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

It was more interesting than Phoenix’s daily diet of news about debt negotiations with Britain, what President-elect Roosevelt might do come March, and the Japan-China conflict. The local newspaper had barely a peep about the dire economic situation. Will Rogers’s two or three paragraphs on the front page mentioned the Depression more than the news columns. The rare “good news” business story received big play. But nothing about people starving, the county relief fund empty, or the businesses closing every month right here. Nothing about the refugees from the Midwest desperately moving through town—if they could avoid Kemper Marley’s welcoming committee. And not even the peep of a peep about dead Carrie Dell.

The waitress brought coffee, and I ordered a hamburger. Across the room, a dozen legislators were debating around a large, round table. Voices raised, then whispers, arms gesticulating emphatically. The subject was the governor and the highway commission. Cigar smoke pumped above them like a factory going full out. When I looked back, the man standing before me wasn’t my brother but John J. McGrath, the chief of Ds. I reflexively stood and came to attention.

“Sit, Gene.” His voice was gentle and his manner professorial. It was a devastatingly effective personality trait in gaining confessions. The only things that made him look different from the faculty at the teachers’ college were the shoulder holster and a pair of handcuffs and a nipper in his belt beneath the off-the-rack suit of an honest cop. The nipper was a neat tool, a nonlethal item used to whip around a suspect’s wrist and tighten to put pressure on a nerve in the hand and cause compliance. They disappeared as he buttoned his coat and sat, ordering coffee.

I sat. “I was waiting for Don.”

“I know,” he said. “Your brother asked me to talk some sense into you.”

“How thoughtful of him.”

McGrath smiled sadly. “Oh, my young friend, I am so sorry about the way things turned out. I had such high hopes for you.”

McGrath had been on the force for more than twenty years, possessed a photographic memory, and had introduced modern scientific investigation methods, including a department identification bureau. He had always played straight with me—until the Judd case.

“I’m doing okay,” I said.

“That’s what I hear. But I want you to know that I really fought for you. I tried. Wanted to make you take two weeks’ vacation during the trial. Get you out of the line of fire when the testimony started. But the higher-ups were afraid Ruth’s lawyers might call you, or the Hearst press in L.A. might have gotten to you. The layoff was forced on me.”

“It’s okay, Captain. I’m a happy ending kind of guy. The bigs got their conviction, even though the evidence showed she acted in self-defense, and there was no way she could have cut up those bodies and stuffed them in trunks by herself. I’m not sure Judd’s lawyers were even smart enough to call me. And I got to start a new business in the worst economy in American history.” I smiled.

“This came for you at headquarters.” He passed over an envelope. I could tell from the regimented stationery, if you’d apply such a genteel term as “stationery,” that this was from an inmate in the State Penitentiary at Florence. Hoping like hell it wasn’t from Ruth Judd, I opened it, relieved to find my jailhouse correspondent was Jack Hunter.

I arrested him for a holdup, and he was doing a fifteen-to-thirty-year bounce for intent to commit murder. Jack had escaped five times. I read:

Detective Gene,

Come see me. We can talk about the train girl, Carrie. It will be worth your time.

I stashed it. “Jack Hunter, can’t be important.”

“Ah, the escape artist.” McGrath smiled, but the expression didn’t last. “Don tells me you have a client who wants to find a missing girl, and she might be the one who fell from the Sunset Limited.”

“She didn’t fall from the Sunset,” I interrupted. “She was brutally murdered.”

He continued: “I won’t ask the client’s identity. But what have you found?”

I opened up the file, laid out the photos, and told him. It took fifteen minutes and several bites of my hamburger.

When I was through, he waited a good five minutes. Then he said, “You’ve been a busy boy. No wonder I gave the toughest homicide cases to you.”

“I appreciate that, Boss. But this is where you say ‘thanks’ and ‘we’ll take the investigation from here.’”

He shifted uncomfortably. I felt as if a nipper had wrapped around my wrists.

“What?” I said.

“It’s not that simple.” He pulled out a pipe and meticulously filled the bowl with tobacco, tamped it down with a silver pipe tool, and slowly lit it.

“Don has explained to you how the commissioners and the chamber of commerce don’t want Phoenix back in the national spotlight for another lurid murder. I don’t agree, but I have to take orders, same as everyone else.”

“What does that mean?”

Behind a haze of cherry-flavored tobacco, he said, “It means the case is classified as a suspicious death.”

“So that’s it?”

After a pause for another puff: “What if I authorized you to go to Prescott and do the death knock? I’ll put together a hundred dollars from petty cash. The girl’s parents deserve to know what happened.”

“I’d want that authorized in writing.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“I trust you, Boss. But I don’t trust the people who sign your paycheck. You have to take orders, same as everybody else, remember?”

“I’ll send over a letter this afternoon.”

“And what happens then?”

He looked at me like I was the stupid boy in class, repeating that the case was classified as a suspicious death.

I pushed back, trying to keep my voice calm and measured. I felt anything but that inside. “Cap, this girl was sawed apart elsewhere, and her body parts were dressed, dumped, and arranged, moved just inside the city limits. Her purse had money but no identification.” I neglected to mention that my business card was also in her purse.

I