Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“You don’t have to make a dash for the phone,” Necessary said. “Lynch’ll have a full report on this from Mr. Dye inside of an hour. And don’t get any funny ideas about appealing either. You’re in real bad trouble, buster, and the only thing that’s keeping you out of the state pen is me, so don’t forget it. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” Henderson said.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, sir, Chief Necessary.”

“Take off.”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t hurry to the door. He seemed too tired to hurry.

“That was the last one,” Necessary said, going down a list on his desk.

“At least he didn’t get down on his knees and beg like Purcell did,” I said.

“I’m gonna transfer Purcell to head up the vice squad,” Necessary said.

“Jesus Christ.”

“We’ve sort of shuffled them around this last month,” Necessary said happily. “None of them knows whether to shit or go blind. They’re scared to take their payoffs. Christ, I’ve had some punks even call me at the hotel at night and ask me who they should pay.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Sit tight and don’t worry. That the lid’s off.”

“I hear that the word’s getting around,” I said.

Necessary nodded. “It doesn’t take long. Listen to this. It’s a list of what Lieutenant Ferkaire calls ‘distinguished arrivals.’ He’s that young cop outside there.”

“I know who he is,” I said.

“Listen to this. These are just the ones who’ve flown in during the past three days. Edouardo (Sweet Eddie) Puranelli, Cleveland; Frank (Jimmy Twoshoes) Schoemeister, Chicago; Arturo (Tex) Turango, Dallas; the Onealo brothers, Roscoe and Ralph from Kansas City; Nicholas (Nick the Nigger) Jones from Miami; and a whole delegation from New Orleans. They came to see Lynch.”

“What are the rest of them doing?”

“Looking around. Taking a market survey. Sizing things up. The word’s got out that Lynch has slipped. The New Orleans crowd knows goddamn well something’s slipped and I hear they’re unhappy about it.”

I rose and moved toward the door. “I’ll go see him.”

“Lynch?”

“Yes.”

“Give him my best.”

“He’ll want a meeting.”

“What do you think?”

“Let’s see what happens this morning.”

“Okay,” Necessary said.

I paused at the door. “Is Lieutenant Ferkaire still keeping a check on arrivals?”

Necessary nodded.

“You might tell him to keep an eye out for one.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Tall, redheaded, and wears a pipe and Phi Beta Kappa key.”

“Name?”

“Carmingler.” Necessary made a note of it.

“Hard case?”

I nodded. “About as hard as they come.”

Two unfriendly strangers met me at the door of Lynch’s Victorian house. About the only difference between them was that one was bald and the other wasn’t. The bald one stood squarely in the doorway while the one with hair took up a protective flanking position. Neither of them said anything. They stood there and looked at me and their expressions made it clear that they didn’t want any today, no matter what it was.

“Where’s Boo?” I said.

“Who’s Boo?” the baldheaded one said.

“The mayor’s son.”

“We don’t know any mayor.”

“Tell Lynch I’m here.”

“Tell him who’s here?”

“Dye. Lucifer Dye.”

“Lucifer Dye,” the bald one said slowly, as if he couldn’t decide whether he cared for its sound. “We don’t know you either, do we Shorty?”

Shorty was close to five-eleven so something else must have earned him the nickname, but there was no point in dwelling on it. “I never knew nobody named Dye or Lucifer either,” Shorty said. “Where’d you get a name like Lucifer?”

“Out of a book,” I said. “A dirty one.”

“And you want to see Lynch?” the baldheaded one said.

“No,” I said. “He wants to see me.”

They thought about that for a moment until they got it sorted out. “I’ll go see,” Shorty said and left. I stood there on the screened porch with the man with the bald head. We had nothing further to say to each other so I admired his dark green double-breasted suit, his squared-off black shoes, and his green-and-black polka dotted tie. A bumblebee had fought its way through the screen and buzzed about the porch. When we got tired of admiring each other, we watched the bee.

“They ain’t supposed to fly,” he said. “I read somewhere that the guys who design airplanes say bumblebees ain’t built right for flying.”

We pondered the mystery of it all until Shorty came back. “This way,” he said. The baldheaded man took two steps backward so that I could enter. He waved a hand in the direction of the dining room. They didn’t seem to want me behind them.

Ramsey Lynch looked as if he hadn’t been getting enough sleep. His eyes were bloodshot and had dark smears under them. He wore an ice cream suit that made him look fatter than he was. He didn’t smile when I came in, but I hadn’t expected him to. Three of them sat at the far end of a table. Lynch wasn’t in the center; he was on the left side. The man on the right side wore glasses and had an open attaché case before him. The man in the center stared at me and I thought that he had the oily eyes of an unhappy lizard.

“Sit down, Dye,” Lynch said, so I sat at the opposite end of the table, near the sliding doors. Neither Shorty nor the baldheaded man had followed me into the room.

“So you’re what we paid twenty-five thou for,” the man in the center said, and from his tone I could tell that he didn’t think I was much of a bargain.

“Twenty-five thousand so far,” I said. “The final bill is for sixty.”

“You know me — who I am?” he said.

I knew, but he didn’t wait for my answer.

“I’m Luccarella.”

“From New Orleans,” I said.

“You’ve heard of me, huh?” He didn’t seem to care one way or another.

“Giuseppe Luccarella,” I said, “or Joe Lucky.”

“That Joe Lucky’s newspaper stuff,” he said. “Nobody calls me Joe Lucky, but if they did, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t care about things like that anymore. You wanta call me Joe Lucky, go ahead.”

“I’ll call you Mr. Luccarella,” I said.

He shrugged. “This is my lawyer, Mr. Samuels.”

I nodded at the lawyer and he nodded back and said, “Mr. Dye.”

Luccarella leaned over the table, resting his elbows on it. He had a narrow, crimped face that looked as if it had been squeezed so hard that his lizard eyes and gray teeth threatened to pop out of his skull. His skin had an unhealthy yellowish tinge to it, as if he had just suffered a bad bout with jaundice. The deep lines in his face, especially his forehead said that he was somewhere past fifty, but his hair was still thick and black and glossy and he wore it long. He looked like a man who worried a lot.

“Lynch works for me,” he said. He had that New Orleans Rampart Street accent that borders on Brooklynese and makes works come out close to woiks and for sound like fah. “You work for Lynch, so that means you work for me, right?”

“I don’t work for anybody,” I said. “Particularly Lynch.”

“He pays you, don’t he?”

“He pays me a fee in exchange for information. I don’t work for him. We’d better get that straight at the start.”

“Possibly Mr. Dye would prefer the word retained,” the lawyer said in that smooth, conciliatory tone that the expensive ones seem to be born with.

Luccarella gestured impatiently. “Works, retained, who the hell cares? All I know is that since Lynch’s been paying you this town’s gone to hell.”