Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“Plenty,” Necessary said.

“There’s somebody in town who calls himself Franz Mugar. I think he’s our old friend ‘just a guy.’ ”

“You want to cool him off?”

“I think so.”

“You want it legal and all?”

“No.”

“We can keep him a while on one thing or another. Where is he?”

“Right here in my room.”

“Will he stay put until I send somebody around?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll ask him.”

Mugar was backing toward the door. “You sonofabitch,” he said.

“I don’t think so, Homer,” I said.

Necessary chuckled. “Well, tell him we’ll pick him up inside a couple of hours or so.”

“I’ll see what he says,” I said and told Necessary that I’d ride to headquarters with him. He said he was leaving in fifteen minutes and I said that would be fine. I hung up the phone and turned toward Mugar who was at the door, his hand on the knob, a look of angry disbelief in his eyes.

“You’d do it, wouldn’t you?” he said.

“You can call Carmingler and he’ll have you out in an hour, but then we’d have you back in another hour. It can go on for quite a while. In and out two or three or four times a day. Of course, you could sue, couldn’t you?”

“You’ve had it, Dye. I swear you have.”

“Tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “I’ll give you an hour to get the first plane out of Swankerton. After that, well—”

Mugar shook his head slowly from side to side. “You are through, Dye. You just don’t know how through you are.”

“You are catching that plane, aren’t you?”

“Sure. Sure, I’m catching the plane, and when it lands and I get through doing what I’m going to do, maybe I’ll even have time to feel a little sorry for you. Maybe. But I don’t really think so.”

“You know,” I said in what I hoped was a thoughtful tone, “there is one thing you can do for me when you see Carmingler.”

“On top of everything else that I’m going to do,” he said, a little of his confidence coming back.

“That’s right. On top of everything else.”

“What?”

“Tell Carmingler I said that if he’s still set on it, and can’t spare the experienced help, he’d better come himself.”

“That’s all?” Mugar said.

“That’s all. You won’t forget, will you?”

“No,” he said, still keeping most of the bitterness out of his voice, “I won’t forget.”

“I didn’t think that you would.”

The second thing that Homer Necessary did after he was sworn in as chief of police was to order a specially equipped Chrysler Imperial which had arrived only a few days before. It was black, not much longer than a pocket battleship, and had a hotted-up engine with a four-barrel carburetor to make it go fast. In its air-conditioned rear, where we now were, it had leather upholstery, a TV set, a telephone, a bar of sorts, an AM-FM radio, a police radio, and a sawed-off shotgun which went by the euphemism of riot weapon. Necessary’s driver was Sergeant Lester Krone, the sponsor of a local hot-rod club whose members called themselves the Leaping Lepers. Sergeant Krone was fond of the car’s red light and siren and used them at his discretion, which meant most of the time. Necessary didn’t seem to mind.

“What happened to your friend?” Necessary said.

“You mean ‘just a guy’?”

“Yeah.”

“He left town.”

Necessary grinned. “You roust him?”

“He might call it that.”

“Was he bad news?”

“Bad enough. I’ll tell you about it at noon when we meet with Orcutt and after I see your friend Mr. Lynch.”

Necessary pushed a button that rolled the glass up between us and Sergeant Krone. “Old Lynch is getting antsy.”

“I know,” I said. “He called you three times yesterday for a meeting. He wants to know what the hell you’re up to.”

“His weekly take’s down,” Necessary said and smiled comfortably.

“By about three-fourths, he claims.”

“That’s about right.”

“He’s getting pressure from New Orleans.”

“He’ll be getting some more after our meeting this morning.”

“More reorganization?” I said.

“The last one.”

“Who?”

“Henderson.”

“He’s vice squad,” I said.

“That’s right, he is, isn’t he?”

Necessary liked me to be present when, in his words, he “rattled the box and shook ‘em up.” The sessions never lasted more than twenty minutes, were highly educational, often emotional, and those who had been summoned often left white-faced and visibly shaken.

“New uniform?” I said.

Necessary looked down and ran his hand over the blue summerweight worsted uniform’s gold buttons. “Yeah, three of them came yesterday. What do you think?”

“Becoming. It matches your left eye.”

“You want one?”

“Not unless it has a Sam Browne belt.”

“We can put in a special order.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

Necessary’s office on the twelfth floor of the new municipal building was richly carpeted, contained a large desk and some comfortable chairs, two flags on standards, the stars and bars of the Confederacy, and the stars and stripes of the U.S.A., a country to which Swankerton’s allegiance was nominally pledged. The room also had a small bar, an autographed photograph of the mayor, and an unsigned one of the President. Through the black-tinted windows there was a gloomy view of the Gulf of Mexico.

Necessary had quickly recruited himself a staff of young, able persons who handled the paperwork and left him free for “standing at the window and nodding yes or no,” as he put it. His secretary was a young Negro girl whose appointment had stirred up considerable comment, none of it favorable, and when anyone even vaguely alluded to it, Necessary would smile, slip into his best mushmouth drawl, which wasn’t bad, and say, “I sho wouldn’t have hired her either if she wasn’t my wife’s youngest sister.”

Captain Warren Gamaliel Henderson was born in Ohio the year that they elected his partial namesake President. His family moved to Swankerton the following year in 1921, switched quickly to the Democratic party, and started calling their youngest son by his initials.

Now somewhere past his fiftieth birthday, W.G. had run the Swankerton vice squad for a dozen profitable years and it had rubbed off on him. He was a big man with a red, rubbery face and neatly cropped, thick gray hair. His nose was purpling at its blunt tip and there were networks of deep lines at the corners of his eyes that had all the warmth of old pieces of slate. His big bony chin, freshly barbered, underscored a stubborn mouth that seemed frozen halfway between a smirk and a snarl. He also had gaunt, sunken cheeks whose insides he liked to suck on when he was thinking. He didn’t carry any spare fat that I could see and his uniform had cost him more than the city paid him in two weeks. He looked exactly what he was: tough, mean and nasty, and none of it bothered Homer Necessary in the least.

“Time we had a little private talk,” Necessary said, leaning back in his high-topped executive chair.

“I like private talks in private,” Henderson said and stared at me.

“You mean my special assistant bothers you?”

“If that’s what you call him.”

“I call him Mr. Dye and I have a lot of confidence in his judgment and I think you should too.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

It was a bleak and wintry smile that Necessary gave Henderson. “Mr. Dye calls me Chief Necessary, Captain Henderson, and I think you’d better call me that, too.”

“Whatever you say, Chief Necessary.”