Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

He stumbled backwards and dropped the knife and looked down curiously at the two holes in his vest. He didn’t touch them. He looked at me and there was surprise and, I suppose, sorrow in his face. I remember thinking that he looked like a sorrowful horse. His mouth worked a little, but no words came out. He lurched toward me then and there was nothing else to do but try to catch him before he fell.

I caught him, but he was dead weight, and I knew I couldn’t hold him up for long. He looked at me again, his face no more than a few inches from mine. The sorrow in his gaze seemed to have been replaced by contempt, but you can never really tell. It may have been just pain. His lips worked and finally he got it out, what he very much wanted to tell me.

“You still aren’t very important to us, Dye,” he said. I nodded, but he didn’t see it because he could no longer see anything. I lowered him to the sidewalk gently, but it didn’t matter anymore how I did it because he was already dead.

Necessary, still clutching Luccarella, yelled at the crowd to move back. He picked out somebody and told them to call an ambulance. “Call three of them,” he added.

He and Luccarella moved up to me as I stood there staring down at Carmingler. “The hard case?” Necessary said.

“As hard as they come,” I said.

“That was a goddamned fool thing of me to do in a crowd like this,” he said. “I could have shot somebody.”

“You did,” I said.

“I mean somebody else.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “You shot him.”

“If it doesn’t matter, then what the hell are you crying for?”

“I didn’t know that I was,” I said.

Three things happened Saturday, the day after the crime wave. First, as a special favor to the Swankerton Police Department, the First National Bank let me visit my safe-deposit box. They may have felt that it could help them get their stolen $50,000 back. It didn’t.

The second thing happened after I left the bank. I called a private number at Police Headquarters and said: “I’m all done.” Five minutes later Swankerton’s chief of police submitted his resignation.

The third thing was the telegram that I got from New York. It read: “I died by my own hand last night. Just thought you might like to know. Regards. Gorman.” A postscript read: “Mr. Smalldane left instructions insisting on the wording of this telegram.” The postscript was signed by Gorman Smalldane Associates, Inc., and I wondered who they were.

I sometimes still take out a rather crumpled copy of that Sunday’s edition of The Swankerton News-Calliope. Because it never published on Saturday, it was full of news that Sunday. There was the one-day crime wave, of course, and six or seven shootings and killings to recount and speculate about. There was also the resignation of the chief of police to announce. But in the center of the front page was a large three-column picture of a rather puzzled looking man and underneath it in very black, very bold forty-eight point type is a headline which asks the question:

I sometimes read the story over because it’s quite long and it goes into great detail about someone called Lucifer Dye. According to the story, Lucifer Dye was the man who corrupted Swankerton. All by himself. He was, if one were to believe the story, a onetime spy, a hired gun, a crooked cop, a confidence man, a crime czar, and an agent provocateur for some unnamed foreign power. He was also a long list of other things, none of them fashionable, and The News-Calliope hated the man and urged its readers to hate him and to undo the evil that he had done by going to the polls in November and electing good men to office. If they didn’t, the newspaper implied in an editorial signed by Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III, they were fools. The editorial then thoughtfully listed a number of men who, it said, deserved the votes of all those citizens of Swankerton who weren’t absolute fools.

I like to reread the long article about Lucifer Dye because it promises to tell who he really is, but it never does. I keep hoping that it will. Clipped to the fading newsprint is a shorter article, only a couple of inches long, that was torn from a copy of the international edition of Time. It’s about how the citizens of Swankerton elected a last-minute, write-in slate to fill all of the major municipal offices. It has a kicker, of course, or Time wouldn’t have printed it. The kicker is that one of the new city councilmen is Buford Robineaux, only son of the city’s defeated mayor.

I live in Mexico now and I’ve quit smoking and I run a store in a seaport-resort town that sells books in English about Mexico to tourists who can’t read Spanish. There seem to be a lot of them. It doesn’t cost much to live in Mexico and the bookstore earns enough to support my wife and me. My wife’s name is Carol and her best friend is a twenty-three-year-old stunner from the Midwest whose husband runs a boat marina. Sometimes her husband and I go to a local cantina and drink beer with a redheaded Mexican who’s the chief of police. The Mexican feels that there’s nothing unusual about his hair, but he thinks that my friend has rare eyes because one is blue and one is brown.

We sit there and drink beer in the afternoon and talk about crime in far off places. We never talk about a place called Swankerton.