City of Dark Corners by Jon Talton (novels to read .txt) 📗

tracks, maybe half, it pays for the exclusive rights to use a direct wire from the press box. Other tracks, they have a spotter with a telescope or a wigwag artist who can signal the racing results to someone on a telephone. Whatever way they get it, Trans-America has exclusive Western Union circuits leased. The distributors are given what they call a drop—a receiving station with a high-speed ticker. The radio might carry an individual race. The syndicate covers them all, coast to coast, two dozen major tracks.”

“I get the speed,” I said. “But where’s the money made, aside from the truth that the house always wins?”

Ong leaned in. “For one thing, it lets a bookmaker keep taking bets as if he doesn’t know the race results. The AP hasn’t reported them yet, follow me? So when the bookie already knows a horse has lost, he’ll take the bets anyway. Or say it’s too late to bet if the customer wants to wager on the winner. Before the hour of the races, when customers line up, the early bettors don’t get the full information that the bookmaker has—so they don’t know, say, track conditions, things like that, and the bookie sure isn’t going to tell them. Easy money, even though most of it flows up to the syndicate. Local bookies have to pay a percentage of net daily receipts, plus a fixed weekly fee to receive the results.”

“You know a lot about this.”

“I’ve learned it. This is having a big effect on the older Chinese community, the one that depended on gambling. And I intend to become a lawyer.”

“You’ll make a good one.”

I asked why the cops couldn’t stop the operation, knowing it was a naive inquiry.

“This is technically illegal in most states,” Ong said. “But so what? The police are bribed. No offense, Gene. And the syndicate contributes to politicians. It’s hard to find the big racing rooms anyway. It’s not illegal to sell the telephone and telegraph equipment. Western Union has fought every effort to shut the big gambling wire services down.”

* * *

After Ong left, I scribbled his background information in the notebook I kept in my suit coat pocket. Then I walked through the east arches of the depot and past the garden with its immaculate grass, hedges, and flowers to welcome travelers. Phoenix was always in bloom.

To the east, most of the produce houses were dormant or working short-staffed. The big harvests began in the spring. I walked around boxcars spotted at warehouses and wholesale outfits along Jackson Street, making sure they weren’t attached to a locomotive and likely to move, with deadly consequences.

Ong’s information was useful, but I knew the story went deeper. Chinatown gambling was hardly benign. It was controlled by the Hop Sing Association, one of the most powerful of the tongs that had set up chapters in cities around the country. The tongs presented themselves as benevolent associations to protect their people against anti-Chinese prejudice, and we had plenty of that to go around. But they were also organized-crime gangs that controlled rackets in Chinatowns. The bloody tong wars of the early century were over. But the gangs persisted, although much diminished.

They had been especially quiet lately, after three tong soldiers were found dumped in the riverbed outside the city. This was around the time I was laid off from the cops last year. Each one had been tapped three times in the head. At the time, we wondered if it was retaliation from a Paris Alley gunfight in ’31 where the Suey Sing tong from L.A. tried to muscle in. We worried the assassinations could be a revival of the old tong wars. Now, especially given the manner of the latest killings, I wondered if they had been a message from the Chicago Outfit and Greenbaum, instead.

The landscape became grimmer, especially when I crossed Second Street and entered the Deuce, our city’s skid row. Paris Alley, between Jefferson and Madison streets, was a dense collection of barely concealed bars and gambling houses.

When I was a cop, it was a nightly cockfight, only with guns and knives, every hood a rooster until he was assuming room temperature on the cobblestones. The metal call box sitting at head level on a telephone pole, labeled POLICE TELEGRAPH and below it THE GAMEWELL CO. NEW YORK, made me feel strangely nostalgic. Every cop carried a key so he could open it and call headquarters for backup or a paddy wagon.

In an emergency, a blue light on a pole above headquarters lit up, and a horn sounded. You were supposed to drop everything to reach the nearest call box, open it with the distinctive Gamewell key next to your handcuff key, and find out what was going on. That emergency might be a fight or shooting somewhere—or it might be a killer on the loose. You never knew until you opened the door to the box and picked up the phone receiver. Downtown, the police call boxes were mounted on their own pedestals, neatly painted blue. The department was starting to put radios in the squad cars, the first such system in the state. But the boxes were still essential, especially for beat cops on foot. I patted this shabby one affectionately.

Walking on, I waved away the panhandlers, jive dealers, and flimflam men who frequented the alley. After dark, things got…interesting.

On the Third Street side, I ducked into the restaurant supply store. The radio was playing Ethel Waters singing “Stormy Weather.”

“Detective Hammons, it’s been too long.”

He hadn’t gotten the memo about me not being a cop, but I let it go and greeted Carl Sims, a young Negro who stood behind the counter. With exotic friendly eyes and a widow’s peak where his hair met his forehead, he had arrived from Texas a few years ago. He turned down the radio.

“This is my last day,” he offered. “I’m starting my own gardening and painting business.”

“That’s good, Carl. Tough times, though.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said.