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

colored high school, much less the schools in outlying towns. The killer was strong. He prepared his attacks in advance. For example, he never chose a house with a dog but did pick one with a deaf grandmother. He had a connection to University Park.

“He’s neat, almost fussy,” said Victoria, who by this time had become my friend and confidant. “The comforter or blanket and sheet wasn’t thrown off in a heap. It was neatly folded. He took trophies from the first two, but otherwise their rooms were undisturbed. Barbed wire will hurt, but it won’t cause extensive bleeding.”

I made neat reports and forwarded them to Captain McGrath, as if my every addition to his “in” tray was a fresh nail pounded in the strangler’s coffin. Hell, the coffin was empty.

After a week, the case went cold again.

McGrath assigned me, Don, and Muldoon to continue working on it full-time, while other detectives went back to cases that had been holding. We had four dead students, no viable suspect. The city commissioners fired Chief Matlock in May and replaced him with David Montgomery, captain over the traffic division, who made it clear that nobody on the Hat Squad was safe from meeting the same fate. He stared at me, the youngest detective, as he made this announcement.

Dead ends multiplied: A second check found no previous arrests of the high-school teachers, not even of the many deliverymen and tradesmen who spent time in University Park. The same was true of Phoenix Union High janitors and maintenance staff.

Prowler calls increased, but arrests were few. In many cases, someone called after seeing a neighbor take out his trash or work in his backyard after sundown. One suspect had a burglary conviction in Texas, but he had the best alibi in town for the time when Grace Chambers and Ben Chapman went missing: He was in jail for drunkenness and vagrancy. Finally, the FBI report came back: The prints on the Buick were not in their extensive files.

Yet somewhere in all this noise was the fact that would break the case.

I knew I wasn’t alone among the detectives in feeling guilty for partly wishing the Fiend of Phoenix would strike again, but this time we’d get him before he killed the victim.

City leaders considered canceling the Masque of the Yellow Moon, scheduled to begin April 25th. But their consideration lasted about as long as a drunk thinking about quitting the bottle. The Masque might have started as a high-school event, but the Junior Chamber of Commerce had turned it into a parade and festival aspiring to nip at the heels of Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses. People came from all over the state. The final night of this harvest celebration—a vast pageant going all the way back to the Aztecs—filled the Phoenix Union High’s 10,500-person-capacity Montgomery Stadium.

So much money was flowing into Phoenix, to build the new office towers and hotels, start new businesses, and increase land under irrigation and the yields of the farms and groves. Never mind that Mexico was in turmoil, with rebels seizing Nogales, Sonora, and federales bombing them. That seemed far away from the Roaring Twenties in the states, and especially in this state.

The last thing Phoenix political and business leaders wanted was to dampen the good times by canceling the biggest event in the annual life of the young city. The mayor demanded the chief promise him Phoenix would be safe from this “maniac nonsense,” and he did. Once again, the entire force was mobilized. Fortunately, a full moon began on April 23rd. The Masque came off safely, and May was strangely quiet except for the real harvest rituals. In a single day, the Salt River Valley sent one hundred seventy-five refrigerated railroad cars off to help feed the nation. And that was just lettuce—we also picked, packed, and shipped oranges, cantaloupes, watermelons, onions, dates, grapes, strawberries, and beets.

I had to make a break instead of waiting for one.

McGrath blew up when I first took the idea to him. Only Muldoon agreed. Turk pulled me aside and said, “Always trust your gut, lad, and sometimes fight for what it’s telling you. It’s the best weapon a good detective has.”

Finally, McGrath agreed.

Juliet Dehler worked in the records department. She was twenty-one but looked much younger. She was petite, pretty, red-haired. In my work with Juliet, I’d been impressed by her intelligence, maturity, and most important, moxie. Over lunch at the Saratoga, she readily agreed to help me in my plan. I issued her a .38 snub-nosed for her purse and took her into the desert to teach her how to use it. She also got a police whistle to hang around her neck, hidden below her blouse.

June arrived. Phoenix Union High School graduated 407 students, the Valley shipped its first-ever carloads of apricots on the Santa Fe Railway to New York City, people had to shake out their shoes for scorpions, and wealthy men sent their wives and children to California or Iron Springs. Juliet took to the streets of downtown and University Park two or three times a week. Although the summer heat was oppressive, the city cooled down at night.

She dressed like the victims the strangler favored, feminine and middle-class stylish but never like looking like a roundheels. She went to movies in air-conditioned theaters; shopped on Thursday nights, when the stores stayed opened late; took the streetcar to the Carnegie Library; walked “alone” to a rental house in University Park we’d commandeered as her “home.” She made herself visible.

I was watching, of course, tailing at a safe distance. Sometimes Don or Muldoon joined the tail. Juliet attracted plenty of attention, whether from young whistling wolves or the summer bachelors freed for the hot months of their families.

Nothing dangerous happened, however. Not a sign of a perv or rapist, much less the strangler. That changed on the night of Friday, June 28th.

Twenty-Four

Back in ’29, Turk Muldoon told me to always trust my gut. My much more experienced gut