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

really murdered Zoogie Boogie, why keep the straight razor? The immediate answer was so that he could plant it on the Negro suspect of his choice. But if that were the case, why dust it for prints, lift latents, and put both in a safe-deposit box? That made no sense.

No, Frenchy found Zoogie dead—arriving at the junkyard ahead of Muldoon—and took the razor. Then he claimed the killing to get Kemper Marley off his back. This went a long way to untangling his convoluted explanation about the murder of a man who was secretly collecting for him in Darktown. Someone else did the killing and Frenchy either knew who he was or he was protecting the evidence until he could match the prints.

Back at the office, I locked the envelope containing the razor and prints in my safe. No more carelessness like the kind that had cost me Carrie’s diary and letters.

McGrath hadn’t responded to my report. On the plus side, he hadn’t demanded my badge back.

Some unrelated business came in. A few weeks ago, I would have welcomed it. Now it was an unwelcome distraction.

Barry Goldwater put me on retainer for the Williams Investment Company, which was formed by his family with two hundred thousand dollars of capital stock. What they intended to do—maybe purchase land—and why they might need a private eye were mysteries to me. I felt as if he was taking pity on me. But the four-hundred-dollar retainer fee he offered helped my dwindling treasury. A few weeks ago, I would have stuck the money in the safe and celebrated with a shave and haircut from Otis Kenilworth, a shoeshine, and a movie and prizefight with Victoria. The shave and haircut would have to do.

A man named Street hired me to help him in a dispute with the city. He didn’t want to pay an assessment on his property at Twelfth and Van Buren streets, claiming the contract was awarded illegally. It was boring by my standards but it was fifty bucks and easy money. The job entailed working up background on the contractor, the Phoenix-Tempe Stone Company.

As part of the Street case, I attended a city commission meeting in the sparkling new commission chambers at City Hall. I sat in the back and took notes as the city attorney discussed Street’s case.

The four commissioners were R. E. Patton, J. B. Guess, David Kimball, and O. B. Marston. These worthies were behind my layoff from the force. I wondered how many saw me sitting there. I wondered how many were in compromising photos taken from the wall peek in Kemper Marley’s whorehouse. A case like this gave my mind plenty of time to wander.

Once the meeting ended, I grabbed a late lunch at the Busy Bee Café and got back to the office. Removing the Carrie Dell file from the locked filing cabinet, I turned to the call log for Summer Tours and started dialing.

As a police detective, I quickly learned that there were basically two kinds of cases. One set were obvious, with the suspect already apprehended or easily identified. Most murder victims knew their killers. The second kind were rarer but more interesting. They were cases that appeared random and evidence was scattered, requiring many hours, days, even months of work plus creativity. That was certainly true back in 1929.

Twenty-Three

On Monday, March 11, 1929, the next new moon, the entire force was mobilized to apprehend the University Park Strangler before he killed again. All vacations and leaves were canceled. Twelve-hour shifts with overtime were authorized.

The national press had caught the story, labeling the perpetrator as the “Fiend of Phoenix” but “University Park Strangler” stuck locally. Part of me wondered if it was because people in other parts of the city used the moniker as an incantation to keep the killer there and safely out of their neighborhoods.

Captain McGrath worked out a plan to focus marked police cars on the fringes of University Park, to “give him a sense of safety” inside the neighborhood itself. At the same time, members of the Hat Squad and patrolmen in plain clothes stationed themselves around University Park in parked cars, commandeered delivery trucks, and one empty rental house with good views of the street.

Everybody worked in pairs. Pump-action shotguns and Thompson submachine guns were issued. McGrath kept me with him at our new headquarters, which probably made sense because officers could use call boxes to notify us of the situation. But I wanted to be on the street. We were all in position as the sun went down.

Yet nothing happened that night.

Just after sunrise two days later, Wednesday, a homeowner at Thirteenth Avenue and Polk Street called. A girl was on his front yard, half dressed, not moving. By the time I got there, the street was crowded with people, police cars, and an ambulance. But she was long dead. Her head was turned at an angle, cherry-red hair swept back, eyes staring at us reproachfully. On her stomach with her blouse off, I made an immediate check: The cross was carved in the small of her back.

“Goddamn it!”

Muldoon knelt down and put his big arm around me. “Easy, lad. We all feel that way, too. But civilians are around.”

It was the only time I ever lost my composure on the job.

As the girl was sent off for the postmortem, we fanned out to interview everyone within two blocks of the body dump. Nobody saw anything. Not even the milkmen who were out that early.

More information allowed us to sort out the basics. She was likely Grace Chambers, sixteen, who never came home from the movies the night before. Her parents felt it was safe for her to see the pictures at the Rialto with her steady boyfriend, Ben Chapman. It was her birthday, and they also wanted to reward her for perfect grades this year. They felt safe because they lived in the Las Palmas neighborhood, north of McDowell Road, miles from University Park.

When neither