Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Croner nodded glumly. “You want anything to read?” he said and waved a hand at the racks of books and magazines. “On the house.”

Necessary shook his head firmly. “My wife don’t like me to read that stuff less I’m home where it’ll do her some good. How ‘bout you?” he said to me.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Croner nodded again, just as glumly as before. “Don’t blame you. It’s all a bunch of crap. You’d be surprised at who buys it though. Sometimes I think this whole town is full of freaks.”

We got the car out of the lot and Necessary drove down Fifth to Forrest and turned left. “How much cash you got on you?” he said.

“About eight hundred.”

“That’ll get you in.”

“Where?”

“I’ll show you in a minute.” He turned right on Sixth Street and went two more blocks. “Just to your left is the new municipal center and police headquarters where I spent last night,” he said.

It was new, about fifteen stories high, and with its parking lot took up most of a city block. It was built of precast concrete slabs and its windows were tinted almost black and recessed a foot or so into the outer wall. The black windows gave it a grim, forbidding air and that was probably the way that they wanted it to look.

“They got the criminal courts in there, too,” Necessary said. “The city and county jails are around back.”

Across Sixth Street from headquarters were the usual inexpensive restaurants, poolhalls, and bars frequented by those who have good and bad reason to hang around police headquarters. There was a lawyers’ building and a number of signs painted on windows in gold leaf advertising twenty-four-hour bail bond service. The block also had three pawnshops.

Necessary drove into another parking lot and we walked up Sixth Street and turned into the side entrance of a three-story brick building whose ground floor was home to the Bench and Gavel Bar. We walked up a flight of stairs and down a hall that was lined with the offices of bail bondsmen and one-man legal offices. A phone rang occasionally. The sound of electric typewriters was constant. Necessary pushed through a door with no lettering on it. Past the door was a regular reception room with a desk and a chair. Behind the desk sat a young, uniformed policeman who nodded at Necessary and stared at me.

“You gonna try it again, huh?” he said to Necessary.

“Try,” Necessary said.

“He okay?” the cop said, nodding at me.

“He’s okay,” Necessary said.

The cop reached under the desk and a buzzer sounded. We went through another door and into a room whose three windows offered a fine view of police headquarters across Sixth Street. There were two poker tables in the room, six chairs at each, and at least three of the gamblers wore the blue uniforms and the insignia of police lieutenant or captain. There were two chairs open at the far table and Necessary and I sat down next to each other. On my left was a police lieutenant with a small stack of chips in front of him. He nodded at me and I nodded back.

A young man of about thirty with green eyes and crinkly brown hair grinned at Necessary and said, “Well, Chief, you gonna try to get even?”

“I’ll take two hundred worth,” Necessary said and pushed ten twenties across the table. The man with the green eyes looked at me and said, “How much, friend?”

“Two hundred,” I said and gave him four fifties. We played draw for an hour and I won nearly fifty dollars. Necessary lost a hundred. The police lieutenant was the big loser. He dropped nearly a thousand during the hour to a pair of quiet thin men with careful faces whose conversation was limited to “in, out, call, up twenty, or check.” Whenever the chips in front of the lieutenant disappeared, he merely looked at the man with the crinkly hair, who shoved another two or three-hundred-dollar stack at him. The lieutenant was a bad player, a compulsive better, and an indifferent bluffer. At four o’clock he looked at his watch, cashed in forty dollars’ worth of chips, nodded at me again, rose and left. The two captains at the other table also cashed in and left.

The man with the crinkly hair sighed. “Thank God he doesn’t win often,” he said to nobody in particular.

“Free ride again, huh?” Necessary said.

“When they win, they win. When they lose, they put it on the tab and the tab’s never paid.” He looked at Necessary. “Hear you had a little trouble last night.”

“Just a misunderstanding,” Necessary said.

“Uh-huh,” the man with the green eyes and crinkly hair said, “that’s what I heard. A misunderstanding.”

“Deal,” said one of the men with a careful face. We played until five and I lost $125. Necessary was ahead a hundred or so. He shoved his chips in and the man with the crinkly hair cashed them without comment. I tossed him the couple of chips that I had left and he handed me $10.

“Come back,” he said, “now that you know the way.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will.”

A different young policeman was on duty at the desk in the waiting room. He looked at us as we went out but said nothing. Halfway down the stairs, Necessary said, “That’s one of the six games that Lynch runs. It starts at nine every morning and runs till about five A.M. The headquarters’ brass play free, but they’re all pretty bad and don’t win much.”

When we were on Sixth Street, Necessary paused and said, “You want a drink?”

“Sounds good.”

We went into the cool, damp interior of the Bench and Gavel, sat in a booth, and ordered two gin and tonics. Necessary took a long swallow of his and said, “How’d you like the tour?”

“Educational.”

“Give you any ideas?”

“A few.”

“We only skimmed the surface today,” he said.

“What’s it look like underneath?”

“It’s not the looks so much, it’s the smell.”

“Pretty bad?”

“It stinks,” Necessary said.

“And the more it’s stirred, the worse it’ll get.”

Necessary finished his drink and waved for another one. “You figure on doing a little stirring?”

I nodded. “When I find a long enough spoon.”

The evening paper, The News-Calliope , broke the story a week later with a screaming, eight-column banner. Skirting the libel laws by a legal pica or so, the publication charged that Mrs. Francine Sobour, prominent realtor and secretary of the Swankerton Clean Government Association, had stolen nearly a half million dollars from some Catholic nuns and had used the funds to get herself out of a financial hole.

To prove it, the newspaper printed pictures of Xeroxed copies of various checks and documents that had been involved in the transaction. There was even a signed, front-page editorial by the editor and publisher himself, Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III, calling upon Mrs. Sobour to resign from the Clean Government Association “until these damaging and shocking allegations are explained to the complete satisfaction of concerned citizens, Catholic and Protestant alike.” He forgot to mention those of the Jewish faith, but that must have been an unintentional oversight.

The story pushed Washington and Southeast Asia back to pages four and five. The reform candidate for mayor, a prissy-looking attorney with rimless glasses, said that he was “deeply disturbed.” The incumbent mayor, Pierre (Pete) Robineaux, whom I had met at Lynch’s Victorian house, said that it was “shocking, but not surprising,” and Phetwick’s paper printed a picture of him saying it with his tiny mouth agape and his eyes bulging half out of their sockets. The law firm that handled Mrs. Sobour’s affairs issued a statement that in one paragraph made vague threats about filing a libel suit and in the next announced that Mrs. Sobour would “have no comment at present.”