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

As I bathed, shaved, and dressed, I thought about the diary. Navarre was mentioned by name. But who was Big Cat, a man Carrie was afraid of?

Carrie-Cynthia wrote with a tone far beyond what I expected from a nineteen-year-old girl. But Pamela said she had literary aspirations. Maybe I’d known the wrong nineteen-year-old girls.

I stuffed the letters, journal of writing, and diary in my briefcase and headed to work.

Downtown, people were talking about it on the street before I got to the newsstand outside the Monihon Building. Two black decks in capital letters on the front page of the Arizona Republic:

ROOSEVELT ESCAPES DEATH

AS ASSASSIN SHOOTS FIVE

The president-elect was visiting Miami when an Italian bricklayer opened fire at the Bay Front Park. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was expected to die. Four others were wounded, including a detective shot in the head.

I had never been to Florida. The attempted murder of Roosevelt, and a sidebar about the Secret Service detail at the White House being doubled, added to the sense of dread as the Depression worsened. Even Will Rogers’s pithy two paragraphs didn’t ease the feeling.

This wasn’t the only news. Outside Los Angeles, a bandit boarded the eastbound Sunset Limited and robbed passengers until he faced an armed conductor. Both men exchanged fire, with the robber killed and the conductor badly wounded. The story said the Southern Pacific would combine the Sunset with the Golden State and the train would arrive in Phoenix at 7:15 a.m. today—old news, because it was already past nine. Crime was down in the Great Depression.

It was a good thing the national morticians’ group was going to hold its convention at the Hotel Westward Ho. At least the cold wave was easing, with Phoenix forecast to hit 72 degrees today.

Upstairs, Gladys nodded toward my office.

“Your friend is back.”

I doubted it was a friend, and sure enough Kemper Marley was pacing around the room, fussing with the safe combination. He showed no contrition when I caught him.

“Going into the safecracking business, Kemper?” I put my hat on the coatrack and sat at my desk. “Phoenix is notorious among safecrackers. The detectives interrogate them with blows from phone books. Hurts like hell. If you do it the right way, it never shows a bruise. Safecrackers avoid Phoenix.”

He barely heard me before launching into a lather. “You hear about that damned Frank Roosevelt? Almost got himself killed. Then where would we be? I’m telling you this country is on the verge. Immigrants like the assassin in Miami. Communists everywhere. Fascists. At least fascists believe in free enterprise. You watch how Herr Hitler turns Germany around, cleans up those Reds and Jews. It might come to that here, you know. Blood in the streets. We’re closer to it than most people realize.”

The ball-peen hammer sat in the client chair. He was in his come-to-town outfit of a black suit, vest, and tie.

“I want to get some private investigating from my retainer, Hammons.”

“How’s that?”

“Frenchy Navarre. What do you know about him? Is he trustworthy?”

I leaned back and considered my approach. How about straight on?

“Frenchy, huh? I hear he’s Greenbaum’s man, collecting from the bookies in Darktown. One of his runners got his throat slit yesterday, body dumped in a junkyard by the tracks. Was that your work, Kemper? Send Gus a message?”

Navarre had killed Zoogie Boogie. I wasn’t feeling charitable. And I was armed with the information I picked up while listening to Kemper lay into Frenchy yesterday.

Marley was momentarily thrown off-balance. That gave me time to light a coffin nail, as much to irritate him as for my pleasure.

He finally said, “What if I wanted to hire him?”

“To do what?”

He waved the smoke away with his hand. “Errands.”

Errands, my ass. “I’d say you’d be playing a dangerous game by hiring an untrustworthy, dirty cop.”

His lips curled up. “I like dirty cops.” The smile didn’t last. “But I don’t want somebody who would play a double game, give Gus Greenbaum intelligence about me. Or do something stupid like killing Greenbaum’s line rider and making it seem like I ordered it.”

“Well, there you have your answer.”

“Tell me about the dead girl. Carrie’s her name?”

I leaned forward. “What makes you think that’s her name?”

“I’ve already told you I have my sources.”

“Then what do they tell you?”

“They say she was meticulously cut up, head, arms, legs, and laid out by the railroad tracks at Sixteenth Street, south of Eastlake Park. There wasn’t enough blood there, so she was killed and sawed up somewhere else, then taken to be dumped. Nineteen years old. Pretty. A student at the teachers’ college. And she was pregnant.”

I exhaled a plume of smoke, considering the depth of his information, who might have told him these things, most of which I had discovered. The only things he didn’t mention were her being from Prescott with a drunken father, working last summer at the Arizona Biltmore, and setting up a tourist business. Those were details in my report to Captain McGrath.

He also didn’t know about my business card being in Carrie’s otherwise nearly-empty purse. And he didn’t mention the Hamilton railroad watch I found in the Hooverville that his gang laid waste. Was he capable of ordering a prison hit on Jack Hunter, who had information for me? You bet.

“You know, Kemper, if I was still a police detective and heard all that, you’d be my prime suspect. First, I’d put you in the interrogation room for a tumble. And I’d have a search warrant by this afternoon and we’d go over every inch of your property looking for evidence. Who knows what we might find out there? We’d search your whorehouse, too. You couldn’t buy your way out of it, either. Not murder of a pretty white coed.”

I’d started this to feel him out, but the more I talked the more plausible he actually became as a suspect. Sure, Carrie mentions Navarre in her diary. But who the hell knew where her adventure was going, the men she