The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Chapter 33

Carol slept while I dressed, quickly as always, but more quietly than usual. I could dress quietly now because my clothing was hung neatly on hangers or the backs of chairs and I no longer had to make a muttering search for an odd sock or the missing tie. The neatly hung clothes indicated the stage that we had reached by the first week in October. We no longer left them on the floor in what Carol called rumpled piles of passion. Instead we undressed in stages, taking our time, talking and perhaps drinking a final Scotch and water, comfortable in our knowledge that passion would arrive on schedule, or perhaps a few minutes early, but that there was no hurry. In fact we enjoyed each other’s company and I’m still not sure which of us was more surprised at the discovery.

I was buttoning my button-down collar when Carol rolled over in the bed, opened her eyes, gazed at the ceiling, and said, “If I go out that door, Vincent, I’m never coming back. Never.”

“There was a woman here to see you this afternoon, Countess,” I said. “An old woman. She said that she was... your mother.”

“That medical degree doesn’t give you the right to play God, Doctor,” she said and then yawned as prettily as anyone can. “Okay, I’m awake. Where’s the coffee?”

“Roger should be knocking on the door any minute, which will make him only twenty minutes late.”

“He’s improving,” she said.

The knock came three minutes later and I opened the door for Roger, the defeated room waiter. He smiled grumpily, if that can be done, and said, “Right on time this morning, huh, Mr. Dye?”

“On the dot,” I said.

“How you, Miz Thackerty?”

“Fine, Roger.”

“Gonna be a nice day,” he said, pouring the coffee. “Shouldn’t get no more than ninety, maybe ninety-two.”

“In October,” I said.

“Nice day.”

I signed the check and added his usual dollar tip. He looked at it glumly and said, “Might rain later though.”

“Thanks, Roger,” I said.

“Might even storm,” he said, moving toward the door. “Even some talk about a hurricane, but that weatherman’s a liar.” He took another quick peek at Carol, but found nothing interesting, mumbled something else about the weather or the state of the world, and left.

I handed Carol her coffee. “You should walk around naked for him just once,” I said.

“Not really. If I did he’d have nothing to anticipate. An occasional glimpse of breast and thigh keeps him stimulated and interested.”

I finished my coffee and put the cup down. “Who am I this morning? It’s slipped my mind.”

“You’re Special Investigator Dye from nine until ten,” she said.

“Him, huh? He’s the one who always thinks he should have known what lay behind the sealed tomb’s door.”

“His reports are good, too,” she said. “They all begin, ‘Chief Homer Necessary and his faithful assistant, Lucifer Dye, moved cautiously through the fog-shrouded night.’ From ten-thirty this morning until eleven-thirty you’re back being Triple Agent Lucifer Dye. You meet Lynch at his place. At noon you revert to your original role as Orcutt’s number one skulk.”

“What’s a skulk?”

“It’s what Orcutt wants to meet with at noon in his suite.”

“He likes meetings,” I said.

“He needs his audience.”

I leaned over the bed and kissed her. “I’ll see you at noon.”

“After it was over — really over,” she said, “I never actually believed that I would come back here to Venice.”

“I’ve never once asked for your love, Myra,” I said. “Only for your respect.” It was a harmless enough way to say goodbye.

I only needed a glance to tell what he was and who had sent him. He stood in the center of my room, his hands carefully in sight, but well balanced on the balls of his feet in case I tried to throw him out before he said what he had come to say. I nodded at him and tossed my room key on the dresser.

“How’s Carmingler?” I said.

“Fine.”

I pointed at the bathroom door. “I’m going in there and shower and shave and probably take a shit. I’ll be fifteen minutes. You can make yourself useful in the meantime by ordering up some coffee. I’ve only had one cup this morning and I’d like some more. Okay?”

“All right,” he said.

He was still standing in the center of the room when I came out, but he now held a cup and saucer. I went over to the dresser and poured myself a cup. Then I sat in the room’s most comfortable chair and looked at him.

“You know what somebody else and I call you?” I said.

“What?”

“We call you ‘just a guy.’ ”

He nodded as if he didn’t care what I called him. He was young, probably around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, wore a sleepy expression and a faint smile, as if he thought I was just a little quaint or old-fashioned. Maybe I was.

“I’ll make two guesses,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You sent a couple of punks up here about a month ago to see how nervous I was. That’s one guess. The second one is that your name is Mugar and that you’re Section Two’s young man of the year.”

He walked to the dresser and put his cup down. He moved well and had a deft way of pouring a cup of coffee. He drank it black, I noticed. He turned and looked at me, taking his time. His ash blond hair fitted his head like a bathing cap except for a few curly locks that wandered partway down his forehead. It gave him a slightly tousled look that must have cost him fifteen minutes before the mirror each morning with comb and brush.

The rest of him was regular enough, about five-eleven, a hundred and sixty pounds, regular features except for his dark hazel eyes, which I thought were a little too confident for his age, but I may have been jealous.

“Carmingler wants you to pack it in,” he said. It was his first complete sentence and it came out Eastern Seaboard from somewhere south of Boston and north of Baltimore.

“All right,” I said and watched his reaction with pleasure. He started slightly, but recovered well enough.

“You’ll do it then?” he said.

“I’ll take the third flight out. If Carmingler had said, ‘please,’ I’d take the first one.”

“They told me to expect some smart answers.”

“Anything else?”

“He wants you out of here next week. Friday.”

“And you’re to see to it?”

“That’s right. I’m to see to it.”

“He wanted me out a month ago and you made a half-hearted attempt that didn’t work. Why wait till now to try again?”

“The first was just a precautionary move,” he said. “Now we’re certain.”

“Carmingler’s never been certain of anything,” I said.

“He is of this.”

“You’ve waited long enough for it so I’ll say what?”

“Gerald Vicker.”

“Old Gerald.”

“He’s got to Senator Simon.”

“That’s not quite news,” I said.

“It will be when Simon makes his speech next Friday.”

“You’re a born tease, aren’t you?”

“You want it all?”

“Most of it anyway.”

“All right. Vicker got to Senator Simon and told him all about the Li Teh fiasco and how you’d spent three months in jail. The Senator’s not too happy with Section Two anyway, but I won’t go into the reasons unless you insist.”

“I don’t.”

“So now he’s going to make a speech on the Senate floor about the Li Teh thing and about how Section Two is messing in domestic politics where it’s not supposed to be. And you’re the goat. That’s bad enough, of course, but Simon’s also working with a top magazine that’s going to run a muckraker’s delight on you and this crew you’re working with here in Swankerton.”

“They’ve got two sources, I’d say. Gerald Vicker and his brother, Ramsey Lynch.”

“That’s right.”

“Carmingler’s worried about his appropriations,” I said.

“That and he just doesn’t like publicity.”

“Well, you can tell him that I think he’s got a real problem.”

“You’ve got until Friday,” he said.

“Your name is Mugar, isn’t it?”

“Franz Mugar.”

“If I don’t bow out by Friday, what happens then, Franz?”

“You’ll bow out one way or another.”

“A promise, I take it?”

“If you like. If you don’t, it’s a threat.”

“What about my associates?”

“A little scummy, aren’t they?”

“Not for me, but then I bet you and I don’t travel in the same crowd. I know Carmingler doesn’t.”

“We don’t care about them,” Mugar said. “We just don’t want anything of ours around that can tie us into this mess when it breaks.”

“And I’m the anything?”

“That’s right.”

“And if I don’t go quietly, then I’ll go however you decide’s best?”

“That’s right,” Mugar said again.

“I don’t like threats. They make me nervous.”

“You should take something for it.”

I rose, walked over to the phone, and picked it up. “Chief Necessary’s room, please.”

Mugar stared at me. I beckoned him over to the phone. “I’ll hold it so you can hear,” I said. He moved over so that he could hear.

When Necessary came on I said, “How much room do we have in that new jail of ours?”

“Plenty,” Necessary said.

“There’s somebody in town who calls himself Franz Mugar. I think he’s our old friend ‘just a guy.’ ”

“You want to cool him off?”

“I think so.”

“You want it legal and all?”

“No.”

“We can keep him a while on one thing or another. Where is he?”

“Right here in my room.”

“Will he stay put until I send somebody around?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll ask him.”

Mugar was backing toward the door. “You sonofabitch,” he said.

“I don’t think so, Homer,” I said.

Necessary chuckled. “Well, tell him we’ll pick him up inside a couple of hours or so.”

“I’ll see what he says,” I said and told Necessary that I’d ride to headquarters with him. He said he was leaving in fifteen minutes and I said that would be fine. I hung up the phone and turned toward Mugar who was at the door, his hand on the knob, a look of angry disbelief in his eyes.

“You’d do it, wouldn’t you?” he said.

“You can call Carmingler and he’ll have you out in an hour, but then we’d have you back in another hour. It can go on for quite a while. In and out two or three or four times a day. Of course, you could sue, couldn’t you?”

“You’ve had it, Dye. I swear you have.”

“Tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “I’ll give you an hour to get the first plane out of Swankerton. After that, well—”

Mugar shook his head slowly from side to side. “You are through, Dye. You just don’t know how through you are.”

“You are catching that plane, aren’t you?”

“Sure. Sure, I’m catching the plane, and when it lands and I get through doing what I’m going to do, maybe I’ll even have time to feel a little sorry for you. Maybe. But I don’t really think so.”

“You know,” I said in what I hoped was a thoughtful tone, “there is one thing you can do for me when you see Carmingler.”

“On top of everything else that I’m going to do,” he said, a little of his confidence coming back.

“That’s right. On top of everything else.”

“What?”

“Tell Carmingler I said that if he’s still set on it, and can’t spare the experienced help, he’d better come himself.”

“That’s all?” Mugar said.

“That’s all. You won’t forget, will you?”

“No,” he said, still keeping most of the bitterness out of his voice, “I won’t forget.”

“I didn’t think that you would.”

Chapter 34

The second thing that Homer Necessary did after he was sworn in as chief of police was to order a specially equipped Chrysler Imperial which had arrived only a few days before. It was black, not much longer than a pocket battleship, and had a hotted-up engine with a four-barrel carburetor to make it go fast. In its air-conditioned rear, where we now were, it had leather upholstery, a TV set, a telephone, a bar of sorts, an AM-FM radio, a police radio, and a sawed-off shotgun which went by the euphemism of riot weapon. Necessary’s driver was Sergeant Lester Krone, the sponsor of a local hot-rod club whose members called themselves the Leaping Lepers. Sergeant Krone was fond of the car’s red light and siren and used them at his discretion, which meant most of the time. Necessary didn’t seem to mind.

“What happened to your friend?” Necessary said.

“You mean ‘just a guy’?”

“Yeah.”

“He left town.”

Necessary grinned. “You roust him?”

“He might call it that.”

“Was he bad news?”

“Bad enough. I’ll tell you about it at noon when we meet with Orcutt and after I see your friend Mr. Lynch.”

Necessary pushed a button that rolled the glass up between us and Sergeant Krone. “Old Lynch is getting antsy.”

“I know,” I said. “He called you three times yesterday for a meeting. He wants to know what the hell you’re up to.”

“His weekly take’s down,” Necessary said and smiled comfortably.

“By about three-fourths, he claims.”

“That’s about right.”

“He’s getting pressure from New Orleans.”

“He’ll be getting some more after our meeting this morning.”

“More reorganization?” I said.

“The last one.”

“Who?”

“Henderson.”

“He’s vice squad,” I said.

“That’s right, he is, isn’t he?”

Necessary liked me to be present when, in his words, he “rattled the box and shook ‘em up.” The sessions never lasted more than twenty minutes, were highly educational, often emotional, and those who had been summoned often left white-faced and visibly shaken.

“New uniform?” I said.

Necessary looked down and ran his hand over the blue summerweight worsted uniform’s gold buttons. “Yeah, three of them came yesterday. What do you think?”

“Becoming. It matches your left eye.”

“You want one?”

“Not unless it has a Sam Browne belt.”

“We can put in a special order.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

Necessary’s office on the twelfth floor of the new municipal building was richly carpeted, contained a large desk and some comfortable chairs, two flags on standards, the stars and bars of the Confederacy, and the stars and stripes of the U.S.A., a country to which Swankerton’s allegiance was nominally pledged. The room also had a small bar, an autographed photograph of the mayor, and an unsigned one of the President. Through the black-tinted windows there was a gloomy view of the Gulf of Mexico.

Necessary had quickly recruited himself a staff of young, able persons who handled the paperwork and left him free for “standing at the window and nodding yes or no,” as he put it. His secretary was a young Negro girl whose appointment had stirred up considerable comment, none of it favorable, and when anyone even vaguely alluded to it, Necessary would smile, slip into his best mushmouth drawl, which wasn’t bad, and say, “I sho wouldn’t have hired her either if she wasn’t my wife’s youngest sister.”

Captain Warren Gamaliel Henderson was born in Ohio the year that they elected his partial namesake President. His family moved to Swankerton the following year in 1921, switched quickly to the Democratic party, and started calling their youngest son by his initials.

Now somewhere past his fiftieth birthday, W.G. had run the Swankerton vice squad for a dozen profitable years and it had rubbed off on him. He was a big man with a red, rubbery face and neatly cropped, thick gray hair. His nose was purpling at its blunt tip and there were networks of deep lines at the corners of his eyes that had all the warmth of old pieces of slate. His big bony chin, freshly barbered, underscored a stubborn mouth that seemed frozen halfway between a smirk and a snarl. He also had gaunt, sunken cheeks whose insides he liked to suck on when he was thinking. He didn’t carry any spare fat that I could see and his uniform had cost him more than the city paid him in two weeks. He looked exactly what he was: tough, mean and nasty, and none of it bothered Homer Necessary in the least.

“Time we had a little private talk,” Necessary said, leaning back in his high-topped executive chair.

“I like private talks in private,” Henderson said and stared at me.

“You mean my special assistant bothers you?”

“If that’s what you call him.”

“I call him Mr. Dye and I have a lot of confidence in his judgment and I think you should too.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

It was a bleak and wintry smile that Necessary gave Henderson. “Mr. Dye calls me Chief Necessary, Captain Henderson, and I think you’d better call me that, too.”

“Whatever you say, Chief Necessary.”

“How long have you been head of the vice squad?”

“Twelve years.”

“Now that’s a long time, isn’t it?”

“I like it.”

“I’m sure you do,” Necessary said, “but didn’t you ever get just a little sick of all those whores and the pimps and the fags and the rest of the lot?”

“It’s my job,” Henderson said. “I never thought about getting sick of it.”

“Well, maybe you’re a little sick of it, but just don’t know it.”

“You got a complaint?”

“I don’t know if you’d call it a complaint or not,” Necessary said and turned to me. “You got those figures, Mr. Dye?”

“Right here, Chief Necessary,” I said, the way an up-and-coming special assistant should say it.

“Read off some of the highlights for Captain Henderson. These are statistics, Captain, that tell how our crime rate’s going. They only deal with the past month. Go ahead, Mr. Dye.”

“Armed robbery, up seventeen percent,” I read. “Auto theft, up twenty-one percent; homicide, up sixteen percent; assault, up twenty-seven percent; extortion, up nine percent, and what’s generally called vice, down four percent. These are only percentages as compared with the previous month’s figures.”

“Vice down four percent,” Necessary said. “And everything else up. You seem to be keeping on top of things, Captain.”

“I do my job,” he said.

“Now I’ve had talks with just about every ranking officer in headquarters except you and they’ve all agreed to cooperate one-hundred percent and I think these figures reflect that cooperation. Our crime rate’s up about fourteen percent and I call that progress, don’t you?”

“No.”

“That a fact?” Necessary said. “Well, I thought that everybody thought that getting at the truth was progress and that’s just what these figures are, Captain Henderson. The truth. All except yours.”

“You calling me a liar?” Henderson demanded, his tone thick and phlegmy.

“That’s right, I am. You’ve been lying about the number of vice violations and if you want me to prove it, I will. That’s why the crime rate’s gone up. The rest of the squads have quit lying, all except yours. They’re reporting actual figures — or near actual. I expect they’re still fudging a little, but that’s to be expected. But Jesus Christ, mister, you’re giving yours six coats of whitewash.”

“I report the figures as they’re given to me,” Henderson said.

“Sure you do. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I’ve got some more figures down pretty good. A fag can buy himself off for fifty bucks. A whore, ten. Gambling’s fifteen for each player and a hundred for the house. A pimp’s not good for much more’n fifty and a disorderly house will bring a hundred. I can go on.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Henderson said.

“You’re surprised?”

“Yes.”

“Shocked?”

“Sure.”

“You’ve heard of the Sarber Hotel?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“You know it’s a wide-open whorehouse?”

“No.”

“Did you know that a police private, Benjamin A. Dassinger, badge number two-four-nine-eight is regularly on duty there from seven P.M. till three A.M. to keep order and to make sure the customers pay up? You know that?”

“No,” Henderson said, “I didn’t know that.”

“For a vice cop you don’t know a hell of a lot, do you, Captain?”

“I do my job.”

“Well, if you do, maybe you know that the Sarber Hotel is owned by one Mary Helen Henderson and this Mary Helen Henderson is the wife of Warren Gamaliel Henderson who happens to be a captain in the Swankerton Police Department. Now, goddamn it, tell me you didn’t know that?”

Henderson said nothing and sucked on the insides of his cheeks.

“There’s a crap game that’s been running in this town for seven years. It used to float, but it doesn’t anymore. It’s the oldest crap game in town and it’s open every night from nine till two on the second floor of a bakery at two-forty-nine North Ninth Street. You know about that?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s funny, since the guy that runs it says he pays you five hundred a week to let him alone and, God knows, that’s cheap because it’s a hell of a big game and it draws the high rollers from as far away as Hot Springs and Memphis, but you wouldn’t know about that either, would you?”

“No,” Henderson said and sucked on his cheeks some more.

“The last count I got was that there are thirteen regular table-stakes poker games going on in town with an off-duty patrolman playing doorkeeper at each one. That’s on this side of the tracks. God knows what goes on in Niggertown, but you don’t know anything about those thirteen games or about the three hundred dollars-a-week payoff that each of them makes, do you?”

“No.”

“You ever heard of John Frazee, Milton Sournaugh, Joseph Minitelli, Kelly Farmer, or Jules Goreaux?”

“No,” Henderson said.

“Well, they say they all know you and that they’ve been shaking down fags and pimps and whores for you, some of them for as long as three years. They work on a percentage, they tell me; they get twenty-five and you get seventy-five. What you got to say about that?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you kick back to Lynch? I hear it’s up around two-thirds now.”

“I don’t know anything about kick backs.” Henderson said. “I just do my job.”

Necessary leaned back in his chair and stretched and yawned. “How long would it take to draw up charges against Captain Henderson here, Mr. Dye?”

“A few hours,” I said.

“What do you think?”

“Perhaps you might take into consideration his claim that he was only doing his job.”

“That’s a thought,” Necessary said. He leaned over his desk toward Henderson and nodded in a confidential, you-can-tell-me manner. “How much you really knocking down a year, Henderson? Sixty? Seventy-five?”

“I don’t knock down anything,” Henderson said.

“You think I should bring you up on charges?”

“That’s up to you, Chief Necessary.”

“It sure is, isn’t it? Probably get your wife, too, for running a whorehouse, come to think of it. Be a real mess, but you could probably get off with — oh, say — five years, maybe ten.”

Henderson cracked then. Not much, really; just enough. He looked down at his shoes. That was all. “What do you want?” he said dully.

“A list,” Necessary said. “Break it all down, where it comes from, who gets it, and how much. And I want your name at the bottom of it. I want it on my desk by five o’clock tonight.”

“All right,” Henderson said.

“I want your resignation, too.”

Henderson looked up quickly and his mouth opened, but no words came out. “Undated,” Necessary said, and Henderson closed his mouth.

“What do you think, Mr. Dye?”

“Well, he can’t stay in vice. As you said, he seems a little sick of it.”

Necessary nodded judiciously. “He sure does, doesn’t he. You got any suggestions?”

“There’s always the Missing Persons’ Bureau,” I said.

Henderson looked at me, and if he was afraid of Necessary, he wasn’t of me. The snarl came back to his mouth. “There ain’t any Missing Persons’ Bureau.”

Necessary smiled. “There’ll be one tomorrow and you’ll be in charge of it. How much help you think he needs, Mr. Dye?”

“At least one man,” I said.

“Maybe a rookie?” Necessary said.

“A rookie could learn a lot from Captain Henderson.”

Henderson rose slowly from his chair and half-turned toward the door. “Sit down, Henderson,” Necessary snapped. “I’ll tell you when you’re dismissed.” Henderson sat down again.

“You don’t have to make a dash for the phone,” Necessary said. “Lynch’ll have a full report on this from Mr. Dye inside of an hour. And don’t get any funny ideas about appealing either. You’re in real bad trouble, buster, and the only thing that’s keeping you out of the state pen is me, so don’t forget it. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” Henderson said.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, sir, Chief Necessary.”

“Take off.”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t hurry to the door. He seemed too tired to hurry.

“That was the last one,” Necessary said, going down a list on his desk.

“At least he didn’t get down on his knees and beg like Purcell did,” I said.

“I’m gonna transfer Purcell to head up the vice squad,” Necessary said.

“Jesus Christ.”

“We’ve sort of shuffled them around this last month,” Necessary said happily. “None of them knows whether to shit or go blind. They’re scared to take their payoffs. Christ, I’ve had some punks even call me at the hotel at night and ask me who they should pay.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Sit tight and don’t worry. That the lid’s off.”

“I hear that the word’s getting around,” I said.

Necessary nodded. “It doesn’t take long. Listen to this. It’s a list of what Lieutenant Ferkaire calls ‘distinguished arrivals.’ He’s that young cop outside there.”

“I know who he is,” I said.

“Listen to this. These are just the ones who’ve flown in during the past three days. Edouardo (Sweet Eddie) Puranelli, Cleveland; Frank (Jimmy Twoshoes) Schoemeister, Chicago; Arturo (Tex) Turango, Dallas; the Onealo brothers, Roscoe and Ralph from Kansas City; Nicholas (Nick the Nigger) Jones from Miami; and a whole delegation from New Orleans. They came to see Lynch.”

“What are the rest of them doing?”

“Looking around. Taking a market survey. Sizing things up. The word’s got out that Lynch has slipped. The New Orleans crowd knows goddamn well something’s slipped and I hear they’re unhappy about it.”

I rose and moved toward the door. “I’ll go see him.”

“Lynch?”

“Yes.”

“Give him my best.”

“He’ll want a meeting.”

“What do you think?”

“Let’s see what happens this morning.”

“Okay,” Necessary said.

I paused at the door. “Is Lieutenant Ferkaire still keeping a check on arrivals?”

Necessary nodded.

“You might tell him to keep an eye out for one.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Tall, redheaded, and wears a pipe and Phi Beta Kappa key.”

“Name?”

“Carmingler.” Necessary made a note of it.

“Hard case?”

I nodded. “About as hard as they come.”

Chapter 35

Two unfriendly strangers met me at the door of Lynch’s Victorian house. About the only difference between them was that one was bald and the other wasn’t. The bald one stood squarely in the doorway while the one with hair took up a protective flanking position. Neither of them said anything. They stood there and looked at me and their expressions made it clear that they didn’t want any today, no matter what it was.

“Where’s Boo?” I said.

“Who’s Boo?” the baldheaded one said.

“The mayor’s son.”

“We don’t know any mayor.”

“Tell Lynch I’m here.”

“Tell him who’s here?”

“Dye. Lucifer Dye.”

“Lucifer Dye,” the bald one said slowly, as if he couldn’t decide whether he cared for its sound. “We don’t know you either, do we Shorty?”

Shorty was close to five-eleven so something else must have earned him the nickname, but there was no point in dwelling on it. “I never knew nobody named Dye or Lucifer either,” Shorty said. “Where’d you get a name like Lucifer?”

“Out of a book,” I said. “A dirty one.”

“And you want to see Lynch?” the baldheaded one said.

“No,” I said. “He wants to see me.”

They thought about that for a moment until they got it sorted out. “I’ll go see,” Shorty said and left. I stood there on the screened porch with the man with the bald head. We had nothing further to say to each other so I admired his dark green double-breasted suit, his squared-off black shoes, and his green-and-black polka dotted tie. A bumblebee had fought its way through the screen and buzzed about the porch. When we got tired of admiring each other, we watched the bee.

“They ain’t supposed to fly,” he said. “I read somewhere that the guys who design airplanes say bumblebees ain’t built right for flying.”

We pondered the mystery of it all until Shorty came back. “This way,” he said. The baldheaded man took two steps backward so that I could enter. He waved a hand in the direction of the dining room. They didn’t seem to want me behind them.

Ramsey Lynch looked as if he hadn’t been getting enough sleep. His eyes were bloodshot and had dark smears under them. He wore an ice cream suit that made him look fatter than he was. He didn’t smile when I came in, but I hadn’t expected him to. Three of them sat at the far end of a table. Lynch wasn’t in the center; he was on the left side. The man on the right side wore glasses and had an open attaché case before him. The man in the center stared at me and I thought that he had the oily eyes of an unhappy lizard.

“Sit down, Dye,” Lynch said, so I sat at the opposite end of the table, near the sliding doors. Neither Shorty nor the baldheaded man had followed me into the room.

“So you’re what we paid twenty-five thou for,” the man in the center said, and from his tone I could tell that he didn’t think I was much of a bargain.

“Twenty-five thousand so far,” I said. “The final bill is for sixty.”

“You know me — who I am?” he said.

I knew, but he didn’t wait for my answer.

“I’m Luccarella.”

“From New Orleans,” I said.

“You’ve heard of me, huh?” He didn’t seem to care one way or another.

“Giuseppe Luccarella,” I said, “or Joe Lucky.”

“That Joe Lucky’s newspaper stuff,” he said. “Nobody calls me Joe Lucky, but if they did, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t care about things like that anymore. You wanta call me Joe Lucky, go ahead.”

“I’ll call you Mr. Luccarella,” I said.

He shrugged. “This is my lawyer, Mr. Samuels.”

I nodded at the lawyer and he nodded back and said, “Mr. Dye.”

Luccarella leaned over the table, resting his elbows on it. He had a narrow, crimped face that looked as if it had been squeezed so hard that his lizard eyes and gray teeth threatened to pop out of his skull. His skin had an unhealthy yellowish tinge to it, as if he had just suffered a bad bout with jaundice. The deep lines in his face, especially his forehead said that he was somewhere past fifty, but his hair was still thick and black and glossy and he wore it long. He looked like a man who worried a lot.

“Lynch works for me,” he said. He had that New Orleans Rampart Street accent that borders on Brooklynese and makes works come out close to woiks and for sound like fah. “You work for Lynch, so that means you work for me, right?”

“I don’t work for anybody,” I said. “Particularly Lynch.”

“He pays you, don’t he?”

“He pays me a fee in exchange for information. I don’t work for him. We’d better get that straight at the start.”

“Possibly Mr. Dye would prefer the word retained,” the lawyer said in that smooth, conciliatory tone that the expensive ones seem to be born with.

Luccarella gestured impatiently. “Works, retained, who the hell cares? All I know is that since Lynch’s been paying you this town’s gone to hell.”

“Well, it’s not quite that bad,” Lynch said.

“I say it’s gone to hell and when receipts are down sixty-five percent I don’t know what it’s done if it hasn’t gone to hell.”

“Sixty-eight percent, Mr. Luccarella,” the lawyer said.

“It’ll be even worse next week,” I said.

Luccarella frowned. “What do you mean worse?”

“Necessary busted Henderson down to the Missing Persons’ Bureau.”

“There isn’t any Missing Persons’ Bureau,” Lynch said.

I smiled. “There is now.”

“What was Henderson?” Luccarella said.

“Vice squad.”

Luccarella threw up his hands and flopped back into his chair. “That’s the fucking end!” he yelled. He turned on Lynch and the fat man seemed to cower in his chair as if afraid of being struck. “You can’t even keep a line on a goddamned vice-squad cop! What are you doing to me, Lynch? I hand you the sweetest setup in ten states and you just sit around and piss it away. What are you doing it to me for?”

Before Lynch could answer, I said, “You might have some competition, too, but I suppose Lynch has already told you about that.”

Luccarella pulled himself together with a visible effort. “I shouldn’t do that,” he said in an apologetic tone. “I shouldn’t fly off the handle like that. My analyst tells me that it’s inner-directed rage that should be channeled into something constructive. So that’s what I’m gonna do. No, Mr. Dye, Lynch hasn’t told me about any competition. Lynch doesn’t seem to know what’s going on anymore. He seems to have let things sort of slide. Ever since that tame police chief of his shot hisself, Lynch seems to be sort of out of it, you know what I mean?”

“I’ve tried to keep him informed,” I said.

Lynch glared at me, but said nothing. “Sure you have,” Luccarella said. “I bet you’ve kept him right up to date, but maybe you can sort of bring me up to date, if you don’t mind too much?” He was trying to be very polite and constructive and perhaps the tight grip that he had on his end of the table helped.

“By competition I mean that Swankerton’s got some visitors. Chief Necessary says that they’re making a market survey and he seems to think that they might move in. Or try to.”

Luccarella squeezed his eyes shut. “Who?” he said. Then he said it again without opening his eyes.

“I think I remember most of them,” I said. “Jimmy Twoshoes of Chicago is one. The Onealo brothers, Roscoe and Ralph out of Kansas City. Nick the Nigger from Miami. Tex Turango, Dallas, A guy named Puranelli from Cleveland.”

“Sweet Eddie,” Luccarella said, his eyes still tightly closed.

“You didn’t tell me none of this,” Lynch said.

“I just found out.”

Luccarella opened his eyes and looked at me. “I want things back the way they were, Mr. Dye. I want things nice and calm and peaceful. I want to know how much that will cost me.” He gripped his end of the table so hard that his knuckles turned white. “You notice I’m being constructive.”

“Your analyst would like it,” I said.

“He’s an interesting guy. I had a lot of the worries and that’s why I went to him. I still have the worries, but I don’t mind them so much now. He said that most people have got the worries, but when they find out that they got them, then they can live with them. He said worrying about having the worries is what really gets you down. So you see why I don’t want to have any of the worries over here in Swankerton.”

“I understand,” I said.

“That’s good. That’s real good. So how much is it gonna cost me?”

I leaned back in my chair and smiled at Luccarella. I hoped it was a friendly one, the kind that wouldn’t worry him. “Chief Necessary said he would be willing to meet Friday to discuss things.”

Luccarella shook his head. “I have to be at my analyst Friday. What about today?”

“No chance today. Tomorrow’s a possibility.”

“Set it up with Lynch.”

I shook my head. “As you said earlier, Lynch has sort of lost touch.”

Luccarella smiled for the first time, a big, buck-toothed smile. He even chuckled. Then he looked at Lynch and chuckled some more. It was turning into his kind of a meeting after all.

“You agree with him, Lynch?” he said. “You agree that you’ve sort of lost touch?”

Lynch looked at me and moved his head slowly from side to side as if he could see seven chess moves ahead to the end of a game that he couldn’t possibly win. The lawyer looked a little embarrassed and busied himself with some papers. Luccarella chuckled some more. I smiled at Lynch. Everyone knew what was coming, but only Luccarella seemed to have any relish for it. Perhaps I did too, but I’m still not sure.

“I asked you something,” Luccarella said.

“You asked me if I thought I’ve lost touch,” Lynch said, still looking at me.

“That’s what I asked you.”

“I’ve only made one mistake, Joe, and you’re about to make the same one. I haven’t lost touch. I just made that one mistake.”

“Sometimes one mistake’s one too many,” Luccarella said, looked around for confirmation, and got it from Samuels, the lawyer, who nodded automatically.

“The only mistake I made,” Lynch said, “was to believe one word that lying sonofabitch down there at the other end of the table ever said.”

“I told you I was a liar,” I said.

“Yeah,” Lynch said. “You did. And I believed that, too.”

“So your price is gonna cost me Lynch, huh?” Luccarella said to me.

“That’s right.”

“What else?”

“I name his successor.”

“What about this new chief of police, what’s his name — Necessary?”

“What about him?”

“What’s he gonna cost me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He sets his own price.”

“He’ll probably come high.”

“Probably.”

“But all you want to do is name Lynch’s successor?”

“That’s right.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

Luccarella nodded. “What time?”

“Ten o’clock. My room in the Sycamore.”

Luccarella shook his head. “My room. It’s six twenty-two.”

“Your room,” I said.

“You’ll bring Necessary?”

“I won’t bring him; he’ll come with me.”

Luccarella turned to Lynch. “There’s a plane out of here this afternoon for New Orleans. Be on it. Just make sure you hand all the records over to Samuels.”

Lynch didn’t argue. He nodded his understanding and then in a mild tone said, “You’re making a goddamned bad mistake, Joe.”

“At least I’m making it and not letting somebody do it for me.”

“I’m not fixing to dispute that,” Lynch said. “I’m just saying that if you try to make a deal with him, you’re gonna regret it to your dying day.”

“You don’t think I’m smart enough to do a deal with him?”

“I’m wasting my breath,” Lynch said.

“No. I want to know. You don’t think I’m smart enough, do you?”

“Being smart don’t have anything to do with it. I’ve skinned lots of guys smarter than Dye is, twice as smart, and so have you, but like I said, smart has got nothing to do with it.”

“What’s got to do with it?” Luccarella said.

Lynch stared at me some more. “I’ll tell you what it is. He’s a loser who doesn’t expect to win. You don’t have to worry about losers who think they’ll win because that always gives you the edge. But you haven’t got any edge on the loser who’ll play by your rules and not give a damn if he wins or loses or breaks even. He doesn’t really give a damn if he even plays, so that means that you never hold the edge on him and it means that you never really win. And that matters to you, but it don’t to him, so that puts you in the hole, I don’t care what happens.”

Luccarella nodded after Lynch finished and slumped back into his chair as if winded. “You know what my analyst would call that?” he said. “My analyst would call that insight.”

“Or projection,” I said.

“You got an analyst, Mr. Dye?” Luccarella asked in a hopeful tone, as if he wanted to compare notes.

“No.”

“What do you think of what Lynch said?”

“Not much.”

“But you do want something, despite what he said. You want to name his successor, like you said.”

“That’s right.”

“I can tell you who it’s gonna be,” Lynch said.

“You want to let him guess?” Luccarella said. “After all, it’s his own successor.”

“I don’t care,” I said.

“Okay, who?” Luccarella said.

Lynch stared at me again. He seemed to find something about me fascinating. “It’s gonna be you, isn’t it, Dye?”

“That’s right,” I said. “It’s going to be me.”

Chapter 36

“What do you think you should call yourself at this particular point in time, Mr. Dye?” Victor Orcutt asked. “Are you Swankerton’s vice lord apparent? Or would vice lord designate be more appropriate?”

Four of us had just lunched on some more of Orcutt’s homecooking, thin slices of veal swimming in a thick sauce whose principal ingredients seemed to have been sour cream and a heavy Marsala that I thought had been too sweet. I had eaten all of mine anyway.

“Either one,” I said.

Orcutt flitted over to the coffee and poured himself another cup. He wore a blue blazer with gold buttons, striped blue and white trousers, white buck shoes with red rubber soles, and another Lord Byron shirt, whose open neck was partially filled by a carelessly knotted narrow paisley scarf. He looked all of twenty-two.

“The only thing that disturbs me is Senator Simon’s speech,” he said as he glided back to his chair by the window that looked out over the Gulf.

“What about that magazine piece?” Homer Necessary said. “What’s that thing got, about nine million circulation?”

“Six,” Carol said.

“You know, Mr. Dye, you were right,” Orcutt said. “I really did place too much trust in Gerald Vicker. This grudge he has against you seems almost pathological.”

“His brother doesn’t like me much either,” I said.

Orcutt almost bounced up and down on the seat of his chair. “Oh, I would have given anything to have seen Lynch this morning! You give excellent reports, Mr. Dye, but you never include all the little spicy details. You’re really not much of a gossip, you know.”

“Sorry.”

“No matter. It just means that we’re going to have to move our schedule back — or is it up? I never could get that straight.”

“Back,” Carol said.

“Up,” Necessary said.

“Never mind,” Orcutt said. “What we hoped and planned would happen will now have to happen earlier than we had hoped and planned. All right?” He didn’t wait for a vote. “Senator Simon will speak Friday after next, that’s ten days from now, and the main thrust of his speech will charge that Mr. Dye’s former employers are now engaged in domestic politics and Swankerton will be his proof. Data on this and other details relating to Mr. Dye’s past activities were furnished the senator by Gerald Vicker and his brother, Ramsey Lynch. Am I correct so far?”

“So far,” I said.

“Good. Meanwhile that awful magazine — I simply never could read it, especially its editorials — will publish an article buttressing and embellishing the senator’s speech. It also will appear a week from Friday. It will not only attack Mr. Dye and his former employers, but it will also carry an account of Victor Orcutt Associates’ involvement here in Swankerton. Incidentally, Homer, have you heard of any of the magazine’s writers or photographers being in town?”

Necessary nodded. “They’re around, but they’ve been working with Lynch.”

“Isn’t it strange that they haven’t called any of us?”

“No,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because they’ll put together what they think is a story, and at the last minute ask what we think of it. They’ve still got time to do that.”

Orcutt made a church of his hands, and then a steeple, and then opened them up to look at the people. He was thinking. I wondered how much faster he thought than I did. “You know,” he said, “it’s really quite simple.”

“What?” Necessary asked.

“We’re going to apply Orcutt’s First Law.”

“To get better, it must get much worse,” I said.

“You remembered!” he said. “I’m so delighted!”

“You were going to tell us how simple it was,” Necessary said.

So Orcutt told us and as he said, it was simple, but then a broken neck can also be described as a simple fracture.

Homer Necessary made two calls before we went back to his twelfthfloor office. Carol Thackerty was on the other phone that Orcutt had had installed in the Rickenbacker Suite and when I went out the door I heard her setting up a conference call between Swankerton, Washington, and New York.

While we waited for the elevator I said, “How many times has he been out of the hotel since he got here?”

“Orcutt?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think he’s been out any since we got here from San Francisco,” Necessary said. “He was out a couple of times before that, you know, when you weren’t here yet.”

“I’d think he’d get cabin fever.”

Necessary shook his head. “Not him. He likes playing spider king.”

There were two doors to Necessary’s office and both of them were busy that afternoon. Five minutes after we got there, Lt. Ferkaire came in, brimming with his sense of justice, eager to please, and proud of the University of Tennessee ring that he wore on his left hand. I think he made the chief of police nervous, although Necessary never said anything other than that he thought Ferkaire was “a nice, bright kid.”

“They’re bringing the first one up now, sir,” Ferkaire told Necessary.

“They got their instructions like I said?”

“Yes, sir. They bring them in this door and when they come out your other one they take them back where they picked them up.”

“Any trouble locating them?” Necessary said.

“No, sir. Not yet.”

“You tell them all to be goddamned polite?”

“My exact words, sir. Goddamned polite. Excuse me for asking, Chief Necessary, but how important are these men?”

“To who?”

“Well, I mean how do they rank nationally?”

“They’re major league, kid,” Necessary said. “Don’t worry about it, they’re all pros from the majors.”

“Would you like me to sit in, sir?” Ferkaire asked stiffly, but not stiff enough to keep the eagerness and hope out of his voice.

“Not this time.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“For what?” Necessary said. “I just told you you couldn’t sit in.”

“I just meant—” Ferkaire grew flustered and tried to think of something else to say, something pertinent, when Necessary said, “Forget it. When the first one gets up here, bring him right in. Who’s first by the way?”

Ferkaire looked at a three-by-five card that he carried. “Frank Schoemeister. Chicago.”

Necessary nodded. “That’s all, Ferkaire.”

Ferkaire said yes, sir, again and left.

“Jimmy Twoshoes,” Necessary said as he moved behind his desk. “They come up with the goddamnedest nicknames. I knew one in Pittsburgh once that they used to call Billy Buster Bible because he used to carry one around and always let them kiss it before he shot them. He used to shoot them through the ear. The left one, I think.” He sank back in his executive chair and looked at me. “You going to be over there by the window?”

“That’s right.”

“I wish to hell more light would come through it.”

“There’s enough to give them the idea.”

“You want to go first?” he said.

“Better if you did,” I said. “They may not know you, but they’ll know the gold braid. I’ll come in on the chorus.”

Necessary looked at his watch. “It’s going to be a long afternoon.”

“Longer than most,” I agreed.

A few minutes later Ferkaire knocked on the door, entered, and said, “Mr. Frank Schoemeister, Chief Necessary.”

Then he closed the door and left Schoemeister standing there in the center of the room. Schoemeister looked at Necessary, then at me, and then back at Necessary. After that he studied the rug, the ceiling, and the two flags behind Necessary’s desk. He nodded his head as if he’d reached some silent agreement with himself and put his hands in his coat pockets. Then he smiled and it came out hideous.

Necessary waved a negligent hand at him. “Sit down, Schoemeister, pick a chair. That’s my special assistant over there, Mr. Dye.”

Schoemeister nodded in my direction, selected a chair so that he could keep me in view, and sat down. Finally, he decided to say something: “Social?”

“Social,” Necessary said.

“You don’t mind if I smoke then?”

Necessary waved his hand again. “You want a drink? I’m going to have one.”

“A drink?” Schoemeister said. “That would be nice.”

“What would you like?” I said, moving to the bar.

“Scotch and water, please.”

I mixed three of them and handed Schoemeister his. He accepted it with a slim, well-cared-for hand that went with the rest of him, which was equally well tended. He was not yet forty, looked even younger, and wore dark, quiet clothes that almost made him look like a successful corporate executive whose career was a couple of years ahead of schedule. He looked like that until you noticed his shoes. And his mouth. The shoes were black alligator with large silver buckles that got encouragement from the white, brushed-suede fleurs-de-lis that decorated each toe. I had read somewhere, probably in a barber shop, that Jimmy Twoshoes had more than two hundred pairs of customcobbled footwear and sometimes wore as many as six different pairs in a day. But he had only one mouth, and there was nothing he could do about that, although he had tried hard enough. The twelve puckered white scars were still there where they had sewed his lips together with fishing line in 1961. The heavy mustache he wore failed to disguise the scars that twisted his mouth into a perpetual snarl. The Chicago police never did learn who had sewed Schoemeister’s lips together, nor would Schoemeister tell them. During the month after he was released from the hospital funerals were held for four of Schoemeister’s more prominent contemporaries. They had all died messily and none of their caskets was opened during their funerals.

“We got a nice little town here,” Necessary said after he took a swallow of his drink.

“I noticed,” Schoemeister said.

“Got some new industry and more on the way. Got one of the best little beaches on the Gulf. The niggers have been fairly quiet up till now. Nice big Air Force depot about fifteen miles out of town helps keep the unemployment down. Got a good, clean, local government that listens to reason. Of course, Swankerton’s no Chicago, but it’s a real nice little city where you can still walk the streets safe at night. You here on a vacation?”

“Vacation,” Schoemeister said.

“There’ve been some changes here recently,” Necessary said. “They put me in as chief of police and Mr. Dye’s my new special assistant and it’s sort of up to us to look out for law and order.”

“I hear the last chief of police shot himself,” Schoemeister said.

“He sure did, poor guy. Pressure, I guess. Funny you’d bring that up, but a good friend of his left town this afternoon sudden like. Name’s Ramsey Lynch. Ever heard of him?”

Schoemeister nodded. He did it carefully. “I’ve heard of him.”

“Well, he was quite prominent here in certain circles. Had a lot of interests.”

“Who’s looking after them for him?” Schoemeister said, and I decided that he knew what the right questions were.

“Well, that’s funny, too, but it seems that me and Mr. Dye here are sort of going to have to look after things. We were talking about it just this afternoon, weren’t we, Mr. Dye?”

“This very afternoon,” I said. “Just before you got here.”

“I see,” Schoemeister said. He wasn’t pushing anything.

“The trouble, Mr. Schoemeister,” I said, “is that neither Chief Necessary nor I have schedules that will permit us to devote full time to the various activities that formerly were under Mr. Lynch’s personal supervision. We were thinking of taking in a partner — a working partner, of course — who could devote at least a portion of his time to these various interests. Your name happened to come up, so we thought we’d arrange this meeting.”

“I’m going to ask you a question,” Schoemeister said.

Necessary smiled. “Go ahead.”

“This place bugged?”

“You think I’d bug my own office?”

“Some do.”

“Some are goddamned stupid, too.”

“Okay,” Schoemeister said and looked at me. “You talk awful pretty, but you don’t really say anything. See if you can’t make it not quite so pretty and a little more plain.”

“All right,” I said. “Lynch is out as of noon today. I’m in. So is Necessary and so are you, for a third if you can run it.”

“I hear it’s pretty rich,” Schoemeister said.

“You hear right,” Necessary said.

“I also hear that Lynch was under Luccarella.”

“Luccarella’s out too,” I said.

“Since when?”

“Since tomorrow,” Necessary said.

“What keeps him out?”

Necessary tapped the third gold button down on his uniform. “This keeps him out and gets you in, if you’re interested.”

Schoemeister nodded. “Like I say, I’ve been on vacation down here, but you know how it is, I sort of nosed around.”

“We know how it is,” Necessary said.

“I’d kinda heard of some trouble when I was up in Chicago.”

“It gets around,” I said.

Schoemeister looked at me. “When you talk about these interests, just what’re you talking about?”

“Everything,” I said.

“How much you figure it’s worth?”

“By the month?” Necessary said.

“That’ll do.”

Necessary looked at me. “What did we come up with?”

“Before we reorganized the police department it grossed about two million a month. There was the usual big overhead and that knocked the net down to around two or three hundred thousand. Some months were better than others.”

“How many ways is the net split?” Schoemeister said.

“Three,” Necessary said. “Just three ways and each of us pays his own expenses.”

“And what do you expect me to do?” Schoemeister said.

“The operation has deteriorated during the past month,” I said. “Gone to hell really. We expect you to personally supervise its rebuilding. After it’s functioning smoothly again, you can appoint your own supervisor. He — and whoever he hires — will be responsible to you and you will be responsible to us.”

Schoemeister nodded thoughtfully. “Suppose I just moved in on my own? Suppose that happened?”

“We’d move you right out,” Necessary said.

“What about Luccarella? He’s tied in back east, you know.”

“That bother you?” I said.

“Those guys back east don’t bother me,” Schoemeister said. “I don’t go looking for trouble from them, but they don’t bother me.”

“Luccarella might get a little unfriendly,” Necessary said.

“Who takes care of him?”

“You do,” Necessary said. “And anybody else who starts getting pushy. There may be a couple of them or so.”

“I’ll have to get some people down.”

“How soon?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I call ‘em today; they’ll be here tomorrow. How much trouble you think there might be, not counting Luccarella?”

“Two or three maybe,” Necessary said.

“You got any names?”

“A couple. Tex Turango from Dallas. Nigger Jones from Miami.”

Schoemeister shook his head and smiled his horrible smile. “That ain’t much trouble.”

“We didn’t think it would be.”

“One thing though.”

“What?” I said.

“I’d like to go over the books. I mean you go into a business like this and invest time and money and you’re a damn fool if you don’t go over the books.”

“Tomorrow afternoon be okay?” I said.

“Fine,” Schoemeister said. “I’ll have my accountant come down too.”

“Good,” Necessary said.

“Well,” Schoemeister said, rising, “I guess that does it for now.”

We shook hands all around. “I think it’s going to be nice doing business with you fellows,” he said.

“I think it’ll work out fine all the way around,” Necessary said.

“You might want to use the private entrance over here,” I said and steered Schoemeister to it.

“Thanks for the drink,” he said as he went out, and I told him not to mention it.

When he had gone Necessary picked up the phone and spoke to Lt. Ferkaire, who came in promptly.

“Who’s next?”

“The Onealo brothers, Ralph and Roscoe. Kansas City.”

“Send them in,” Necessary said.

After they came in and after they were seated, Homer Necessary leaned back in his chair and said, “We got a nice little town here. Got some new industry and more on the way. Got one of the best little beaches...”

It went that way all afternoon. The Onealo brothers, blond, dumpy and stupid-looking, couldn’t conceal their eagerness. Arturo (Tex) Turango, handsome and olive-skinned, smiled a lot with his big white teeth and said he did believe it was his kind of proposition. Edouardo (Sweet Eddie) Puranelli from Cleveland wanted to know more about how Luccarella figured in the deal and when we told him he said that he never did like the sonofabitch anyhow. Nicholas (Nick the Nigger) Jones from Miami was whiter than either Necessary or I, spoke with a clipped Jamaican accent, and thought the proposition had “fascinating possibilities” and asked if we wanted him to fly his people in that same evening and we told him that it might be a good idea.

When Jones had gone, I turned to the window and stared out at the Gulf Coast through the black-tinted glass. “How many times did we sell Swankerton this afternoon?” I said.

“Five,” Necessary said. “Six if you count the Onealo brothers twice.”

“The meeting with Luccarella tomorrow could get rough.”

“You think he’s as nutty as they say?”

“It’s worse than that,” I said.

“How?”

“He knows he’s nutty.”

Lt. Ferkaire stuck his head in the door. “That’s the last of them, Chief Necessary.”

“Good.”

“By the way, Mr. Dye, I just got a report from the airport.”

“Yes?”

“A Mr. Carmingler arrived on a Braniff flight from Washington about twenty minutes ago.”

“Redheaded?”

“Yes, sir. I thought you’d want to know. Do you want us to keep him under surveillance?”

I turned back to the window and looked out at the Gulf and wished it would rain. “No. He’ll get in touch with me.”

“Yes, sir,” Ferkaire said, and I could hear the pneumatic door close behind him.

“The hard case?” Necessary said.

“That’s right.”

“You need some help?”

I turned and shook my head. “Nobody stocks the kind I need anymore.”

Necessary examined a hangnail. He bit it. “Maybe they never did,” he said in between bites.

I turned back to the window. “You’ve got a point, Homer. Maybe they never did.”

Chapter 37

I had long admired Carmingler’s ability to summarize a situation. His facts were always neatly marshaled and if a few of them needed embellishment, as they sometimes did, he supplied it with an airy phrase or two that usually began “of course” or “naturally” or “it goes without saying.”

He had been talking now, and talking well, for almost fifteen minutes. We were in my room in the Sycamore, still on our first drinks, and he was near the end of his summary of things as he saw them, or wanted to see them, or as they should be, and I could only marvel at his single-mindedness.

“Of course,” he said, “I don’t deny that we may have made a mistake about Gerald Vicker,” and with that manly confession of near fallibility he gave me a satisfied smile, as if he had just stepped on the old homestead’s last termite.

“You knew he was recommending me for this thing, didn’t you?”

“We’d heard.”

“But you didn’t mention it to me.”

“It seemed harmless enough at the time. And we felt you could use the money.”

“Can’t you get to Simple the Wise?”

Carmingler looked pained. “We’ve tried.”

“What’s he say?”

“That we paid blackmail to get you out of jail.”

“Does he know how much?”

“Yes. He got it from Vicker.”

“Who did Vicker get it from?”

“From Tung, the man who interrogated you.”

I grinned at him. “When you question somebody for seven hours, it’s a debriefing. When they do it, it’s an interrogation.”

“You’re quibbling.”

“You want another drink?” I said.

“No.”

“Okay, let’s see if I’ve got it straight. The senior senator from Utah—”

“Idaho,” Carmingler said.

“I just wanted to make sure you were listening. The senior senator from Idaho, Solomon Simple, will rise on the floor of the Senate a week from Friday and denounce Section Two on a couple of counts. First, that it paid some Oriental despot three million dollars ransom to get three of its bungling agents out of jail and that the Secretary of State compounded the error by writing a letter of apology for the mess that his colleagues down the street were still trying to deny. All that rehash should be good for at least an hour, if he’s halfway sober.”

“He’s quit,” Carmingler said.

“Drinking?”

“Yes.”

“What was it, his liver?”

“Heart.”

“Well, after the first hour, during which he denounces the super-secret Section Two for groveling, with a couple of passing swipes at the State Department, he recounts how this same notorious agent, Lucifer Dye, is now deeply embroiled in the domestic politics of one of the South’s fairest cities in blatant defiance of all legal safeguards. I can hear him now.”

“Hear him what?” Carmingler said.

“‘Where will it all stop, Mr. President? Where will it ever end? How would you like agents of the FBI or the CIA to guide the destiny of your home town? Would you want your City Council to be elected through the machinations of ruthless, devious men who take their orders from a super-secret agency on the banks of the Potomac? Are we entering into a police state, Mr. President?’”

“You don’t do imitations very well,” Carmingler said.

“The essence is there,” I said. “At the same time Simple is making his speech, America’s favorite picture magazine will blanket the country with a sixteen-page spread on ‘The Men Who Are Corrupting Swankerton.’ ”

Carmingler almost looked startled. “Have you seen an advance copy?” he demanded.

“I just like to make things up.”

“Oh.”

“Why don’t you get the White House to stop him?”

“They tried, but not too hard. They need his vote on the tax bill.”

“What about the magazine?”

“No chance.”

“You tried?”

“Yes.”

“You’re in a bind,” I said.

“So are you.”

“You could blackmail the senator. Threaten to reveal that slush fund of his.”

“I said they need his vote.”

“That close, huh?”

“It’s that close.”

“So you sent your young friend Franz Mugar down to take care of me.

“That was a mistake.”

“That’s two you’ve admitted. It must be a record.”

“There won’t be any more.”

“Sorry I can’t help.”

“You won’t then?”

“No.”

Carmingler looked at the window and said, “If it’s money—”

“It’s not.”

“It would only be for six months.”

“I don’t have six months.”

He looked at me quickly. “Do you have—”

“Don’t get your hopes up. I don’t have anything fatal. I just don’t have time to sit around in Brazil or the Canary Islands while you try to tidy things up. It’s not that important to me.”

“It is to us,” Carmingler said.

“Why?”

Carmingler’s hand darted to the Phi Beta Kappa key, which hung on the gold chain that decorated the vest of his glen plaid suit. The key didn’t seem to give him as much reassurance as it usually did. For a brief moment, a very brief one, he almost looked bewildered. “What do you want, a lecture?” he said.

“I’ve heard them all.”

“It wasn’t a good question.”

“That’s because you don’t have a good answer for it.”

He shook his head. “You’re wrong. I have an answer.”

“I’ll listen.”

“You asked why it was important.”

“Yes.”

“It’s important because it’s what we do,” Carmingler said with more fervor in his voice than I’d ever heard before. “We do a job, and you know what kind of job it is because you once did it. You weren’t all that good at it because you never really believed in it, but most of us do, and that’s something you’ll never understand because you don’t really believe in the importance of anything, not even yourself. If your wife had lived, you might have changed a little, but she didn’t and you didn’t. So you ask why it’s important. It’s important because form and substance are important to us and we’re part of both, the important part. Without us, there’d be no form and substance — no structure. There might be another one around, but not the one that we shaped. I don’t detach myself from what I do. It’s an important part of me and I’m an important part of it.”

“It’s the job,” I said.

“Yes, goddamn it, it’s the job. I think the job is important.”

“I remember,” I said. “I remember that briefcase in Manila was important.”

“It was the job.”

“You had to cut off his hand to get that briefcase. You chopped it off with a machete. All part of the job.”

“My job. Yes.”

“And your job is to make me go away. To make me disappear as if I’d never really existed. And then I’d just be something else that the senator had found in the bottom of a bottle of Old Cabin Still.”

“We’ll pay you for your loss of identity,” Carmingler said, losing a small battle to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

I said no again for the same reason that I’d once said yes, which was for no reason at all other than that it seemed the thing to do at the time.

“I’ll ask why one more time,” Carmingler said.

“Because I don’t care enough to say yes, I suppose.”

“It would be easier.”

“That’s part of it, too.”

“You don’t think we’re very important, do you?”

“No,” I said. “Not very.”

Carmingler nodded and rose. He took out his pipe, looked at it, and then replaced it in his coat pocket. He studied me for several moments as if trying to decide how to say what I knew that he had to say. “I’m sorry,” he finally said and sounded as if he might really mean it, if he could ever mean anything. “I’m sorry,” he said again, “but you’re not very important to us either.”

Chapter 38

I had breakfast with Victor Orcutt the next morning. Or rather he had breakfast while I nursed a hangover, the rotten kind that makes everything taste yellow, even coffee and tomato juice.

“Breakfast is really the only hotel food that I can abide,” Victor Orcutt said, and I nodded my agreement or understanding or whatever it was. I didn’t yet feel like talking.

“Do you like the South, Mr. Dye? I don’t think I’ve ever asked,”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“There’s something about it that fascinates and repels me at the same time.”

“It affects a lot of people like that, I’ve heard.”

“Really? Does it affect you that way?”

“No.”

“Of course, Swankerton isn’t really the South.”

“It isn’t?”

“Well, it’s in the South, but it’s right on the Gulf and it gets all the traffic from New Orleans and Texas and Florida and those places. No, to be in the South, the real South, you have to go about forty miles north of Swankerton.”

I decided to try a cigarette.

“Swankerton is such an ugly name for a city, I think,” Orcutt said, spooning some marmalade on to his toast, which still looked warm as did his link sausage and scrambled eggs. He must have had a different room waiter.

“It also has an unfortunate nickname,” I said and felt as if I were prattling.

“You mean Chancre Town? Isn’t that perfectly ghastly?”

“Terrible.”

“They have such beautiful names down here. Natchez-under-the-Hill. That’s really nice. So is Pascagoula.”

“They’re in Mississippi.”

“But they’re still beautiful names. So is Mississippi. It’s from the Chippewa and they pronounced it more like mici-zibi.” He spelled it for me. “It means large river.”

I put out my cigarette after the third puff.

“You sure you won’t have a piece of toast?” Orcutt asked.

“No, thank you.”

“I called New York and Washington yesterday,” he said.

“Hmmm,” I said to indicate interest.

“I learned that magazine story is definitely scheduled and that any amount of pressure has been brought to have it killed. I also learned that Senator Simon is adamant about making his speech.”

“I heard the same thing.”

“You’re going to bear the brunt of it, you know.”

“I know.”

“Does it bother you? I know that’s such a personal question.”

“It’s what I’m being paid for.”

“I do hope Homer will bear up under it.”

“He’ll be all right,” I said. “He did fine yesterday.”

“I heard! He really seemed to enjoy himself. Let’s see, you have your meeting with Luccarella this morning, right?”

“At ten,” I said.

“I’d so like to be there.”

“I’ll try to give you a spicier report.”

“Do. Please. Incidentally, I had a most curious call this morning.”

“Who?”

“Frank Mouton, the druggist.”

“Our candidate for the City Council?”

“The same. You did turn that evidence of his drug-peddling activities over to Lynch, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, Mouton was weeping and sobbing into the phone. He kept telling me how he had betrayed the Clean Government Association because Lynch had forced him to.”

“That was the plan,” I said.

“But then he stopped crying and started to shout. He said that he knew what we were up to, that we were out to ruin him.”

“He’s right. Or at least he was.”

“He really sounded disturbed, poor man. He said Lynch had told him the entire story.”

“It probably was the last thing Lynch did before he left town.”

“Mouton was almost hysterical.”

“Did he threaten you?”

Orcutt shook his head. “No. He said that God would take care of me.

“Well, Mouton is a deacon in his church.”

“That’s right,” Orcutt said. “I’d almost forgotten. The First Methodist.”

At three minutes to ten Homer Necessary came by Orcutt’s room for me and we rode the elevator down to the sixth floor of the hotel. We stopped in front of 622 and Necessary tugged at his new uniform. “This is gonna be interesting,” he said.

“Let’s hope that’s all it is,” I said and knocked on the door.

It was once again opened by Shorty and the baldheaded man who knew about bumblebees. “Come on in,” the baldheaded man said. We went in and once again they steered from the rear.

Luccarella had a suite, not quite as large as Orcutt’s, and his two human sheepdogs nudged us into the living room where Luccarella and Samuels, the lawyer, sat side by side on a couch. Two large closed briefcases rested on a low coffee table that was within handy reach of both.

Luccarella looked at his watch when we came in. “You’re right on time,” he said. “That’s a good sign. I like doing business with people who’re on time.”

“This is Chief Necessary,” I said. “Mr. Luccarella and Mr. Samuels who is his attorney.” Necessary shook hands with both of them.

“Sit down, sit down,” Luccarella said, making vague gestures toward a couple of chairs that were drawn up to the coffee table. We sat down. “You want some coffee?” he said.

“You wanta drink?”

“I’ll take a drink,” I said and drew a disapproving glance from Samuels, who apparently didn’t think much of those who drink in the morning. I didn’t feel that I could stand to care what he thought.

“How about you, Chief?” Luccarella said.

“Scotch and water,” Necessary said.

“Dye?”

“That’s fine.”

Luccarella jerked his head at Shorty. “Fix them,” he said.

After Shorty mixed and served the drinks, he moved over to help the baldheaded man lean against a wall. “Go on, beat it,” Luccarella snapped at them. “And close the door behind you.”

When they had gone, Luccarella leaned back on the couch and smiled with his gray teeth. “Heard a lot about you, Chief Necessary.”

“That right?”

“You got a good reputation up North. Reputation of a man you can do business with.”

“I like a quiet town,” Necessary said, “where everything fits in place.”

“You’ve sort of quieted this town down,” Luccarella said.

“It could get even quieter.”

“I think I sort of understand you,” Luccarella said.

Necessary smiled. “I hope so.”

Samuels cleared his throat. “Shall we go over the books?”

“We ain’t got no deal yet. What do you mean go over the books? We go over the books when we got a deal.” Luccarella was growing excited again,

“I just thought—”

“Don’t think,” Luccarella said sourly.

“Let’s talk deal, Luccarella,” Necessary said.

“There,” Luccarella said to Samuels. “You see what I mean. We make a deal and then we look at the books.” He waved a hand at Necessary. “Go ahead, Chief. I hear you like to talk for yourself.”

Necessary lit one of his Camels and blew some smoke at the fourth gold button on his uniform. “Before we do, I thought I’d mention something and if it offends you, I’m sorry.”

“Go ahead,” Luccarella said with another wave of his hand. He was all magnanimity that morning.

“I like my privacy just like you do. So I told one of my men to watch the door to the hall. He’s my driver, Sergeant Krone.”

“So we won’t be interrupted, huh? I don’t mind, but Shorty and Jassy’ll take care of the door.”

“I’m not worried about anyone coming in; it’s about their going out. So if you got a bug in this room and you’re thinking of taping any of this, I suggest you forget it.”

“What the hell kind of creep do you think I am?” Luccarella said, not quite yelling.

“The kind who might bug a conversation like we’re about to have.”

Luccarella smiled suddenly. “Yeah, maybe I am at that. But there’s no bug. I swear to God.”

“We’ll make sure later,” Necessary said.

“Okay, you made a point, now make an offer.”

“It’s no offer,” Necessary said. “It’s take it or leave it. I get a third. You and Dye can fight over the rest.”

An incredulous look appeared on Luccarella’s squeezed-up face. “A third of what?”

“The net. On everything.”

“A third! Christ, what do you mean a third? Lynch only got ten percent.”

“I may as well give you the bad news now,” I said. “I get a third, too.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Luccarella yelled. “You get a third, he gets a third — you know what that leaves me? You know how much?”

“A third,” I said.

“Like shit it does. It leaves me just what Lynch got — ten percent. The rest goes back east.”

“That’s too bad,” Necessary said and drained his Scotch and water. “I don’t want to argue. I’ll take thirty percent. Dye can talk for himself.”

“Thirty’s okay,” I said. “That leaves you forty.”

“I can’t operate on forty.”

“You won’t operate at all unless I say so,” Necessary said.

“Fifty-five, forty-five,” Luccarella said.

Necessary shook his head. “It’s too complicated. I can figure the easy ones like thirty percent and a third and a half and the round numbers. Figuring forty-five and fifty-five percent’s too hard.”

“I’ll have to check back east,” Luccarella said. “I’ll have to explain to them what I’m up against.”

“I tell you something, Luccarella,” Necessary said. “Either you’re in or you’re out for forty percent. You can explain things later. Right now it’s yes or no time.”

Luccarella looked at Samuels, who refused to return his gaze. “Well, don’t just sit there, dummy! Say something, for Christ’s sake. That’s what I pay you for.”

Samuels sighed. “Under the new circumstances, perhaps Chief Necessary’s proposal does have merit, particularly if the net increases over what it formerly was.”

“It’ll increase,” Necessary said, shaking the ice in his glass. “Dye and I’ll see to that, won’t we?”

“Sure,” I said.

“How much?” Luccarella said, a measure of greed creeping into his voice.

“Well, Dye and I’ve been talking about that and we thought we just might turn Swankerton wide open now that I got the department all reorganized the way I like it. From what me and Dye can figure, Lynch and that doodlebug who was his chief of police kept things running about half speed. We thought we just might edge her up a notch or two.”

“What the hell’s he talking about?” Luccarella said to me.

“Just what he said. We’re going to exploit the town’s full potential.”

“Why don’t you translate that into dollars and cents?”

Necessary looked at me. “Go ahead,” he said.

“It means the net should go up by one hundred percent at least.”

“Ah,” Samuels said. “I think I see.”

“In one-syllable words, just for me,” Luccarella said. He was almost pleading.

“I believe what Mr. Dye is saying is that the fixed costs will remain fairly constant despite a marked increase in the volume of business.” Samuels looked at me for confirmation and I nodded.

“You mean the nut’s going to stay the same because the payoffs will stay the same and any new business will be just that much gravy? That’s what you mean, ain’t it?”

“That’s it, Luccarella,” Necessary said. “So your forty percent share of the new net will be equal to eighty percent of the old.”

“That’s better,” Luccarella said softly, almost to himself. “That’s a hell of a lot better. You got a deal.”

“Almost,” Necessary said. “Almost we got a deal.”

“Now what’s the matter?” Luccarella looked at me. “Now what the hell’s bugging him?”

“Ask him,” I said.

“All right, goddamn it, I’m asking you!” It came out a yell and this time Luccarella heard it himself. “Sorry,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I gotta watch that. I just get too enthusiastic. I’m impatient, you know. My analyst says that there’s nothing wrong with being impatient. He said a lot of great men have been noted for their impatience. But it’s gotta be channeled, he says. It’s a type of energy and it’s gotta be directed. Now then, Chief, I’m gonna ask you again calmly. See how calm I am? What do you mean by almost we got a deal?”

“The word got around that Lynch was slipping so some of them came down to see if it was true.”

Luccarella gestured impatiently. “I heard about that. Dye here told me about it. Jimmy Twoshoes from Chicago and Sweet Eddie Puranelli out of Cleveland. Couple of others. They’ll forget about it when they hear Lynch’s out.”

“They’ve heard,” Necessary said.

“So they’ll get out.”

“They’ve heard something else.”

“What?”

“They’ve heard you’re slipping.”

I estimated that roughly $30,000 worth of analysis was destroyed by Necessary’s comment. Luccarella shot up out of his seat. “Me?” It was a scream this time, not a yell. “Who said I’m slipping? Who’s the sonofabitch who said it, Necessary?” He was stalking about the room now, knocking into furniture. He picked up an ashtray and smashed it against the wall. “Slipping, huh? Who said it, goddamn it? I’ll fix that sonofabitch. You think I’m slipping, Samuels? Did you tell ‘em I’m slipping?” He rushed over and grabbed the lawyer by his shirt front and jerked him from the couch. “What are you, a goddamned spy?”

“I never said—”

Luccarella dropped the lawyer, who sank back down on the couch. He spun around to face us. “You guys — you guys told them I’m slipping. You set it all up, I can tell. You guys are trying to fix me. You’re trying to get everything for yourself. I can’t trust nobody. I can’t even—”

“Shut up, Luccarella!” It was either Necessary’s harsh, slashing tone or my hangover, but it made me start. It also stopped Luccarella in mid-sentence.

“Bad, wasn’t it?” he said and hung his head like a scolded child. “I know what it is, all right. My analyst explained it all to me. It’s paranoia. That means that you think people are plotting against you when they’re not. He said lots of great men have had it and have gone on to live real useful lives.”

“It’s not paranoia this time,” Necessary said. “These guys think Swankerton’s ripe and they think you’ve slipped and they’re set to move in and move you out.”

“You can stop them,” Luccarella said.

“It’s not my job when you think about it,” Necessary said. “I can get my cut from them. They’ll give me a deal, just like you’ve done. But you already know the operation and that’s why I prefer to do business with you. Dye and me don’t want to spend our time breaking in the new help.”

“So it’s up to me,” Luccarella said in a quiet tone.

“That’s right,” Necessary said. “It’s up to you. All me and Dye can give you is our unofficial support. You’ll have that.”

Luccarella turned to Samuels. “Get on the phone and call Ricci. Explain it. Tell him to get up here and to bring a dozen with him. If he has to import a few, tell him he can pay top dollar.” He gave the instructions in a low, confident tone and for the first time I saw some reason for him to have risen as far as he had. “Now,” he added, and Samuels rose and hurried to the door.

Luccarella turned to Necessary and in that same, quiet, emotionless tone said, “I want all of their names and where they’re staying.”

“Sure,” Necessary said and told him. Luccarella didn’t seem to need to write anything down.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all I know about, although I’ve heard that some of them are moving their people in.”

Luccarella nodded. “I want this deal, Chief. I need it if you want to know the truth and I don’t care if you do or not. I’ve had a little trouble lately, but I’m getting that cleared up with the help of my analyst. He told me that I should trust people more. That I’m too suspicious. So I’m gonna take his advice. I’m gonna trust you and Dye. Bad things, real bad things happen to people who I trust and who then cross me. I don’t want anything bad to happen to either of you.”

“You take care of your end, we’ll take care of ours,” Necessary said.

“We’d still like to go over those books,” I said.

Luccarella pointed at one of the briefcases. “There’s a duplicate set in there. Take ‘em with you. It’s got everything — names, addresses, cash flow, everything. Lynch kept a good set of books, I’ll say that for him. He didn’t cross me either, so nothing bad’s going to happen to him. He just made a mistake. I can take that. But I can’t take being crossed by people I trust.”

“You’ve made that clear,” I said and picked up the briefcase.

Shorty stuck his head in the door. “What the hell you want?” Luccarella said.

“It’s for him,” he said, pointing at me. “It’s some chick on the phone called Thackerty. She’s all shook and says that she has to talk to him so I said I’d see.”

“I’ll take it,” I said and crossed to the telephone and picked it up.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“It’s Orcutt,” she said.

“What about him?”

“You’d better get up here.”

“Up where?”

“His suite.”

“What about him?” I said again.

“He’s dead and they took away his face.”

Chapter 39

Necessary hurried through the door to Orcutt’s suite first, followed by Sergeant Krone who had drawn his revolver. I came last, carrying the briefcase.

Carol Thackerty stood by the window that offered a view of the Gulf of Mexico but she wasn’t looking at it. She was looking at the skinny gray-haired man who knelt by Orcutt’s body. The gray-haired man rocked back and forth and crooned to himself. His hands were pressed together as if he were praying. A long-barreled revolver lay on the floor beside Orcutt. Two feet away from it was a wide-mouthed glass jar, the kind that will hold a pint of mayonnaise. I could smell the exploded gunpowder, but there was another, sharper smell that stung my nostrils. I didn’t know what it was.

Necessary moved quickly over to Orcutt and lifted the towel from his face.

“I put it there,” Carol said. “I came in and saw him and put the towel over his face.”

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want—” the gray-haired man crooned in a singsong voice and rocked back and forth some more on his knees.

Necessary beckoned to me and I went over to Orcutt’s body. He lifted the towel again. Carol Thackerty had been right; something had taken away his face. The nose was almost gone, and there was some bone visible and also some blood. Only the eyes were the same, and they contained no more in death than they had in life. Necessary dropped the towel back into place.

“You know him, don’t you?” he said, jerking a thumb at the kneeling man.

“Frank Mouton, candidate for the city council.”

Necessary shook his head and turned to Sergeant Krone.

“Call Benson at Homicide and tell him to get his crew over here.” Krone hurried to a phone.

Necessary turned to Carol. “Well?” he said.

“I have my own key,” she said. “You know I have my own key.”

“I know,” Necessary said in a patient, reassuring voice.

“I was in the hall when I heard the shots. I was still in the hall and I heard three shots.”

“Take it easy, Carol,” I said.

“Let her tell it,” Necessary said.

“When I heard the shots I hurried and I got so frantic that I couldn’t find the keys in my purse and then I found them and finally got the door open and he was kneeling over Orcutt and praying and pouring this stuff on his face.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “So I called you and then got a towel and put it over his face.” She turned and stared through the window at the Gulf.

Mouton must have been close to sixty. His hair was gray and sparse on top of his long slab of a head. He had closely set, dark eyes. They looked out of focus behind his rimless glasses that were cocked a little to one side about halfway down a long, thin nose that seemed to have too many veins in it. His red, wet mouth was open now, crooning something else. He rocked back and forth and then started on the Twenty-third Psalm again. He wore a tan raincoat that was buttoned up to his neck.

Homer Necessary walked around him, got down on his hands and knees and smelled the empty pint jar. He rose and stared at Mouton. “Some kind of acid,” Necessary said. He walked over to the kneeling man and nudged him with his foot. “Hey, Mouton,” he said.

Mouton looked up at him. “Amen,” he said.

“What d’you kill him for?”

“He was a son of Satan,” Mouton said. “Father, forgive them for they know not what—”

“Get up,” Necessary snapped.

“I am the resurrection and the life—”

“Get your ass up,” Necessary said again in a hard voice and grabbed Mouton by an elbow and jerked him to his feet.

“Whosoever believeth—”

“He’s a deacon in his church,” I said.

“I remember,” Necessary said. “Take off your raincoat, Deacon.”

Mouton looked coy and suddenly went into a pose that resembled September Morn. “Not in front of you,” he said.

“Jesus,” Necessary said.

Mouton looked wildly around the room. He saw Carol Thackerty and smiled and I couldn’t find much sanity in that smile. “I’ll show her!” he said.

“All right,” Necessary said, “show her.”

Carol turned from the window as Mouton moved over to her. “You’re very pretty,” he said, unbuttoning his raincoat. “I like pretty girls. I’m going to show you something nice.” He held his raincoat open.

Carol looked at him and then turned back to the window. “He’s naked underneath the coat,” she said in a dull tone. “He’s got the legs of his trousers belted to his thighs somehow, but the rest of him’s naked.” She paused. “He’s ugly.”

Mouton spun around and held his raincoat wide open so that we could all take a look. He was ugly all right. “Button that up, mister!” Sergeant Krone snapped, and Mouton pouted before he rebuttoned the coat up to his neck.

Mouton looked down at Orcutt’s body. “It’s all so confusing. First, I was Judas and he was the Savior and then he was Judas and I was... I was—” He stopped, looked at me, and then in a calm, rational voice said, “I’m a professional man, you know.”

“I know.”

“I’m a pharmacist,” he said, a little desperately this time.

“I know,” I said again.

“Why d’you kill him, Mouton?” Necessary asked.

“Why?”

“That’s right. Why?”

“Because, you miserable fuckhead, God told me to!” With that, he walked over to a chair and sat down. He closed his eyes and refused to say anything else. The homicide cops finally took him away not long after Orcutt’s body was carted off to the morgue where they found three bullets in it.

Carol Thackerty answered the phone when it rang in Orcutt’s bedroom-office where the three of us sat. The homicide crew was still busy in the living room. Forty minutes had passed since they had taken Mouton away.

“It’s Channing d’Arcy Phetwick the third,” Carol said. “He wants to talk to whoever’s in charge of Victor Orcutt Associates.”

I made no move toward the phone and neither did Necessary. Finally, he said, “Take it, Dye.”

I took the phone and said, “Lucifer Dye.”

Old man Phetwick’s voice was dry and gritty as emery dust. “I am grieved to learn of Mr. Orcutt’s death,” he said.

“Yes. All of us are.”

“So is Doctor Colfax, who is on the line with me.”

“I was sorry to hear about it,” Colfax said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Poor Mouton, too,” Phetwick said. “Is he really mad?”

“I’m no doctor,” I said, “but he looked crazy to me.”

“Orcutt’s death changes things,” Colfax said, all business now that condolence time was over.

“Especially for Orcutt,” I said.

“With the Lynch person gone and with the police department reorganized by Mr. Necessary, I think our main objectives have been accomplished,” Phetwick said. “In view of Mr. Orcutt’s death, we have decided that we can dispense with the services of his firm. This is no reflection on you, Mr. Dye, and we expect to offer a generous cancellation settlement.”

“You want us to pack up and leave then?” I said, more for the benefit of Necessary and Carol than for my own clarification. I understood what he wanted.

“Well, yes, if you insist on putting it that way,” Phetwick said.

Dr. Colfax chimed in. “You did your job, Dye, and a damned good one. Now we don’t need you anymore, so we’ll pay you off and everybody’s happy.”

I decided to go formal. “Would you hold on please while I confer with my colleagues for a moment?”

“Sure,” Colfax said.

I turned to Necessary and Carol. “They want us to bug out,” I said. “They’ll make a cash settlement.”

Necessary frowned and carefully removed a piece of lint from the sleeve of his blue uniform. He looked at Carol. “Had Orcutt told them about what Dye and I have got set up with Luccarella and the out-of-town guys?” he said.

“No,” she said. “He was going to tell them today.”

“He tell them about the senator and the magazine?”

She nodded. “He told them about that. Phetwick’s already got the counter-attack written.”

“They’re trying to cool it off,” Necessary said.

“So it seems,” I said and took my hand from the mouthpiece of the phone. “It’ll only be a few seconds,” I said.

“Take your time,” Colfax said and chuckled to demonstrate that he understood how people might scurry about when they suddenly found themselves out of their jobs.

“Well?” I said.

Necessary looked down at his blue left sleeve again, stroked it gently with his right hand, smiled to himself, and then looked up at me. “I think,” he said softly, “I think they’re going to have to fire themselves a chief of police.”

I nodded. “Carol?”

“I’d like to see if he gets the girl in the last reel.”

I took my hand from the phone. I looked at the mouthpiece rather than at Carol and Necessary. I felt their eyes on me. I took a deep breath. “I explained things to them,” I said.

Phetwick’s voice was dry and remote. “I knew that they would be reason—”

“Our answer is no,” I said and hung up.

Chapter 40

I wasn’t asleep when Necessary called at six-thirty Friday morning. I was lying in Carol’s bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about Victor Orcutt. He seemed far more attractive in death than he had in life, but there must be a great many persons who seem that way.

“It’s started,” Necessary said.

“When?”

“Just before dawn. Luccarella and his friends went calling.”

“On who?” I asked.

“On all of them.”

“What happened?”

“The next flight out of here is a direct one to Minneapolis and St. Paul. It leaves in fifteen minutes. Tex Turango’s on it.”

“He’s from Dallas,” I said.

“The Onealo brothers are from Kansas City, but they’re on it, too,” Necessary said.

“Anyone else?” I said.

“Sweet Eddie Puranelli. All he could get was economy class.”

“But he took it.”

“Uh-huh,” Necessary said. “And glad to get it. Lt. Ferkaire says Puranelli doesn’t look too well. There’re some teeth missing, Ferkaire says, and one eye’s closed, and something’s wrong with his nose. Looks busted, Ferkaire says.”

“He’ll feel better back in Cleveland,” I said. “What about Nigger Jones and Jimmy Schoemeister?”

“That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Where are you?” I said.

“In the lobby.”

“I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”

“Make it ten,” Necessary said and hung up.

Carol rolled over in the bed and propped herself up on an elbow. “Necessary?” she said.

“He said it’s started.”

“You want some coffee?”

“No time.”

“I can use the immersion unit.”

“Okay,” I said and started to dress. She had the instant coffee ready by the time I came out of the bathroom. I drank two sips and lit a cigarette. I used to smoke Pall Malls then.

“He say anything else?” she asked.

“Some are leaving town; some aren’t.” I drank more of the coffee and then handed her the cup.

“I never knew what life could be, Captain,” she said, “until you came here to Pago Pago.”

I kissed her. “I’m riding with them, Alma,” I said. “Sodbusters’ve got rights too.”

Necessary was pacing the lobby when I stepped out of the elevator. His eyes looked tired and bloodshot and it gave them a peculiar three-toned look, or four, if you counted their whites.

“You took long enough,” he said in the grumpy voice of a man who’s been up most of the night.

“I had to rinse out a few things,” I said and followed him to the long black Imperial which waited in front with Sergeant Krone at the wheel.

Once we were rolling I asked Necessary about Nigger Jones and Jimmy Twoshoes. He shook his head as if trying to clear it. “They won’t budge,” he said. “Their people came in last night. Schoemeister’s got about a dozen; Nigger Jones’s got about the same.”

“What’s Luccarella got now?”

“About ten from New Orleans and maybe a dozen more from back east. Ferkaire’s keeping score out at the airport.”

“Anyone prominent?” I asked.

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

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

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

“What?”

“The little fellah would have liked all this.”

“Orcutt?”

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

“You miss him, don’t you?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’s Nick the Nigger?” I said.

“In a private home over in Niggertown.”

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

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

“No?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schoemeister smiled terribly again. “Just some friends.”

“I counted eleven of them.”

“That’s about right.”

“Did Luccarella count them?”

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

“What’d he want?” Necessary said.

“He wanted me to catch a plane.”

“To St. Paul?”

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

“The Onealo brothers do,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think the newspapers do,” I said.

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

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

“We pay another social call.”

“On who?”

“On Nick the Nigger.”

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

Chapter 41

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How was Luccarella?” Necessary asked Jones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” Jones said. “Who?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m okay.”

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

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

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

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

“They were too far away,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The attendant nodded — a little vigorously, I thought.

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

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

Quickly, the two attendants loaded the whimpering Morze onto the wheeled stretcher. I moved over to Jones and helped him up. “You’d better go with him,” I said. Jones nodded and grimaced at the pain as he stood on his wounded leg.

“Here,” I said, and took his left arm and draped it around my shoulder. We moved slowly out of the house, past the four cops, and into the crowd which by now numbered at least a thousand. It was a sullen, too quiet crowd. They pressed in close to the wheeled stretcher and there were some gasps and oh mys when those near enough caught sight of Morze’s bloody, blinded face. I helped Jones limp close behind the stretcher.

Morze suddenly popped upright and screamed: “Nick! I can’t see, Nick! Where’s Nick?” Then he collapsed on the stretcher as I helped Jones to kneel down by him.

“I’m here, Bill,” Jones said softly. The man on the stretcher nodded and stared wildly about with his sightless eyes. “You gotta do some thing, Nick, you gotta do something for me.” He said that loudly enough for those who pressed close to hear it.

“Come here,” Morze said, “come here, Nick.”

I helped Jones go closer. “You gotta do it, Nick.”

“Whatever you say, Bill.”

Then he whispered his dying request and there were only two who heard it, Nick the Nigger and me. “Burn it, Nick, burn the fucking place down.” Then William Morze whimpered once more and died.

I helped Jones rise. He looked at the crowd of dark faces that encircled him. “What he say, Nick?” one large black man demanded. “What Saint Billy tell you t’do?”

The word spread quickly through the crowd — Saint Billy done told Nick what to do. Other voices near the stretcher started demanding the instructions. Nick the Nigger looked around carefully at the encircling black faces. Then he looked at me and smiled faintly. “This one’s for you, Dye.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” I said.

“Help me over to that one,” he said, indicating the large black who had first asked what Morze’s final request had been. I helped him over. He looked at the man for several moments. The man stared back patiently.

“You want to know what Bill said?”

“We gotta know,” the man said.

Nick the Nigger nodded several times, not taking his gaze from the man’s face. “Bill said cool it. That’s all. Just cool it.”

I helped Jones limp the rest of the way to the ambulance. The word had already flashed through the crowd and it was beginning to disperse by the time I helped him into the rear of the ambulance where he sat next to the dead William Morze.

“We’re even now, Dye,” Jones said, just before they closed the doors.

“We always were,” I said.

Chapter 42

By three o’clock that Friday afternoon Mayor Pierre (Pete) Robineaux was pounding on Necessary’s desk and demanding that Swankerton’s police force be withdrawn from Niggertown. “They got the First National for fifty thousand,” Robineaux yelled and slammed his fist down on the desk for the ninth time in forty seconds. “Fifty thousand!” he yelled, “and it was forty-eight goddamned minutes before a cop showed up. Forty-eight minutes!”

Necessary leaned back in his chair with his feet propped up on the desk. He nodded at the mayor. “The FBI’s looking into it,” he said. “They’re pretty good at bank robberies. I think they catch about half of them.” He looked at me. “Or is it a third?”

“I think it’s half,” I said.

The mayor sputtered and pounded the desk again. “You got a crime wave going on, Necessary! A goddamned crime wave!” Boo Robineaux, the mayor’s son, looked up from his copy of The Berkeley Barb and smiled at his father. A little contemptuously, I thought.

Necessary took his feet down from the desk and leaned forward in his chair. “Now you can take your pick, Mayor,” he said coldly. “You can have yourself a full scale race riot that can wreck this town or you can put up with a few extra holdups.”

“A few!” Robineaux yelled, his face taking on an apoplectic shade of red. “You call eighty-nine armed holdups a few?”

“Better than watching the whole town burn,” Necessary said and put his feet back on the desk.

“Listen to me, Necessary. Listen to me now! If you don’t get those men out of Niggertown within the hour and back to protecting life and property over here, you won’t be wearing that badge by sundown.” The mayor pounded his fist on the desk again. “I’ll have your ass, by Christ, I will!”

“Who you working for now, Boo?” I said.

The mayor’s son jerked a thumb at his father. “It,” he said.

“Well, now, Mayor, just calm down a little,” Necessary said. “As soon as the feelings about old man Morze’s death sort of simmer down over in Niggertown, I’ll call the men back.”

“Goddamn it, Necessary,” the mayor yelled, “there ain’t no trouble in Niggertown! The trouble’s all over here.”

“I’m exercising my professional judgment, Mayor Robineaux,” Necessary said coldly. “Law and order is my business — not yours.”

Robineaux pranced over to the black tinted window and waved at it. “Look out there! They’re robbing the fucking city blind and you sit there and call it law and order!”

The idea had come to Necessary on our way back from Morze’s house. When he was through explaining it to me, I turned to him and said: “Homer, Orcutt would have been proud of you.” I’d never seen Necessary look happier.

At nine o’clock that morning he canceled all leaves and ordered ninety-five percent of the Swankerton police force into Niggertown. They patrolled it — every square block of it — on foot and in cars. By eleven o’clock they had made two arrests. Doris Emerson, twenty-three, was booked for soliciting. Miles Camerstane, thirty-seven, was taken in for drunk and disorderly.

On a normal day the white section of Swankerton experienced between two and three armed robberies. By eleven o’clock that Friday morning, forty-six had been reported — not including the First National Bank which had been hit by a lone white gunman with a stocking mask over his face.

In Niggertown, the citizens strolled along the sidewalk and goodmawnined and lifted their hats to the patrolling police. And then they smiled broadly and used their hands to stifle their giggles. By noon, the frustrated cops were looking for jaywalkers without much luck. Niggertown had cooled it.

Necessary yawned when Robineaux, his eyes bulging, once more crashed his fist down on the desk and screamed: “You’re fired, goddammit!”

“Pete, you know you can’t fire me,” Necessary said calmly. “The city council’s got to do that — a majority. And I understand that most of them are partying over in New Orleans.”

“Throw him out,” I said. “You’re wasting your breath.”

“By God, I think you’re right.” Necessary buzzed for Lieutenant Ferkaire who popped in looking harassed and a little forlorn. “Show the mayor out, Lieutenant,” Necessary said.

“I’m not going,” Robineaux said and took a tight grip on the edge of Necessary’s desk.

“Throw him out.”

“The mayor, sir?”

“The mayor.”

“The press is out there, Chief.”

“Fine. He can make a statement on his way out.”

Ferkaire approached the mayor and tentatively put a hand on his arm. “If you’ll just step this way, sir.”

“I said throw him out, Ferkaire. You’re a cop, not a goddamned wedding usher.”

Ferkaire looked first at the mayor who still clung to the desk, then at Necessary who glowered at him, and then at me. “Throw him out,” I said.

There was a brief struggle, but not much of one. Ferkaire got a hammerlock on the mayor and marched him across the room. “I’ll get your ass for this, Necessary,” Robineaux yelled. “I’ll get both of you for this!”

“Get the door for your father, will you, Boo?” I said.

“My pleasure,” Boo said, opened the door, and made a low sweeping bow as his father was frog-marched from the room.

“Thanks,” Boo said to me.

“Don’t mention it,” I said. And then, because I’d promised myself that I would, I said: “How’d you get those scars on your face?”

Boo nodded his head at the closed door. “Him. He did it to me when I was twelve. With an old piece of chain.”

“For what?”

“For what do you think? For jerking off in the bathroom, what else?”

“What else,” I said as he closed the door behind him.

Ferkaire popped back into the office and stared around, a little panicky, I felt. “You got any coffee out there?” Necessary asked him.

“He’s making a statement to them,” Ferkaire said. “They got pictures of me throwing him out and now he’s making a statement to them.”

“I think I’ll have a drink instead,” Necessary said.

“I’ll join you,” I said.

“What’U I do with them?” Ferkaire asked.

Necessary poured Scotch into two glasses before he answered. “Send them in here about five minutes from now,” he said. “I’ll have a statement.” Ferkaire nodded and went out quickly.

Necessary walked over and handed me a drink. “I can’t keep them out there in Niggertown much longer,” he said.

“You probably won’t have to.”

“When do you think Schoemeister will try it?”

“It could be any time now.”

“You think it was Luccarella who got Nick and old man Morze?”

I shrugged. “Luccarella or Schoemeister. Does it matter?”

“I guess not,” Necessary said. “I thought he’d stay in the hotel though. He’d’ve been smarter to stay in the hotel.”

“You mean Luccarella?”

“Yeah. Luccarella.”

“No back way out,” I said. “That’s why he moved to that old house of Lynch’s.”

Necessary took a long swallow of his drink and smiled. “Well,” he said, “we found what we were looking for anyway.”

“What?”

“Something to stir it up with.”

“You mean the long enough spoon?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s only one thing wrong with it,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s a little longer than I’d counted on.”

There was no reason to be polite to the press anymore and Necessary wasn’t. A dozen reporters crowded into the office and we ignored them until the television cameras were ready.

“This live?” Necessary asked.

“That’s right.”

“I got a statement to make.”

“We want to ask you some questions, Chief. Why did you throw Mayor Robineaux out of your office?”

“What’s your name, sonny?” Necessary asked his questioner, a prominent local TV personality. It hurt his feelings. “Campbell,” he said. “Don Campbell.”

“Well, Don Campbell, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to throw you out just like I did the mayor.”

Two newspapermen and a wire-service reporter tittered.

Campbell whirled quickly to his camera and sound men. “You get all that? Did that go out?”

“We’re getting you right now, stupid,” the cameraman said.

Necessary stood up behind his desk. “I have a statement. It’s not prepared, but I’ll make it and then you can ask some questions.” He cleared his throat and stared into the lens of the nearest camera. “Through the efforts of the men of this police department, the city of Swankerton has been spared the horror of a serious riot. The brutal murder of William Morze could have provoked a tragic disturbance — the kind they have up North. It didn’t. And we can thank the good common sense of our colored population — and the efforts of Swankerton’s policemen — that it didn’t. I would like to announce that we know who the killers of William Morze are. They will be arrested within a few hours. In the meantime, law and order will prevail in Swankerton.” Necessary started to sit back down, but instead came back to the microphone, said “Thank you,” and then he sat down.

“Why did you throw the mayor out of your office?” Campbell asked.

“The mayor is ill. He was helped out of my office.”

“He said that he was going to have you fired.”

“Like I said, the mayor is ill and isn’t responsible for what he says. Next question.”

“How long have you known who killed William Morze?”

“Not long.”

“Can you reveal their identity?”

“No.”

“How many armed robberies have been committed in the white section of Swankerton today?”

“More than usual.”

“How many?”

“The last figure we had was one hundred three.”

“Jesus Christ!” a wire-service man said.

“Would you call that a crime wave, Chief?”

“I would, but I’d rather have a crime wave than a race riot and that was the choice we had to make.”

“What’s been the total take so far?”

Necessary looked at me. “Close to a quarter of a million,” I said.

The wire-service man said Jesus Christ again.

“The mayor says you’re more interested in protecting blacks than you are in protecting whites and their property.”

“The mayor’s sick,” Necessary said.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Ask his psychiatrist.”

“Has he got one?”

“If he doesn’t, he should.”

“He says he’s going to call the National Guard in.”

Necessary smiled and circled his ear with a finger. I watched the cameras zoom in on that for a close-up and then I rose and said, “That’s it, gentlemen. The press conference is over.”

“Hey, Dye,” a wire-service man called to me, “You think the mayor’s nutty?”

“As peanut brittle.”

“Can I use that?”

“I hope you do,” I said.

It was nearly 5 P.M. before the call came from our man who was watching the Lee-Davis Hotel. “They’re coming out now,” he said, his voice tinny over Necessary’s desk telephone speaker.

“How many?” Necessary asked.

“I counted thirteen.”

“Schoemeister with them?” Necessary said.

“He’s in the first car. They got three cars.”

“Okay,” Necessary said.

“You want me to follow them?”

“No,” Necessary said. “We know where they’re going.”

He switched off the speaker and looked at me. “How long’s it take to get from the Lee-Davis to that old house of Lynch’s?”

“Fifteen minutes,” I said. “Maybe sixteen.”

He nodded. “You’d better tell Ferkaire that I want every ambulance in town there in forty-five minutes.”

“When’ll we get there?” I said.

“When do you think?”

“In about forty-five minutes,” I said.

Carol Thackerty came in a quarter of an hour later and told me: “I didn’t know any place else to go.” She looked at Necessary. “I saw you on television, Homer. You came over well.”

“I know,” Necessary said. “Sincere.”

“Extremely,” she said.

“I wonder if it’ll go network?” he asked.

“Why?” I said.

“Well, I’d just sort of like the wife to see it.”

The second call came from a plainclothes detective that we’d stationed in a house across the street from the Victorian one that Ramsey Lynch had once occupied. It was now home for Giuseppe Luccarella and nearly two dozen assorted friends.

Necessary turned on his desk telephone speaker again. “Okay, Matthews,” he said. “We just want you to tell us what you see — not what you guess. I’m not going to interrupt with any questions except this one: You know what Schoemeister looks like?”

“He’s the one with the mustache and the funny looking lips.”

“That’s right. It’s all yours now.”

“Well, there’s not a hell of a lot to see. Sometimes one of them will come out on the porch and look around and then go back inside. I figure that there’re maybe a couple of dozen of them in there — at least that’s what I counted since I’ve been here and that’s been since ten this morning. Luccarella got here about noon, I guess. I haven’t seen him since. Wait a minute. There’re some cars coming down the street now — three of them. They’ve stopped in front of the house now. About four guys in each car — maybe five in the back one.

“It looks like Schoemeister in the front car getting out on my side. Two guys are getting out with him. One of them’s got what looks like a pillowcase. He’s waving it around and he seems to be yelling something at the house. Let me get the window open and maybe I can hear what he’s yelling.”

We could hear Matthews’ grunts over the phone speaker as he tried to open what must have been a stubborn window.

“I got it,” he said. “He’s yelling for Luccarella to come out. That they want to talk. The pillowcase must be some kind of a truce flag or something. Anyway, they’re still waving it. Now somebody’s coming out of the house — a baldheaded guy. He’s carrying some kind of white handkerchief or something. He’s yelling something about halfway — that they’ll meet halfway.

“I guess that’s okay with everybody. The door to the house is opening and it looks like Luccarella — let me get the glasses on him. Yeah, it’s Luccarella. Schoemeister’s moving around his car now — the two guys with him. One of them’s carrying the pillowcase. They’re on the sidewalk now and Luccarella’s at the porch’s screen door.”

We heard it then. It was the long crack of a submachine gun. “Oh Jesus Christ Goddamn sonofabitch!” Matthews moaned over the speaker. “Jesus Christ! Oh, God!”

“Quit praying and tell it!” Necessary snapped.

“They shot ‘em. They shot all three of them. Luccarella dove back through the door and they used a submachine gun and they got all three of them. I mean Schoemeister and the guy with the pillowcase and the other one. Schoemeister’s guys are firing at the house now and a couple of them are dragging Schoemeister back to the car. The one with the pillowcase is crawling back. They shot the baldheaded one on the steps. He was one of Luccarella’s. I think he’s dead. I know goddamned well Schoemeister is. They’re dragging him into the car and still firing at the house. Aw, Christ.”

Necessary didn’t seem to be listening anymore. He was busy strapping on an open holster that held a .38 caliber revolver. When he was through with that, he reached into his desk drawer, brought something out and offered it to me. I just looked at it. “It’s a gun,” he said. “A Chief’s Special.”

“I know what it is,” I said.

“You may need it.” He gazed at me curiously. “You know how to use it.”

“I know.”

“Then take it, for Christ sake, and let’s go.”

My hand moved toward the gun and an hour or so later I was holding it and when I looked at it, that was all that it was, a gun. I dropped it into my coat pocket.

“Just you and me?” I said.

“That’s right, Dye, just you and me.”

Chapter 43

By the time we got to the old Victorian house eleven ambulances jammed the street and their white-coated attendants were wandering around looking for someone to cart off to a hospital — or the morgue. A crowd of around two hundred or two hundred and fifty persons had formed and they were all telling each other what had happened. One of the ambulance attendants spotted Necessary and pushed through the crowd toward him.

“I can’t find anything or anybody, Chief,” he complained in a whining, nasal tone. “Everybody says they heard a lot of shots and there’s sure as hell a lot of blood on the sidewalk, but there’s nobody dead. There’s not even anybody sick.”

“Must have been a false alarm,” Necessary said.

“With all that blood?”

“That’s right,” Necessary said, “with all that blood. Now tell the rest of those ambulances to get on out of here.”

The attendant shrugged and disappeared into the crowd. We pushed through it and made our way up the walk, skirting the bloody spot where Schoemeister must have died. I wondered if the man with the white pillowcase had been his oldest sister’s kid, Marvin.

I let Necessary do the pounding on the door. It was opened cautiously by the man called Shorty. He grinned when he saw who it was and opened the door wide. “Worked out real nice, didn’t it?”

“What worked out nice, friend?” Necessary asked.

“Yeah. Well, come on in — he’s expecting you.”

We followed him into the stiff parlor where the man from New Orleans with the squeezed-together face wore the broadest smile he could manage. There was a magnum of champagne on the coffee table. Samuels, the lawyer, was fiddling with its cork.

“Just in time,” Luccarella said happily. “You just made it for the celebration.” He nudged Necessary in the ribs. “The way you got rid of the cops out in Niggertown. That was something, Chief, really something, let me tell you.”

“There could have been a riot,” Necessary said.

Luccarella snuffled. “A riot,” he said. “I thought it was a real riot when I saw old Schoemeister’s face. You should’ve seen it... it was really something.” He turned to Samuels. “Give the chief a glass of champagne. We’re gonna celebrate, by God, because it all worked out so nice. It worked out so nice that I even sent all the boys back home except what you see right here.”

There were six of us in the room now. Necessary, Luccarella, Samuels, the man called Shorty, and another one whom I didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to meet. He leaned against the wall across from me and smiled pleasantly at everything.

“I haven’t got time for champagne, Mr. Luccarella,” Necessary said.

“What do you mean, you haven’t got time? And what’s this mister shit? You don’t have to call me mister. I don’t like it that you should call me that.”

“You’re under arrest for the murder of William Morze, Mr. Luccarella,” Necessary said just as Samuels popped the cork out of the champagne bottle. The lawyer looked up quickly. The man across the room from me stopped smiling. Luccarella’s face colored — a bit purplish, I decided. Necessary raised a small, typed card that he’d palmed and started to read Luccarella all about his rights. Then he looked at Samuels and said, “Does Mr. Luccarella understand these rights?”

Samuels nodded slowly. “He understands them.”

“Let’s go, Mr. Luccarella,” Necessary said, reaching for the man’s arm. Luccarella danced away, his mouth working furiously, but making no sound.

Finally he stopped dancing around and pointed a finger at Necessary. “You crossed me, you sonofabitch!” he yelled. “You swore you wouldn’t and you crossed me. I didn’t have nothing to do with killing any Morse or whatever his name is. You goddamned well know I didn’t. You’re putting the frame on me, Necessary, you and that slick buddy of yours.”

Necessary turned to Samuels again. “Maybe as his lawyer you should inform him of his rights and make sure that he understands them.”

“I don’t think—” Samuels made a helpless gesture with his hands and moved away from the champagne bottle and toward the door to the hall. He looked around once frantically and then darted through it.

“Let’s go, Luccarella,” Necessary said again.

“No, by God! It’s a frame. I got friends — I got friends just like anybody else.” He hurried over to a small desk and yanked open a drawer. He pawed through it and almost got the revolver out, but Necessary moved over quickly and slammed the drawer on his hand. Luccarella screamed and sank to the floor, clutching his injured hand. Necessary reached down, got hold of an arm, and yanked him to his feet. Luccarella squirmed loose again and danced over to the man by the wall, the one that I kept watching.

“Shoot him, goddamn you! Kill him!” Luccarella was screaming now. “You saw what he done to me!” The man looked at Luccarella and then at Shorty who stood near the door. They nodded at each other. The man against the wall came up with his gun and I shot him twice and then turned and shot Shorty once. Then I looked at the gun for what seemed to be a long time and laid it carefully on a table. Necessary had his revolver out now and was looking around, as if for someone to shoot. He aimed it at Luccarella.

The thin man’s face contorted and his mouth worked and he screamed again. No words, just sounds. His analyst wouldn’t have liked those sounds. Luccarella jerked open his coat and held it wide from his chest as he stumbled toward Necessary, still screaming. Necessary slapped him hard across the face and it stopped screaming and lost its distortion. It just looked old and crumpled now. “You shoulda shot me,” he muttered. “You shoulda killed me.”

Necessary turned to me. “You all right?”

“Sure.”

“You didn’t bring any cuffs along, did you? I forgot to bring any.”

“You shoulda shot me, you sonofabitch,” Luccarella said. He was whimpering now and I thought he sounded very much like William Morze.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t bring any cuffs.”

“Christ,” Necessary said, “I wish I’d thought to bring some cuffs.”

The crowd outside the Victorian house had grown by another hundred persons or so when we came out the front door and walked down the steps that led from the screened-in porch. I pushed my way through the crowd and Necessary followed, his left hand clamped on Luccarella’s right arm. Necessary had his gun out and clasped firmly in his right hand. Someone in the crowd wanted to know who the guy in front was and somebody replied that he was with the FBI and then someone else wanted to know why the FBI man didn’t have no gun like the chief of police had.

We were halfway to the Imperial when Necessary yelled: “Look out, Dye!” I turned just in time to see him. He was coming at me fast, the familiar triangular-bladed knife held in the acceptable style and I remember thinking that he knew all the tricks that I knew, and then some, and that there wasn’t one goddamned thing I could do about it but watch. So I did and, fascinated, heard the sound of the two shots and watched the twin holes appear in his vest. Just above the Phi Beta Kappa key. It was Carmingler. The one they sent when they sent their very best.

He stumbled backwards and dropped the knife and looked down curiously at the two holes in his vest. He didn’t touch them. He looked at me and there was surprise and, I suppose, sorrow in his face. I remember thinking that he looked like a sorrowful horse. His mouth worked a little, but no words came out. He lurched toward me then and there was nothing else to do but try to catch him before he fell.

I caught him, but he was dead weight, and I knew I couldn’t hold him up for long. He looked at me again, his face no more than a few inches from mine. The sorrow in his gaze seemed to have been replaced by contempt, but you can never really tell. It may have been just pain. His lips worked and finally he got it out, what he very much wanted to tell me.

“You still aren’t very important to us, Dye,” he said. I nodded, but he didn’t see it because he could no longer see anything. I lowered him to the sidewalk gently, but it didn’t matter anymore how I did it because he was already dead.

Necessary, still clutching Luccarella, yelled at the crowd to move back. He picked out somebody and told them to call an ambulance. “Call three of them,” he added.

He and Luccarella moved up to me as I stood there staring down at Carmingler. “The hard case?” Necessary said.

“As hard as they come,” I said.

“That was a goddamned fool thing of me to do in a crowd like this,” he said. “I could have shot somebody.”

“You did,” I said.

“I mean somebody else.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “You shot him.”

“If it doesn’t matter, then what the hell are you crying for?”

“I didn’t know that I was,” I said.

Chapter 44

Three things happened Saturday, the day after the crime wave. First, as a special favor to the Swankerton Police Department, the First National Bank let me visit my safe-deposit box. They may have felt that it could help them get their stolen $50,000 back. It didn’t.

The second thing happened after I left the bank. I called a private number at Police Headquarters and said: “I’m all done.” Five minutes later Swankerton’s chief of police submitted his resignation.

The third thing was the telegram that I got from New York. It read: “I died by my own hand last night. Just thought you might like to know. Regards. Gorman.” A postscript read: “Mr. Smalldane left instructions insisting on the wording of this telegram.” The postscript was signed by Gorman Smalldane Associates, Inc., and I wondered who they were.

Chapter 45

I sometimes still take out a rather crumpled copy of that Sunday’s edition of The Swankerton News-Calliope. Because it never published on Saturday, it was full of news that Sunday. There was the one-day crime wave, of course, and six or seven shootings and killings to recount and speculate about. There was also the resignation of the chief of police to announce. But in the center of the front page was a large three-column picture of a rather puzzled looking man and underneath it in very black, very bold forty-eight point type is a headline which asks the question:

I sometimes read the story over because it’s quite long and it goes into great detail about someone called Lucifer Dye. According to the story, Lucifer Dye was the man who corrupted Swankerton. All by himself. He was, if one were to believe the story, a onetime spy, a hired gun, a crooked cop, a confidence man, a crime czar, and an agent provocateur for some unnamed foreign power. He was also a long list of other things, none of them fashionable, and The News-Calliope hated the man and urged its readers to hate him and to undo the evil that he had done by going to the polls in November and electing good men to office. If they didn’t, the newspaper implied in an editorial signed by Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III, they were fools. The editorial then thoughtfully listed a number of men who, it said, deserved the votes of all those citizens of Swankerton who weren’t absolute fools.

I like to reread the long article about Lucifer Dye because it promises to tell who he really is, but it never does. I keep hoping that it will. Clipped to the fading newsprint is a shorter article, only a couple of inches long, that was torn from a copy of the international edition of Time. It’s about how the citizens of Swankerton elected a last-minute, write-in slate to fill all of the major municipal offices. It has a kicker, of course, or Time wouldn’t have printed it. The kicker is that one of the new city councilmen is Buford Robineaux, only son of the city’s defeated mayor.

I live in Mexico now and I’ve quit smoking and I run a store in a seaport-resort town that sells books in English about Mexico to tourists who can’t read Spanish. There seem to be a lot of them. It doesn’t cost much to live in Mexico and the bookstore earns enough to support my wife and me. My wife’s name is Carol and her best friend is a twenty-three-year-old stunner from the Midwest whose husband runs a boat marina. Sometimes her husband and I go to a local cantina and drink beer with a redheaded Mexican who’s the chief of police. The Mexican feels that there’s nothing unusual about his hair, but he thinks that my friend has rare eyes because one is blue and one is brown.

We sit there and drink beer in the afternoon and talk about crime in far off places. We never talk about a place called Swankerton.