Wicked City

by Ace Atkins

  Yarborough’s white puckered face didn’t move, and his eyes and hands turned back to the lemons.

  About that time, the front door opened and in walked Bert Fuller, dressed in his full khaki outfit and wearing his Texas gun rig and his Stetson hat. He sidled up next to Reuben and asked Clyde for a shot of anything strong and just looked at the endless lines of booze behind the bar, his face flushing the color of a beet.

  “What you say, Bert?”

  “What you smiling at, asshole?”

  Reuben stubbed out his cigarette and stood from the chair.

  “Ain’t you heard? We’ve been overrun with little green men.”

  Reuben sat back down and looked at the bar. Fuller toasted himself in the mirror and sucked down the whiskey.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Reuben said. “It’s all talk and posturing. They been shutting down this place since the Civil War. Phenix City will close, they’ll bust up some slots and empty out some moonshine and then two months later it’ll open back up.”

  “Not this time.”

  “You want to make a bet?”

  Yarborough refilled Fuller’s glass and Fuller fired back the shot in his throat and wiped his mouth and it was all done quick and practiced as in every B western that Reuben had ever seen.

  Yarborough garbled out something, and his eyes, the only part of his face that revealed something human, flashed to Reuben.

  “He asked if you want another.”

  “I reckon not.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “I don’t know,” Fuller said. “I had a half dozen whores run off on me today. I heard a bunch of them were working out at some trailer park out in Columbus.”

  “You gonna drive ’em back?”

  “I’m gonna least get my cut of the gash they’re dishin’ out.”

  “Thatta boy.”

  “You think all this is funny, don’t you?”

  “Like I said, it’s just a big dog and pony show. Just keep your head down and take your licks and it will be over. Sit down and drink with me. Don’t fight it. It won’t be long till the GIs will be so thick in here that you can’t stand.”

  Reuben nodded to Yarborough, and Yarborough uncorked the whiskey bottle again, filling three glasses, the sticky sweet alcohol spilling across the bar and shining with red light.

  He clicked glasses with the two men in front of him. “To the end of the Occupation,” Reuben said.

  Fuller snorted. Yarborough grumbled and poured the whiskey into the hole in his face.

  “So where were you last night?”

  “Where am I every Friday night?”

  “I got to ask,” Fuller said. “A lawman has to look to everybody.”

  Reuben squinted one eye at him, trying to hold him in focus, and then turned back to his drink.

  “I tell you one thing,” Bert Fuller said. “I’m not gonna lie down and let them RBA people run me down in the newspapers and corn-hole my ass. I want them to think about every fucking lie they tell about me.”

  Reuben looked down at his empty drink and then laid down some money.

  “And the worst of them all is that that goddamn bald-headed sonofabitch who runs the Texaco station. Murphy. You know that bastard, don’t you?”

  “For a long time.”

  “You his friend?”

  “We used to box together before the war.”

  “I think it’s time he just disappeared from the scene. Comprende, partner?”

  Fuller affixed his Stetson in the mirror and readjusted the rig on his fat belly and walked out as Hank sang on about a mournful wooden Indian named Kaw-liga.

  3

  PEOPLE HAD ALWAYS CALLED Phenix City wicked. Or Sin City. For those of us who lived and worked outside the rackets, we tried our best to ignore it. But it was hard when most of the vice boasted services in neon down by the river, on the way to the only two bridges out of town. But we had schools and a hospital paid for in dirty money, and sometimes big-time poker chips would end up in the collection plates on Sunday. My son and daughter went to school and church with sons and daughters of bootleggers, pimps, and whores. Bert Fuller was a deacon, and Hoyt Shepherd, who most called the town’s kingpin, sometimes sang in the Christmas pageant and liked to play the part of the innkeeper who turned away Mary and Joseph.

  It was just an engrained part of our local economy, and the vice had gone on so long, it was very much like a strand of barbed wire that cuts a tree but is later absorbed, becoming part of its growth.

  Until that June, I guess I didn’t even know how deeply that wire cut. But there were things I learned, the darkest of moral depravity that went far beyond slot machines and illegal liquor that I still can’t wash from my mind.

  The night after the shooting, for the first time in months, it rained. Big, thick thunderheads blew in from the west and pounded the dry Phenix City asphalt, running off the bottles and cigarette butts and trash into narrow rivulets and into the Chattahoochee. You could smell the wet asphalt and concrete, the rich red clay, and scraggly pines on the hills. The windows in my Ford station wagon fogged as Hugh Britton and I crossed the roadblock at the Lower Bridge to Columbus, the river frothing and boiling over the Rock Cut Dam to the north.

  “Did you notice anything unusual about Bert Fuller this morning?” I asked.

  “Something’s always unusual about Fuller.”

  “You notice his rig?”

  “I’ve seen it. Asshole thinks he’s Randolph Scott.”

  “He wore it this morning, but those pearl-handled revolvers were gone,” I said.

  Britton looked at me, the windshield wipers spastically working over the window.

  “Now, have you ever known him not to wear those guns?”

  “No, sir,” he said.

  At a corner filling station just off Broadway, I made a phone call, and then we ate some toast and drank coffee over at Choppy’s Diner for half an hour before getting back in the station wagon and heading toward Fort Benning on Victory Drive. On Victory, there were dry cleaners and pawnshops and liquor stores and churches of redemption. Little trailer parks and workingman’s diners and drive-ins that pulled you in with neon arrows. The rain hardened and fell in long, endless sheets, and I heard little else but the drumming on the cab, until I spotted the big flashing marquee for the Victory Drive-In and another long, sweeping neon arrow that pointed past an empty box office and through an open chain-link gate. There was supposed to be a Creature Double Feature tonight and a special showing of The Robe on Sunday. But the customers had already gotten a weather refund and had pulled out of the lot.

  The screen was big and concrete and seemed like an ancient monolith in the endless gravel lot pinging with rain. I slowed by the bleachers covered by a corrugated tin roof and parked close to the lighted overhang, and we made a run for it.

  Soaked, Britton wiped the drops from his pressed slacks and shook his straw summer hat. “Damn it.”

  Moments later, a rusted Ford pickup stopped short of us and a little man came running for the overhang, a newspaper held over his head. No one shook hands, and the little man, now out of breath, nervously wrenched off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his blue coveralls. When he sat them back on his face, he looked like a bug.

  “Anyone follow?” he asked.

  “No,” Britton said. “We’re fine, Quinnie.”

  “You sure?” Quinnie asked.

  “Sure we’re sure,” Britton said. “We did what you said. Now, what’d you know?”

  Quinnie Kelley was a little man, not much more than five feet, and wore enormous Coke-bottle glasses and a short little fedora. He still had on some dirty blue coveralls from his work as the courthouse janitor. As he looked out into the rain and watched little rivulets forming and tilting toward a long, narrow ditch, he wiped the rain from his neck and put his hands on his waist.

  “Heard some talk ’round the place,” Quinnie said. “Not much, but some.”

  “Who?” I asked.

/>   “I don’t know who. Some peoples is sayin’ that Mr. Shepherd called in a killer from Chicago. And others say Miss Fannie Belle. I cain’t be sure. You heard the name Tommy Capps?”

  “You said you saw something?” I asked. Everyone knew about Tommy Capps. He was a thug and a killer, but not dumb enough to shoot Mr. Patterson on Fifth Avenue on a Friday night.

  “I don’t want this known. You hearin’ me? I got a family. I got kids. But when I was locking up last night, I heard them shots and seen this man run across Fourteenth and back behind the jail.”

  “Who?”

  Quinnie froze. “I didn’t say who. I don’t know nothin’ about who. I’m just sayin’ I seen a man.”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “If you say I saw somethin’, I’ll deny it. And I didn’t see his face. He was runnin’ back in the shadows and I didn’t have on my glasses.”

  Hugh Britton looked to me and then back at Quinnie.

  “That’s all you got?” Britton said. “Well, good God Almighty. You call up Lamar at supper and have us driving through roadblocks and the rain for somethin’ that you ain’t even gonna admit to? And then you tell us that it may be Hoyt Shepherd or Fannie Belle who had him killed. Well, thanks, Quinnie. That’s some fine work.”

  “Hold the damn phone,” Quinnie said, balancing up on his toes. “I know a man and I ain’t sayin’ his name because that sure as hell is a one-way ticket to the river. But I’ll tell what he told me. He heard someone, an officer of the court, say he wanted Mr. Patterson dead. This man said Mr. Patterson wouldn’t live if he won that election.”

  We looked at him as he shifted from foot to foot.

  Quinnie Kelley shook his head and looked out in the rain, the neon sign, the long sweep of the Victory Drive-In arrow. “I’d keep my eye on Mr. Arch Ferrell, if I were you. That’s the meanest son of a gun in Phenix City. But you didn’t hear a word from me. Not a dang word.”

  EARLIER THAT DAY, ARCH FERRELL CHUGGED DOWN THREE glasses of bourbon and smoked eight cigarettes before hustling down the courthouse stairs to meet the outgoing attorney general, Silas Coma Garrett, on Fourteenth Street. Garrett arrived in Phenix City in a long police escort, leaning over his driver to honk the Cadillac’s horn while he waved to cops and constituents, broad smiles and thumbs up, as if the goddamn carnival had come back to town. As soon as they stopped, Garrett emerged from the passenger’s side in his white suit, tipping his matching white Stetson hat to the crowd.

  Arch had to shield his eyes out in the bright light, the American flag popping crisply on the courthouse pole.

  Arch straightened his tie, smoothed down his suit jacket, and popped a couple of sticks of Doublemint gum in his mouth. By the time he reached Garrett, he again showed remorse and sadness, to the click and whir of the newsmen’s film, and hung onto his mentor’s hand for a few beats longer than was customary, pulling him up onto the curb with him.

  Garrett wore a concerned, if not confused, smile and clutched a leather satchel while touring the crime scene. The attorney general was well aware of the cameras, too, and would often hold an emotion or hand gesture just to make sure his visit was captured for immortality.

  He was a tall, strapping man, and gave a reassuring wink to Arch as Arch continued to light one cigarette after another. Garrett slapped Arch on his back several times, and that big hand felt like that of a father letting a boy know he could relax and that he’d done good. After a while, Arch felt like he could breathe again.

  Soon, the men found their way back to Arch’s office, and all the assistants and investigators waited in the hall, all except Chief Deputy Bert Fuller, who was the last inside, closing the door with a click and finding a place to sit by the radiator.

  Fuller switched a toothpick to the other side of his mouth and looked down at the ground and then took to staring at each man, who talked in low, steady tones, tones of people in mourning. His eyes went from Arch to Garrett like watching a fucking tennis match.

  “Arch, we need to step back for a moment,” Garrett said, resting his shoes up on the desk and folding his big, oversized hands in his lap. “When is the last time you slept? You know I spent the morning at the country club. I swam, ate lunch, had some family time. You can’t let your job swallow you whole. I needed to be clearheaded before I drove over here. You understand that, don’t you? A mind that’s cluttered can turn to an awful case of the nerves.”

  Arch’s upper lip was sweating, a cigarette bobbed and twitched in his mouth. He watched Garrett, but while he watched he poured another few fingers of bourbon into a short, stumpy glass, the kind you’d find by the sink of a roadside motel.

  He drank it down.

  “That’s it, boy,” Garrett said. “That’s it.”

  “The governor has turned my town into a circus.”

  Arch stood up and began to pace the office, fingering up the blinds to see newsmen filling up the city streets. Outside, more newsmen and photographers waited, one of them with a whirring newsreel camera perched on the stock of a shotgun, and Arch flinched at the sight.

  He paced more and ran his hands through the hair at his temples. He could feel the blood rush through his ears and pound the veins in his head. “They blame me for this. They blame me for all of this. Did you hear what Governor Persons said? He said all of the debauchery and gambling has to stop and mentioned me by name, as if he didn’t know a goddamn pair of dice had ever rolled in Phenix City. Well, goddamn him to hell.”

  Arch hauled off and drop-kicked his trashcan across the room and it landed with a hard clatter and a crash, and two framed diplomas fell from the wall. A black-and-white picture of Arch, a captain standing by the Rhine with his boys holding up captured Lugers and bullet-riddled helmets, loosened from a nail and hung crooked on the cracked plaster wall.

  Thirty minutes later, Garrett decided to call in all the favorite newsboys into the grand jury meeting room, where he sat thoughtfully at the head of the table, the windows open, letting in hot breezes and the sounds of bullhorns and sirens. He waited for another siren to pass, face drawn and solemn, thoughtful as hell, watching his hands till he spoke. He’d left his white Stetson on the rack outside and wore a pair of large, round gold glasses that made Arch think of a cartoon owl.

  Someone leaned back into their seat and the wood clicked and groaned as Garrett nodded to Bert Fuller, who closed the door to give them all some privacy. Arch wanted a drink very badly and wished he’d filled a coffee cup with bourbon.

  Fuller, still in his Texas hat and western shirt, leaned against a wall, just a cowpoke against a fence. His arms were crossed.

  “I want to make it plain I have complete confidence in these elected officials,” Garrett said. “Sheriff Matthews. And Mr. Ferrell. Who I believe is the best damn solicitor in the state. These men are already working on three different theories on the murder.”

  One of the reporters, a worthless sonofabitch from Birmingham named Ed Strickland, didn’t miss a beat: “Does one of these theories factor in the vote fraud case concerning Mr. Patterson’s election as attorney general?”

  Jesus H. Christ.

  “Since I will be testifying in that particular case, I don’t think there is any reason to ask me for comment.”

  “What about the accusation that you and Mr. Ferrell personally added six hundred votes in the Russell County tally to his opponent? It’s been said that Mr. Patterson knew of other cases like this across the state.”

  Arch mopped his face with a handkerchief. He could excuse himself for a moment, fill the coffee mug, and step back into the meeting.

  “Considering the situation, I don’t think we need to visit a mess of political slander.”

  “Are you working on any leads?” asked another newspaperman.

  Si Garrett nodded and nodded, his face drawn like an old hound. He brushed some dirt off his crisp white suit and stood, peeking through the slatted blinds and then back to the small group of men in the room.

  Ar
ch took a long breath. Si’s goddamn pauses working on his last nerve. If he would just be quiet, he could sneak off for that drink.

  “We’ve had such little time. In fact, I only just learned that this horrendous act occurred at the exact moment Mr. Ferrell and I were on the telephone discussing the recent Brown versus Board of Education decision. I never dreamed something so horrible was happening at that very moment.”

  Arch nodded along with Garrett, feeling good about him again, but as he did he noticed a few of the newspapermen looking at each other. They looked to have grown uncomfortable in their hard chairs in the closed-off room.

  ON SUNDAY NIGHT, GARRETT DROVE ARCH OVER THE RIVER to his deluxe suite at the Ralston while troops continued hammering signs on telephone poles announcing that Fourteenth and Dillingham streets were off limits to Army personnel. Arch watched them all, slunk down in the backseat of the big black Cadillac, as Garrett talked to his driver about this wonderful place where they were all going for steaks and cocktails tonight called the CoCo Supper Club. As long as they could sneak him some liquor, all was right in the world.

  “Take me home,” Arch said. “Please.”

  “Nonsense,” Garrett said. “I invited half the newsmen in town to come have Sunday dinner with us. We got to get the good feelings back again. We got to let them know that you are doing everything in your power as solicitor to make sense of this horrible situation.”

  “I didn’t create this place. It was here long before me.”

  “Since the Civil War.”

  Arch tipped a bottle of Canadian whiskey to his lips, switching from the good bourbon he’d brought from his home out in the country. “You’re goddamn right. If I tried to stop the gambling, they’d run me out of town on a greased pole.”

  Garrett turned full around in the front passenger’s seat and smiled as if he’d just had a spot of great news. “Did I tell you last year I had to be institutionalized?”

  “What?”

  Arch just looked at him, the view of Phenix City fading from the windows around him, one of the Guard troops saluting the car. He narrowed his eyes and waited for a punch line that didn’t come.