer the phone naked.”

“I like to,” she said.

“So did I.”

“But you don’t anymore?”

“No.”

She looked at me for a moment. “I think you’re a little weird after all.”

“A little,” I said.

“Where do you want it, on the dresser?”

“What?”

“Your twenty thousand I got from the bank this morning. By the way, Orcutt wants to see you at noon,”

“Okay.”

“Well, where do you want the money?”

“On the dresser, honey,” I said. “I like to preserve the traditions.”

Chapter 24

They caught a Mutt and Jeff pair in Bonn who they thought might have raped and murdered my wife. It was in January of 1958 and I had just finished the training program that Section Two claimed would equip me to go out into the world and cope with the enemies of the Republic. I could divine a map, shoot a pistol with what everyone agreed was fair accuracy, and even use a knife should the occasion arrive. Not only that, but I could burgle a house or a flat with reasonable competency, defend myself unarmed against the neighborhood bully, and decipher a code or two. There were some other courses which were taught to the five of us who composed the class of ’57, and the instructors would usually preface their lectures with the phrase, “This may save your life.” But since there were no tests, only an evaluation by a board, I no more listened to the lectures than I did to those that I had endured while in basic infantry training at Camp Hood.

Halfway through the course I received a written evaluation which I suppose was designed to shake me up a little. It noted that I was “inattentive” and “unmotivated,” whatever that meant. It didn’t bother me. They had spent close to twenty-six thousand dollars sending me to college for four years and they were buying that and my languages, not what I had learned in a six-month course in Maryland. I must have been graduated, if that’s the term, at the bottom of my class.

Again it was Carmingler who told me about the pair in Bonn. He wore a greenish-gray tweed suit that day, which emphasized his flaming hair and once more I thought that he must be the world’s most conspicuous secret agent. “They fit the description you gave,” he said.

“It wasn’t much of a description except that one was a little short and the other one was taller than that.”

“There are a couple of other things that fit,” he said. “They’re East Germans and that’s where the colonel had been operating.”

“Doing what?” I said.

He ignored the question and didn’t even wince as much as usual. Carmingler had been on my evaluation board and in his appraisal had written that I had a “facile mind, but an unfortunately flippant attitude which bodes him ill.” Nobody but Carmingler could have written “bodes him ill.” He really should have been a major in a proper British regiment seconded to special operations during World War I. It would have made him extremely happy.

“The other thing,” he said, “is that the pair removed someone in Bonn who had been working closely with the colonel.”

“Removed?”

“Eliminated.”

“Killed?”

“Yes, damn it.”

“I won’t even ask who.”

“Good.”

“You want me to try to identify them?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” I said. “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

We flew from Baltimore to what was then still Idlewild and made the long prop flight to Gander and Scotland and London and finally to Cologne. Carmingler read books and documents and otherwise improved his mind during the trip. I stared out the window, drank what was offered, and slept. We didn’t talk much.

We were met at the Cologne-Bonn airport by a driver with a black Opel Kapitan. It was one of those wet, nasty January days that the Rhine is so good at producing. The heater didn’t work in the Opel and when we finally got to where we were going I was chilled and irritable.

It was an old brick warehouse that somehow had escaped the bombing, probably because it was built just outside of Cologne in a sparsely settled residential area. It hadn’t escaped completely, however, and I could see where shell fragments had torn into the brick leaving scars that still looked like pink scabs.

“Ours?” I said.

“Belongs to the British really,” Carmingler said.

We went up a short flight of concrete steps, through a door, and down a hall that was covered with scuffed green linoleum. The walls were painted a dirty tan and some notices in German about what to do in case of an air raid were still thumbtacked up in several places. Carmingler seemed to have been there before and he walked briskly down the hall as if headed for the executive washroom. He stopped at the door that was half wood, half frosted-glass, knocked, and opened it before anyone said who is it or come in. He held it open for me and I entered into what once must have been Herr Direktors office. There was a carpet on the floor and a massive oak desk at one end of the almost square room. There was also a long table with nine or ten chairs around it that could have been used for meetings of the board or the staff. Some photographs of the Rhine decorated the tan walls, along with a calendar whose pages no one had turned since June, 1945. I suppose the British needed the calendar to remind them that they had really won the war.

A man behind the desk rose as we entered and said, “Hullo, Carmingler.” They didn’t shake hands and Carmingler said, “Dye, Speke,” which may have set a record for short introductions.

“Where are they?” Carmingler said.

“In the cellar.” Speke was English.

“Did your people do any good?”

Speke nodded his head. “Some, but they both talked a lot of gibberish. Their English is excellent, you know, and they could pass as Americans. Both were P.O.W.s in Mississippi during the war. One even has what I’d venture is a slight Southern accent.”

Carmingler looked at me and I shook my head. “They never said a word.”

“Anything else?” Carmingler said.

Speke looked down at his bare desk as if trying to remember. “We’re quite satisfied that they’re a team who’ve been operating out of the GDR since forty-nine or so. They admit that they did for a chap that we had in Hamburg in fifty-three and to a long list of other probables.”

“They admit anything else?” Carmingler said.

“Well, they could scarcely deny the Bonn thing after your people caught them in the act — or just after the act, since poor old Basserton was already dead.”

“Political?” Carmingler asked, and I noticed that he was shaving his consonants and elongating his vowels more than usual. He always did that around the British.

“No,” Speke said, “no we don’t think so any more than your people do. They’re professionals, no doubt of that. But their motivation is exclusively money, not politics.”

“What about before the war?”

“They both claim that they were petty crooks in Berlin. It could be. They’ve got the accent and the argot. After they were sent back from the States and demobbed, they say that they drifted into this, although they are a little vague about how one drifts into the assassination profession.”

“And despite the necktie they still deny having been back to the States?” Carmingler said.

“What necktie?” I said.

“One of them was wearing a tie with a Hecht Company label on it. The Hecht Company’s a Washington department store. We checked the tie out and it can’t be more than a year old.”

“The one with the tie claims that he traded with a drunken American tourist in a Frankfurt bar,” Speke said.

“Who paid them?” Carmingler said.

“The same story they told your people. Some chap in Berlin whom they know only as Willi. They got two thousand marks each plus expenses.”

“D’you think you’ve got everything out of them that you can?”

Speke nodded. “I think so. We’ve been at them day and night for three weeks.”

“Drugs?”

“Your people did. We used — uh — other methods and after a while they talked readily enough.”

“But not about Mrs. Dye?”

“Curiously no. They don’t seem to mind confessing any number of political assassinations, but they were quite adamant in their denial that they had participated in a rape-murder.” He glanced at me. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“So you’re through with them?” Carmingler said.

“Yes. I should think so.”

“Dye needs to look at them.”

“Quite.”

We left the office and went down the hall to another door that opened onto a flight of stairs. The stairs led to a bricked cellar with a cement floor that ran underneath the entire length and breadth of the warehouse. At one end was a small room, not more than twelve by twelve. It was much newer than the rest of the building and had been constructed of cement blocks with a metal door that had a small opening covered with heavy iron mesh. Two men sat outside the door in wooden armchairs. They wore coats and sweaters and had an electric three-bar heater which was plugged into the double-socket of a bare bulb that hung overhead.

“Bring them out,” Speke said to one of the men, who nodded and rose. He took out a ring of big keys and unlocked the door with two of them and then slid back a heavy iron bar which squeaked and for a moment I was back in Shanghai, in Bridge House, where the sounds had been the same, and I could imagine the apprehension felt by the two inside the cell. They must have known that there never would be any good news again.

Both of the men who guarded the cell were up now. Both had produced revolvers, 38s from the look of them. One stood directly in front of the door while the other pulled it open. Two men dressed in dark suits and sweaters came out. They wore no ties and probably no belts. The laces were gone from their shoes and they had to shuffle to keep them on. One was tall and one was short.

Speke told them what to do in English. “Stand over here,” he said, motioning to the brick wall. They shuffled over to the wall and stood facing it. “Turn around,” he said. They turned around. I walked over and looked at them.

Mutt, the taller one, was about five-eleven with sloping shoulders and long arms that ended in hairy-backed hands. He had brownish hair and light blue eyes with ordinary brows that ran into each other across a nose that leaned a little to the left. His mouth was small and almost pursed and it didn’t go with his big chin and thick neck. He also needed a shave.

Jeff, the shorter one, had long, light blonde hair, almost white, that kept flopping down into blue eyes that were a little piggy and mean. He had a potato nose and red splotches on his cheekbones, light almost invisible eyebrows, and a surprisingly hard slice of a mouth that looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler. He had a sharp chin, a slight build that was probably all gristle, and skinny hands.

“Well?” Carmingler said. He was standing at my elbow.

“They wore masks,” I said. “Halloween masks. The rubber kind.”

“Their size, their build?” he said.

“Could be.”

“The big one. Hairy hands.”

“A lot of people have hairy hands,” I said.

“You can’t make either of them?”

“Drop your pants,” I said to the taller one.

He looked at Speke and frowned so I said it again in German and told him to be goddamned quick about it. Speke told him the same thing. The man grumbled something and then undid his fly and dropped his pants so that they lay in what seemed to be a dark puddle about his shoes.

“Your shorts, too,” I said.

He didn’t like that at all. “What is the meaning of this?” he said.

“I want to look at your cock,” I said.

He almost blushed and shot another look of appeal at Speke, who must have played the only friend role with them.

“Drop them,” Speke said.

The taller man did blush this time and dropped his shorts. They were blue-and-white striped ones, but a lot of men wore those. I looked at his penis. He wasn’t circumsized and it lay there shriveled from cold and fear and embarrassment. I went down on one knee to get a better look at it and he jumped. I rose and stared at the man. “You remember me, don’t you?” I said. “You remember how I got to watch you rape my wife and then shoot her one Saturday night?”

He was a good liar, but not good enough. There was a twitch in his left eyelid when I mentioned Saturday because it hadn’t been Saturday. It had been Friday. It was only a twitch, “I don’t know you,” he said. “I have never seen you before.”

I turned to Carmingler and Speke. “Are you through with them both?” I said.

Carmingler said, “We are,” and turned to Speke who shrugged.

“May I use one of those pistols?”

Speke nodded and one of the guards handed me his. It was a .38 Smith and Wesson, I noticed. I turned back to the pair and pointed the gun at the smaller one. “You remember me, don’t you?” I said.

“No,” he said and locked his blue eyes with mine.

“I remember your friend there because of the blue spot on the end of his cock.”

The taller one jerked his head forward to look for the blue spot. “There isn’t any,” he said.

“You got it cured after all.”

“I didn’t have—” He stopped then.

“I’m going to kill you both, you know,” I said.

The taller one must have believed me. He swallowed and began to work his lips around. I knew what he was doing, so I waited. When he had enough saliva he spat at me and it landed on the lapel of my topcoat. He was snarling now. “She was rotten sex!” He yelled it in German. Then he switched to English and screamed it. “She was a lousy fuck!”

I almost killed him then. I tried to. I remember that my finger was beginning to pull at the trigger and the scene came back of him sprawled across Beverly, his pants and shorts down to his ankles, as he grunted and lunged. I recalled her face and how she looked and what had happened to her eyes. I tried to kill him then, but instead I turned and said, “Ah, shit,” and shoved the gun at Speke and hurried for the stairs before any of them could see my face.

We flew back to New York the next day.

Chapter 25

The friendly folks at Swankerton’s First National Bank couldn’t have been nicer. Someone smiled pleasantly when I said that I wanted to open a checking account. Someone else beamed when I rented a safety deposit box in which to store the $20,000 in cash delivered to me that morning by Carol Thackerty. A vice-president was absolutely radiant when I showed him the letter of credit from Orcutt’s St. Louis bank and for all I knew they were equally charming to those who said they could use a couple of hundred till payday.

I was rich now, I decided. I had more money than I’d had since I was eight years old and a partner in a crap game on the Gripsholm. I had $19,500 in San Francisco; $20,000 in a Swankerton safe-deposit box; $5,000 in a checking account for expenses, and the promise of another $25,000 on the way from Ramsey Lynch. I also had $816.59 cash. I thought about retirement and that kept me busy until around eleven o’clock when Homer Necessary called from the lobby and said that he was on his way up.

“You got a drink?” he said as he came in.

“I still have some Scotch,”

“That’ll do.”

I mixed two drinks and handed him his. “No ice,” I said.

“I’m used to it.”

“How was it?”

“How or why?”

“Both.”

Necessary told it quickly in his usually concise manner and once again he placed everything in the present tense. “I leave you last night around ten to twelve and head down the street to a joint called The Easy Alibi. You know it?”

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “A city councilman owns it.”

“That figures. I order a drink and I’m sitting there wondering how talkative the barkeep might be when a couple of plainclothes come in, let me look at their badges, and then give me a ride to headquarters. They’re new, by the way, the headquarters, I mean, real nice. So they print me and mug me and then they take me into a quiet little room and ask me a few questions.”

“About what?”

“About what we’ve got on who. So I tell ‘em that we haven’t got anything on anybody and they ask me again. After a while they get tired of asking and smack me around a little, but not too hard, more like they don’t really have their hearts in it. So one of ‘em pulls out a pint and tells me to drink it. What the hell, it’s better than getting smacked around so I drink it. Cheap bourbon. Well, I can drink a pint and still move around okay, but they take me down and book me for drunk and disorderly and resisting arrest. Then they toss me into the tank. It’s not so bad — only three drunks in it. You oughta see one when they got forty or fifty packed in and most of them are coming down with the d-t’s.”

“When did they let you go?”

“Maybe an hour ago. One of the trusties comes by and says I must have pull someplace because they’re changing the blotter. Trusties know everything. A little later they give everything back, even my money, and send me home in a goddamned squad car.”

“Did anyone apologize?”

“No.”

“They were supposed to.”

“You fixed it?”

“With Lynch. The chief wasn’t too happy.”

Necessary nodded thoughtfully. “One guy did say something about ‘these things happen’ and even called me ‘mister,’ so I guess that’s as close as they can bring themselves to an apology.”

“It shouldn’t happen again,” I said.

“You made your deal?”

“Yes.”

“They buy it?”

“Only after I told them Orcutt knew that I was doing it and that he’s dumb enough to believe that I’ll really stick with him instead of switching to them.”

Necessary nodded again. “Yeah,” he said, “that would make them feel smart.” He took a large swallow of his drink, saw that there was only a little left, and finished it. “Only thing is, you might be telling the truth.”

“I might,” I said.

He flicked his brown and blue eyes over me and there was only indifference in them. “You know something? I bet there’re times when you’re not sure yourself what side you’re on.”

“There’re times,” I said.

“This one of ‘em?”

“I don’t think so.”

He looked at me again, more carefully this time, and then got up and mixed another drink. He came back to where I sat and looked at me some more.

“They probably made a lot of hard noise about what might happen if you crossed them.”

“They mentioned it,” I said. “In passing.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I’ll mention it myself and just give you some advice about not getting too cute unless you want a real unhappy ending.”

“You’re loyal, huh?”

“To Orcutt?”

“Yes.”

Necessary looked into his drink and for a moment he seemed a little embarrassed. Finally he said, “He pays me.”

I let it go at that.

Orcutt was cooking lunch for the four of us when we gathered in the Rickenbacker suite at noon after I’d waited in Necessary’s room for him to shave, shower and change clothes. There were two chafing dishes bubbling away over lighted cans of Sterno. Several opened bottles of wine stood around as if some of their contents had been splashed into whatever was on the burners. Orcutt was peering into one of the chafing dishes and stirring it with a long wooden spoon. He wore a frilly apron.

“I just don’t feel like going out in this heat,” he said and followed my gaze down to the apron. “Isn’t it ridiculous? But it’s the only one that Carol could find. Or so she said.”

“It was the only one they had unless I wanted to go traipsing all over town,” she said.

“Smells good,” Necessary said. “What is it?”

“Chicken livers Orcutt,” Carol said. She was sitting in an armchair and I noticed that she wore a dress different from the one she’d had on that morning.

The hotel (reluctantly, I guessed) had set up near a window a cloth-covered table which held dishes and silverware and glasses. A shallow silver tray contained some green and black olives and I helped myself to one. I also noticed a large green salad.

“You got anything to drink?” Necessary said.

“You’ll simply have to help yourself, Homer,” Orcutt said as he glided between the two chafing dishes, stirring this and poking that,

“Have you got any goddamned ice for a change?” Necessary said to Carol after he found a bottle.

“In the bucket over there,” she said.

Orcutt tasted one of the dishes with his wooden spoon. “Now,” he said. “Carol, if you and Mr. Dye will bring your plates over, I’ll serve while it’s still hot. Homer doesn’t really care what he eats.”

I followed instructions and brought a plate over. Orcutt served Carol and then me. He spooned what looked to be a half-pound of sautéed chicken livers on to my plate and then moved to the second chafing dish. “This is really a kind of paella except that it has a bit more saffron than most people use and also a tiny smidgeon more garlic. I hope you like garlic?”

“I love it,” I said.

Orcutt waved the spoon. “The wine is over there, so please help yourself.”

I helped myself and when we were all settled around the room I tried the chicken livers, which may have been the best I’d ever eaten, but the paella had too much garlic. Everyone complimented Orcutt on his cooking and he beamed for almost five minutes and then remembered to take off the apron.

“Well, I think it’s fortunate that I do like to cook,” he said. “There’s only one decent restaurant in town and it’s not open until six. And there’s something else about the South that I’ve never understood. It doesn’t have any real delicatessens. I can get by just fine with a proper delicatessen, but there simply aren’t any here and no place else in the South unless it’s New Orleans or Atlanta. I’ve also heard that there’s one in Montgomery.”

“They got some damned good ones in Miami,” Necessary said around a mouthful of chicken livers. “They got to because of all the kikes.”

“Really, Homer,” Orcutt said. “Miami isn’t the South.”

We ate in silence for a while until Orcutt sighed, rose, put his plate on the cloth-covered table, and smoothed the lapels of his double-breasted coat. The coat was one-half of his white-on-white seersucker suit that was set off by a dark blue shirt, a white knit tie, and black-and-white wing-tipped shoes with built-up heels. He was, I decided, a man who took his fashion seriously.

He turned toward me. “Now to business. What happened at your meeting this morning?”

I told him in detail without embellishment or unnecessary footnotes and he listened well, asking only a couple of pertinent questions. When I was done, he said, “You think they really believed you?”

“Not completely. Their faith will increase after I hand over our first victim and when you seem to act on some of their phony information that I’ll transmit to you.”

Orcutt paced the room and tapped a forefinger against his lower lip. It seemed to help him think. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “I understand that someone is checking us out for you.”

“An old friend. He’s also checking out Ramsey Lynch and the chief of police.”

“Good,” Orcutt said. “I’m glad you’ve done that. I’d say it shows that you prefer our side, providing that our references prove satisfactory.”

“You can say that,” I said. “You can also say that I’m merely suspicious.”

“I certainly hope so,” Orcutt said. “Now then, I’ve spent scads of time going over a list of persons who might be sacrificed to enhance your reputation with Lynch and his people. For the purpose of verisimilitude, I’ve selected a man and a woman, both of whom, as you would say, Mr. Dye, need ruining.”

“A woman’s good, if she’s gone and done something real smelly,” Necessary said and then looked around the room as if he expected someone to contradict him. Nobody did.

“We’ll start with her then,” Orcutt said. “I’ll give you a condensed version.” He took several four-by-five-inch cards from an inside coat pocket and flipped through them.

Her name, he said, was Mrs. Francine Sobour, widow of Maurice Sobour who had died at seventy-eight six years ago of a heart attack brought on, some said, by the rapacious demands of his bride of six months. Mrs. Sobour was forty-two years old when she married her husband and two months after the wedding he changed his will, disinheriting a number of deserving sons, daughters, grandchildren and charities, and leaving his new wife the entire estate, which was valued at approximately a million dollars. Although Mr. Sobour had no medical history that indicated a heart condition, there had been no autopsy. “We have a sworn statement that she paid the county coroner five thousand dollars cash not to conduct the autopsy.”

“Where’s the coroner now?” I said.

“Dead,” Orcutt said, “but his statement is witnessed and attested to by his wife and two sons, who claim to have been present at the transaction with the Sobour woman.”

“Where are they now?” Necessary said.

“In Florida, I think.”

“How much the statement cost us?” Necessary said.

“Another five thousand.”

“It’s not too hot,” Necessary said. “What he should have done was perform the autopsy and if he found anything, maybe arsenic, he’d been set for life.”

“Which in his case was only three months,” Orcutt said. “His car went out of control on a bridge one night and crashed through the guard rail. It was a perfectly clear night.”

Necessary grunted suspiciously.

Before she married her late husband, Mrs. Sobour had been the wife of Jean Dupree, last in the line of an old but impecunious Swankerton family. Dupree had been a prominent Catholic layman and a member of a number of the city’s civic and social organizations.

“How’d he die?” Necessary said.

“He drank himself to death,” Orcutt said.

The Widow Dupree, soon to be the Widow Sobour, was also a great joiner and currently served as co-chairman of the city’s United Fund Drive. She was also chairman or president of the Swankerton League of Women Voters and active in the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She belonged to a number of social clubs, had served as an alternate delegate to the 1968 Republican convention in Miami, and was prominent in various Catholic charities and fundraising drives.

“When her second husband died,” Orcutt said, “she became president of the Maurice Sobour Real Estate Company. A year ago she was elected secretary of the Swankerton Clean Government Association which is, of course, nominally the organization that has retained Victor Orcutt Associates.”

“What you got on her, Victor?” Necessary said.

“I’m coming to that. Three years ago Mrs. Sobour started a large development of expensive, custom-built homes on some property that was located several miles from Swankerton. Apparently, she sank every cent that she had and could borrow into the venture. Costs skyrocketed, she ran into the usual unexpected delays, there were some zoning problems, and to sum it up she ran out of money.”

“So who’d she steal it from?” Necessary wanted to know.

“Homer, your habit of anticipating conclusions could become most irritating,” Orcutt said in the sharp tone of one whose punch line has just been ruined by the party buffoon. It didn’t bother Necessary.

Orcutt leaned forward and his dark blue eyes seemed to glitter a bit. “Now it really gets delicious,” he said, and I decided that he was a born gossip. Some people are. “Mrs. Sobour was desperate for funds. She’d exhausted all sources of credit. In the meantime, a Catholic order of nuns — Sisters of Charity or Mercy or Solace or something like that, I have the name here somewhere — had entrusted her with nearly half a million dollars to invest for them in some land in Florida. Well, she optioned the land with a token payment of fifty thousand dollars and used the remainder of the half-million to pay off her debts. The option expires in three months.”

Necessary leaned back in his chair and smiled at the ceiling. “That should get her kicked out of the realtor’s league or whatever they call it,” he said.

“Unless she picks up the option,” I said. “Can she?”

“Probably,” Orcutt said. “If we do nothing.”

“What’s the Catholic population in Swankerton?” I said.

“Forty-six percent,” Orcutt said.

“Well, the headlines won’t be too bad,” Carol said. “Reform Move ment Secretary Robs Sisters of the Poor.”

“You have all the necessary documents?” I asked Orcutt. He nodded. “Okay. She’ll do for the first ruinee. Old family, prominent Catholic, tied to the reform movement, and caught with her hand in the church poor box. The Catholics might vote for whoever you run in her place out of sympathy — or stubbornness. And the Protestants might vote for him — or her — because they probably hope that the widow’s successor will do the same thing to the nuns who, as everybody in the South knows, don’t do anything but shack up with the priests and sell their babies to wandering gypsies.”

“Now I’ve never heard that!” Orcutt said.

“Common knowledge,” Carol said.

“Lynch is going to like it all,” Necessary said. “Lynch and his crowd’ll like it just fine. Who’s next, Victor?”

The next sacrificial lamb was the father of four, a deacon in the First Methodist Church, a well-to-do pharmacist, and one of the Clean Government Association’s candidates for the city council. His name was Frank Mouton and he owned a chain of six drugstores that bore his name. “Sale of barbiturates without prescription,” Orcutt read from his notes.

“That’s not much,” Necessary said.

“In wholesale lots, Homer,” Orcutt said. “Fifty thousand at a time to the local pushers. It’s how he expanded from one drugstore to six.”

“How long ago was this?” I said.

“Long enough for the statute of limitations to keep him out of jail, but still recent enough to make a perfectly marvelous scandal.”

“How long’s the statute of limitations?” I said.

“Five years in the state.”

“What about Federal?”

“They probably won’t bother.”

“Another good headline,” Carol Thackerty said. “Prominent Deacon Branded Dope Pusher.”

“Well, at least we’re ecclesiastically impartial,” Orcutt said.

“What was he wholesaling the most of?” Necessary said.

Orcutt looked at his notes. “It seems to have been rather evenly divided between stimulants and depressants. Six year ago he sold a total of more than two hundred thousand capsules of phenobarbital sodium and another hundred thousand of secobarbital sodium. On the stimulant side, he disposed of one hundred twenty-five thousand capsules of amphetamine sulfate and one hundred sixty thousand capsules of dextroamphetamine sulfate. I think they’re called ‘bennies’ and ‘dexies.’ It should have netted him close to one hundred thousand dollars during that one year.”

“How good is your source?” I said.

“Unimpeachable, you might say.”

“You have solid evidence?” I said.

Orcutt nodded, “Take my word as an attorney, Mr. Dye. It’s solid.”

“Good. I’ll feed Lynch the woman first. A week or ten days later I’ll hand him the druggist.”

“What are your plans in the meantime?” Orcutt said.

“I thought I’d better take a look at the city.”

“You want a guided tour?” Necessary said.

“That sounds good.”

Necessary looked at his watch. “What about this afternoon?”

“All right.”

Orcutt rose and moved over to a window and stood there for a few moments before he turned with a thoughtful look on his face. “Something just struck me,” he said.

“What?” Carol Thackerty said.

He pushed his hands into his trouser pockers, looked at the ceiling, and rocked back and forth a little on his elevated heels. “You know, I don’t think that the Deacon Mouton would have made a very good city councilman anyway.”

Chapter 26

Swankerton had the outline of a squatty pear; its fat bottom sprawled along the expensive Gulf Coast beach and then tapered reluctantly north into quiet, middle-income residential areas whose forty and fifty-year-old elms and weeping willows cooled and shaded streets where parking was still no problem. In the warm evenings the owners of the neat houses came home, changed into bermuda shorts, and stood about, gin and tonic in hand, watching their creepy-crawler sprinklers wet down the thick green lawns and wondering whether it wasn’t the right time to sell and move to the suburbs, now that the place was looking so nice.

Farther up the pear, just below the neck, the neat homes and green lawns made way for ugly frame houses that once may have been bright green or blue or even yellow, but were now mostly a disappointed gray, ugly as old soldiers. The poor whites lived there, the millhands and the rednecks and their big-boned wives and tow-headed kids. The gray houses weren’t really old. Most had been built right after World War II to accommodate the returning warriors and they had been thrown up fast in developments that went by such names as Monterey Vistas and Vahlmall Gardens and Lakeview Acres. They had been cheaply built and cheaply financed with four percent VA loans and no money down to vets.

But the vets who had lived there right after World War II had long since moved away. The lawns had turned brown and some of the trees had died and the concrete streets with the fancy names were broken. Nearly every block had one or two or three rusting shrines to despair in the form of a ’49 Ford with a busted block or a ’51 Pontiac with frozen main bearings. Nobody admitted that the shrines even existed because admission implied ownership and it cost fifteen dollars to have them towed away.

The owners and renters here came home after work too, but they didn’t change into anything. Those who worked the day shift just sat around on the shady side of the house in their plastic-webbed lawn chairs that they got at the drugstore for $1.98 each and drank Jax beer and yelled at their kids.

The gray houses with their composition roofs kept on going block after block until they ran up against the railroad tracks which split Swankerton neatly in two about halfway up the pear. The tracks, which ran all the way from Washington to Houston, served as the city’s color line. North of the tracks was black. South was white.

When you crossed the tracks leading north you found yourself in another enclave of neat houses and emerald lawns and creepy-crawler sprinklers. It lasted for almost twelve blocks. The owners here were black and after work they came home and changed into their bermuda shorts and stood around, martini in hand, and wondered whether they should buy their wives a Camaro or one of those new Javelins. They were Niggertown’s affluent, its political leaders, its doctors and dentists, its morticians, schoolteachers, lawyers, skilled workers, restaurant owners, insurance salesmen, policy men, and the Federal civil servants who worked out at the big Air Force depot.

Past these well-tended houses and still farther up the neck of the pear spread the rest of Niggertown, a collection of flimsy, gimcrack houses, often duplexes, whose sides were covered with Permastone or imitation brick and which often as not leaned crazily at each other. And on the edge of the city, just before the suburban sprawl began, was Shacktown, a fully integrated community, composed of packing-crate hovels, abandoned buses, and ancient house trailers that hadn’t been moved in twenty years. In Shacktown teeth were bad and bellies were swollen and eyes were glazed. Those who lived there had given up everything, but the last luxury to go had been the comforting awareness of racial identity. But now that had gone, too, and everyone in Shacktown was almost colorblind.

The stem of the pear was the Strip, a three-mile-long double strand of junkyards, motels, gas stations, nightclubs, roadhouses and honkytonks. Interspersed among these were the franchised food spots, all glass and godawful colors, that hugged the highway to offer fried chicken and tacos and hamburgers which all tasted the same but signaled the wearied traveler that a kind of civilization lay just a little way ahead.

The Strip sliced outlying suburbia neatly in two, skirted Shacktown, and when it reached the city limits they called it MacArthur Drive. Desk-top flat and six and eight and even ten lanes wide, it rolled and twisted all the way down from Chicago and St. Louis and Memphis, taking bang-on aim at the Gulf of Mexico. They called it the Strip sometimes but more often just U.S. 97. It was the river that Swankerton had never had, the route of the endless caravan of semis and articulated vans, big as box cars, that growled up hills in low tenth gear and roared down the other side, seventy and eighty miles per hour, black smoke snorting from their diesel stacks and their drivers praying for the goddamned brakes to hold. The teamsters rolled them night and day down the highway that linked the city with the North and the West and they handled more freight in a day than the railroads did in a week. They rolled down from Pittsburgh and Minneapolis and Omaha and Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, bringing Swankerton what it couldn’t grow and what it couldn’t make for itself, which was just about everything except textiles and vice.

“The trouble with Swankerton,” Homer Necessary said at the end of our two-hour sightseeing tour during which he had served as guide, social commentator, and economic analyst, “is that it ain’t got any harbor. They got that nice beach and all those hotels, but there’s no river, so there’s no harbor. They got that concrete pier that goes out about a mile and the tankers use that some, but that’s really why the town never grew as much as it should’ve. No harbor.”

We drove on in silence for a block or so and then he said, “Now I’m gonna show you something else that’s wrong with Swankerton. Or right. It all depends on how you look at it.”

He headed toward the downtown section, the older part, where the streets that ran east and west were named after such notables as Jefferson, Calhoun, Washington, Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Clay, Forrest, Hampton, Longstreet, Pickett and Early. The streets that ran north and south were numbered. We rolled down Third Street in the blue air-conditioned Impala that Necessary had rented, down to the edge of the commercial and financial districts. He pulled into a parking lot on Clay. “It’s about a block from here.”

We walked the block and I sweated in my too-heavy suit. We walked past the Texas Chili Parlor and Big Billy’s Inn and Emmett’s Billiard Parlor where “just a guy” supposedly hung out, past a TV repair shop, and turned into a narrow store front that had a black-and-white sign reading “Books and Movies.”

“I’ve buttered this guy up some,” Necessary said as we went in.

Most of the books were paperback and were written by authors with such alliterative names as Norman Norway and Jennifer Jackson and Paula Pale. The covers weren’t too well done, but they got their messages across. Often there were two girls of impressive physical proportions who went around in boots and whips and not much else. Sometimes there were two men and one girl or two girls and one man and they all seemed to have large, unmade beds in the background. The paperbacks’ titles were about as imaginative as the names of the authors. There was Red Lust and The Longest Whip and Broken Dyke and Fallen Devil. The paperbacks took up about three-fourths of the small shop and the rest was given over to magazines that featured extraordinarily well-built muscle boys or nude girls or sometimes both.

“Hello, Croner,” Necessary said to the man behind the tall counter that held a cash register.

“You remembered,” Croner said and looked first over Necessary’s right shoulder and then over his left.

“I remembered,” Necessary said.

Croner glanced at his watch. “Should be about fifteen minutes,” he said and darted another glance over Necessary’s shoulders. I looked this time and found two large, curved mirrors up at the ceiling corners in the rear of the store which gave Croner a view of the entire place.

Croner caught my look and said, “You know what the freaks steal? They steal two, three hundred dollars’ worth a week. I sometimes think when they boost it they get more of a jolt, you know what I mean?”

I told him that I did and Necessary said, “This is Lu; he’s a friend of mine.”

Croner nodded at me and then shot another glance at his mirrors. He had three customers, two well-dressed men of about fifty who browsed through a couple of magazines, one of which was called Bondage; I couldn’t see the name of the other. The third customer was about eighteen and wore hair down to his shoulders and some pink-and-white pimples on his face. He was moving his lips over some of the words in a paperback.

“So how’s business?” Necessary asked and leaned on the counter.

“Compared to what?” Croner said in a bitter tone. His complexion was the color of overcooked rice with dark eyes that reminded me of fat raisins. He was taller than I, almost six-four or six-five, and his thin elbows rested easily on the high counter. He talked out of the left side of his mouth because the right side seemed to be frozen. At least that corner didn’t move either up or down, although his dark eyebrows did. They jumped around in constant motion as if compensating for the immobility of his mouth. He had a long neck, extraordinarily long, and his shirt had a collar that was two and a half inches high and a monogram in the place of a breast pocket. I decided that business was good enough for him to afford custom-made shirts.

“Croner here used to write about two thousand bucks’ worth of numbers a day until Lynch came to town,” Necessary told me. “Now he sells dirty books and rents blue movies. He could still be writing numbers except he thought the dues were too high.”

“How much?” I said.

“You’ll see in a couple of minutes,” Croner said out of the side of his mouth and shot his eyebrows up and down a few times before flicking his glance at the two mirrors.

“Guy across the street in that dry cleaning place writes them now,” Necessary said. “Does a nice business. Just watch for a few minutes.”

It was a small shop called Jiffy Cleaners and it did seem to be doing a better than fair business. Every two or three minutes a woman or a man would go in, sometimes two and three at a time. They usually came out a minute or so later.

“Now what’s wrong with that picture?” Necessary said.

“Not much,” I said, “except that they don’t carry any clothes in or out.”

“Money in, a slip out,” Necessary said. “He writes maybe two to three thousand bucks’ worth a day. And in about five minutes he’ll pay his dues.”

We waited five minutes. A uniformed cop sauntered by and entered the dry cleaning shop. He came out forty-five seconds later according to my watch.

“Every day about this time he goes in and collects his five bucks,” Croner said. “Except Sunday when he’s off. He’s off Monday too, but he still comes down for it. I only used to pay him a couple a day. Talk about your goddamned inflation.”

“That’s an extra thirty a week in take-home pay,” I said.

“Thirty shit,” Croner said. “He’s got another one six blocks down. He drags down at least sixty to seventy a week. Tax free.”

“Now watch this,” Necessary said. “Should be any minute.”

Some more customers without dry cleaning either to be done or to be picked up entered and left the shop. A Ford squad car with Swankerton Police Department on its side double parked in front of Jiffy Cleaners for a minute while one of its uniformed occupants went in and came out. He hadn’t dropped by to pick up his other suit either, and the squad car didn’t move off until the one who had gone into the shop handed something to the driver.

“They’re splitting the weekly take,” Croner said. “Three hundred bucks. I used to pay them two hundred.”

It was a half hour before something else interesting happened. Two more customers came into Croner’s store and the two middle-aged men left after buying a couple of magazines each. The teenager with the long hair and the pimples didn’t buy anything. The dry cleaning shop across the street continued to do a steady business.

An unmarked green Mercury double parked in front of the cleaning shop. Its single occupant entered the store, remained less than a minute, came out, and drove off.

“He just picked up the monthly take of seventeen hundred bucks for the brass down at headquarters,” Croner said. “His name’s Toby Marks and he’s regular bagman all over town.”

“Altogether, that’s about three thousand a month,” I said.

“About,” Croner said. “I figure that guy across the street’s working about ten or eleven days a month just for the cops. If he can’t cut it and goes out of business, that’s too damned bad for him. Somebody else’ll open up and pay off and the bastard cops are the only ones who’re guaranteed a profit.”

“Why pay off the beat cop?” I said. “He’s not going to arrest anybody if they’re dragging in that much downtown.”

Croner gave me a pitying look, which he managed by manipulating his eyebrows. “Why pay off the beat cop, he asks. Well, all he has to do is stand out there for about three hours and the guy inside begins to hurt. Nobody’s gonna play numbers at a spot where a cop’s holding up the wall.”

“How many places like that in town?” Necessary said, mostly for my benefit, I thought.

Croner shrugged his bony shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe a couple of hundred, maybe more. I think they lose count in Niggertown. Last time I figured it out the total monthly payoff to the cops was around maybe half a million a month.”

“Nice,” Necessary said. “Real nice.”

“Why aren’t you still writing?” I said.

Croner shot quick looks at his two curved mirrors. “Like your buddy here says, I thought the dues were too high so I quit paying the beat cop. He stood outside my place for four hours a day for two weeks. I went broke. Then the people I banked with got mad and took it away from me and gave it to the guy across the street.”

“Seen enough?” Necessary said.

“I think so.”

“Thanks, Croner,” Necessary said. “I’ll be around in a couple of days with a little something for you.”

Croner nodded glumly. “You want anything to read?” he said and waved a hand at the racks of books and magazines. “On the house.”

Necessary shook his head firmly. “My wife don’t like me to read that stuff less I’m home where it’ll do her some good. How ‘bout you?” he said to me.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Croner nodded again, just as glumly as before. “Don’t blame you. It’s all a bunch of crap. You’d be surprised at who buys it though. Sometimes I think this whole town is full of freaks.”

We got the car out of the lot and Necessary drove down Fifth to Forrest and turned left. “How much cash you got on you?” he said.

“About eight hundred.”

“That’ll get you in.”

“Where?”

“I’ll show you in a minute.” He turned right on Sixth Street and went two more blocks. “Just to your left is the new municipal center and police headquarters where I spent last night,” he said.

It was new, about fifteen stories high, and with its parking lot took up most of a city block. It was built of precast concrete slabs and its windows were tinted almost black and recessed a foot or so into the outer wall. The black windows gave it a grim, forbidding air and that was probably the way that they wanted it to look.

“They got the criminal courts in there, too,” Necessary said. “The city and county jails are around back.”

Across Sixth Street from headquarters were the usual inexpensive restaurants, poolhalls, and bars frequented by those who have good and bad reason to hang around police headquarters. There was a lawyers’ building and a number of signs painted on windows in gold leaf advertising twenty-four-hour bail bond service. The block also had three pawnshops.

Necessary drove into another parking lot and we walked up Sixth Street and turned into the side entrance of a three-story brick building whose ground floor was home to the Bench and Gavel Bar. We walked up a flight of stairs and down a hall that was lined with the offices of bail bondsmen and one-man legal offices. A phone rang occasionally. The sound of electric typewriters was constant. Necessary pushed through a door with no lettering on it. Past the door was a regular reception room with a desk and a chair. Behind the desk sat a young, uniformed policeman who nodded at Necessary and stared at me.

“You gonna try it again, huh?” he said to Necessary.

“Try,” Necessary said.

“He okay?” the cop said, nodding at me.

“He’s okay,” Necessary said.

The cop reached under the desk and a buzzer sounded. We went through another door and into a room whose three windows offered a fine view of police headquarters across Sixth Street. There were two poker tables in the room, six chairs at each, and at least three of the gamblers wore the blue uniforms and the insignia of police lieutenant or captain. There were two chairs open at the far table and Necessary and I sat down next to each other. On my left was a police lieutenant with a small stack of chips in front of him. He nodded at me and I nodded back.

A young man of about thirty with green eyes and crinkly brown hair grinned at Necessary and said, “Well, Chief, you gonna try to get even?”

“I’ll take two hundred worth,” Necessary said and pushed ten twenties across the table. The man with the green eyes looked at me and said, “How much, friend?”

“Two hundred,” I said and gave him four fifties. We played draw for an hour and I won nearly fifty dollars. Necessary lost a hundred. The police lieutenant was the big loser. He dropped nearly a thousand during the hour to a pair of quiet thin men with careful faces whose conversation was limited to “in, out, call, up twenty, or check.” Whenever the chips in front of the lieutenant disappeared, he merely looked at the man with the crinkly hair, who shoved another two or three-hundred-dollar stack at him. The lieutenant was a bad player, a compulsive better, and an indifferent bluffer. At four o’clock he looked at his watch, cashed in forty dollars’ worth of chips, nodded at me again, rose and left. The two captains at the other table also cashed in and left.

The man with the crinkly hair sighed. “Thank God he doesn’t win often,” he said to nobody in particular.

“Free ride again, huh?” Necessary said.

“When they win, they win. When they lose, they put it on the tab and the tab’s never paid.” He looked at Necessary. “Hear you had a little trouble last night.”

“Just a misunderstanding,” Necessary said.

“Uh-huh,” the man with the green eyes and crinkly hair said, “that’s what I heard. A misunderstanding.”

“Deal,” said one of the men with a careful face. We played until five and I lost $125. Necessary was ahead a hundred or so. He shoved his chips in and the man with the crinkly hair cashed them without comment. I tossed him the couple of chips that I had left and he handed me $10.

“Come back,” he said, “now that you know the way.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will.”

A different young policeman was on duty at the desk in the waiting room. He looked at us as we went out but said nothing. Halfway down the stairs, Necessary said, “That’s one of the six games that Lynch runs. It starts at nine every morning and runs till about five A.M. The headquarters’ brass play free, but they’re all pretty bad and don’t win much.”

When we were on Sixth Street, Necessary paused and said, “You want a drink?”

“Sounds good.”

We went into the cool, damp interior of the Bench and Gavel, sat in a booth, and ordered two gin and tonics. Necessary took a long swallow of his and said, “How’d you like the tour?”

“Educational.”

“Give you any ideas?”

“A few.”

“We only skimmed the surface today,” he said.

“What’s it look like underneath?”

“It’s not the looks so much, it’s the smell.”

“Pretty bad?”

“It stinks,” Necessary said.

“And the more it’s stirred, the worse it’ll get.”

Necessary finished his drink and waved for another one. “You figure on doing a little stirring?”

I nodded. “When I find a long enough spoon.”

Chapter 27

The evening paper, The News-Calliope, broke the story a week later with a screaming, eight-column banner. Skirting the libel laws by a legal pica or so, the publication charged that Mrs. Francine Sobour, prominent realtor and secretary of the Swankerton Clean Government Association, had stolen nearly a half million dollars from some Catholic nuns and had used the funds to get herself out of a financial hole.

To prove it, the newspaper printed pictures of Xeroxed copies of various checks and documents that had been involved in the transaction. There was even a signed, front-page editorial by the editor and publisher himself, Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III, calling upon Mrs. Sobour to resign from the Clean Government Association “until these damaging and shocking allegations are explained to the complete satisfaction of concerned citizens, Catholic and Protestant alike.” He forgot to mention those of the Jewish faith, but that must have been an unintentional oversight.

The story pushed Washington and Southeast Asia back to pages four and five. The reform candidate for mayor, a prissy-looking attorney with rimless glasses, said that he was “deeply disturbed.” The incumbent mayor, Pierre (Pete) Robineaux, whom I had met at Lynch’s Victorian house, said that it was “shocking, but not surprising,” and Phetwick’s paper printed a picture of him saying it with his tiny mouth agape and his eyes bulging half out of their sockets. The law firm that handled Mrs. Sobour’s affairs issued a statement that in one paragraph made vague threats about filing a libel suit and in the next announced that Mrs. Sobour would “have no comment at present.”

The TV stations picked it up, of course, and showed pictures of the virtually completed luxury development that Mrs. Sobour was in hock for. They also ran some old film clips of her which showed a still attractive, dark-haired woman with a broad smile and a cheery wave. Some of the Sisters of Solace were also interviewed. They said that they were praying for Mrs. Sobour.

At nine o’clock that night, Mayor Robineaux bought a half hour of political time on all three television stations and used it to attack the Clean Government Association as “the spoiler of Swankerton.” He wasn’t a very good speaker and since he had preempted two of the top ten TV programs, he probably lost himself a few thousand votes.

It had taken me the entire week to get the information on the Sobour woman to Ramsey Lynch. I gave it to him piecemeal, an item at a time. Some of it was Xeroxed on different machines, some of it I had copied in my own scrawled handwriting on the backs of envelopes, and some of it was verbal stuff that Lynch could check out himself. Orcutt and I spent hours deciding what particular document or scrap of evidence Lynch should get on a particular day and what form it should take. Carol Thackerty had suggested that I use my almost indecipherable handwriting.

Lynch had been like a man who is given a jigsaw puzzle one piece at a time. He had a vague, general idea of its outline, but until I handed him the final damning piece of documentation, the picture had been of interesting composition, but inadequate impact. The final piece brought it all into focus and Lynch said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned go to hell, so that’s how she did it!”

“She’s good,” I said.

“Good, my ass, she’s damn near perfect. The thing is, she could’ve paid it all back in three months and nobody’d ever known the difference.”

“That’s right.”

Lynch looked at me carefully. “How’d you get tipped off?”

“I listen a lot,” I said. “And I remember what I hear.”

“You must have done some sneaking around late at night.”

I shook my head. “Early in the morning. Before cock crow.”

Lynch grinned and nodded his four or five chins. “That’s a good time all right.” He tapped the pile of Xeroxed material and scribbled notes with a forefinger. “You know what I’m gonna do with all this?”

“What?”

“I’m gonna get it all typed up neat with extra Xeroxed copies of everything and then I’m gonna wrap it up in a pink ribbon and send it over to old Phetwick at the Calliope with a note that says ‘for your information.’ ”

“He’ll print it.”

“He might sit on it till it’s hatched,” Lynch said with a dubious look. “He’s one of the high muckety-mucks in the Clean Government crowd.”

“That’s why he’ll print it,” I said. “That and because he’s in the business of selling newspapers. Christ, The News-Calliope will be more outraged and hurt than the nuns themselves.” I didn’t mention that a reporter on the Calliope had dug up most of the material on Mrs. Sobour nearly two months before and that Phetwick had locked it away in a safe.

We were in my hotel room at the Sycamore, alone except for Boo Robineaux, the mayor’s disenchanted heir, who was reading a copy of Evergreen, or at least admiring the pictures.

“Boo,” Lynch said, “bring me my bag over here.”

Boo rose, not taking his eyes from the magazine, picked up the briefcase, brought it over to Lynch, handed it to him, and went back to his chair without skipping a word. He seemed totally disinterested.

“Got a little something for you,” Lynch said, unlocking the briefcase.

“Like money?”

“Like money. Sorry I’m a week late with it, but we wanted a look at the merchandise.”

He started taking it out of the briefcase and stacking it on the coffee table. Then he was done and there were ten stacks of brand new fifty-dollar bills.

“Twenty-five grand,” he said. “Want to count it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t even want to touch it.”

“What’s the matter? You said cash.”

“Tell you what you do,” I said. “You put the money back in the briefcase, give it to Boo, and tell him to go across the street to the First National and ask that nice vice-president over there, the one who’s so friendly, to change it into used tens, twenties, and just a few old fifties. You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you, Lynch?”

Lynch chuckled. “By God, I bet you think it’s queer.”

“No,” I said. “I just think it’s new and so are the serial numbers.”

Lynch tried to look gravely offended, but it was ruined by the twinkle in his eyes. “There’s not much Christian trust in that heart of yours, Brother Dye.”

“None at all, Brother Lynch.”

We had a drink while Boo Robineaux went across street to switch the new money for old bills. “What else do you think you might dig up?” Lynch said.

“You just named it,” I said. “Something else.”

“Just as good.”

“Better, I think.”

“You’re not sure yet?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m gonna have something for you to slip your friend Orcutt.”

“When?”

“You anxious?”

“I’m supposed to be working for him.”

“That’s right, I keep getting confused about who you really work for.”

“So do I.”

“I hope it’s nothing you can’t straighten out.”

“It’s not.”

“Orcutt pressing you?”

“He keeps asking.”

“Next time he does, tell him a couple of days.”

“It had better be good.”

Lynch smiled comfortably, as if well pleased with life and his place in the scheme of things. “It’ll be just dandy,” he said.

After I put the $25,000 in old bills in my safe-deposit box, I called an airline just for the hell of it, I told myself, and asked what flights there were from Swankerton to San Francisco and if there was a connecting polar flight from there to Geneva. When she said that there wasn’t, I thanked her and lied about how I would make other arrangements out of New York.

I’m still not sure what I would have done if I could have made connections. For a few moments I had been on my way, gone from Swankerton and heading west, the only way to go when flight turns into the final solution. It had happened too quickly, of course. That was most of it, if not all. The body went through its normal functions. It ate and bathed and talked and made love, but the mind still wandered around and waited for the key to turn in the lock and for the thud of the bolt as the guard slid it back. I went over to the mirror and took a good look at the man with the too pale face who only four or five weeks before had been dining on fish and rice and amusing himself by counting the number of lice he killed each day. It wasn’t exactly a stranger’s face, it was just the face of someone whom I no longer knew very well and whose renewed acquaintance would require too much effort. I waved at him and he of course waved back. It was not a wave of greeting but rather of vague acknowledgement, one that admitted existence, but nothing else.

Gloomy persons like gloomy weather. They like foggy days and rain and sleet. They can understand those and cope with them. But it’s on those shiny, bird-singing days that they order up the two-fifths of vodka and take the sleeping pills down from the medicine cabinet, or crawl out on the ledge of the building, or go out to the garage with a length of hose and tape it to the exhaust. I went over to the window and stared down at the girls in their sunglasses and short summer dresses and wished it would rain. I waited five minutes for a bolt of lightning or a thunderclap or at least for a cloud to hide the sun, but when nothing happened I went over to the phone and called Carol Thackerty.

“I’ll buy you a drink,” I said when she answered.

“I thought you had company.”

“He’s gone.”

“You’re supposed to see Orcutt.”

“Not for lunch, I hope.”

“No. He’s having that with Phetwick the third and Doctor Warner Colfax.”

“Of the Colfax clinic?”

“The same. You’re supposed to give them a report after lunch.”

“When will that be?”

“A couple of hours.”

“Fine. I’ll buy you a drink and lunch.”

“Where?”

“My room.”

“Shall I bring Homer, and don’t say it’s not necessary.”

“Don’t anyway.”

“Just a cozy tête-à-tête with perhaps a nooner thrown in, right?”

“That did occur to me,” I said.

“Me too.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

“Make it twenty,” she said, “and order my lunch.”

“What?”

“Steak tartare with lots of capers.”

“And a raw egg?”

“Two,” she said.

“Chopped onions?”

“Gobs.”

“Well, there’s one thing about steak tartare,” I said.

“What?”

“If we’re busy doing something else, we won’t have to worry about it getting cold.”

After the drinks, and the wine, and the raw chopped steak, and a most satisfactory midday journey down some heretofore unexplored avenues in sexland, Carol Thackerty and I sat drinking coffee and waiting for my command appearance in the Rickenbacker suite before the crowned heads of Swankerton.

“It’s not really your dish, is it?” she said.

“What, sex?”

“No.”

“Well, what?”

“This whole Swankerton bamboozle.”

“That’s a good word.”

“It describes it.”

“Probably,” I said.

“But you don’t fit in, do you?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“You’re a good liar, but not that good.”

“All right, I thought about it. For five minutes just before I called you.

“And what did you decide?”

“Why the hell do I have to decide something? I just thought about it.”

“If somebody were setting me up, I’d think about it. Hard.”

“I read the enlistment papers carefully,” I said.

“You signed on to be tough, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Why?”

“My thinking hasn’t got that far yet,” I said. “That’s tomorrow’s episode.”

She ground her cigarette out in an ashtray and kept on grinding it even after it was dead. “You’re in for a long fall,” she said. “I don’t think you know how far.”

“I’ve got a fair idea.”

“If I had to fall that far, I’d be looking for something to catch me.”

“Maybe I’ll just bounce.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You won’t bounce. You’ll just shatter into a million, billion, trillion pieces.”

“That’s a lot of pieces.”

“I used to say that when I was a kid.”

“Why all the sudden concern?” I said.

She looked at me steadily. “Jesus, you ask some dumb questions sometimes.”

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose I probably do.”

Chapter 28

Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III crossed one bony leg over the other, cleared his throat, and in his old man’s faltering tenor said, “What precisely was the reaction of the Lynch person?”

I turned from the window which had a view of the Gulf and said, “He thought Mrs. Sobour was a financial whiz.”

Phetwick must have been close to eighty. He occupied one of the three chairs that were drawn up around a coffee table in the Rickenbacker suite. Orcutt and Doctor Colfax sat in the other two, Orcutt on the edge of his so that his feet could touch the floor. Phetwick’s voice kept cracking when he spoke, going from tenor to soprano, but each word came out all by itself, freshly minted, and the phrasing of each word was exactly the same. It was a curious way of speaking, something like a talking robot whose voice box needed oiling. Phetwick wore a hearing aid and thick bifocals and the backs of his hands were covered with brown liver spots. He had on a dark suit, almost black, that may have been broadcloth if they still make it, and a high collar, like the one that Herbert Hoover wears in all the history books. His stringy neck was too small for the collar and his flesh hung in gray, flabby folds, as if he had lost a lot of weight.

“Does Lynch believe that I will publish the story?” he said.

“Yes, I think so. He’s going to turn the stuff over to you today.”

“Excellent. I wrote my signed editorial this morning. It is, I think you will agree when you read it, exceptionally forceful.” Phetwick never seemed to use contractions when he spoke. “Now let us get on with the affair of the druggist.”

“Doctor Colfax has gone over the information concerning Frank Mouton,” Orcutt said. “It appears incontrovertible to him as well as to me and I suggest that Mr. Dye transmit it to Lynch much in the same manner that he transmitted the material on the Sobour woman.”

“Mouton is a deacon in my church,” Phetwick said to no one in particular. “Pity, I suppose.”

Dr. Warner Colfax stirred in his chair at Orcutt’s left. He was my idea of what a doctor should look like: his expensive tweed suit was carelessly rumpled, his tie was the wrong shade, and his shirt, while clean enough, was a little too tight at the neck and snug at the belly. His shoes, also expensive, were thoughtlessly cared for, and his blue eyes twinkled merrily behind practical, steel-rimmed glasses. He had a brush mustache, clipped fairly well, but gone to salt and pepper, and a wide sensitive mouth over a strong chin, with gray thinning hair that he brushed just so to cover a bare patch and to reveal that he, too, had a reassuring streak of harmless vanity. Good, gray Dr. Colfax.

“I don’t mind if the cocksucker slipped pills to every neurotic old cunt in town,” the good gray doctor said in a voice as gritty as ground glass. “But when he started wholesaling to those shitheads, I had a little talk with him.”

“To cut yourself in for ten percent, I believe,” Phetwick said.

The doctor twinkled his eyes some more. Only his voice kept him from being the lovable rogue. “Prove it,” he said with a warm smile and a weasel’s snarl.

The old man turned his head to look at the doctor. He turned it slowly and carefully and I almost expected to hear it squeak. “That may not be as difficult as you believe, Warner, should the occasion arise; I am certain that if your participation in the druggist’s illegal activities could not be proved, several of your other nefarious adventures would be unable to bear close public scrutiny.” Phetwick talked like that — commas, semicolons, and all.

“Don’t bang skeletons with me, Channing,” the doctor said. “I know where they’re all hidden — even yours.”

“Fortunately, Mr. Orcutt, Doctor Colfax and I over the years have reached what at one time was popularly described as a Mexican standoff. We could easily ruin each other. Realizing this, we have joined forces, although you may have noticed that a current of animosity runs between us. To be quite frank, we despise each other.”

“I think it’s perfectly charming,” Orcutt said and smiled his fake smile to try to show that he really did.

“Yes,” Phetwick said slowly and with a trace of doubt, “charming. Let us now return to the druggist Mouton who, sad to say, is also a Clean Government Association candidate for a vacancy on the city council. He can be easily pilloried, true. But if he were to be elected, he would be a most amenable councilman. We sacrifice this virtual certainty so that Mr. Dye can gain the confidence of the Lynch person in the fond but uncertain hope that he will discover information that will be useful to us and conversely damaging to Lynch and his supporters. That is correct, is it not?” He peered at Orcutt through his thick glasses.

“Perfectly,” Orcutt said.

“Christ,” Doctor Colfax said, “how many times do we have to rake this shit up?”

“As many as necessary, Warner,” Phetwick said.

“How ‘bout it, Dye?” the doctor said. “You think you can get something on Lynch’s people? And don’t fall for that crap about him being an ex-con. Everybody knows that and they all feel soft and gooey inside because they’re giving him a second chance.”

“There’ll be something,” I said. “I can’t guarantee quid pro quo. Nobody can. But there’ll be something.”

“Something that will turn the stomachs of our voters, I hope,” Phetwick said. “Perhaps you have already discovered this, Mr. Dye, but the citizens of Swankerton all seem to have stomachs that are made of cast iron. Nothing really bothers them very much.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said.

“I say turn the goods on Mouton over to Dye and let him get on with his job,” Doctor Colfax said. “That’s what we’re paying him for.”

“Mr. Phetwick?” Orcutt said.

Phetwick sighed. “I never really cared for Mouton, even though he is a deacon in my church. It is the First Methodist, you know. Will it put him behind bars?”

“Probably not,” Orcutt said. “The statute of limitations has run out.”

“That’s the state statute,” Doctor Colfax said. “What about Federal? What about the income-tax boys?”

“That will be up to them, of course,” Orcutt said. “It may be that Mouton paid his proper income tax.”

“In a pig’s ass,” the doctor growled.

“It is really not our concern,” Phetwick said and sighed again, so deeply that it made him shudder. “Our concern is to destroy the man and by doing so cast even more of a shadow on the efficacy of the Clean Government Association. It does seem to be a dear price to pay, but if it will help return a semblance of orderliness to Swankerton, then I can only agree.”

“I have an idea,” I said, “which may be an answer to your objections, Mr. Phetwick.”

“Then say it, young man, say it.”

“I go ahead and turn the information on Mouton over to Lynch. But he doesn’t use it to destroy Mouton publicly. Instead, he uses it to blackmail Mouton into informing on the Clean Government Association. Since we have equal leverage, we can force Mouton to channel misleading information to Lynch. We’ll supply him with it, of course.”

Doctor Colfax slammed a big white fist on his knee. “Now, by God, I like that! That’s real shitty!”

Phetwick nodded slowly and carefully. “It does have merit, I agree. However, do you think that Lynch will be able to withstand the temptation? By that I mean if one has the power to destroy another and by doing so achieve measurable gain for oneself, the temptation to destroy is quite often difficult to resist and becomes, in many instances, overriding.”

“You should know, Channing,” Doctor Colfax said.

“I do know, Warner,” Phetwick said. “That is why I mentioned it.”

“I might have an answer to that, too,” I said. “I’ll suggest to Lynch that the information he has on Mouton can be useful in two ways. First, it’ll get him inside dope on the Clean Government Association, and if it comes from Mouton, he’ll trust it more than if it came from me. But second, I’ll suggest that he use the information to force Mouton into making a last minute refutation of the Clean Government Association. You can then counter that, Mr. Phetwick, with a front-page exposé of Mouton’s illegal drug sales.”

“By God, Dye, I don’t know what the Christ you’ve been doing up till now, but you sure as hell earned your money today!” It was the good, gruff, gray doctor complimenting me and I started to ask him if he had something for nausea.

“Devilish, Mr. Dye,” Phetwick said. “Sound thinking, too. Should have thought of it myself. We first use Mouton to mislead Lynch. When Mouton makes his eleventh-hour attack on the Clean Government Association and embraces the Lynch slate, we expose him as a grubby drug peddler. We thus destroy the validity of his attack on us and at the same time expose Lynch and his people as being foolishly gullible at best, or in cahoots with Mouton at worst. Yes. I like it, probably, I must confess, because of its utter ruthlessness. Are you an utterly ruthless man, Mr. Dye?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Phetwick rose from his chair. He did it slowly, helping himself up with the aid of a silver-handled cane. “Come, Warner, you can give me a lift back to my office in that Rolls of yours. We have done enough mischief for today.”

Doctor Colfax strode over to me and stuck out his hand. I shook it. There was nothing else to do. Nothing I could think of anyway. “Like your thinking, Dye, by God, I do. You’ve got the touch.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Drop round my office sometime when you’re out our way. We’ll have a drink.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Goodbye, Mr. Dye,” Phetwick said. “It was reassuring to have met you — probably because I believed that most of my kindred souls were long since dead. Take that as a compliment. It was meant as such.”

“I will,” I said and wished that I were lying on a deserted beach somewhere with nothing to do but count the waves.

When they were gone Orcutt spun around and pointed a finger at me. “You were just terribly good!” he said. “So devious! Now tell me everything that Lynch had to say today.”

I told him everything and when I was done he nodded in a satisfied way and said, “What did you think of our two patrons?”

“I think I like Lynch better.”

He nodded understandingly. “That old man is simply fantastic, isn’t he? One can literally smell the evil coming out of him.”

“That doctor friend of his has a nice bedside manner, too.”

“Oh, he’s terrible!” Orcutt said. “A real villain. But they both liked you very much.”

“That’s what bothers me.”

Orcutt waved his hand gracefully. “Think of them as chess pieces. I do.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

“Now. Call Necessary’s room and tell him to bring the man down.”

“What man?”

“He’s a photographer. A motion picture cameraman really. Homer has cooked up something that should prove most exciting.”

“What?”

“We’re going to expose the Swankerton police. And you must inform Lynch, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Call Necessary and tell him to bring Carol along too. She often has some excellent suggestions.”

“It’s a fur job,” Necessary said.

“How much?” Orcutt asked.

“They might get away with seventy-five, maybe even ninety thousand worth. They’ll fence it for maybe thirty thousand if they’re lucky. More like twenty-five.”

The cameraman’s name was Arch Soderbell and he was about twenty-five years old, had a fine black beard, smoked Gauloises, and seemed to wear whatever was handy. That afternoon he had on tan chinos, white sneakers, a blue chambray shirt, and dark glasses.

“Are you all set, Mr. Soderbell?” Orcutt said.

“All set,” Soderbell said.

“What time, Homer?” Orcutt said.

“They got it planned for around three-thirty tomorrow morning. We’ll be there by three to get set up.”

“Have you made all the necessary arrangements?”

“Quit worrying, Victor,” Necessary said. “You sound like some old maid.”

“I’m paid to worry, Homer. Some call it infinite attention to detail and there are others who call that genius.”

“All right,” Necessary said. “You’re a genius.”

“I want Mr. Dye to go with you.”

“Why?” Necessary said. “I don’t mind Dye coming along. But it’s really a two-man job and we might have to get out of there damned fast.”

“It has something to do with Lynch,” Orcutt said.

Necessary nodded. “Dye’s tipping him off, huh?”

“Not all the way.”

“Okay,” Necessary said. “I get it.” He turned to me. “I’ll call you about two unless you want to stay up.”

“Call me,” I said. “I’ll call Lynch from a phone booth.”

“When it’s too late,” Necessary said.

“That’s right,” I said. “When it’s too late.”

Chapter 29

Homer Necessary came back up to my room with me, probably because he knew that I had laid in a new supply of Scotch, and he was thirsty as usual. I ordered up some ice and some coffee for myself while Necessary mixed himself a drink, not waiting for the ice.

“Where’d you find Soderbell?” I said.

“Cleveland,” Necessary said. “He was in the army in Vietnam for a year and when he got discharged he went back out there as a civilian free lance. He helped shoot a documentary for some German producer that won an award in Berlin.”

“What was he doing in Cleveland?”

“Looking for a job.”

“Does he know what he’s getting into tonight?”

“Hell, this isn’t his first time. He’s been flying in and out of here for the last month from New Orleans. Old man Phetwick let us commission him to do a documentary on Swankerton. He’s shot some real nice stuff.”

“Such as?”

“Well, he sets up inside a delivery truck at noon around a grade school and gets some close-up stuff of kids spending their lunch money on numbers. Now that’s not bad, is it?”

“No, that’s pretty good.”

“Then he sets up just above that dirty book store we were in and shoots the payoffs of the cops and the customers going in and out across the street without any dry cleaning. Then he rigs a camera up in a briefcase and goes to one of the better cathouses and gets some prominent citizens coming and going. He rigs another one up in a big box, like it was gift-wrapped, you know, and puts it on the front seat of his car and then goes out and gets himself arrested for stop line running and speeding. They arrest him six times in one day and he pays the cops off on the spot with five-dollar bills and gets it all down on film. You can even read their numbers. Then he gets some good shots out in Niggertown of cops just standing around on a corner grinning while a pusher takes care of his customers.”

“Have you seen any of it?” I asked.

Necessary shook his head. “He’s keeping it all in New Orleans. He’s made duplicate prints of everything just in case. Oh, yeah, he got one more pretty good shot too — with sound.”

“What?” I said.

“Well, Phetwick owns a hell of a lot of property around town, you know, and he owns this small store building that he’s going to tear down anyway. It’s a three-story building over on Early. The top two floors are vacant and downstairs is a grocery store, one of those mom and pop things, and their lease is about to run out. So I make a deal with them.”

“What kind of deal?”

“The old guy has been paying protection to some of Lynch’s hard cases. Not much. About twenty-five or thirty a week. We offer him a bundle not to pay the next time they come around and to let Soderbell film and tape it.

“The old guy’s afraid he might get beat up, but we tell him not to worry about it, and that we’ll stop any rough stuff. Soderbell rigs everything up in the back room, gets his mikes hidden away, and we sit and wait.”

“You were with him?”

“I was with him on all of them except when the traffic cops stopped him. I tell the old guy not to pay and sure enough, here they come, a couple of real punks. They call him dad and ask for the weekly premium and all that and the old man says he’s not paying. They just smile and open a big jug of Lysol and pour it all over his vegetables. Soderbell gets all that. The old man still won’t pay so they get a couple of cans of shaving cream in those aerosol things and squirt it all over the inside of his meat case. Nothing rough yet and Soderbell gets that on film too.”

“The conversation, too,” I said.

“That too. Then they start getting rough with the old man. They slap him a couple of times and bend his arm a little and he starts yelling. Soderbell wants to go help him, but I tell him to shut up and just keep shooting. Finally, one of them hits too hard and the old man faints or passes out. They open the cash register, take out their thirty dollars or whatever it is, and leave. Soderbell gets it all.”

“What happened to the store owner?”

“We send him to Colfax’s Hospital, all bills paid. Then we give him his bundle and as soon as he gets over his concussion he heads for Florida.”

“He recovered?” I said.

“Sure, he recovered,” Necessary said. “If I thought they were going to kill him or anything like that, mess him up real bad, I’d of stepped in. But they just mussed him up a little and if I’d done anything about it, then Soderbell’d lost some real fine stuff.”

“You’re nothing but heart, Homer.”

“What the Christ would you have done?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably have gone for the film instead of the rescue.”

Necessary stared at me with his brown and blue eyes and I could find no admiration in them. “You know, Dye, you got something wrong with you inside somewhere. Maybe in your head. You remind me of some tough old cops that I’ve known who got worried when they couldn’t feel about things like they did when they were rookies. It bothered some of them so much that they went out looking for things that’d make ‘em feel like they thought they should, and if they didn’t get killed doing it, they got preachy. I don’t think you feel a hell of a lot about anything or anybody. But you think you should because of all the crap around that says that’s the way normal people are. Well, you just as well face it: you ain’t normal. You might have been once, but not anymore, so you may as well get used to it.”

“I feel I should be taking notes.”

Necessary shook his head. “I haven’t got much hope for you, Dye. You’re the kind who’ll keep on playing by somebody else’s rules, lose every time, and always wonder why.”

“Whose rules do you play by?”

“My own, good buddy, my very own.”

“And you never lose?”

Necessary finished his drink. “Sure I lose,” he said, “but when I do, at least I know why.”

The telephone rang fifteen minutes after Necessary left and it was Gorman Smalldane calling from New York.

“You’re five days late,” I said.

“And you’ve got some nice playmates,”

“I know.”

“You want the good as well as the bad?” Smalldane said.

“Just the bad.”

“I’ll skim it for you.”

“Fine.”

“The Thackerty woman’s been arrested twice for prostitution. It was nol-prossed both times.”

“Anything else?”

“She was Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year.”

“Is that supposed to be good or bad?” I said.

“I won’t try to influence you.”

“Thanks.”

“Victor Orcutt,” Smalldane said. “No record other than a rather startling academic one. He’s a genius.”

“If you don’t believe it, ask him.”

“Like that, huh?”

“Like that.”

“Homer Necessary. Now there’s a name I like. At twenty-six he was a second-grade detective who busted his own police department wide open. By himself. He nailed every one from the chief on down. He had facts, figures, documents, photographs, and his evidence and testimony helped send thirty-one of his fellow officers to the state penitentiary. The chief himself got five years. The city was so impressed and grateful that it made Necessary its new chief of police at twenty-seven, and for the next fifteen years he — shall we say — prospered. He did everything the old crowd did and added a few new licks of his own.”

“Was he fired?”

“They could never nail him. There was a lot of talk about it, but he resigned four years ago to enter what he called ‘private industry,’ which turned out to be Victor Orcutt Associates. After he resigned, there was another tremendous shake up in the police force, but Necessary was completely absolved.”

“He saw to that,” I said.

“Ramsey Lynch, born Montgomery Vicker. He’s been in and out of trouble since he was sixteen. Born in Newark and at eighteen legally changed his name to Ramsey Lynch at his family’s insistence. The family was rather staid and prominent in a mild sort of way. He was on the fringes of the rackets until he took a fall for one of the higherups on a narcotics rap and spent eighteen months in Atlanta. After that, they were so grateful that they set him up in New Orleans where he was either Number Two or Number Three boy until he opened up in Swankerton where I understand he’s now Number One. The only member of his family who still admits that he’s alive is one Gerald Vicker who lives in Hong Kong. They’re supposed to be close.”

“They are,” I said.

“Now the dessert,” Smalldane said. “Your chief of police, Calvin Loambaugh. Born in Swankerton and joined the army at nineteen for a three-year hitch. He came out a first lieutenant in the MPs. Served in Germany and there’s nothing on him there. He joined the police force in Buffalo and resigned under a cloud.”

“What kind of a cloud?”

“Suspected of being a receiver of stolen goods.”

“Could they prove it?”

“They could, but they didn’t because they had him for something else which they also wanted to forget about.”

“What?”

“Two counts of child molestation.”

“And they let him off?”

“Buffalo was having a lot of trouble with its cops about that time,” Smalldane said. “They didn’t need any more.”

“What then?”

“Loambaugh joined the Birmingham police just in time for the riots there. He got a couple of commendations and suddenly resigned under yet another cloud, one that really looked like rain.”

“Child molestation?” I said.

“Right. Three counts this time. By the way, he’s married and has two children of his own.”

“Then he came back home,” I said.

“Right again, and in a rise that can only be described as meteoric, he was appointed Swankerton’s chief of police four years ago, doubtless at the behest of your friend Lynch.”

“What does he go for,” I said, “little boys or little girls?”

“Both.”

“Any concrete evidence?”

“No. All talk, but it was reliable.”

“Your service is excellent, Gorm. Send me a bill.”

“You think you’ll be around to pay it?”

“Why not?”

“Some rumors I heard.”

“What about them?”

“They claim that things might get rough in Swankerton.”

“Probably.”

“I think you need some help.”

“From whom?”

“Me.”

“This isn’t a PR campaign, Gorm. There’s no million-dollar budget and no bonus for the cutest press release. I’m not out to win the hearts and minds of men to democracy’s side. I’m not even sure that I’m out to win.”

“I won’t cost you anything,” Smalldane said.

“It’s not that.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know where to fit you in.”

“We’ll think of a slot.”

“I don’t think that we—”

“I’ll be there at three tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “You don’t even have to meet me at the airport.” Then he hung up.

Homer Necessary called me at two o’clock that morning and wanted to know if I were awake.

“I am now.”

“Soderbell’s here,” he said. “We’re leaving in half an hour.”

“Where’s here?”

“My room.”

Twenty minutes later I joined them in Necessary’s room. Soderbell was fooling with a Bolex Pro 16mm camera equipped with what looked to be a zoom lens.

“You don’t have to carry the lights after all,” Necessary said.

“Why?”

“Soderbell’s using infrared film. Says he doesn’t need lights.”

“It’s not infrared,” Soderbell said. “It’s Kodak two-four-eight-five rapid-access retrieval stuff with an ASA of twelve thousand.”

“Will it do what it’s supposed to?” Necessary said. “I hear that infrared’s the best.”

“It’s got some infrared in it,” Soderbell said, and for all I knew he could have been telling the truth. “But with special processing, the film I’m going to use is better.”

“Don’t get me wrong, but I’ve heard that the infrared stuff is better,” Necessary said.

Soderbell put on the face that he must have used to deal with the enthusiastic amateur. “It’s dammed good, Homer, but I think my stuff is just a little better for this particular job.”

“Well, you’re the expert,” Necessary said, obviously unconvinced. “Just don’t forget that if something goes wrong they’re not coming back and pose for retakes.”

Soderbell was a patient man. Perhaps most professional photographers are. He lit one of his French cigarettes and blew some of its acrid smoke around the room. “Quit worrying, Homer. The only thing that can go wrong is if we are caught, and if that happens, none of us will have to worry.”

The bars were still open at two-thirty in the morning in Swankerton and seemed to be doing a good swing-shift business. We drove down Snow Street in Necessary’s rented Impala, turned left onto Fourth, followed that for six blocks, and then turned right onto Forrest. We drove four more blocks until Necessary found a parking place that he seemed to like.

“We walk from here,” he said.

We were in Swankerton’s wholesale district. The street was lined with long, low brick buildings, most of which had loading docks at their fronts or sides. Rows of silver, red and blue semis, sometimes parked less than six inches from each other, hulking tributes to the teamsters’ skill, were backed up to the docks waiting to be unloaded.

In between something called Gulf States Distributors, Inc. and Merriman Liquors (Wholesale Only) was a narrow, frame, three-story house, which sat far back on its fifty-foot lot. We turned into its cracked sidewalk, went up four steps to a small porch with a broken plank, and waited until Necessary unlocked the door. Inside, the house was vacant and smelled as if the door hadn’t been opened in years.

By guess and by feel we followed Necessary down a long hall. There was no furniture to bump into.

“We turn right and go up the rear stairs,” Necessary said.

I reached my hand out and touched Soderbell. “You okay?” he said.

“Fine.”

“Step up and turn right again,” he said.

I followed slowly, using the bannister and placing both feet on each stair tread.

“Left here,” Necessary said from some place up above me. We were in another hall that led toward the rear. Necessary opened a door and a window in the room produced enough light to make a single vague outline of him and Soderbell. I followed them into the room.

“I got three-o-four,” Necessary said. “What have you got?

I looked at the luminous dial on my watch. “About that. Maybe three-o-five.”

“What do you think?” Necessary said to Soderbell. The cameraman went to the window and peered out. “That light in the alley will just save us,” he said. I moved over to the window and looked out. The frame house was longer than I had thought. Its rear was flush with the alley and the window I stood at had a view of the rear of a firm directly across the alley that was called Bolberg and Son, Wholesale Furriers. There were no windows in the rear of the furrier’s building but there was a sturdy-looking steel door and a corrugated-metal overhead door that was large enough for a good-sized truck to go through.

“Nice, huh?” Necessary said.

“Who owns it?” I said.

“Some guy called Bolberg.”

“I mean this house.”

“It belongs to Phetwick like almost everything else in town. He just keeps paying taxes on it and waits for the price to rise. I understand it’s up to about two thousand dollars now.”

“For the house and lot?”

“A front foot,” he said. “I think it’s on the tax rolls for about five thousand dollars, and that does include the house and lot.”

“That light over there’s sure as hell going to save us,” Soderbell said again, as if to himself. The light that arched over the furrier’s metal door was about a hundred watts and was encased in a wire-mesh shield.

“What if they bust it?” Necessary said.

“Then we’re shit out of luck,” Soderbell said. “Let’s break out this window. It’s too dirty to shoot through.”

“Why not just open it?” Necessary said.

“I tried. It’s nailed shut.”

“Wait a minute,” Necessary said. He took a roll of masking tape from his pocket and started to tape the window in an intricate, cobwebby pattern. He took off his shoe and tapped the window with its heel. It broke and we spent the next few minutes removing pieces of taped glass until Soderbell said he had enough space to shoot through.

We waited five more minutes, until it was 3:20. The lights of a car turned into the alley from its far right end.

“You ready?” Necessary said to Soderbell.

“Always,” Soderbell said.

The car rolled down the alley slowly. Spotlights on both sides flashed along the rears of buildings. One of them flicked across the house we were in, but not above the first story. “That’s why I said second story,” Necessary muttered. “Nobody ever looks up. You can tell ‘em till you’re purple, but they won’t look up.”

The car fixed a spotlight on the iron door of the furrier’s and kept it there. Soderbell’s camera was whirring faintly. The car was black and white and had Swankerton Police Department stenciled on its side along with a nice, official-looking shield. Big white letters on its black top spelled SPD. It slowed, almost to a stop, and then drove on by. The spotlights went out.

“Get its number, boy, get its number,” Necessary whispered to Soderbell.

The camera kept on whirring and then stopped. “I got it.”

“That’s the lookout crew,” Necessary said. “They’ll cruise around the block from now on.”

We waited four or five minutes more until another set of lights approached from the right end of the alley. I looked at my watch. It was almost exactly 3:30 A.M. The car cut its lights when it was slightly past the furrier’s steel door. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that the car had two occupants. It was a dark color, either blue or black, and it had no markings.

“The thieves,” Necessary said.

Whoever was in the car made no move to get out. Another minute went by before yet another set of car lights turned into the alley from the right. Then its headlights went out and the driver used his amber parking lights instead. He switched them on and off in rapid succession four times. The new arrival parked on the other side of the furrier’s back door and from where I stood I could see that it was another black-and-white police car. Soderbell’s camera whirred some more.

Two men got out of the police car and stood in the pool of light made by the shielded bulb above the metal door.

Soderbell whispered directions to them. “Move, you sonofabitch. Now turn this way and look up just a little... a little more, you mother... oh, that’s fine... that’s just fine... your shield and everything.”

The two men who got out of the squad car wore the gray-and-blue summer uniforms of the Swankerton police. They waited by the door until they were joined by two men in dark clothing who had waited in the unmarked car. One of the men carried a small bag. The two policemen took up positions so that they could watch both ends of the alley. The man with the bag handed it to his fellow thief and bent over the door. He turned his head two or three times, and the other man passed him something.

“He’s fixing the alarm system,” said Necessary, who furnished us with a running commentary on the methodology of the theft. In a few minutes the man in the dark clothes had the door open. His fellow thief went back to the unmarked car, stored the bag away, and opened the trunk.

The two thieves, accompanied by one of the policemen, entered the building. Soderbell got a few shots of the remaining cop as he walked in and out of the circle of light. It was almost another five minutes before the two thieves and the policeman came out, all burdened with armloads of furs. They dumped them into the open trunk of the unmarked car. After that, they made three more similar trips. Soderbell filmed it all, muttering unheard directions to the silent stars of his back-alley drama.

During the thieves’ final trip into the warehouse, the policeman on guard moved over to the driver’s side of the squad car. He reached in with his left hand and did something else with his right, but we never could see what it was because the car’s spotlight blazed on. It blinded Soderbell and transfixed him before the window with his camera aimed directly at the spotlight. He stood there like that until the bullet hit him somewhere in the chest, I thought, and hurled him back into the room a few, wild staggering steps. He fell in a lump, still holding the camera, and in the brief, total silence that followed, I listened to it whir.

The cop must have been nervous because he fired through the window twice more. Then the spotlight went out and I could hear the four of them jabbering in the alley. I was flat against the wall next to the window. Necessary was already bending over Soderbell. He rose quickly and I saw that he had the camera in his hands.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, his voice tight, fast and low.

“Do we carry him or drag him?” I said.

“We leave him. Let’s go.”

I could hear an engine start in the alley. A car trunk lid slammed closed, then two car doors thunked. Tires squealed in high-pitched protest for what seemed to be a long time but could only have been less than a second. Thieves’ getaway, I thought. It was an idle, almost lazy thought.

“We can’t leave him,” I said because it seemed to be the thing to say.

“He’s dead, goddamnit,” Necessary said and headed for the door. I could think of nothing better to do than follow. We went down the stairs to the long hall much faster than we had come up. I felt or sensed that Necessary turned right instead of left.

“Where the hell you going?” I whispered, a little frantically, I suppose.

“Out the alley entrance. They’re around in front by now.”

As if to prove it, something large and heavy crashed against the front door of the old house. Something about the size and weight of an archless foot encased in a number eleven shoe. It crashed again as Necessary thrust the camera into my arms and started to fumble with the lock and bolts on the rear door. On the third crash I could hear the front door splinter open. Necessary got the last lock undone and swung the rear door wide. We went through it and down four steps. I stumbled on the last one, almost falling, almost dropping the camera. I recovered and ran after Necessary, who had turned right, heading for the squad car that was still parked in the alley, just beyond the pool of light that came from the bulb above the furrier’s still-open door.

Necessary opened the left door of the squad car, reached inside, and came out with the keys. He threw them as far as he could into the darkness. Then he fumbled his hand in again. Once more the spotlight on the driver’s side blazed on. I looked up and saw the too-white faces of the cops through the hole in the broken second-story window. They closed their eyes against the glare and I saw why it had been an easy shot for the cop who’d killed Soderbell. It would be hard to miss.

Necessary was off and running down the alley. I followed, the camera cradled in my arms. When we reached the end of the alley, Necessary stopped and peered around the corner. He was breathing even harder than I was, great, harsh, lung-filling pants. That pleased me.

“Let’s go,” he said or croaked, and we darted across the deserted street, went another block down the alley, only trotting now and barely that. We came out of the alley, turned right, and walked to Necessary’s rented car. He opened the trunk and I put the camera inside it.

We pulled out sedately and drove down Forrest at twenty-five miles an hour. A squad car roared by, headed in the opposite direction. Its siren was off, but its red-and-white dome light spun angrily.

Necessary slammed the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “It just doesn’t make any goddamned sense,” he said.

“That’s probably what Soderbell thought, too, if he had the time.”

Necessary glanced at me and shook his head, a little impatiently, I felt. “I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the cop turning on the spotlight. Christ, I never knew one of them who’d look up even two inches above his head.”

I could have said something like “you do now” or “there’s always the first time,” but I didn’t. I just sat there and looked for something that I didn’t see.

After a moment or two, Necessary said, “It was a lucky shot. That cop was just lucky.” I could have argued that, too, but I didn’t. I just sat there and looked some more.

“Funny about Soderbell though,” Necessary went on. “He goes all through Vietnam twice and winds up getting shot in some back alley. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, “it does that all right.” I found what I was looking for and said, “Here’s one.” Necessary stopped the car beside the lighted telephone booth. I got out, dropped in a dime, and dialed a number. It rang for a long time before someone answered with a gruff hello.

“This is Dye,” I said.

“Yeah... Yeah,” Lynch’s sleepy voice said.

“Homer Necessary was up to something tonight. I just found out about it.”

“What?” Lynch said and sounded less sleepy.

“I hear that some cops were in on a fur burglary. Homer Necessary got the whole thing down on film. The cops shot somebody. I don’t know who yet.”

“When’d all this happen?” Lynch said, and his voice was crisp and wide awake now.

“I just heard about it.”

“You didn’t know about it before?”

“I just heard about it,” I said again. “I thought you might want to wake up Loambaugh.”

“Shit,” Lynch said just before he said goodbye and hung up.

I got back in the car and Necessary said, “What’d he say?”

“He said shit.”

Necessary chuckled a little. “Can’t say that I blame him,” he said. “Can’t say that I blame him at all.”

Chapter 30

Necessary and I spent a long, predawn hour with Victor Orcutt in his Rickenbacker suite when we returned to the hotel. Orcutt listened politely while we told him how Soderbell had died. When we were finished he said, “Well, I suppose those things are bound to happen,” and never mentioned him again, except indirectly, when he made sure that we had brought back the camera, if not the cameraman.

I spent five minutes telling Orcutt what I thought should be done with the film. He listened attentively, said, “Good. I agree,” and then launched a twenty-minute monologue which instructed me how to carry out my suggestion. “You do understand?” he said.

“Does that mean do I agree with you?”

“That isn’t important,” he said. “It merely requires understanding so that you’ll be able to function properly.”

“Since it was my idea, I understand well enough not to blow it.”

“But you don’t agree with my method?” he said.

“As you mentioned, that’s not important.”

Orcutt turned to Necessary. “Homer?”

“Oh, I understand everything just fine,” he said, “and I like it even better. I like it so much that I might even have a drink to celebrate.”

Carol Thackerty came away from the phone that she’d been using since we arrived. “There’s no ice,” she said to Necessary, “and your plane will be standing by in fifteen minutes. The lab in New Orleans already has a rough cut of what Soderbell previously filmed. As soon as they process what he shot last night, or rather this morning, they’ll make a print and splice it on to the rough cut.”

“I don’t need any ice,” Necessary said and poured himself a drink from a bottle that he’d found on a table near the door. “Did you tell the lab that the new stuff’ll need special processing?”

“They know all about it,” she said. “Soderbell had already filled them in. They’ll be able to deliver a completed rough cut to you by one o’clock this afternoon. The plane will get you back here by two-thirty. You should be able to turn over the rough cut to Dye by three.”

“What kind of plane?” said Necessary, the detail stickler.

“A Lear jet.”

Necessary finished his drink. “See you around three,” he said and left.

I stood up. “I need some sleep,” I said.

“Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said, also rising, “I dislike to harp on this, but I do very much hope that you will follow my instructions as closely as conditions permit.”

“You want it in writing, Orcutt?” I said, the testiness in my voice stronger than I had intended.

“I don’t particularly care for that tone.”

“Neither do I, but it’s the only one I have left at five in the morning. I’ve had a bad night. I always do when somebody gets killed. It makes me irritable. Even surly.”

“It wasn’t your fault that—”

“Nothing’s ever my fault,” I said. “I just do the job I’m paid to do and if somebody dies along the way, well, as you say, those things happen. So quit worrying. I’ll do it just the way you told me to and for all I know, it may work. If it doesn’t, you can always fall back on contingency plan R-twenty-three.”

“You’re teasing again,” Orcutt said. “I’m so glad. That means you’re in a better humor.”

“Ah, Christ,” I said and went out the door, slamming it behind me.

I finally went to sleep around six and Ramsey Lynch didn’t call until seven-thirty and when I picked up the phone there was no trace of jolly fat man in his voice.

“You’d better get your ass over here,” he said.

“I’m busy.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I and I’m still busy.”

“I might send somebody around for you.”

“Who? A pair of those moonlighters who got their pictures taken last night?”

“It’s an idea,” he said. “They know all about it now, and if I told them that you were kind of involved in the whole thing, they’d volunteer to go fetch you.”

“Do that and you’ll never see it.”

“Have you got it?”

“I can get it.”

“When?”

“This afternoon about three.”

“What’re you going to do with it?”

“I thought you might like your own private preview before it goes out over the airwaves and into the living rooms of Swankerton.”

“You got an idea how to kill it?”

“Maybe. It’ll cost a little.”

Lynch was silent for a moment and I listened to his heavy breathing. “You bring it out here.” He almost managed to make it sound like a polite request.

“Around three or three-thirty. You’ll need a sixteen-millimeter projector.”

“I’ll get one.”

“You’ll need something else, too,” I said.

“What?”

“Your chief of police.”

At three-ten that afternoon, about the time that Gorman Smalldane was supposed to be landing at the airport, I was driving out to Lynch’s Victorian home in a newly rented Plymouth Roadrunner which had a hot engine under its hood and a brown, round can of 16mm film on the seat beside its driver whose nerves, some might have said, were shot.

I parked the car at the curb with its bumper about a foot from the driveway so that if a hurried departure were called for, there would be nothing to stand in its path. I put the can of film under my arm, plodded up the brick path to the screened-in porch, and knocked on the door, trying in vain for the confident rap of an aluminum-siding salesman.

Boo Robineaux, His Honor’s son, opened the door and took his eyes off a copy of I.F. Stone’s bi-weekly Weekly long enough to say “hello” and “they’re in the dining room.” He didn’t offer to lead the way, but followed instead, still deeply engrossed in the latest machinations of the military-industrial complex. One of these days, I promised myself, I would ask Boo how he’d got those scars on his face.

I opened the sliding doors to the dining room. Lynch was on the right side of the long table; Loambaugh was on the left. At one end of the table rested a 16mm projector. At the other end was a portable screen.

“Howdy, there, Lucifer,” Lynch said, once more the professional country boy and jolly fat man, but spreading it on a little thicker than usual. I decided that he was also nervous, just like me. Loambaugh merely nodded and went back to biting his nails.

I said, “Gentlemen,” and put the can of film on the projector.

Lynch yelled for Boo, who came in and threaded the film through the projector in an offhand, practiced manner and asked only one question, “Is it sound?”

“Parts of it,” I said, and he nodded and adjusted the sound controls.

“When you want it to start, just flip this button,” he said to Lynch and then left, closing the sliding doors behind him.

“You seen it?” Loambaugh said to me.

“What the hell difference does that make?” Lynch said. “You want him to give you a goddamned movie review?”

“I just asked, for Christ’s sake.”

“Well, don’t. This ain’t the only copy, I suppose?”

“You suppose right,” I said.

“Another dumb question,” Lynch said. “Do any good to ask you how you got your hands on it?”

“No.”

He nodded somberly and said, “Well, we might as well look at it. You want to get the lights?”

I switched the room lights off and Lynch turned on the projector. I found a chair next to him and settled down to watch. It was all there in black and white cinema vérité just as Necessary had described it. Even from the rough cut I could see that Soderbell had style. He got a cop picking his nose as he came out of the dry cleaning numbers’ joint, zooming right in on the exploring forefinger. You could count the pores and blackheads on the faces of those he had bribed to tear up his traffic tickets. I listened to the rasping tease in the voices of the two punks who had beat up the old man in the grocery store and then watched them spray shaving cream over the cold cuts in the meat case. I watched as the blows landed and listened to the old man scream and stared as he fell behind the cash register. Lynch said nothing during the films, but Loambaugh grunted and cursed every time he recognized a cop. The last episode featured the fur thieves and because I’d been there, I watched with special interest to learn how Soderbell had seen it through the lens of his camera. There was an establishing shot of the alley, dark, gloomy, and deserted, perhaps even forbidding. The first squad car crept along, shining its spotlight on the steel door of the furrier’s. The camera followed the car, zooming in close on its number and then cutting to the sign over the door that read Bolberg & Son. He got the entire theft: the cops standing guard while the thieves did for the lock; the cop carrying out armloads of furs and dumping them into the trunk of the car, and finally the cop moving over to the squad car, and reaching inside. Then there was a blinding light for a second or two, and the film racketed through its sprockets and guides, signalling that it was ended. Lynch reached over and switched off the projector. I moved to the room lights and turned them on.

“The guy who filmed it, the cameraman,” Lynch said. “He’s the one they shot over on Forrest last night, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“He had a nice style.”

“A keen sense of mood,” I said.

“There were a few more episodes than I’d been led to believe,” Lynch said. “About four more.”

“Five really,” I said. “I found it a gripping portrayal of the Swankerton Police Department in action.”

“Don’t ride me, Dye,” Loambaugh said. “I’ll just tell you once. Don’t ride me.”

“That’s twice already,” Lynch said. He pulled a cellophane-wrapped cigar from a pocket and took his usual three minutes to get it lighted. When it was burning to his satisfaction, he blew some smoke at Loambaugh and said, “As a citizen of Swankerton I was shocked by what I’ve just seen. Shocked. What was your reaction, Chief Loambaugh?”

“Somebody got dumb,” he said, “and I’m gonna have their ass by six o’clock tonight.”

“That what you going to tell the wire services after this thing goes on TV?” Lynch said.

“What do you mean when it goes on TV? That’s why you’re juicing him, isn’t it?” He jerked a thumb at me. “He’s the bright boy. Let him figure out a way to cool it off,”

“What happened to Soderbell’s body?” I said to Loambaugh.

“It’s in the morgue. For autopsy.”

“I want it shipped back to his family.”

Loambaugh bent toward me and the now familiar flush started rising from his neck. He didn’t shout this time. His voice was low and almost toneless. It was far more effective than a shout. “I’m getting goddamned sick of you telling me what to do, buster. I don’t care who you got for friends. Don’t do it again.”

I looked at him for a time and then smiled. “I want his body shipped back to his family. I think they’re in Cleveland. I want it escorted back by one of your cops. A lieutenant, at least.”

Loambaugh jumped up from his chair and headed around the corner of the table. I assumed that I was the goal line. He got all of two feet before Lynch cracked out his order: “Sit down, Cal, and shut up!”

Loambaugh hesitated, stopped completely, turned and went back to his chair. “Don’t ride me,” he whispered, not looking at anyone. “Don’t do it again.”

Lynch’s fat round face was wreathed in smoke and smiles now. “I reckon we can take care of that fella’s remains okay, Lucifer. No big problem that I can figure. What really concerns me is this little old film we’ve just seen. Film can lie just like words can. I mean pictures don’t always tell the full story. Now if you was taking a picture of a barrel of apples and you had a thousand apples in that barrel and you just picked out six or seven rotten ones and took pictures of those and then showed ‘em to somebody and said, ‘Hey, here’s what apples look like,’ why, they wouldn’t really know what a good apple looked like, would they?”

“Jesus, that’s vivid,” I said. “I never thought of it in just that way.”

The wreath of smiles on Lynch’s face disappeared and was replaced by a sour, puckered look. “Okay, pal, you came here with a proposition. A deal. Let’s have it.”

“That was just a rough cut you saw. Wait’ll they edit it, throw in some background music, write the narration, and then get somebody like Cronkite or Brinkley to narrate it. Of course, they’d have to interview the chief here. Or if he didn’t want to go on, then they’d have to talk about that for a while and about his reasons for being unavailable. Then, too, what you’ve seen is only what they have on film. They must have a couple of file cabinets of other evidence lying around. Still pictures, sworn statements, witnesses, even victims. They’d all make nice little vignettes that would round out the film — give it breadth and scope and depth, if you follow me.”

“How much?” Lynch said.

“I’m getting to that.”

“You’re sure as hell in no hurry,” Loambaugh said.

“Well, after they have the film all put together, with additional facts, a big name voice — what do you think of Gregory Peck?”

“Not much,” Lynch said.

“Just an idea. So after they put it all together in a slick, professional, competent manner and give it a catchy title, something like, ‘Swankerton’s Cops: the Best that Money Can Buy,’ well, they’ll have no problem giving it — or even selling it — to one of the networks and then you’ll have about twenty or thirty million viewers instead of a mere hundred thousand or so here in Swankerton. Think of what the publicity will do for the place. You’ll have a special team down here from Life the next day plus a couple of dozen other hard-nosed reporters, all specialists in crime and corruption. The state cops will move in. They’ll have to, and they’ll be falling over the feet of the Justice Department types from Washington. That film, I’d say, can really put Swankerton on the map.”

Lynch sat through it all, puffing calmly away on his cigar. Loambaugh listened, at first with a certain amount of affected boredom that changed into interest and then deepened into fascination. By the time I was through he was chewing on his fingernails again.

Lynch sighed and ground his cigar out into an ashtray. It was only half-smoked. “I don’t know about Cal over there, Lucifer, but you don’t have to paint me any more word pictures. For an old country boy, I got a pretty good imagination. So I’m going to ask you again, how much do they want?”

“They?”

“That’s right. They. Them.”

“There is no they or them, Lynch. There are no expensive middlemen. I’m what’s called the sole source.”

“You are, huh?”

“He’s a lying sonofabitch,” Loambaugh said.

“Well, shit, Cal, we already know that.” He turned to me again. “I thought you was kind of working for us.” He tried to sound a little disappointed, even hurt, but it didn’t come out that way. Just petulant.

“Is there anyone else in town who’d have shown you the film?”

“So you’re the man?” Lynch said.

I nodded. “That’s right; I am.”

“Well, Mr. Man, what’s your price?”

I coughed once to clear my throat so that I could be sure that my voice wouldn’t crack when I named it. I kept my hands flat on the table so that they could be plainly seen, but not their fibrillary tremor. I ignored the sweat that formed in my armpits despite the air-conditioning. I looked at Lynch, but nodded my head toward Loambaugh.

“I want his resignation as chief of police. Today.”

Loambaugh hurtled across the table at me, his knees working on the polished surface in a scrambling effort to gain purchase. His hands were around my neck in less than a second and I could smell his SenSen breath and count the veins in his rolling eyes. I brought the heel of my right palm hard against his chin and I heard his teeth click shut. I shot both locked hands up and out through his arms and broke his hold on my neck. Then I hit him again as hard as I could, once with the heel of my left palm just at the base of his nose, and when that straightened him up, I hit him just below the breast bone with my right fist. He was softer than he looked and my fist seemed to sink in several inches and he whoofed and grabbed his middle with both hands, pressing hard. His nose was bleeding now and so was his tongue where he had bitten it when I had knocked his jaws shut. He knelt there on the long table, his head bent as he clutched his stomach and bled all over the polished surface. I leaned back in my chair, pressed my hands flat on the table again, and watched him without much interest. I noticed that the tremor was gone from my hands.

Lynch yelled, “Boo!” and the young man poked his head through the door. He looked at the kneeling figure of Loambaugh on the table, but it wasn’t unusual enough to make him change his expression.

“Get Chief Loambaugh a cold, wet towel,” Lynch said, “he’s had a little accident.”

After the blood was mopped from the table and Loambaugh was back in his chair with a towel pressed to his nose, Lynch gave me a genial smile and said, “Well, I reckon that’s enough excitement for one afternoon, don’t you, Lucifer?”

“Plenty,” I said.

“You were serious?”

“Completely.”

“It’s a mighty awesome thing,” he said, “asking a man to resign at the peak of his career for the good of the community. It takes a big man to do that. A real big man. You think you’re a big enough man to do that, Chief Loambaugh?”

“No resigning, Lynch. You can go fuck yourself.”

“Hear that, Lucifer? The chief doesn’t much care for your proposition.”

“I heard,” I said.

“You think this bastard’s got something on you?” Loambaugh said to Lynch, his voice muffled by the wet towel. “I got enough on you to send you down for twenty years.”

Lynch turned his head slightly and yelled for Boo again. When the young man popped his scarred head through the sliding doors, Lynch said: “Bring us some writing paper and some carbons and a ball-point pen, will you, Boo? Chief Loambaugh here wants to write up something.”

When Boo came back he offered the writing materials to Loambaugh, who ignored him. Boo glanced at Lynch, who said, “Just put them down here in front of him. He’s busy with his nose right now. He’ll get to them directly.”

“You know something, Cal?” Lynch said. “I can’t recall a day when I’ve been threatened so much. First old Lucifer here with his film and then you acting uppity and making threats just because it’d be in the best interest of the community if you was to resign. Now when you think it over, you’ll just pick up that pen and write out a real nice letter of resignation and sign the original and maybe three or four carbons. You might mention something about personal reasons and other interests. That’s always good, isn’t it, Lucifer?”

“Usually,” I said.

“You want him to say something else?”

“No.”

“See how cooperative everybody’s being, Cal?”

Loambaugh’s nose had quit bleeding and he dropped the bloody towel on the table. “I swear to God I’m not resigning. And the first thing I do when I get back to the office is open the safe and take out some stuff I’ve been saving. Then I’m going to call in the FBI — that’s right, the FBI, Lynch — and they’re going to rack you so hard you won’t know if you’re in Swankerton or Cincinnati.” He picked up the writing paper and the carbons and threw them across the table at Lynch. They fluttered in the air, caught a current from the air-conditioner, and floated back in a zig-zag pattern to the table. Lynch waited until the last one had settled to the table before he spoke, and then it was only a mild query,

“Is that a fact?”

“You goddamned right it’s a fact. This afternoon, Lynch. This very afternoon, not more than a couple of hours from now.”

Lynch got up from his chair and bent over the table. He carefully assembled the papers and the carbons in two neat stacks and slid them back across the table to Loambaugh.

“Write it out, Cal, for your sake,” he said in a soft tone.

Loambaugh shoved his chair back and rose. “You can get me fired, you sonofabitch, but you ain’t about to get me to resign. Ever. You’ll like it back in Atlanta, Lynch. And that’s where you’re headed sure as shit stinks.” He turned to leave.

“Little Timmy Thornton,” Lynch said in a low, soft voice that still managed to stop Loambaugh in midstride. “Little Timmy Thornton, five years old, with a torn up rectum where somebody cornholed him.”

Loambaugh turned slowly and his face was pale and his hands began to shake. He looked at his hands as if they belonged to somebody else and then rested them on the back of a chair. But the shakes were in his arms now and they seemed to travel up them slowly until they reached his shoulders. He quivered visibly, but seemed unaware of it. His face was no longer white, but almost gray instead, and his eyes were fixed on Lynch in an unblinking stare as if he had just peered into the future and didn’t much like what he’d seen.

Lynch wouldn’t look at Loambaugh. He gazed at the surface of the table instead, and when he spoke again, his voice was still low and soft as if he were talking to himself and was comfortable doing so. “Well, we’ve been talking about a lot of threats here this afternoon, haven’t we, Cal? So I’m going to talk about something that I thought I’d never have to. I’m going to talk about little Timmy Thornton with his torn asshole and little Beth Mary Fames, all of six and a half, with her little pussy chewed up so much that they had to take twelve stitches in it, and maybe I should mention little Barbara Wynnewood, who got it both front and rear and then had all of her upper teeth knocked out because she bit it. Now these are the ones that I got evidence to prove, Cal. I admit that there are a couple of others that are nothing but pure D speculation and rumor, but the ones I mentioned, well, I got the facts and even some nigger witnesses to back them up. Now I suggest you sit yourself down and write out that resignation and then we’ll just forget about everything that’s been said and done in this room this afternoon.”

I watched Loambaugh disintegrate as Lynch spoke. He slumped, caved in really, I suppose, and I wondered if he would ever get his posture back. His eyes glazed, but they never left Lynch, and they seemed to watch the words that came out of the fat man’s mouth. He continued to tremble and his mouth opened and his swollen tongue played around his lips, but he didn’t seem aware of it. His color went from gray back to pasty white and a couple of red spots appeared high up on his cheekbones. When Lynch stopped talking, Loambaugh looked around warily as if he might have stumbled into the wrong room. Then he pulled out a chair, sat down on it cautiously, like an old man, reached for the paper and carbons, interleaved them in a mechanical fashion, and began to write. His hand still shook and he wrote large, bearing down hard on the paper with the pen. I watched him sign his name. He did it carefully and slowly, as if these were the last times he would ever sign it. All five copies. He put the pen down slowly, pushed the papers toward Lynch, rose, and walked out of the room. He moved blindly, bumped against two chairs, and fumbled with the sliding doors.

Lynch watched Loambaugh leave and when he was gone, the fat man said, “Now, by God, I hated to do that to old Cal.” He slipped the carbons from between the sheets of paper and handed me one of the copies. “I’ll turn the rest over to the mayor and the city council. You drive a hard bargain, Dye. Mighty hard.”

I folded the carbon of the resignation and put it in my pocket. “You haven’t heard it all yet.”

Lynch turned slowly in his chair until he could face me. He looked as if he expected to chew something that would taste bad. He swallowed once and coughed. “I haven’t heard it all?” he said.

“No. There’s more.”

“You better tell me what it is then, hadn’t you?” He was using the same low tone that he had used on Loambaugh. I didn’t like it.

“I name the new chief of police.”

“You?”

“That’s right.”

“You name the new chief of police,” he said slowly, spacing the words so that he could savor each one. “You.”

“Me.”

“Well,” he said. “Huh. That’s really something, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Part of the whole deal, huh?”

“Part of the deal.”

“I suppose you got a candidate?”

“That’s right.”

“Can I ask who?”

“Sure.”

“Who?”

I smiled and tried to make it a reassuring one. I don’t think I succeeded. “Who?” Lynch said again.

“Homer Necessary,” I said.

Chapter 31

There were five messages under my door when I returned to room 819 in the Sycamore and all of them urged me to call Mr. Gorman Smalldane. I tossed them into the wastebasket, stretched out on the bed, and made a careful study of the ceiling. In my mind I could still hear the sound of my voice which, in retrospect, had all the warmth of a mechanical duck as it quacked away the afternoon, first with Lynch and Loambaugh, and later, for another hour, with Orcutt, Necessary, and Carol Thackerty. It had taken that long to describe how Homer Necessary would be sworn in as Chief Necessary at a special meeting of the Swankerton City Council come next Friday afternoon, which was three days off.

“You’ll receive a hand-delivered letter from the mayor tomorrow offering you the job,” I told Necessary.

“How far did you have to bend?” he said.

“Over backwards.”

“Be more precise, Mr. Dye, please,” Orcutt said.

“I know what he means,” Necessary said. “He means I clear it all with Lynch.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You might be able to fix an overtime parking ticket without checking, but that’s all.”

“Did you have to concede so much?” Orcutt said.

“Once he’s chief, I don’t think Homer’s going to give a damn what I conceded.”

“Lynch knows that, of course,” Orcutt said.

“Sure. But he still needed the concession. It was a matter of pride. Face. He’ll make his own deal with Homer when he thinks it’s time. Knowing Lynch, that’ll probably be fifteen minutes after the swearingin ceremony.”

“Now that deal’s something I really look forward to,” Necessary said. “Lynch say anything else?”

“About you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There was one thing.”

“What?”

“He said to tell you that you’d have to buy your own uniforms.”

That was the day or evening that The News-Calliope broke the story on the Widow Sobour. An eight-column banner read: REFORM LEADER BILKED THEM, NUNS CHARGE and old man Phetwick’s editorial was also featured on page one in a two-column box bang under the picture of Mayor Pierre (Pete) Robineaux, bug-eyed and gap-mouthed. The photo had a cute little caption line that read: “... not surprised...” Phetwick’s editorial was self-righteous and sonorous, but the news story was well-written, simple, even trenchant. It also left no doubt in anyone’s mind that Mrs. Sobour was guilty as hell.

I tossed the paper aside, lay back on the bed, studied the ceiling some more, and tried to decide how I felt about the culmination of my efforts, which that afternoon had helped wreck the lives of a couple of none too-innocent persons, not to mention their families. I consoled myself with the discovery that while I felt no remorse, neither was there any pride nor any sense of accomplishment, which must have balanced things out in the record book of whoever was bothering to keep score. I wasted some more time wondering if Victor Orcutt ever thought of himself as a spiderlike genius who spun his web of intrigue and coercion only because it served some impossibly lofty ideal, and if he did think of himself as such, whether he realized that his web only caught a few emotional cripples, such as me, whom he apparently liked to have around for company. I had noticed that Orcutt spent very little time by himself and then I wondered if anyone ever called him Vic, decided probably not, but promised myself that I would the next time I saw him. I was thinking some additional, similarly rich thoughts when the phone rang and Carol Thackerty wanted to know if I’d like to take her to dinner.

“I have to see an old friend,” I said.

“The one from New York — Gorman Smalldane?”

“You keep busy.”

“That’s what I’m paid to do,” she said. “Smalldane’s in room seven-nineteen and he called you four times this afternoon according to my spies at the desk and on the switchboard.”

“How’s Vic?” I said.

“Who?”

“Orcutt.”

“Nobody calls him Vic.”

“I didn’t think so, but I had to make sure.”

“He’s fine, if you still want to know. He and Homer are meeting with Phetwick and one of his reporters tonight. The reporter’s going to write a profile-type piece on the aging boy wonder who’s to be Swankerton’s new chief of police. Orcutt and Phetwick are sitting in to make sure that Necessary doesn’t mention too many facts.”

“I think both of you underrate Homer,” I said.

“Victor may; I don’t. I don’t underrate him for a second.”

“That’s about how long he’d need.”

“If that.”

I told her that I would call later to see whether she wanted a nightcap and she said that if it were after twelve not to bother, and I said that I wouldn’t, and we hung up. I thought about Carol for a while and decided, or felt, or whatever it was that I did, concluded perhaps, which implies at least a little emotional involvement, that if I needed a temporary entangling alliance, it might as well be with her. It was the nicest thought I had all day.

Because I couldn’t postpone it any longer, although I wasn’t sure why I’d delayed as long as I had, I picked up the phone and asked for Smalldane’s room. When he answered, I said, “Let’s have dinner and get a little drunk.”

“Why a little?” he said.

“Because I’d only have a little hangover. I can’t stand the regular brand anymore.”

“You want to come down or do you want me to come up?”

“I’ll come down.”

I hadn’t seen Smalldane in more than ten years and I don’t quite know what I expected, but certainly not what opened the door to my knock. Age smooths many by rounding off craggy edges with personal growth which the unkind sometimes call fat. It dehydrates others by squeezing out most of their life juices, leaving nothing but dry husks. The cosmetics of age occasionally dignify a few past all recognition by anyone who knew what clunks they were when young. Age simply ravages some, and Gorman Smalldane was one of those.

When I’d first seen him more than a quarter of a century ago in Tante Katerine’s courtyard, he’d been a broad-shouldered man with a nipped-in waist who topped my present 6′ 1½ by at least 2″. He then had a long mop of light blond hair that always needed a trim and kept falling down over the pale blue eyes that had questioned it all. His mouth, I remembered, had been wide and sardonic and out of it had come some of the world’s most infectious laughter.

The hair was gone now except for some white tufts above his ears. His skull was the color of old putty and I seemed to top his height by almost half a foot because of the bent way that he held himself. He had gone to fat in his forties and fifties, which he had then carried well enough, but now the fat was gone too and the skin stretched tight across his face, but raddled around the neck. He must have weighed no more than 125 pounds. Only his eyes remained the same, set a little farther back in their sockets perhaps, but still bright pale blue and as skeptical as ever. So was his voice.

“Well, one of us looks healthy,” he said. “Come on in.”

I went in and watched him move across the room to the Scotch and the ice bucket. He walked slowly, as if he had to remember how to do it. With his back to me he mixed two drinks and said, “You’ve seen it before.”

“When did you find out?”

“Two months ago. They cut me open and there it was. Big as a grapefruit, they said.”

He crossed the room with the drinks and handed me one. “I keep going on booze and pills. I think the pills have opium in them because my dreams have been rather interesting lately. I get to screw some real dolls.”

“Well, I won’t say how are you.”

“That’s apparent, isn’t it? I never thought I’d be an ugly old man with the eagle pecking away at my liver. They say that I’ve got a couple of months left. That means a month.”

“You still don’t like hospitals?” I said.

“That’s where they want me so they can stick tubes up every hole they can find. I might last three months that way, but I won’t go through the indignity of it all. I don’t find life quite that precious.”

He eased down into a chair carefully, but it still made him wince.

“Bad?”

“You goddamned right it’s bad. Don’t ever let them tell you it’s not.”

“I won’t,” I said.

He took a long swallow of his drink and then looked at me and grinned with most of his former skepticism. “Now just what the hell are you doing in Swankerton?”

“I’m corrupting it.”

“I hear it doesn’t need much, but if it does, you ought to be better than a fair hand. After all, you did have a fine upbringing.”

“There’s that,” I said.

“Well, tell me about it.”

I told him the entire story, partly because in telling it I brought it into focus, but mostly because I knew that he’d enjoy it and there were few enough things left that he could.

When I’d finished, Smalldane nodded his understanding and held out his empty glass to me. “You mind?”

“Not at all,” I said.

I handed him a fresh drink and he said, “That’s quite a story. You only left out one thing. Why’re you doing it?”

“Lacks motivation, huh?”

“That and an ending.”

“I’m doing it because it seemed to be the thing to do at the time.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“Money,” I said.

“More bullshit.”

“I can see that we’re coming to the stop where the Smalldane Theory gets on.”

“I got one.”

“I never knew you to run short.”

“Born again,” he said. “How’s that?”

“You could give the one at Delphi some stiff competition.”

“A little oracular?”

“A little.”

“You should have brought along your chicken entrails.”

“I forgot.”

“I’ll spell it out for you,” he said.

“I’ll listen.”

“There were two persons killed that night in Maryland. One of them was Beverly and the other one was you. She may have been luckier because that night you turned into a zombie and, as such, a perfect candidate for the spooks because most of them, at least the ones I’ve known, have been zombies, too.”

“Not all,” I said, remembering Beverly’s father.

“For example,” he said. “That redheaded guy at her funeral, the one you never introduced me to.”

“Carmingler,” I said.

“He was a zombie. He couldn’t have been more than thirty then, but he’d been dead for fifteen years.”

“What do you mean dead? Emotionally castrated? Juiceless? Calculating? Cold? Remorseless? Unfeeling? I can go on.”

“You don’t have to. I can see you’ve already been turning it over. What I mean is that you’re like a vacant house. Nobody lives there.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve seen you among the living just twice, kid. When you were in Shanghai with Kate and me and when you were with Beverly. When they took you away from Kate, that really started it. Beverly stopped it, arrested it probably, and when she died, you went under. Succumbed, if you like the word.”

“To what?”

“To zombieism. What had you and Beverly planned to do?”

“I was supposed to go with the spooks. I was on that scholarship of theirs.”

“But what were you really going to do?”

“Teach.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“After Beverly died? There wasn’t any point.”

“That’s why I said born again. You can’t go back to that time with Beverly so now you’re trying to go back as far as you remember, to Shanghai — back to the whores and the pimps and the crooks who surrounded you then during the only other time in your life you were really happy. Now how’s that for penetrating insight?”

“I still think that you were once a good reporter, Gorm.”

“The funny thing is—” He stopped and coughed. I hadn’t heard him cough before, but if I had heard him without seeing him, perhaps through a thin hotel wall at three in the morning, I would have known he was dying. It was that kind of a cough, the kind that wrenches the whole body, twists it, and sounds like a long series of small, harsh explosions.

He straightened up, used his handkerchief to wipe his lips, and then shook his head. His face had turned a dangerous-looking bright pink. “Not lung cancer,” he said. “Just a side effect of its cousin. Where was I in the lecture?”

“Something was funny,” I said.

“It is funny. You want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“What you’re doing down here and why. The funny thing is that it might work. Lucifer Dye might rise to live again.”

We talked through dinner, which we had in Smalldane’s room. We got a little drunk, but not very. I had a steak; he had a bowl of oyster stew. We both had a quantity of Scotch.

“I lied to you over the phone the other day,” he said.

“How’d you lie?”

“I said I wanted in on this deal just for kicks. I didn’t really. I can’t do you a damned bit of good. I’m washed up and the pain’s too bad. There are four other guys and one woman that I’m going to see in the next week and then I’ll go back to New York and sit around and wait for it. If I get tired of that, I might speed things up.”

“It’s that bad?”

“It will be in another week or ten days. There won’t be any funeral.”

“All right.”

“You need some money?” he said.

“No.”

“I’ll leave you some anyhow. I got plenty. I got it from zombies like you. They’d spend twenty or thirty years hustling for it and then discover that they weren’t immortal after all, so they’d come to me.”

“For what?”

“For a slice of immortality. So somebody would remember their name ten years after they were dead. I’d set them up a foundation, have a couple of books ghostwritten for them, maybe have them endow a chair at some university. And then I’d present the bill and to a man they thought it was the best money they’d ever spent.”

I switched to Mandarin. “The master said: ‘The noble man hates to end his days and leave his name undistinguished.’ ”

“The Analects,” Smalldane said.

“Book Five, Number nineteen.”

“Substitute rich for noble and you have one of the secrets of my success. There’s only one thing more that I really want to do and I think, Lucifer, by God, you’ve given me the opportunity.”

“Delighted,” I said.

“I saw a picture show a long time ago.”

“So did I. I sometimes think I spent my entire adolescence in picture shows. Carol does, too.”

“Carol who?”

“Thackerty,” I said. “The girl you checked on.”

“The one I saw had Ned Sparks in it,” Smalldane said. “You remember Ned Sparks?”

“Never had the pleasure.”

“Well, he had a long sad, bloodhound face and a deep voice and a cigar. So this gal and her Negro mammy were running this restaurant where the Negro mammy made the best pancakes in the world from her secret recipe. I think it was secret. Anyway, Ned Sparks comes in and orders some pancakes. He’s so impressed that he offers to make their fortune with just two words.”

“What was his cut?”

“That isn’t important. Say ten percent.”

“Okay.”

Smalldane took another swallow of Scotch. “Well, he did it in just two words. You want to know what they were?”

“What?”

“Box it.”

“The pancake mixture?”

“Right.”

“He stole that from Coca-Cola,” I said. “The guy there said, ‘Bottle it.’ ”

“Well, this was supposed to be something like Aunt Jemimah.”

“And everybody got rich?” I said.

“Sure.”

“And happy?”

“Of course.”

“And that’s your ambition, to make me rich and happy?”

“In two words, just like Ned Sparks. Right here in Swankerton.”

“They call it Chancre Town.”

“Don’t blame them.”

“And you’ve got two words for me?”

Smalldane nodded. “Two words.”

“Maybe I’d better get something and write them down.”

“You’ll remember. Maybe.”

“I’ll try.”

“Ready?”

I nodded.

He spaced them carefully. “Take,” he said, “over.”

“The whole town?”

“The whole town.”

“By God, Smalldane, that’s brilliant, that’s what it is.”

“I think so, too.”

“You think I could?”

“That’s the only way you’re going to get out of it.”

“All right, I’ll do it.” On that much Scotch, anything was possible.

“You’ve made an old man happy. Now get out of here so I can get some sleep.”

I rose, a little unsteadily, and headed for the door. Smalldane followed, tacking a bit, much as he had done the first night that I’d seen him coming up the path in Tante Katerine’s garden. I turned at the door.

“Just like Ned Sparks,” he said.

“Two words.”

He pulled himself up so that he stood straight and taller than I. It required an effort that apparently caused considerable pain. Suddenly, he seemed completely sober. He held out his hand and I took it and was surprised at how thin it was.

“This is the real goodbye, kid, I’m leaving in the morning. Early.”

“All right.”

“That crap I was talking earlier. That zombie crap. Forget it.”

I nodded.

“And those two words. Forget them, too. It might be fun, but you’d never make it. You’re not put together that way.”

“All right.”

He held on to my hand and looked at me for a long time, his eyes steady and for once almost gentle. He nodded after his inspection. “You’re not quite dead after all, are you?”

“Not quite.”

He grinned then and released my hand. “Well, that’ll leave one of us around anyway.”

Chapter 32

I bought a new suit to go to Homer Necessary’s swearing-in ceremony. It was a dark blue poplin that cost all of sixty dollars plus tax at Biendorfer’s department store across the street from the Sycamore Hotel. I bought two others of the same material, one tan and the other gray.

The ceremony was held in the City Council chamber, which was on the seventh floor of the same new municipal building that housed Police Headquarters. Attendance was by invitation only and I went alone. Lynch had stubbornly refused to invite either Orcutt or Carol Thackerty.

The City Council was a seven-man body that sat at a long oval walnut table, the Lynch crowd on one side, the opposition on the other, and the popeyed mayor at the end near the door. Lynch himself sat in a spectator’s chair that was only a few feet from the far end of the table and gave Mayor Robineaux something reassuring to look at. Three tiers of chairs ran around three sides of the room and during the City Council’s regular meetings were used to seat witnesses, reporters, city officials and employees, and citizens who just wanted to kill a dull afternoon. If Lynch’s chair had been any closer to the table, it would have occupied the spot usually reserved for a city manager, except that Swankerton didn’t have one and, as far as I could see, didn’t need one as long as Lynch was around.

The three television stations were represented, as were five or six radio stations. The two newspapers had sent reporters and photographers. There was a handful of ranking police officials and one of them was the captain who had been playing poker a few afternoons before at the table next to Necessary and me.

The seven city councilmen were already in their seats when I arrived. The three who composed what passed for the loyal opposition were middle-aged, mild-mannered men who smiled a lot, wore sensible suits, and favored rimless glasses. The four who belonged to Lynch’s crowd seemed heavier and jowlier, liked cigars, and twisted around in their chairs to wave at friends and acquaintances. Fred Merriweather, big-jawed and stupid-eyed and owner of The Easy Alibi bar, covered all bets and even waved at me. I waved back. He was the only one on the council whom I knew.

All of the ones that I had met that first day in Lynch’s house were in the room, with the exception of Cal Loambaugh. Ancel Carp, the city tax assessor and surveyor, sat next to Lynch, looking as outdoorsy as ever. On the other side of Lynch was Alex Couturier, executive secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, who wore a big, pleased smile on his face, but that meant nothing because he never wore anything else.

Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III crept in with the aid of his cane, surveyed the room through his thick-lensed glasses, spotted me and came over and sat down at my left. “I understand this was all your idea, Mr. Dye,” he whispered. Before I could say that it wasn’t quite all mine, he whispered, “Splendid. Perfectly splendid.”

Homer Necessary sat in the first row of the tier of seats directly behind the mayor and I found myself wondering if he had called his wife about his new job.

Mayor Pierre (Pete) Robineaux picked up a gavel and tapped it apologetically against the table. The councilmen quit waving their arms and gossiping. The small crowd did the usual amount of coughing and throat-clearing. The mayor said, “This special session of the Swankerton City Council is now convened. Good to see y’all. Our first order of business is the resignation of Calvin Loambaugh as chief of police. I’ve sent you all copies of it, so we can dispense with its reading. Is there any discussion?”

He waited, but nobody said anything. After almost a full minute Fred Merriweather stuck up a big hand and said, “I move we accept it.” Somebody else seconded the motion, the mayor called for the ayes and then for the nays, and Cal Loambaugh was out of a job.

“Now before we go into the second order of business I’d like to make a few personal remarks, if nobody objects,” the mayor said. Nobody did, so he said, “Chief Loambaugh’s resignation came as a surprise to all of us, I know. Now my first thought was, where in the world are we gonna find somebody of high calibre, competence, and experience to take his place, and then how in the good Lord’s name, if we do find a man like that, are we gonna find enough money to pay him?” He waited for his laugh and he got it.

“Well, the good Lord smiled down on us. That’s all I can say. Because right after I got the bad news about Chief Loambaugh’s resignation, I got some good news. I learned that there was a man right here in Swankerton on private business who’s generally acknowledged as one of the top law enforcement officers in the whole United States. And not only that, but I learned that although he was mighty successful in private industry, he just might be interested in getting back into his first love.” That brought a titter from the press, if from no one else.

“Well, sir, I didn’t let any grass grow under my feet, so to speak. I contacted this man and asked him to come see me and when he did, I laid my cards on the table. We talked man to man and heart to heart. We discussed Swankerton’s law-and-order problems and I liked what he had to say. Now this man knows police work. He should because he was chief of police of a city larger than Swankerton when he was twenty-seven years old. Think about that. Twenty-seven. Course, he’s a bit older now, but still in his prime. We talked money, too, and I don’t mind telling you that I was downright embarrassed when I had to tell him what we could offer. I bet I even blushed some. Well, he said he understood our problems, but he also said that he’s a great one for merit increases. So I took the bull by the horns and said I’m going to offer you the job as chief of police, providing the City Council will go along, of course, and what’s more I’m going to recommend that we raise the salary of that job up to fifteen thousand dollars a year where it should be. So now I formally recommend to you, the City Council of the City of Swankerton, that we hereby employ Mr. Homer Fairbanks Necessary as chief of police. The meeting is now open for discussion.”

Fred Merriweather was the first to stick up a hand. “Your honor, do you think we might ask Mr. Necessary some questions?”

“That’s why he’s here, Fred,” Robineaux said. He turned in his chair and beckoned at Necessary. “Mr. Necessary, you might be more comfortable sitting up here by me.”

Necessary rose, walked over to the chair that the mayor had indicated, and settled himself into it. He wore the easy, attentive expression of an expert about to be questioned by amateurs. I decided that it wasn’t the first time that Homer Necessary had appeared before a board of inquiry.

Merriweather leaned forward in his chair. “Mr. Necessary, why did you leave police work?”

“To make money.”

“And have you?”

“Yes. I have.”

“May I ask how much your present salary is?”

“You can ask, but I won’t answer. I think that is privileged information and I have high respect for the privacy of the individual.”

“Could I safely say that your present salary is higher — much higher — than what you’d earn as Swankerton’s chief of police?”

“Yes.”

“I know I’m interested in the answer to my next question and I guess most of us are. What I’d like to know is if you’re making a real good living now, then why do you want to get back into something that doesn’t pay half or even a third as much?” Merriweather looked around the table at his fellow councilmen. A couple of them nodded. “Now that’s what I’d like to hear from you.”

Necessary didn’t hesitate. “Because I know police work, because I’m good at it, and because I like it. It’s my profession. I’m a cop, and without bragging, I think I’m a good one. I also think the salaries paid policemen are a disgrace and if I’m appointed Swankerton’s chief of police, then you’re going to get sick of seeing me right in this room arguing for higher pay for police and that means from the newest rookie right on up to the top, and the top includes the chief of police.” It was a small joke and it got a small laugh.

There were some more questions, perfunctory ones, which Necessary answered with short paragraphs or shorter sentences. When he thought a single word would do, it did. The last question came from Merriweather and I suspected that Lynch had told him to ask it.

“If you’re appointed chief, Mr. Necessary, what changes do you foresee under your administration?”

“None.”

“None?”

“That’s right. You asked what I foresee. I don’t foresee any changes. I don’t condemn or condone what’s gone before because I haven’t studied it. When I have made a thorough study of it and get to know the men, there’ll be some changes, but I’m not prepared to say right now what they’ll be. But there is one thing that’s got to be made clear. If I think changes are needed, administrative changes, then I’ll make them. I plan to run the Swankerton Police Department. If you don’t want me to run it the way I see fit, then you’d better find somebody else. I intend to run an honest, efficient department. Law-abiding citizens will like it. The only ones who won’t are the crooks and the thieves.”

It was the longest answer he had given yet and when he finished they voted to give him the job. The mayor swore him in and the city clerk held the Bible. When Necessary said the final “so help me God” there was a ripple of applause and then the mayor asked him to say a few words.

Necessary stood at the end of the table near Robineaux and looked down its length to the man who sat several feet removed in space, if not in power, from its far end. He stared at Ramsey Lynch. Necessary cleared his throat, acknowledged the mayor and the distinguished guests, and still staring straight at Lynch delivered a close version of what Carol Thackerty had written for him: “I really appreciate your confidence and trust. While I’m police chief, I’ll be police chief in fact, as well as in name. I’m beholden to none and I’ll never become so. I promise you only this: an efficient, honest, police force dedicated to the preservation of law and order and the maintenance of justice. I’ll bow neither to influence nor pressure from any source regardless of its office or power. I’d now like to perform my first official act and announce the appointment of a special investigator who will also serve as assistant to the chief of police. He is a man of talent, dedication, experience, and total honesty. He happens to be in the room now and I wish to introduce him. Mr. Lucifer Dye.” The television cameras panned until they found me and I stood up, a little awkwardly, I hoped, and let them all look at me. There were a few smiles of greeting and encouragement from those who didn’t know any better. I nodded, sat back down, and glanced at Lynch. He was staring at me and it was difficult to read the expression on his face, but there was nothing that said, “best of luck in your new job.”

The mayor asked for a motion to adjourn, got it along with a second, and all of the councilmen crowded around Necessary to congratulate him. The ranking police officials gathered at one side of the room, talking among themselves and shooting glances at Necessary. None of them seemed quite sure what to do or where to go.

Phetwick turned to me and said, “Congratulations, Mr. Dye.”

“Thank you.”

“A most interesting maneuver,” he said. “I must say that I look forward to the events of the next few weeks with what only can be described as keen anticipation.”

I told him that I hoped he wouldn’t be disappointed. We both left the tier of seats and moved toward the small crowd that was still formed around Necessary. A young policeman hurried into the council room, looked around as if he wanted to tell someone something important, but couldn’t decide who it should be. He finally settled on the mayor and whispered into his ear. The mayor popped his eyes and gaped his mouth at the news. He then shook his head and looked more indecisive than usual. He burrowed into the crowd, got Necessary by the arm, and drew him to one side. I moved over to where they stood, but Lynch beat me there. He didn’t miss much.

“Terrible news, Mr. Necessary — I mean Chief. This is just terrible news.” He drew the uniformed policeman into the small circle. “Now tell him just what you told me,” the mayor said.

“It’s Chief Loambaugh,” the young man said as if that explained everything. He waited until someone asked what about Chief Loambaugh and I got the feeling that the young man would never make sergeant.

“He shot them,” the young man said.

“Who?” Necessary said.

“His two kids.”

“Dead?”

“Yessir.”

“When?”

“His wife too.”

“When?” Necessary said again.

“About thirty minutes ago or an hour ago. Around then.”

Necessary sighed and then smiled at the young man. “Just tell it,” he said in a curiously reassuring voice. “Just start where you want to and tell it.”

The young man took a deep breath. “He shot his two kids and his wife and they’re all dead and he is too because he shot himself three times in the—” He stopped while he searched his mind for a word. “In the groin.”

“Jesus!” Lynch said and turned to Necessary. “Could he do that?” he demanded. “Could he shoot himself three times?”

Necessary kept on with his role in the play. “Who’re you, mister?”

Mayor Robineaux rushed in as the reporters began crowding around, sensing something had happened, something that needed telling. “I don’t think you two’ve ever met,” the mayor said. “Mr. Lynch here is one of our... our—” He stumbled in his search for a word or phrase that would describe Lynch. He finally settled on, “our civic leaders.”

Necessary nodded to show the mayor that he understood what a civic leader was. “Well, that’s fine,” he said and turned to leave.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Lynch said and put a large, fat hand on Necessary’s shoulder. Swankerton’s new chief of police stopped quite still and then turned, not with the hand, but away from it, so that Lynch either had to remove it or trot around in a circle after Necessary. He dropped the hand.

“What question?” Necessary said after he had turned fully around.

“I think it sounds fishy. Shooting himself three times.”

“You think it might not be suicide, huh?” Necessary said and examined Lynch as if for the first time. He took in the tentlike suit and the ill-fitting white shirt and the stained tie and the big round face that wore its best smile, the one that didn’t show too many teeth. Necessary studied it all with his blue and brown eyes and nodded slightly, as if confirming some long-held suspicion.

“That’s right,” Lynch said, returning the stare. “I think that maybe it might not be suicide.”

Necessary cocked his head slightly to one side and nodded again, as if he were giving Lynch’s comment a great deal of serious thought. Finally he said, “And what makes you believe I give a goddamn what you think, mister?”

He said it loudly enough so that the reporters could make a note of it, turned and walked rapidly from the City Council chamber, still coming down hard on his heels, as the newly appointed assistant to the chief of police hurried after him.