Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Necessary was off and running down the alley. I followed, the camera cradled in my arms. When we reached the end of the alley, Necessary stopped and peered around the corner. He was breathing even harder than I was, great, harsh, lung-filling pants. That pleased me.

“Let’s go,” he said or croaked, and we darted across the deserted street, went another block down the alley, only trotting now and barely that. We came out of the alley, turned right, and walked to Necessary’s rented car. He opened the trunk and I put the camera inside it.

We pulled out sedately and drove down Forrest at twenty-five miles an hour. A squad car roared by, headed in the opposite direction. Its siren was off, but its red-and-white dome light spun angrily.

Necessary slammed the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “It just doesn’t make any goddamned sense,” he said.

“That’s probably what Soderbell thought, too, if he had the time.”

Necessary glanced at me and shook his head, a little impatiently, I felt. “I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the cop turning on the spotlight. Christ, I never knew one of them who’d look up even two inches above his head.”

I could have said something like “you do now” or “there’s always the first time,” but I didn’t. I just sat there and looked for something that I didn’t see.

After a moment or two, Necessary said, “It was a lucky shot. That cop was just lucky.” I could have argued that, too, but I didn’t. I just sat there and looked some more.

“Funny about Soderbell though,” Necessary went on. “He goes all through Vietnam twice and winds up getting shot in some back alley. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, “it does that all right.” I found what I was looking for and said, “Here’s one.” Necessary stopped the car beside the lighted telephone booth. I got out, dropped in a dime, and dialed a number. It rang for a long time before someone answered with a gruff hello.

“This is Dye,” I said.

“Yeah... Yeah,” Lynch’s sleepy voice said.

“Homer Necessary was up to something tonight. I just found out about it.”

“What?” Lynch said and sounded less sleepy.

“I hear that some cops were in on a fur burglary. Homer Necessary got the whole thing down on film. The cops shot somebody. I don’t know who yet.”

“When’d all this happen?” Lynch said, and his voice was crisp and wide awake now.

“I just heard about it.”

“You didn’t know about it before?”

“I just heard about it,” I said again. “I thought you might want to wake up Loambaugh.”

“Shit,” Lynch said just before he said goodbye and hung up.

I got back in the car and Necessary said, “What’d he say?”

“He said shit.”

Necessary chuckled a little. “Can’t say that I blame him,” he said. “Can’t say that I blame him at all.”

Necessary and I spent a long, predawn hour with Victor Orcutt in his Rickenbacker suite when we returned to the hotel. Orcutt listened politely while we told him how Soderbell had died. When we were finished he said, “Well, I suppose those things are bound to happen,” and never mentioned him again, except indirectly, when he made sure that we had brought back the camera, if not the cameraman.

I spent five minutes telling Orcutt what I thought should be done with the film. He listened attentively, said, “Good. I agree,” and then launched a twenty-minute monologue which instructed me how to carry out my suggestion. “You do understand?” he said.

“Does that mean do I agree with you?”

“That isn’t important,” he said. “It merely requires understanding so that you’ll be able to function properly.”

“Since it was my idea, I understand well enough not to blow it.”

“But you don’t agree with my method?” he said.

“As you mentioned, that’s not important.”

Orcutt turned to Necessary. “Homer?”

“Oh, I understand everything just fine,” he said, “and I like it even better. I like it so much that I might even have a drink to celebrate.”

Carol Thackerty came away from the phone that she’d been using since we arrived. “There’s no ice,” she said to Necessary, “and your plane will be standing by in fifteen minutes. The lab in New Orleans already has a rough cut of what Soderbell previously filmed. As soon as they process what he shot last night, or rather this morning, they’ll make a print and splice it on to the rough cut.”

“I don’t need any ice,” Necessary said and poured himself a drink from a bottle that he’d found on a table near the door. “Did you tell the lab that the new stuff’ll need special processing?”

“They know all about it,” she said. “Soderbell had already filled them in. They’ll be able to deliver a completed rough cut to you by one o’clock this afternoon. The plane will get you back here by two-thirty. You should be able to turn over the rough cut to Dye by three.”

“What kind of plane?” said Necessary, the detail stickler.

“A Lear jet.”

Necessary finished his drink. “See you around three,” he said and left.

I stood up. “I need some sleep,” I said.

“Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said, also rising, “I dislike to harp on this, but I do very much hope that you will follow my instructions as closely as conditions permit.”

“You want it in writing, Orcutt?” I said, the testiness in my voice stronger than I had intended.

“I don’t particularly care for that tone.”

“Neither do I, but it’s the only one I have left at five in the morning. I’ve had a bad night. I always do when somebody gets killed. It makes me irritable. Even surly.”

“It wasn’t your fault that—”

“Nothing’s ever my fault,” I said. “I just do the job I’m paid to do and if somebody dies along the way, well, as you say, those things happen. So quit worrying. I’ll do it just the way you told me to and for all I know, it may work. If it doesn’t, you can always fall back on contingency plan R-twenty-three.”

“You’re teasing again,” Orcutt said. “I’m so glad. That means you’re in a better humor.”

“Ah, Christ,” I said and went out the door, slamming it behind me.

I finally went to sleep around six and Ramsey Lynch didn’t call until seven-thirty and when I picked up the phone there was no trace of jolly fat man in his voice.

“You’d better get your ass over here,” he said.

“I’m busy.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I and I’m still busy.”

“I might send somebody around for you.”

“Who? A pair of those moonlighters who got their pictures taken last night?”

“It’s an idea,” he said. “They know all about it now, and if I told them that you were kind of involved in the whole thing, they’d volunteer to go fetch you.”

“Do that and you’ll never see it.”

“Have you got it?”

“I can get it.”

“When?”

“This afternoon about three.”

“What’re you going to do with it?”

“I thought you might like your own private preview before it goes out over the airwaves and into the living rooms of Swankerton.”

“You got an idea how to kill it?”

“Maybe. It’ll cost a little.”

Lynch was silent for a moment and I listened to his heavy breathing. “You bring it out here.” He almost managed to make it sound like a polite request.

“Around three or three-thirty. You’ll need a sixteen-millimeter projector.”

“I’ll get one.”

“You’ll need something else, too,” I said.

“What?”

“Your chief of police.”

At three-ten that afternoon, about the time that Gorman Smalldane was supposed to be landing at the airport, I was driving out to Lynch’s Victorian home in a newly rented Plymouth Roadrunner which had a hot engine under its hood and a brown, round can of 16mm film on the seat beside its driver whose nerves, some might have said, were shot.