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

“But if I don’t start now, I might never have the guts. I’ve been saving.”

“Not in a bank, I hope.”

“No, sir.”

Theories about the dead blonde were floating around in my head like debris that had yet to form a planet.

“Let’s say I had a piece of beef,” I said. “How would I take a whack at it to separate it from the…” I hesitated, having never worked in a restaurant or slaughterhouse.

“Like a T-bone? A strip steak and a filet. It’s separated by a bone.”

“What if I want to cut through the meat and the bone?”

Carl looked at me oddly, but let it pass.

“Well, you could start with this.” He pulled down a meat cleaver, a medieval-looking tool with a wooden handle attached to twelve inches of stainless steel formed in a curved rectangle. He slid over a wooden cutting board and handed me the cleaver. I hefted it in my right hand, feeling its weight, then brought it down hard. The cutting board and counter shuddered. The impact left a quarter-inch crater in the wood.

“A skilled butcher can do a lot with that,” Carl said. “But he’d still probably use this instead.” He moved through the store and came back with something that looked like a hacksaw. “Butcher saw, twenty-inch blade.”

I held it closer, lightly running my fingers across the serrated edge. The blade was scary sharp.

“Planning on doing some cooking?” he said. “It’s safer to go to a butcher shop and ask for the cuts of beef you want. An amateur could lose a finger or worse.”

Or he could cut up a girl and dump her pieces by the railroad tracks.

“Been selling many of these things?” I asked.

Carl shook his head. “We haven’t been selling many of nothing. Mr. Johnson is worried about the store. The other restaurant supply, the one on Van Buren, closed last year.”

He thought for a moment. “Last week, though, a man came in and bought both a meat cleaver and a saw. Nobody I knew.” He shook his head slowly, as if recalling the face or conversation or something more. “He gave me the fantods.”

“Fantods?”

“The creeps.”

Learn a new word every day, as my pop said. I asked what he looked like.

Carl hesitated. “I don’t want trouble, especially not now that I’m about to go out on my own.”

“What would get you in trouble?”

He sighed. “I wasn’t exactly honest. He was a cop, and I know him. You’ve always treated me real well, Detective Hammons. But you’re the exception. Colored folks don’t get an even shake from the police, not even from the colored officers.”

“Hell, Carl, I don’t even like the cops myself.”

He stared past me a long time. Then: “Frenchy.”

“Frenchy Navarre?”

He nodded. “Man scares me.”

“Frenchy Navarre bought those butcher tools?”

He looked me in the eye. “Yes sir, he did.”

Seven

I knew two men in Phoenix nicknamed Frenchy.

One was Frenchy Vieux, real first name Marcellin, who made a fortune as a sidewalk contractor during the 1920s building boom. Walk down nearly any sidewalk in the newer parts of town and you’ll find his name stamped in concrete. He lived in a majestic Italian villa–style home with a sweeping veranda on Portland Street, a couple of blocks west of me in the swank Kenilworth district.

The other was Frenchy Navarre, given name Leonce, a Phoenix Police detective. He was a few years older than me. We had never worked closely together, and I didn’t know much about him. But his custom-made suits and expensive silk ties from Goldwater’s and Hanny’s made me suspicious he was at least a little bit dirty. Perhaps had I misappraised the man, and not in a good way.

I walked up to Jefferson Street and slipped into Jones Drugs in the new Fox Theater building, the city’s best movie palace—and with cool refrigerated air to boot. They didn’t need it today with the temperature hitting a tourist-pleasing 70 degrees. Past the soda fountain, I stepped into a phone booth, closed the door, and called Don at police headquarters.

“Detective Bureau, Detective Navarre speaking,” came the unexpected voice.

My paranoia meter shot up several notches, and I hesitated, tempted to hang up.

“Hello?”

I forged ahead. “Hello, Frenchy, it’s Gene Hammons.”

“Geno!” The voice was friendly. “We miss you down here. I’m stuck on the dragnet for those escapees. It was the county’s fuckup. They didn’t get out of the city jail.”

I contained my boredom and anxiety as he went on. The two jails were on the same floor.

“How’s the peeper business?”

“Ups and downs. Is my brother around?”

“No. He’s checking a lead on that dead skirt. You hear about it?”

“I read something in the paper.”

“Well, she didn’t fall from a train. She was sliced up and dumped.”

“Nasty business.” I fought the temptation to ask him if he’d been using a cleaver and saw lately.

He agreed about the nasty business and was agreeable enough to give me the address where I could find Don.

* * *

I climbed in my Ford, put the top down, and drove north out of downtown on Central Avenue. The San Carlos and Westward Ho were busy because of players and spectators for the Pro-Am golf tournament at the Phoenix Country Club. What Depression?

North of McDowell Road, the street narrowed and was lined with majestic mature palm trees and handsome homes on inviting shady acreages. Way beyond my budget. Construction of period revival houses that began a few years ago to the west had been stopped as if someone had pulled an emergency brake. No houses were being built anywhere.

A couple of miles farther north, past Central Dairy, I turned right on a two-lane dirt road and was enveloped in citrus groves. It would be a couple of months before their blossoms perfumed the Valley and after that the harvest. It was the next big deal, with the lettuce harvest: 8,700 acres cut, washed, boxed, and loaded in refrigerated railroad cars destined for points back east, already completed. For now, my surroundings were a picture postcard green frame for the bare head of Camelback Mountain,