The Fools in Town Are on Our Side (32 page)

“It's not too hot,” Necessary said. “What he should have done was perform the autopsy and if he found anything, maybe arsenic, he'd been set for life.”

“Which in his case was only three months,” Orcutt said. “His car went out of control on a bridge one night and crashed through the guard rail. It was a perfectly clear night.”

Necessary grunted suspiciously.

Before she married her late husband, Mrs. Sobour had been the wife of Jean Dupree, last in the line of an old but impecunious Swankerton family. Dupree had been a prominent Catholic layman and a member of a number of the city's civic and social organizations.

“How'd he die?” Necessary said.

“He drank himself to death,” Orcutt said.

The Widow Dupree, soon to be the Widow Sobour, was also a great joiner and currently served as co-chairman of the city's United Fund Drive. She was also chairman or president of the Swankerton League of Women Voters and active in the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She belonged to a number of social clubs, had served as an alternate delegate to the 1968 Republican convention in Miami, and was prominent in various Catholic charities and fundraising drives.

“When her second husband died,” Orcutt said, “she became president of the Maurice Sobour Real Estate Company. A year ago she was
elected secretary of the Swankerton Clean Government Association which is, of course, nominally the organization that has retained Victor Orcutt Associates.”

“What you got on her, Victor?” Necessary said.

“I'm coming to that. Three years ago Mrs. Sobour started a large development of expensive, custom-built homes on some property that was located several miles from Swankerton. Apparently, she sank every cent that she had and could borrow into the venture. Costs skyrocketed, she ran into the usual unexpected delays, there were some zoning problems, and to sum it up she ran out of money.”

“So who'd she steal it from?” Necessary wanted to know.

“Homer, your habit of anticipating conclusions could become most irritating,” Orcutt said in the sharp tone of one whose punch line has just been ruined by the party buffoon. It didn't bother Necessary.

Orcutt leaned forward and his dark blue eyes seemed to glitter a bit. “Now it really gets delicious,” he said, and I decided that he was a born gossip. Some people are. “Mrs. Sobour was desperate for funds. She'd exhausted all sources of credit. In the meantime, a Catholic order of nuns—Sisters of Charity or Mercy or Solace or something like that, I have the name here somewhere—had entrusted her with nearly half a million dollars to invest for them in some land in Florida. Well, she
optioned
the land with a token payment of fifty thousand dollars and used the remainder of the half-million to pay off her debts. The option expires in three months.”

Necessary leaned back in his chair and smiled at the ceiling. “That should get her kicked out of the realtor's league or whatever they call it,” he said.

“Unless she picks up the option,” I said. “Can she?”

“Probably,” Orcutt said. “If we do nothing.”

“What's the Catholic population in Swankerton?” I said.

“Forty-six percent,” Orcutt said.

“Well, the headlines won't be too bad,” Carol said. “Reform Move ment Secretary Robs Sisters of the Poor.”

“You have all the necessary documents?” I asked Orcutt. He nodded. “Okay. She'll do for the first ruinee. Old family, prominent Catholic,
tied to the reform movement, and caught with her hand in the church poor box. The Catholics might vote for whoever you run in her place out of sympathy—or stubbornness. And the Protestants might vote for him—or her—because they probably hope that the widow's successor will do the same thing to the nuns who, as everybody in the South knows, don't do anything but shack up with the priests and sell their babies to wandering gypsies.”

“Now I've never heard
that!”
Orcutt said.

“Common knowledge,” Carol said.

“Lynch is going to like it all,” Necessary said. “Lynch and his crowd'll like it just fine. Who's next, Victor?”

The next sacrificial lamb was the father of four, a deacon in the First Methodist Church, a well-to-do pharmacist, and one of the Clean Government Association's candidates for the city council. His name was Frank Mouton and he owned a chain of six drugstores that bore his name. “Sale of barbiturates without prescription,” Orcutt read from his notes.

“That's not much,” Necessary said.

“In wholesale lots, Homer,” Orcutt said. “Fifty thousand at a time to the local pushers. It's how he expanded from one drugstore to six.”

“How long ago was this?” I said.

“Long enough for the statute of limitations to keep him out of jail, but still recent enough to make a perfectly marvelous scandal.”

“How long's the statute of limitations?” I said.

“Five years in the state.”

“What about Federal?”

“They probably won't bother.”

“Another good headline,” Carol Thackerty said. “Prominent Deacon Branded Dope Pusher.”

“Well, at least we're ecclesiastically impartial,” Orcutt said.

“What was he wholesaling the most of?” Necessary said.

Orcutt looked at his notes. “It seems to have been rather evenly divided between stimulants and depressants. Six year ago he sold a total of more than two hundred thousand capsules of phenobarbital sodium and another hundred thousand of secobarbital sodium. On
the stimulant side, he disposed of one hundred twenty-five thousand capsules of amphetamine sulfate and one hundred sixty thousand capsules of dextroamphetamine sulfate. I think they're called ‘bennies' and ‘dexies.' It should have netted him close to one hundred thousand dollars during that one year.”

“How good is your source?” I said.

“Unimpeachable, you might say.”

“You have solid evidence?” I said.

Orcutt nodded, “Take my word as an attorney, Mr. Dye. It's solid.”

“Good. I'll feed Lynch the woman first. A week or ten days later I'll hand him the druggist.”

“What are your plans in the meantime?” Orcutt said.

“I thought I'd better take a look at the city.”

“You want a guided tour?” Necessary said.

“That sounds good.”

Necessary looked at his watch. “What about this afternoon?”

“All right.”

Orcutt rose and moved over to a window and stood there for a few moments before he turned with a thoughtful look on his face. “Something just struck me,” he said.

“What?” Carol Thackerty said.

He pushed his hands into his trouser pockers, looked at the ceiling, and rocked back and forth a little on his elevated heels. “You know, I don't think that the Deacon Mouton would have made a very good city councilman anyway.”

 

 

Swankerton had the outline of a squatty pear; its fat bottom sprawled along the
expensive Gulf Coast beach and then tapered reluctantly north into quiet, middle-income residential areas whose forty and fifty-year-old elms and weeping willows cooled and shaded streets where parking was still no problem. In the warm evenings the owners of the neat houses came home, changed into bermuda shorts, and stood about, gin and tonic in hand, watching their creepy-crawler sprinklers wet down the thick green lawns and wondering whether it wasn't the right time to sell and move to the suburbs, now that the place was looking so nice.

Farther up the pear, just below the neck, the neat homes and green lawns made way for ugly frame houses that once may have been bright green or blue or even yellow, but were now mostly a disappointed gray, ugly as old soldiers. The poor whites lived there, the millhands and the rednecks and their big-boned wives and tow-headed kids. The gray houses weren't really old. Most had been built right after World War II to accommodate the returning warriors and they had been thrown up fast in developments that went by such names as Monterey Vistas and Vahlmall Gardens and Lakeview Acres. They had been cheaply built and cheaply financed with four percent VA loans and no money down to vets.

But the vets who had lived there right after World War II had long since moved away. The lawns had turned brown and some of the trees had died and the concrete streets with the fancy names were broken. Nearly every block had one or two or three rusting shrines to despair in the form of a '49 Ford with a busted block or a '51 Pontiac with frozen main bearings. Nobody admitted that the shrines even existed because admission implied ownership and it cost fifteen dollars to have them towed away.

The owners and renters here came home after work too, but they didn't change into anything. Those who worked the day shift just sat around on the shady side of the house in their plastic-webbed lawn chairs that they got at the drugstore for $1.98 each and drank Jax beer and yelled at their kids.

The gray houses with their composition roofs kept on going block after block until they ran up against the railroad tracks which split Swankerton neatly in two about halfway up the pear. The tracks, which ran all the way from Washington to Houston, served as the city's color line. North of the tracks was black. South was white.

When you crossed the tracks leading north you found yourself in another enclave of neat houses and emerald lawns and creepy-crawler sprinklers. It lasted for almost twelve blocks. The owners here were black and after work they came home and changed into their bermuda shorts and stood around, martini in hand, and wondered whether they should buy their wives a Camaro or one of those new Javelins. They were Niggertown's affluent, its political leaders, its doctors and dentists, its morticians, schoolteachers, lawyers, skilled workers, restaurant owners, insurance salesmen, policy men, and the Federal civil servants who worked out at the big Air Force depot.

Past these well-tended houses and still farther up the neck of the pear spread the rest of Niggertown, a collection of flimsy, gimcrack houses, often duplexes, whose sides were covered with Permastone or imitation brick and which often as not leaned crazily at each other. And on the edge of the city, just before the suburban sprawl began, was Shacktown, a fully integrated community, composed of packing-crate hovels, abandoned buses, and ancient house trailers that hadn't
been moved in twenty years. In Shacktown teeth were bad and bellies were swollen and eyes were glazed. Those who lived there had given up everything, but the last luxury to go had been the comforting awareness of racial identity. But now that had gone, too, and everyone in Shacktown was almost colorblind.

The stem of the pear was the Strip, a three-mile-long double strand of junkyards, motels, gas stations, nightclubs, roadhouses and honkytonks. Interspersed among these were the franchised food spots, all glass and godawful colors, that hugged the highway to offer fried chicken and tacos and hamburgers which all tasted the same but signaled the wearied traveler that a kind of civilization lay just a little way ahead.

The Strip sliced outlying suburbia neatly in two, skirted Shacktown, and when it reached the city limits they called it MacArthur Drive. Desk-top flat and six and eight and even ten lanes wide, it rolled and twisted all the way down from Chicago and St. Louis and Memphis, taking bang-on aim at the Gulf of Mexico. They called it the Strip sometimes but more often just U.S. 97. It was the river that Swankerton had never had, the route of the endless caravan of semis and articulated vans, big as box cars, that growled up hills in low tenth gear and roared down the other side, seventy and eighty miles per hour, black smoke snorting from their diesel stacks and their drivers praying for the goddamned brakes to hold. The teamsters rolled them night and day down the highway that linked the city with the North and the West and they handled more freight in a day than the railroads did in a week. They rolled down from Pittsburgh and Minneapolis and Omaha and Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, bringing Swankerton what it couldn't grow and what it couldn't make for itself, which was just about everything except textiles and vice.

“The trouble with Swankerton,” Homer Necessary said at the end of our two-hour sightseeing tour during which he had served as guide, social commentator, and economic analyst, “is that it ain't got any harbor. They got that nice beach and all those hotels, but there's no
river, so there's no harbor. They got that concrete pier that goes out about a mile and the tankers use that some, but that's really why the town never grew as much as it should've. No harbor.”

We drove on in silence for a block or so and then he said, “Now I'm gonna show you something else that's wrong with Swankerton. Or right. It all depends on how you look at it.”

He headed toward the downtown section, the older part, where the streets that ran east and west were named after such notables as Jefferson, Calhoun, Washington, Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Clay, Forrest, Hampton, Longstreet, Pickett and Early. The streets that ran north and south were numbered. We rolled down Third Street in the blue air-conditioned Impala that Necessary had rented, down to the edge of the commercial and financial districts. He pulled into a parking lot on Clay. “It's about a block from here.”

We walked the block and I sweated in my too-heavy suit. We walked past the Texas Chili Parlor and Big Billy's Inn and Emmett's Billiard Parlor where “just a guy” supposedly hung out, past a TV repair shop, and turned into a narrow store front that had a black-and-white sign reading “Books and Movies.”

“I've buttered this guy up some,” Necessary said as we went in.

Most of the books were paperback and were written by authors with such alliterative names as Norman Norway and Jennifer Jackson and Paula Pale. The covers weren't too well done, but they got their messages across. Often there were two girls of impressive physical proportions who went around in boots and whips and not much else. Sometimes there were two men and one girl or two girls and one man and they all seemed to have large, unmade beds in the background. The paperbacks' titles were about as imaginative as the names of the authors. There was
Red Lust
and
The Longest Whip
and
Broken Dyke
and
Fallen Devil.
The paperbacks took up about three-fourths of the small shop and the rest was given over to magazines that featured extraordinarily well-built muscle boys or nude girls or sometimes both.