Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Orcutt paced the room and tapped a forefinger against his lower lip. It seemed to help him think. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “I understand that someone is checking us out for you.”

“An old friend. He’s also checking out Ramsey Lynch and the chief of police.”

“Good,” Orcutt said. “I’m glad you’ve done that. I’d say it shows that you prefer our side, providing that our references prove satisfactory.”

“You can say that,” I said. “You can also say that I’m merely suspicious.”

“I certainly hope so,” Orcutt said. “Now then, I’ve spent scads of time going over a list of persons who might be sacrificed to enhance your reputation with Lynch and his people. For the purpose of verisimilitude, I’ve selected a man and a woman, both of whom, as you would say, Mr. Dye, need ruining.”

“A woman’s good, if she’s gone and done something real smelly,” Necessary said and then looked around the room as if he expected someone to contradict him. Nobody did.

“We’ll start with her then,” Orcutt said. “I’ll give you a condensed version.” He took several four-by-five-inch cards from an inside coat pocket and flipped through them.

Her name, he said, was Mrs. Francine Sobour, widow of Maurice Sobour who had died at seventy-eight six years ago of a heart attack brought on, some said, by the rapacious demands of his bride of six months. Mrs. Sobour was forty-two years old when she married her husband and two months after the wedding he changed his will, disinheriting a number of deserving sons, daughters, grandchildren and charities, and leaving his new wife the entire estate, which was valued at approximately a million dollars. Although Mr. Sobour had no medical history that indicated a heart condition, there had been no autopsy. “We have a sworn statement that she paid the county coroner five thousand dollars cash not to conduct the autopsy.”

“Where’s the coroner now?” I said.

“Dead,” Orcutt said, “but his statement is witnessed and attested to by his wife and two sons, who claim to have been present at the transaction with the Sobour woman.”

“Where are they now?” Necessary said.

“In Florida, I think.”

“How much the statement cost us?” Necessary said.

“Another five thousand.”

“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.”