Ace Atkins: Wicked City

Arch nodded along with Garrett, feeling good about him again, but as he did he noticed a few of the newspapermen looking at each other. They looked to have grown uncomfortable in their hard chairs in the closed-off room.

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, GARRETT DROVE ARCH OVER THE RIVER to his deluxe suite at the Ralston while troops continued hammering signs on telephone poles announcing that Fourteenth and Dillingham streets were off limits to Army personnel. Arch watched them all, slunk down in the backseat of the big black Cadillac, as Garrett talked to his driver about this wonderful place where they were all going for steaks and cocktails tonight called the CoCo Supper Club. As long as they could sneak him some liquor, all was right in the world.

“Take me home,” Arch said. “Please.”

“Nonsense,” Garrett said. “I invited half the newsmen in town to come have Sunday dinner with us. We got to get the good feelings back again. We got to let them know that you are doing everything in your power as solicitor to make sense of this horrible situation.”

“I didn’t create this place. It was here long before me.”

“Since the Civil War.”

Arch tipped a bottle of Canadian whiskey to his lips, switching from the good bourbon he’d brought from his home out in the country. “You’re goddamn right. If I tried to stop the gambling, they’d run me out of town on a greased pole.”

Garrett turned full around in the front passenger’s seat and smiled as if he’d just had a spot of great news. “Did I tell you last year I had to be institutionalized?”

“What?”

Arch just looked at him, the view of Phenix City fading from the windows around him, one of the Guard troops saluting the car. He narrowed his eyes and waited for a punch line that didn’t come.

Not long after, they were seated at the CoCo Supper Club, a hell of a little restaurant just off the runway from the Columbus Airport where you could eat fried Gulf shrimp and lobster and the best T-bone in the city while you watched planes take off and land. Garrett sat at the head of the table and ordered cocktails for everyone but himself, instead asking the waitress – a pretty little girl who called all the men doll – for an entire bottle of sparkling water with a bucket of ice and a glass. The men ate and laughed, the newsmen telling jokes and Garrett roping them back into points about the murder investigation, telling them all that they were working on those three theories and letting that bit pass just as he saw the food coming out of the kitchen and then hushing as they all settled into the shrimp and T-bones and bourbon and Gibsons with tiny onions.

Arch just looked at his food, feeling outside himself, and sometimes Garrett would ask him something and Arch would just look up expectantly, looking for another place, another situation from the one he now found himself in, and he drank. He drank at least a half dozen bourbons until he began to rattle on, mainly to himself, about Arch Ferrell – using the third person – being a good man. “Arch Ferrell never did anything illegal in his life.”

And this caused some looks from some of the newsmen and some wry smiles and poked ribs, but they all kept eating under the constant, weighted stare of Si Garrett’s owl glasses. To hell with ’em all.

Sometime during the meal, Arch looked up, sure he’d been asked a question but not sure of the question, and simply said: “Si Garrett is the best friend I got. He’s one of the greatest men in Alabama.”

And with that, Garrett motioned to the little waitress, and Arch heard him whisper into her ear: “Please bring Mr. Ferrell another. But make this one a triple.”

“Sure thing, doll.”

Later on, the steaks were polished off, just bloody bones on the plates, the fat and grease congealed into a purplish pink mixture where some of the newsmen had squashed the cigarettes they continued smoking. Arch smoked, too, but he stared beyond the newsmen and out beyond the grand dining room of the CoCo Supper Club and the empty bandstand. For a long while, he watched the planes and the flashing of red lights on the tarmac, but then he noticed the long ash on his cigarette and realized he hadn’t taken a puff.

He studied the cigarette, blinked, and then leaned in close to Garrett’s ear.

“I know all about that talk,” Arch said. “I’ve heard it since Pat was killed. I’m tough and mean, nobody knows that better than me. I’m not a religious fella, never have been, but this thing is making me wish that I were. But no matter what anybody says, I didn’t kill Patterson. I just couldn’t kill a human being.”

He nodded to the group, stubbed out his cigarette, and then took down all the bourbon in one gulp. Some of the men kept gnawing on the bones, freeing those last pieces of gristle. Arch nodded again, satisfied with an answer to a question no one asked, his eyes closing and then opening, his head bobbing down and then jerking back up awake.

And then he stood and wished everyone good-night before placing his hands on the table, taking a deep breath, and vomiting all over the white linen.

“I WAS GOING TO LEAVE THIS DIRTY, GODDAMN TOWN,” John Patterson said to me, searching through another row of files in the endless wood file cabinets in his father’s law office. After a Sunday morning service, he worked row by row, pulling out anything that could be of help, or anything too personal, and setting manila folders into cardboard boxes. He stopped, resting his arm on top of a cabinet. “I don’t want to be a vigilante or savior now. Hell, I never understood my father. His political ambitions. Why he stayed here. He could’ve made better money in about any other town in Alabama.”

I didn’t say anything. I just waited for another box of files to take down to a truck I borrowed. The window air conditioner had been cut off by mistake, and I fanned my face with a ball cap.

“The only reason I wanted to be a lawyer was to make enough money to retire early. Go fishing. Enjoy life. Not this mess.”

“Nothin’ wrong with that.”

“You are damn right,” John said. “Listen, Murphy, I want you to store this at your house, all of this. I don’t want that bastard Si Garrett going anywhere near my father’s papers.”

I reached for another loaded box on Albert Patterson’s desk.

John had rolled up his dress sleeves to his elbows and his hairy forearms glistened with sweat, not a bit of comfort coming from an old Emerson table fan.

He kept flipping through files, his fingers moving each one, another drawn and then slipped back, more yet for the growing boxes we had started to stack.

“You and Britton turn up anything?”

“A little,” I said. “Heard something about our old friend Tommy Capps.”

“Dynamite?”

“Hell of a name,” I said.

“He’d never kill my father.”

“He blew up Hugh Bentley’s house,” I said, talking about the attempted murder two years ago of our little anti-vice group’s president. His two sons and wife miraculously survived.

“You know those men from Montgomery accused Bentley of blowing up his own house to get sympathy.”

We worked for an hour in the heated second floor of the Coulter Building, the old plaster-walled law office feeling like the loft of a barn or an attic. Every few minutes, I’d take a box down to the back of the truck. Armed guards and local hick police watched the still Sunday streets, but no one asked what we were doing.

Everyone seemed to be afraid to look John Patterson in the eye.

Just before John locked up, we heard heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs and up on the landing. Deputy Sheriff Bert Fuller walked inside the office, mopping his face with a red bandanna, with Joe Smelley from the state police right behind. Fuller wore a suit, and Smelley wore wrinkled pants and a short-sleeved dress shirt soaked through the armpits.