Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

I helped Jones limp the rest of the way to the ambulance. The word had already flashed through the crowd and it was beginning to disperse by the time I helped him into the rear of the ambulance where he sat next to the dead William Morze.

“We’re even now, Dye,” Jones said, just before they closed the doors.

“We always were,” I said.

By three o’clock that Friday afternoon Mayor Pierre (Pete) Robineaux was pounding on Necessary’s desk and demanding that Swankerton’s police force be withdrawn from Niggertown. “They got the First National for fifty thousand,” Robineaux yelled and slammed his fist down on the desk for the ninth time in forty seconds. “Fifty thousand!” he yelled, “and it was forty-eight goddamned minutes before a cop showed up. Forty-eight minutes!”

Necessary leaned back in his chair with his feet propped up on the desk. He nodded at the mayor. “The FBI’s looking into it,” he said. “They’re pretty good at bank robberies. I think they catch about half of them.” He looked at me. “Or is it a third?”

“I think it’s half,” I said.

The mayor sputtered and pounded the desk again. “You got a crime wave going on, Necessary! A goddamned crime wave!” Boo Robineaux, the mayor’s son, looked up from his copy of The Berkeley Barb and smiled at his father. A little contemptuously, I thought.

Necessary took his feet down from the desk and leaned forward in his chair. “Now you can take your pick, Mayor,” he said coldly. “You can have yourself a full scale race riot that can wreck this town or you can put up with a few extra holdups.”

“A few!” Robineaux yelled, his face taking on an apoplectic shade of red. “You call eighty-nine armed holdups a few?”

“Better than watching the whole town burn,” Necessary said and put his feet back on the desk.

“Listen to me, Necessary. Listen to me now! If you don’t get those men out of Niggertown within the hour and back to protecting life and property over here, you won’t be wearing that badge by sundown.” The mayor pounded his fist on the desk again. “I’ll have your ass, by Christ, I will!”

“Who you working for now, Boo?” I said.

The mayor’s son jerked a thumb at his father. “It,” he said.

“Well, now, Mayor, just calm down a little,” Necessary said. “As soon as the feelings about old man Morze’s death sort of simmer down over in Niggertown, I’ll call the men back.”

“Goddamn it, Necessary,” the mayor yelled, “there ain’t no trouble in Niggertown! The trouble’s all over here.”

“I’m exercising my professional judgment, Mayor Robineaux,” Necessary said coldly. “Law and order is my business — not yours.”

Robineaux pranced over to the black tinted window and waved at it. “Look out there! They’re robbing the fucking city blind and you sit there and call it law and order!”

The idea had come to Necessary on our way back from Morze’s house. When he was through explaining it to me, I turned to him and said: “Homer, Orcutt would have been proud of you.” I’d never seen Necessary look happier.

At nine o’clock that morning he canceled all leaves and ordered ninety-five percent of the Swankerton police force into Niggertown. They patrolled it — every square block of it — on foot and in cars. By eleven o’clock they had made two arrests. Doris Emerson, twenty-three, was booked for soliciting. Miles Camerstane, thirty-seven, was taken in for drunk and disorderly.

On a normal day the white section of Swankerton experienced between two and three armed robberies. By eleven o’clock that Friday morning, forty-six had been reported — not including the First National Bank which had been hit by a lone white gunman with a stocking mask over his face.

In Niggertown, the citizens strolled along the sidewalk and goodmawnined and lifted their hats to the patrolling police. And then they smiled broadly and used their hands to stifle their giggles. By noon, the frustrated cops were looking for jaywalkers without much luck. Niggertown had cooled it.

Necessary yawned when Robineaux, his eyes bulging, once more crashed his fist down on the desk and screamed: “You’re fired, goddammit!”

“Pete, you know you can’t fire me,” Necessary said calmly. “The city council’s got to do that — a majority. And I understand that most of them are partying over in New Orleans.”

“Throw him out,” I said. “You’re wasting your breath.”

“By God, I think you’re right.” Necessary buzzed for Lieutenant Ferkaire who popped in looking harassed and a little forlorn. “Show the mayor out, Lieutenant,” Necessary said.

“I’m not going,” Robineaux said and took a tight grip on the edge of Necessary’s desk.

“Throw him out.”

“The mayor, sir?”

“The mayor.”

“The press is out there, Chief.”

“Fine. He can make a statement on his way out.”

Ferkaire approached the mayor and tentatively put a hand on his arm. “If you’ll just step this way, sir.”

“I said throw him out, Ferkaire. You’re a cop, not a goddamned wedding usher.”

Ferkaire looked first at the mayor who still clung to the desk, then at Necessary who glowered at him, and then at me. “Throw him out,” I said.

There was a brief struggle, but not much of one. Ferkaire got a hammerlock on the mayor and marched him across the room. “I’ll get your ass for this, Necessary,” Robineaux yelled. “I’ll get both of you for this!”

“Get the door for your father, will you, Boo?” I said.

“My pleasure,” Boo said, opened the door, and made a low sweeping bow as his father was frog-marched from the room.

“Thanks,” Boo said to me.

“Don’t mention it,” I said. And then, because I’d promised myself that I would, I said: “How’d you get those scars on your face?”

Boo nodded his head at the closed door. “Him. He did it to me when I was twelve. With an old piece of chain.”

“For what?”

“For what do you think? For jerking off in the bathroom, what else?”

“What else,” I said as he closed the door behind him.

Ferkaire popped back into the office and stared around, a little panicky, I felt. “You got any coffee out there?” Necessary asked him.

“He’s making a statement to them,” Ferkaire said. “They got pictures of me throwing him out and now he’s making a statement to them.”

“I think I’ll have a drink instead,” Necessary said.

“I’ll join you,” I said.

“What’U I do with them?” Ferkaire asked.

Necessary poured Scotch into two glasses before he answered. “Send them in here about five minutes from now,” he said. “I’ll have a statement.” Ferkaire nodded and went out quickly.

Necessary walked over and handed me a drink. “I can’t keep them out there in Niggertown much longer,” he said.

“You probably won’t have to.”

“When do you think Schoemeister will try it?”

“It could be any time now.”

“You think it was Luccarella who got Nick and old man Morze?”

I shrugged. “Luccarella or Schoemeister. Does it matter?”

“I guess not,” Necessary said. “I thought he’d stay in the hotel though. He’d’ve been smarter to stay in the hotel.”

“You mean Luccarella?”

“Yeah. Luccarella.”

“No back way out,” I said. “That’s why he moved to that old house of Lynch’s.”

Necessary took a long swallow of his drink and smiled. “Well,” he said, “we found what we were looking for anyway.”

“What?”

“Something to stir it up with.”

“You mean the long enough spoon?”

“Uh-huh.”