The Fools in Town Are on Our Side (42 page)

“I've never once asked for your love, Myra,” I said. “Only for your respect.” It was a harmless enough way to say goodbye.

I only needed a glance to tell what he was and who had sent him. He stood in the center of my room, his hands carefully in sight, but well balanced on the balls of his feet in case I tried to throw him out before he said what he had come to say. I nodded at him and tossed my room key on the dresser.

“How's Carmingler?” I said.

“Fine.”

I pointed at the bathroom door. “I'm going in there and shower and shave and probably take a shit. I'll be fifteen minutes. You can make yourself useful in the meantime by ordering up some coffee. I've only had one cup this morning and I'd like some more. Okay?”

“All right,” he said.

He was still standing in the center of the room when I came out, but he now held a cup and saucer. I went over to the dresser and poured myself a cup. Then I sat in the room's most comfortable chair and looked at him.

“You know what somebody else and I call you?” I said.

“What?”

“We call you ‘just a guy.' “

He nodded as if he didn't care what I called him. He was young, probably around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, wore a sleepy expression and a faint smile, as if he thought I was just a little quaint or old-fashioned. Maybe I was.

“I'll make two guesses,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You sent a couple of punks up here about a month ago to see how nervous I was. That's one guess. The second one is that your name is Mugar and that you're Section Two's young man of the year.”

He walked to the dresser and put his cup down. He moved well and had a deft way of pouring a cup of coffee. He drank it black, I noticed. He turned and looked at me, taking his time. His ash blond hair fitted his head like a bathing cap except for a few curly locks that wandered partway down his forehead. It gave him a slightly tousled look that must have cost him fifteen minutes before the mirror each morning with comb and brush.

The rest of him was regular enough, about five-eleven, a hundred and sixty pounds, regular features except for his dark hazel eyes, which I thought were a little too confident for his age, but I may have been jealous.

“Carmingler wants you to pack it in,” he said. It was his first complete sentence and it came out Eastern Seaboard from somewhere south of Boston and north of Baltimore.

“All right,” I said and watched his reaction with pleasure. He started slightly, but recovered well enough.

“You'll do it then?” he said.

“I'll take the third flight out. If Carmingler had said, ‘please,' I'd take the first one.”

“They told me to expect some smart answers.”

“Anything else?”

“He wants you out of here next week. Friday.”

“And you're to see to it?”

“That's right. I'm to see to it.”

“He wanted me out a month ago and you made a half-hearted attempt that didn't work. Why wait till now to try again?”

“The first was just a precautionary move,” he said. “Now we're certain.”

“Carmingler's never been certain of anything,” I said.

“He is of this.”

“You've waited long enough for it so I'll say what?”

“Gerald Vicker.”

“Old Gerald.”

“He's got to Senator Simon.”

“That's not quite news,” I said.

“It will be when Simon makes his speech next Friday.”

“You're a born tease, aren't you?”

“You want it all?”

“Most of it anyway.”

“All right. Vicker got to Senator Simon and told him all about the Li Teh fiasco and how you'd spent three months in jail. The Senator's not too happy with Section Two anyway, but I won't go into the rea sons unless you insist.”

“I don't.”

“So now he's going to make a speech on the Senate floor about the Li Teh thing and about how Section Two is messing in domestic politics where it's not supposed to be. And you're the goat. That's bad enough, of course, but Simon's also working with a top magazine that's going to run a muckraker's delight on you and this crew you're working with here in Swankerton.”

“They've got two sources, I'd say. Gerald Vicker and his brother, Ramsey Lynch.”

“That's right.”

“Carmingler's worried about his appropriations,” I said.

“That and he just doesn't like publicity.”

“Well, you can tell him that I think he's got a real problem.”

“You've got until Friday,” he said.

“Your name
is
Mugar, isn't it?”

“Franz Mugar.”

“If I don't bow out by Friday, what happens then, Franz?”

“You'll bow out one way or another.”

“A promise, I take it?”

“If you like. If you don't, it's a threat.”

“What about my associates?”

“A little scummy, aren't they?”

“Not for me, but then I bet you and I don't travel in the same crowd. I know Carmingler doesn't.”

“We don't care about them,” Mugar said. “We just don't want anything of ours around that can tie us into this mess when it breaks.”

“And I'm the anything?”

“That's right.”

“And if I don't go quietly, then I'll go however you decide's best?”

“That's right,” Mugar said again.

“I don't like threats. They make me nervous.”

“You should take something for it.”

I rose, walked over to the phone, and picked it up. “Chief Necessary's room, please.”

Mugar stared at me. I beckoned him over to the phone. “I'll hold it so you can hear,” I said. He moved over so that he could hear.

When Necessary came on I said, “How much room do we have in that new jail of ours?”

“Plenty,” Necessary said.

“There's somebody in town who calls himself Franz Mugar. I think he's our old friend ‘just a guy.' ”

“You want to cool him off?”

“I think so.”

“You want it legal and all?”

“No.”

“We can keep him a while on one thing or another. Where is he?”

“Right here in my room.”

“Will he stay put until I send somebody around?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'll ask him.”

Mugar was backing toward the door. “You sonofabitch,” he said.

“I don't think so, Homer,” I said.

Necessary chuckled. “Well, tell him we'll pick him up inside a couple of hours or so.”

“I'll see what he says,” I said and told Necessary that I'd ride to headquarters with him. He said he was leaving in fifteen minutes and I said that would be fine. I hung up the phone and turned toward
Mugar who was at the door, his hand on the knob, a look of angry disbelief in his eyes.

“You'd do it, wouldn't you?” he said.

“You can call Carmingler and he'll have you out in an hour, but then we'd have you back in another hour. It can go on for quite a while. In and out two or three or four times a day. Of course, you could sue, couldn't you?”

“You've had it, Dye. I swear you have.”

“Tell you what I'll do,” I said. “I'll give you an hour to get the first plane out of Swankerton. After that, well—”

Mugar shook his head slowly from side to side. “You
are
through, Dye. You just don't know how through you are.”

“You are catching that plane, aren't you?”

“Sure. Sure, I'm catching the plane, and when it lands and I get through doing what I'm going to do, maybe I'll even have time to feel a little sorry for you. Maybe. But I don't really think so.”

“You know,” I said in what I hoped was a thoughtful tone, “there is one thing you can do for me when you see Carmingler.”

“On top of everything else that I'm going to do,” he said, a little of his confidence coming back.

“That's right. On top of everything else.”

“What?”

“Tell Carmingler I said that if he's still set on it, and can't spare the experienced help, he'd better come himself.”

“That's all?” Mugar said.

“That's all. You won't forget, will you?”

“No,” he said, still keeping most of the bitterness out of his voice, “I won't forget.”

“I didn't think that you would.”

 

 

The second thing that Homer Necessary did after he was sworn in as chief of
police was to order a specially equipped Chrysler Imperial which had arrived only a few days before. It was black, not much longer than a pocket battleship, and had a hotted-up engine with a four-barrel carburetor to make it go fast. In its air-conditioned rear, where we now were, it had leather upholstery, a TV set, a telephone, a bar of sorts, an AM-FM radio, a police radio, and a sawed-off shotgun which went by the euphemism of riot weapon. Necessary's driver was Sergeant Lester Krone, the sponsor of a local hot-rod club whose members called themselves the Leaping Lepers. Sergeant Krone was fond of the car's red light and siren and used them at his discretion, which meant most of the time. Necessary didn't seem to mind.

“What happened to your friend?” Necessary said.

“You mean ‘just a guy'?”

“Yeah.”

“He left town.”

Necessary grinned. “You roust him?”

“He might call it that.”

“Was he bad news?”

“Bad enough. I'll tell you about it at noon when we meet with Orcutt and after I see your friend Mr. Lynch.”

Necessary pushed a button that rolled the glass up between us and Sergeant Krone. “Old Lynch is getting antsy.”

“I know,” I said. “He called you three times yesterday for a meeting. He wants to know what the hell you're up to.”

“His weekly take's down,” Necessary said and smiled comfortably.

“By about three-fourths, he claims.”

“That's about right.”

“He's getting pressure from New Orleans.”

“He'll be getting some more after our meeting this morning.”

“More reorganization?” I said.

“The last one.”

“Who?”

“Henderson.”

“He's vice squad,” I said.

“That's right, he is, isn't he?”

Necessary liked me to be present when, in his words, he “rattled the box and shook ‘em up.” The sessions never lasted more than twenty minutes, were highly educational, often emotional, and those who had been summoned often left white-faced and visibly shaken.

“New uniform?” I said.

Necessary looked down and ran his hand over the blue summerweight worsted uniform's gold buttons. “Yeah, three of them came yesterday. What do you think?”

“Becoming. It matches your left eye.”

“You want one?”

“Not unless it has a Sam Browne belt.”

“We can put in a special order.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

Necessary's office on the twelfth floor of the new municipal building was richly carpeted, contained a large desk and some comfortable chairs, two flags on standards, the stars and bars of the Confederacy, and the stars and stripes of the U.S.A., a country to which Swankerton's allegiance was nominally pledged. The room also had a small bar,
an autographed photograph of the mayor, and an unsigned one of the President. Through the black-tinted windows there was a gloomy view of the Gulf of Mexico.

Necessary had quickly recruited himself a staff of young, able persons who handled the paperwork and left him free for “standing at the window and nodding yes or no,” as he put it. His secretary was a young Negro girl whose appointment had stirred up considerable comment, none of it favorable, and when anyone even vaguely alluded to it, Necessary would smile, slip into his best mushmouth drawl, which wasn't bad, and say, “I sho wouldn't have hired her either if she wasn't my wife's youngest sister.”

Captain Warren Gamaliel Henderson was born in Ohio the year that they elected his partial namesake President. His family moved to Swankerton the following year in 1921, switched quickly to the Democratic party, and started calling their youngest son by his initials.

Now somewhere past his fiftieth birthday, W.G. had run the Swankerton vice squad for a dozen profitable years and it had rubbed off on him. He was a big man with a red, rubbery face and neatly cropped, thick gray hair. His nose was purpling at its blunt tip and there were networks of deep lines at the corners of his eyes that had all the warmth of old pieces of slate. His big bony chin, freshly barbered, underscored a stubborn mouth that seemed frozen halfway between a smirk and a snarl. He also had gaunt, sunken cheeks whose insides he liked to suck on when he was thinking. He didn't carry any spare fat that I could see and his uniform had cost him more than the city paid him in two weeks. He looked exactly what he was: tough, mean and nasty, and none of it bothered Homer Necessary in the least.

“Time we had a little private talk,” Necessary said, leaning back in his high-topped executive chair.

“I like private talks in private,” Henderson said and stared at me.

“You mean my special assistant bothers you?”

“If that's what you call him.”

“I call him Mr. Dye and I have a lot of confidence in his judgment and I think you should too.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

It was a bleak and wintry smile that Necessary gave Henderson. “Mr. Dye calls me Chief Necessary, Captain Henderson, and I think you'd better call me that, too.”

“Whatever you say, Chief Necessary.”

“How long have you been head of the vice squad?”

“Twelve years.”

“Now that's a long time, isn't it?”

“I like it.”

“I'm sure you do,” Necessary said, “but didn't you ever get just a little sick of all those whores and the pimps and the fags and the rest of the lot?”