James Chase: Just Another Sucker

Those few words put me onto something that was as hot and as dangerous as an exploding volcano. It took me two months of secret and patient investigation before I got the complete story. It was a story that would hit the headlines of the Herald for weeks.

A Chicago mob planned to take over Palm City. They planned to install slot machines, to set up brothels and all the rest of the paraphernalia of organised vice. The monthly take was estimated to be two and a half million dollars.

When I had convinced myself of the facts, I thought at first this mob must be crazy. I couldn’t believe they could just walk in and take over this city how and when they liked. Then I got a hot tip that the Palm City Police Commissioner as well as half a dozen of the important administrators had been bought and had agreed to give the mob the protection it needed.

Then I made my major mistake: I tried to carry on the investigation on my own. I wanted this to be a personal scoop, and it wasn’t until I had got the necessary evidence and an outline of the articles I intended to write exposing the conspiracy that I went to J. Matthew Cubitt, my boss and owner of the Herald.

I told him what was cooking and he listened, his grey, thin face expressionless.

When I was through, he said he would want to check my facts. There was a coldness in his manner and an odd lack of enthusiasm that should have warned me. Although I had dug deep and had persuaded a lot of people to talk, I hadn’t dug deep enough. The mob had bought the Herald . That was something I had never thought possible. I learned later they had promised Cubitt a seat in the Senate if he played along with them and the bribe had been too much for this grasping, ambitious newspaper owner.

He asked me to turn over all my information to him to check. On my way back to the bungalow to get the dossier, I was stopped by a police car.

The Police Commissioner, I was told, wanted to see me. I was escorted to police headquarters where I had an interview with the Commissioner.

He was a hard, direct man and he didn’t attempt to hedge. He put on his desk ten thousand dollars in new crisp bills. He would trade the bills for the dossier and I could forget the investigation. How about it?

Apart from the fact I had never taken a bribe and didn’t intend to start now, I knew the story I was ready to write would put my name on the front page for weeks and would establish my reputation in the newspaper world as nothing else could. I got up and walked out, and I walked right into trouble.

I turned my dossier over to Cubitt and told him of the bribe offered me by the Police Commissioner.

He stared at me with his hooded eyes, nodded and told me to come to his house at half past ten that night. By then I would have had time to check on my findings and decide the best way to handle the set-up. I guessed he burned the dossier. I never saw it again.

Nina had been in on the investigation from the start. She was scared sick about it, realising, as I did, the kind of dynamite I was handling, but she also realised this was my big chance and she went along with me.

I left home just before ten for my date with Cubitt. I could see how scared she was as she went with me to the car. I had an uneasy feeling myself, but I trusted Cubitt.

His residence was in Palm Bay. To get there, I had to drive along a stretch of lonely road. On this road, I ran into trouble.

A police car, travelling fast, overtook me and sideswiped me. The idea maybe was to force my car off the road and into the sea, but it didn’t work out that way. There was a pretty bad smash and the police driver got his ribs shoved in by his steering wheel. His companion, apart from a shaking, wasn’t hurt. He arrested me for dangerous driving. I knew it was a frame-up, but there was nothing I could do about it. A couple of minutes later, another police car arrived with Sergeant Bayliss of the Homicide Squad at the wheel. What he was doing on this lonely road no one ever bothered to ask. He took charge. The injured cop was rushed to hospital and I was taken to headquarters.

On the way, Bayliss suddenly told the driver to stop. We were in a dark, deserted street. He told me to get out. The driver got out too and grabbed me from behind, locking my arms. Bayliss took a bottle of Scotch from the glove compartment, filled his mouth with whisky and sprayed the whisky in my face and over my shirt. Then he produced a blackjack and clubbed me over the head.

I came to in a cell, and from that moment, I was sunk. The injured cop died. They nailed me on a manslaughter rap and I drew four years. The attorney who defended me fought like a tiger, but he didn’t get anywhere. When he introduced the conspiracy evidence, it was promptly thrown out. Cubitt, on oath, said he never had my dossier, and that he was going to get rid of me anyway as I was not only an unreliable newspaper man, but a secret drunk.

All the time I was serving my sentence I kept thinking what a sucker I had been. I told myself I must have been crazy to have tried to buck the Administration on my own.

It didn’t help me when I heard the Police Commissioner had resigned under pressure, and that the Administration had had a complete shake up. There had been an inquiry after the hints my attorney had dropped around and the Chicago mob had decided to move in elsewhere, but that didn’t help me. I was stuck with a four year sentence for killing a cop while drunk in charge of a car, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

And now, after spending three and a half years in a cell, I was free again. I was a newspaper man with no other training. Cubitt had blacklisted me, and that meant I wouldn’t get any other newspaper work. I would have to make a new career for myself. I had no idea what I was going to do. Although I earned well, I had always been a spender. I hadn’t left Nina much to live on when I went to jail. There wouldn’t be much left now: if anything. I had worried myself sick wondering what she was doing and what was happening to her, but I was obstinate and stupid enough to insist through my attorney that she shouldn’t write to me. The thought of that fat, sadistic Warden reading her letters before I got them was something I just couldn’t take.

I said to Renick, ‘How has she been making out? How is she?’

‘She’s fine,’ he told me. ‘You didn’t doubt that, did you? She’s discovered a talent for art. She decorates pottery of all things and makes quite a good living out of it.’

He swung the Buick around the corner of the street in which I had my home.

The sight of the bungalow brought a lump to my throat. The familiar street was deserted. The rain came down in grey sheets, bouncing on the road and the sidewalk.

Renick pulled up outside the front gate.

‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said and gripped my arm. ‘You’re lucky, Harry. I wish I had someone like Nina waiting for me.’

I got out of the car. Without looking at him, I started up the familiar path. Then the front door swung open, and there was Nina.

Around six-thirty on the seventh morning after my release from jail, I came awake abruptly. I had been dreaming I was back in a cell, and it took me a moment or so to realise I was in my own bedroom with Nina sleeping at my side.

I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling and began to wonder, as I had been wondering for the past seven days what I was going to do to earn a living. I had already probed the newspaper world. As I had expected, there was nothing for me. Cubitt’s influence spread like the tentacles of an octopus. Even the minor local paper was afraid to touch me.

There wasn’t much else I could do. Writing was my profession, but I wasn’t a creative writer. I was a reporter. I had to have facts before I could produce good copy. Without the facilities of a newspaper behind me I was sunk.