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

“No Thayer by any first name in Prescott.” He dropped his ash into the ashtray on my desk.

“What about at the St. Michael Hotel? That was the telegram address.”

He called again. No Thayer at the hotel.

I tried to conceal the squirm of my body in the office chair. “I’m being played.”

“Looks that way,” Don said. “Out of the blue, you get a telegram asking you to find this girl, Carrie. You ask for a photo and description, and it’s our homicide victim. The only person who would do that…”

“Is the murderer,” I completed the thought.

“Did you cash the money order for your fee?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t,” he said.

He was right, of course. I needed to distance myself as far as possible from this case. Still, the metronome of ambition and curiosity that had made me a good detective was swinging, leading me to want to follow this tune where it might go. Maybe the victim really was named Carrie, really was a student at the teachers’ college in Tempe. The next step would be to visit the school, talk to faculty and staff, go through yearbooks. Find her real last name—or full name, if not Carrie. Hell, maybe Victoria had photographed her class or some extracurricular club she belonged to. School shots were part of her business.

I laid this out for Don as he kept shaking his head. He said, “This is a homicide. Do you know how close you came to being a suspect if I hadn’t snagged your business card?”

“Yes, but now I have a legitimate reason to dig.”

“You have a legitimate reason to stay the hell away.”

“What are you going to do about it? Your bosses are stonewalling any investigation into this killing, no new Winnie Ruth Judd scandal to taint the tourism business.”

He gave me a sour look.

“We’ve reclassified it as a suspicious death.”

After I stopped laughing, I said, “Yes, having your head and arms and legs sawed off is suspicious, even to me. It’s too bad no reporter in this town will see it written in the file, and if he did his editors would shut down a story. I know how it works.”

Don slammed his fist on the desk. “What is it with you and the Sir Galahad impersonation? Trying to save damsels in distress. Are you trying to atone for Mother’s death? She didn’t die from anything you did but from the Spanish flu. We were five thousand miles away in the Army and damned lucky it didn’t kill us, too. It was especially deadly for young and healthy people our age!”

“I’m doing my job, especially if you won’t do yours. And by the way, why would Kemper Marley know that the dead girl wasn’t the victim of a fall from the train?”

“What the hell?”

I told him about my conversation. “He says he has his sources in the department. I guess with the money he has to throw around, he can find them. Hope one isn’t my brother.”

That was a needless dig, but our blood was up.

He stood and stomped for the door. Before opening it, he turned. “Don’t do this, Gene. If you do, I might not be able to help you.”

“Are you going to do something?”

He stared at me a long moment. “Give me that goddamned business card.”

I went to the safe and handed him the envelope.

“I’ll get it dusted when I can. That’s all I can do for now.”

Nine

Choir practice was mostly devoted to preparing our upcoming Easter Sunday performance of the last two choruses of Messiah, “Worthy Is the Lamb Who Was Slain” and the “Amen,” with its demanding vocal runs. Most people didn’t realize that the “Hallelujah” chorus was also in the Easter portion of the masterpiece because it was always sung at Christmas. Anyway, this was hard work, and in the weeks to come we would be recycling anthems from the past two years that we knew well so we could focus on rehearsing Handel. And to think he completed the entire composition in twenty-four days.

I doubted twenty-four days would take me any closer to finding the man who had murdered and cut up Carrie Thayer, or whatever her name was. Still, after rehearsal I drove back to the crime scene. I parked off Sixteenth Street and grabbed a flashlight. It was full dark, a moonless night with overcast and cold. The citrus growers would be worrying about a killing frost if it lingered.

Heading south toward the tracks, a shadow silently emerged to my right. I reached for my .45 and was about to unholster it when I heard my name. It was Jimmy Darrow. He wore a zippered leather jacket, open, with his SP police badge pinned to his shirt and a billy club stuck in his pants.

We made small talk for a few minutes: Jack Halloran’s acquittal, a month’s reprieve for Winnie Ruth Judd, Governor Moeur asking the congressional delegation to send relief money, women getting the right to sit on juries. Jimmy had a pro and con argument on every subject, or so it seemed. I let him ramble on both sides of these fences.

Then he said, “I didn’t give you the whole truth, the other day, about the night that girl was found.”

I could tell that at the time but said nothing as he lit nails for both of us, handing me one. After a long drag and painful coughing, he continued. “I was walking east out of the mouth of the yard when I saw a car with its headlights on, facing my direction. It was parked right by where the girl was found.” He kicked the dirt. “Don’t know if that helps.”

“It might. Did you approach the car?”

“No. I was alone, and the car wasn’t on railroad property. But after it drove away, I walked over to see why he might have been parked there. That’s when I found the remains. The car was there for several minutes while I was watching, but I