Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Loambaugh turned slowly and his face was pale and his hands began to shake. He looked at his hands as if they belonged to somebody else and then rested them on the back of a chair. But the shakes were in his arms now and they seemed to travel up them slowly until they reached his shoulders. He quivered visibly, but seemed unaware of it. His face was no longer white, but almost gray instead, and his eyes were fixed on Lynch in an unblinking stare as if he had just peered into the future and didn’t much like what he’d seen.

Lynch wouldn’t look at Loambaugh. He gazed at the surface of the table instead, and when he spoke again, his voice was still low and soft as if he were talking to himself and was comfortable doing so. “Well, we’ve been talking about a lot of threats here this afternoon, haven’t we, Cal? So I’m going to talk about something that I thought I’d never have to. I’m going to talk about little Timmy Thornton with his torn asshole and little Beth Mary Fames, all of six and a half, with her little pussy chewed up so much that they had to take twelve stitches in it, and maybe I should mention little Barbara Wynnewood, who got it both front and rear and then had all of her upper teeth knocked out because she bit it. Now these are the ones that I got evidence to prove, Cal. I admit that there are a couple of others that are nothing but pure D speculation and rumor, but the ones I mentioned, well, I got the facts and even some nigger witnesses to back them up. Now I suggest you sit yourself down and write out that resignation and then we’ll just forget about everything that’s been said and done in this room this afternoon.”

I watched Loambaugh disintegrate as Lynch spoke. He slumped, caved in really, I suppose, and I wondered if he would ever get his posture back. His eyes glazed, but they never left Lynch, and they seemed to watch the words that came out of the fat man’s mouth. He continued to tremble and his mouth opened and his swollen tongue played around his lips, but he didn’t seem aware of it. His color went from gray back to pasty white and a couple of red spots appeared high up on his cheekbones. When Lynch stopped talking, Loambaugh looked around warily as if he might have stumbled into the wrong room. Then he pulled out a chair, sat down on it cautiously, like an old man, reached for the paper and carbons, interleaved them in a mechanical fashion, and began to write. His hand still shook and he wrote large, bearing down hard on the paper with the pen. I watched him sign his name. He did it carefully and slowly, as if these were the last times he would ever sign it. All five copies. He put the pen down slowly, pushed the papers toward Lynch, rose, and walked out of the room. He moved blindly, bumped against two chairs, and fumbled with the sliding doors.

Lynch watched Loambaugh leave and when he was gone, the fat man said, “Now, by God, I hated to do that to old Cal.” He slipped the carbons from between the sheets of paper and handed me one of the copies. “I’ll turn the rest over to the mayor and the city council. You drive a hard bargain, Dye. Mighty hard.”

I folded the carbon of the resignation and put it in my pocket. “You haven’t heard it all yet.”

Lynch turned slowly in his chair until he could face me. He looked as if he expected to chew something that would taste bad. He swallowed once and coughed. “I haven’t heard it all?” he said.

“No. There’s more.”

“You better tell me what it is then, hadn’t you?” He was using the same low tone that he had used on Loambaugh. I didn’t like it.

“I name the new chief of police.”

“You?”

“That’s right.”

“You name the new chief of police,” he said slowly, spacing the words so that he could savor each one. “You.”

“Me.”

“Well,” he said. “Huh. That’s really something, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Part of the whole deal, huh?”

“Part of the deal.”

“I suppose you got a candidate?”

“That’s right.”

“Can I ask who?”

“Sure.”

“Who?”

I smiled and tried to make it a reassuring one. I don’t think I succeeded. “Who?” Lynch said again.

“Homer Necessary,” I said.

There were five messages under my door when I returned to room 819 in the Sycamore and all of them urged me to call Mr. Gorman Smalldane. I tossed them into the wastebasket, stretched out on the bed, and made a careful study of the ceiling. In my mind I could still hear the sound of my voice which, in retrospect, had all the warmth of a mechanical duck as it quacked away the afternoon, first with Lynch and Loambaugh, and later, for another hour, with Orcutt, Necessary, and Carol Thackerty. It had taken that long to describe how Homer Necessary would be sworn in as Chief Necessary at a special meeting of the Swankerton City Council come next Friday afternoon, which was three days off.

“You’ll receive a hand-delivered letter from the mayor tomorrow offering you the job,” I told Necessary.

“How far did you have to bend?” he said.

“Over backwards.”

“Be more precise, Mr. Dye, please,” Orcutt said.

“I know what he means,” Necessary said. “He means I clear it all with Lynch.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You might be able to fix an overtime parking ticket without checking, but that’s all.”

“Did you have to concede so much?” Orcutt said.

“Once he’s chief, I don’t think Homer’s going to give a damn what I conceded.”

“Lynch knows that, of course,” Orcutt said.

“Sure. But he still needed the concession. It was a matter of pride. Face. He’ll make his own deal with Homer when he thinks it’s time. Knowing Lynch, that’ll probably be fifteen minutes after the swearingin ceremony.”

“Now that deal’s something I really look forward to,” Necessary said. “Lynch say anything else?”

“About you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There was one thing.”

“What?”

“He said to tell you that you’d have to buy your own uniforms.”

That was the day or evening that The News-Calliope broke the story on the Widow Sobour. An eight-column banner read: REFORM LEADER BILKED THEM, NUNS CHARGE and old man Phetwick’s editorial was also featured on page one in a two-column box bang under the picture of Mayor Pierre (Pete) Robineaux, bug-eyed and gap-mouthed. The photo had a cute little caption line that read: “... not surprised...” Phetwick’s editorial was self-righteous and sonorous, but the news story was well-written, simple, even trenchant. It also left no doubt in anyone’s mind that Mrs. Sobour was guilty as hell.

I tossed the paper aside, lay back on the bed, studied the ceiling some more, and tried to decide how I felt about the culmination of my efforts, which that afternoon had helped wreck the lives of a couple of none too-innocent persons, not to mention their families. I consoled myself with the discovery that while I felt no remorse, neither was there any pride nor any sense of accomplishment, which must have balanced things out in the record book of whoever was bothering to keep score. I wasted some more time wondering if Victor Orcutt ever thought of himself as a spiderlike genius who spun his web of intrigue and coercion only because it served some impossibly lofty ideal, and if he did think of himself as such, whether he realized that his web only caught a few emotional cripples, such as me, whom he apparently liked to have around for company. I had noticed that Orcutt spent very little time by himself and then I wondered if anyone ever called him Vic, decided probably not, but promised myself that I would the next time I saw him. I was thinking some additional, similarly rich thoughts when the phone rang and Carol Thackerty wanted to know if I’d like to take her to dinner.