by Jon Talton
The last one looked into the citrus trees, calculating.
“Don’t make me kill you.” Don said it in a chilly conversational voice. “This is the police.”
He raised his hands, eyes torn between terror and defeat.
Less than a minute had transpired.
Twenty minutes later, the road was crawling with deputy sheriffs, then Phoenix cops, then meat wagons. Victoria’s Nash came screaming at sixty, a cloud of dust behind it, reaching a hard stop. When our eyes met, she ran without even a camera.
“Gene, my God, are you all right?”
“I am.” I gave her the quick story.
She hugged me a long time, and I allowed myself the shakes. My ears were still ringing from the gunshots. Then she went back to her car, fetched a camera, and got to work.
* * *
The next morning’s Republic had us in bold capital letters:
COP, P.I. TAKE ESCAPEES IN GUNFIGHT
Then the decks:
Three Cons Dead
Two Surrender In Bloody Clash
Hero Hammons Brothers
Credited With Stopping
Spree After County Jail Break
Alongside the story was a V. Vasquez photograph. Aside from the cops and meat wagons, I had to say my Ford looked good.
Eight
The most annoying question posed to a Great War veteran was whether you had killed anyone over there. I usually lied and said I was stationed behind the lines in the Quartermaster Corps. Now, however, there was no denying it. Sheriff McFadden assured us the shoot-out was self-defense and that the county attorney wouldn’t even present it to a grand jury.
That didn’t stop violence from pursuing me into the weekend.
Victoria and I went dancing at the Riverside Ballroom Saturday night. A big band from Oklahoma City was playing swing, and Victoria is a good dancer. We did the foxtrot and the new jitterbug until we were exhausted and sweaty, then a slow number placed us in each other’s arms, close. That perspiration only made her more beautiful.
The evening was cold and overcast when we’d arrived at the ballroom. When we came out later it was snowing. Snow in Phoenix! Neither of us had ever seen it, and we goofed around catching flakes on our tongues. That was the best we could do, with most of the snow melting when it hit the ground.
The snow turned to rain as we drove back to town, and when we crossed the railroad tracks on Central, three squad cars went speeding north with red spotlights and sirens. Victoria put down the gas and followed them.
I could only imagine Don’s reaction to me allowing myself to be driven by a woman, but she usually drove us in her car, where she kept her cameras. I tuned her car radio to KGZJ, the new police frequency—the first police radio operation in the state. They were responding to a robbery at the Pay’n Takit market on Virginia Street at Central, almost out of the city limits. We were there in less than five minutes. I stayed in the car while she grabbed her Speed Graphic and walked into the scene.
She would probably mostly be taking photos for the department, which irritated her because the city paid less than the AP or UP, and, because of the Depression, the city didn’t pay on time. It was strange sitting there, as the uniforms milled around in their peaked caps and Sam Browne belts with shoulder straps, then as the night detectives arrived. That used to be my life not so long ago. I might be the one interviewing witnesses, examining evidence, taking notes, and calming people down. Now I was only a civilian sitting in the passenger seat.
Half an hour later she slid in on the driver’s side, handing me her camera to hold, and gave me a quick rundown. It was a stickup gone wrong, with two dead, one of the robbers and a reserve police officer.
For a small city, Phoenix had its share of crime. Earlier that month, Penney’s had been robbed right down the street from my office.
I could see my hopes for the rest of the evening evaporate into the night like water on a summer sidewalk. She had to develop film, give most of the prints to the detectives for their case, and one or two for the wire services, and maybe for Monday’s Phoenix Gazette. She dropped me off at my apartment on Portland and sped toward downtown.
Upstairs, I waited a long time, sitting in the chill air on my sleeping porch, wrapped in a blanket, smoking and replaying the gunfight outside the citrus groves in my head, glad I had retrieved my .45 in time.
Victoria never made it back that night. But I was still sitting there around two when I noticed a match flare up in a dark late-model, four-door Chevy parked against the south side of the parkway. It had been there the entire time I was lounging on the sleeping porch. I stayed another hour, watching. Was it a coincidence, or was I being watched?
On Sunday, I went to early mass with Victoria at Immaculate Heart of Mary church. The Mexican community had built it in the twenties because St. Mary’s segregated its masses. As usual, I was the only Anglo there and unable to take communion because I wasn’t a Catholic. But my Spanish was good enough to be part of the responses to the priests. My Latin stank.
Then she went with me to the service at Central Methodist, M.E.-South, listening to me sing in the choir. As usual, she was the only Mexican American in the pews, but she was welcome to take communion in our “heathen Protestant” church, as she playfully called it, and did so.
Don could believe what he wanted, but this comforted me beyond the singing: The Apostles’ Creed, Doxology, Lord’s Prayer, and especially words of forgiveness. I needed the last one. Did I kill anybody over there? You bet—I killed over here, too, and I felt rotten about it, “Hero Hammons Brothers” notwithstanding. Why did the ringleader pick that moment to appear with a gun? And just like during the war, it was kill or be killed. I prayed for the souls of the ones whose lives I had ended, prayed for forgiveness. I prayed for Victoria and for Don. This was not an only-Sunday thing.
After I made it through the war and the Spanish flu, I stopped asking God anything for me. The Lord’s Prayer said, “Thy will be done.” That was a tough surrender. After the service, we went to brunch.
“You’re brooding, Eugene,” she said.
“You caught me.”
She placed her hand on mine. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Her family liked me. This was especially true after ’31, when Herbert Hoover’s Mexican deportation—an effort to lessen the number of job seekers in a free-falling economy—swept up American citizens. Among them was Victoria’s brother Feliciano. I went to Nogales and brought him back across the border, pretending he was my prisoner.
The Vasquez family had been in Phoenix for generations, opening a dry goods store in 1884. And they gave me their undying gratitude for saving Feliciano. Whether that would extend to giving me their daughter’s hand in marriage was another matter. Her parents were traditional, and I’m sure imagined Victoria married to a handsome Mexican American and having beautiful Mexican American children.
They wouldn’t have understood our relationship. I’m not sure I did. She was twenty-eight, well beyond the age of marriage in her community, even in the Anglo world, the postwar revolution in morals notwithstanding. Maybe they would welcome this Anglo preventing their daughter from becoming una solterona. She was far from an old maid in my mind, of course. And she had a career as a photographer. When was I going to make Victoria an “honest woman”? I didn’t know. It was complicated.
* * *
On Monday, I enjoyed breakfast as usual at the Saratoga and got into work at nine. Gladys was at her Remington, hammering out the report I had dictated last week—my findings on Gus Greenbaum for Kemper Marley. It wasn’t worth five hundred dollars. Short answer: Chicago organized crime was nesting in Phoenix. Greenbaum had an office in the Luhrs Tower, probably holding his bulky wire service equipment, too. Prohibition had been bad in so many ways, not least because it had provided additional rackets for the mob. Now they were looking for new
ways to make money once liquor was legal again.
It was rich that Marley feigned outrage, considering his soon-to-be-legal booze empire was seeded by Al Capone’s organization. And his indignation wasn’t about lawbreaking—only that he wasn’t getting his cut of a lucrative new hustle. He wanted leverage against Greenbaum, and I had found none, unless he could out-bribe the local officials, and that threatened his ambitions with the Outfit. It was a dirty business, and I regretted ever taking the case. Once again for Gladys’s amusement, I had to tell the quick version of the gun battle outside the citrus groves. I was sick of it, but Gladys was entranced, for once happy to be working for a private eye as well as a dull accountant. I wished I were a dull accountant.
Inside my private office, the morning mail was waiting for me. Mostly bills, except for one. I used my silver letter opener to slit it open.
The telegram was from Prescott and read:
GENE HAMMONS=
MONIHON BLDG PHOENIX AZ.=
WE WISH TO ENGAGE YOU TO FIND OUR DAUGHTER CARRIE A STUDENT AT ARIZONA STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE. WE HAVE NOT HEARD FROM HER SINCE JAN. 5. PLEASE WIRE YOUR ACCEPTANCE=
EZRA THAYER=
HOTEL ST. MICHAEL PRESCOTT AZ=
A Western Union money order for a hundred dollars was attached.
Usually, I would celebrate the prospect of new business. But I physically backed away from the paper as if it were a live hand grenade. Ezra Thayer’s inquiry might be routine, the kind of thing that was the heart of my PI practice. But I feared the worst: That Carrie was the murdered girl beside the railroad tracks. The homicide that the “Valley of the Sun” bigwigs were trying to conceal.
I put the Republic atop it and scanned the news: “Hitlerite Regime in Prospect,” read the headline on the top left. Marley would be pleased. Communists and Nazis were battling in Berlin’s streets. A prospector had been murdered near Casa Grande and his body thrown down a well. Half a million Chinese troops were trying to eject the Japanese from Manchuria without success.
Only after smoking an entire Chesterfield and slowly walking twice around the office did I sit back down, reread the telegram, compose a response, and call Gladys on the intercom to summon a Western Union boy.
* * *
The next day, a Railway Express envelope arrived at my office. Prescott was once the territorial capital and the center of a rich mining district. I asked Thayer to send me a photo of Carrie by train—it was the fastest way. In the meantime, I distracted myself by taking the Greenbaum report down to Kemper Marley at his spread on Fourteenth Avenue near Broadway, south of town. His wife, Ethel, was a charming woman who served us tea and made me wonder how she ended up with a thug like Kemper. I guess no man could be a son of a bitch all the time. After she left the room, he read the report like a predator stalking dinner.
“He lives at 321 West Almeria. Nearly new house. But I don’t see anything I can use to lean on him.”
I handed him an envelope. “That’s why I’m returning your five hundred. I’ll keep the gold piece for my trouble. Greenbaum seems untouchable, even for you.”
“Why can’t you do private detective things? Follow the man? Maybe he’s a rape-o who likes jailbait. Or a weenie wagger? That would be rich. Or better yet, a homosexual. Why not try?”
“Because I don’t want to make enemies of the Chicago Outfit or a guy who came up under Meyer Lansky.” I thought about that car parked across from my apartment in the middle of the night. It might have had nothing to do with me. Or everything.
I said, “We’re talking about a stone-cold killer here. Look, Kemper, people come to the West to reinvent themselves. Maybe that’s partly Greenbaum’s story. You’re going to be richer and more powerful with your liquor distributorship. If you want a piece of Greenbaum’s action, you need to negotiate with Chicago. Offer them a piece of your liquor action.”
“What’s mine is mine, and I’m keeping it. That’s why we have to be vigilant about the communist threat. Do you listen to Father Coughlin on the radio?”
“No.”
“I never trusted Catholics, but the man makes good sense about the Reds and the Jews. America needs to wake up. You don’t approve of my methods, but what we did to that camp sends a message that Phoenix won’t tolerate this. It’s bad enough that we’re stuck with the lungers in their tents up in Sunnyslope, with that rich do-gooder from Cleveland, John Lincoln, protecting them at the Desert Mission. The more money he gives, the more we’ll attract these sick vagrants. It’s too damned bad the Klan died out here.” When I didn’t respond, he gave a reptilian smile. “By the way, what really happened with that young lady who was found dead by the tracks?”
I fought to keep my expression neutral, forced a casual shrug. “I read about it in the newspaper. Sad thing.”
“Might be worse than that. I heard she was murdered.”
“Where did you get that?”
“I have my sources, Hammons. I own some city detectives; don’t think I don’t.”
I didn’t doubt it. I asked why, if this were true, he didn’t ask them to help with his Greenbaum problem.
“Because you have brains, Hammons.”
Great. Kemper Marley considered me a brain. I tried to steer the conversation gently back, asking which sources had told him about the dead girl. But he leaned in to lecture me on the danger of “bums and communists and shines” on the move across America, that even our womenfolk weren’t safe from their depredations.
I silently added Kemper Marley to Frenchy Navarre on my list of suspects. Either one of them could have procured my business card and planted it in the victim’s purse. Why either man would want to set me up was a different question.
“I’m not done with you, Hammons,” he gave his benediction and tossed the money back. “As I said, it’s a retainer.”
“For what?”
His eyebrows squirmed. “Something will come up, trust me.”
I didn’t trust many people, especially after being kicked off the police force. Victoria, I trusted. Don, most of the time. Marley, never. I left the money beside my tea and left, declining his invitation to show me his horses.
Outside with his steeds, he called, “I can take one of these out on the range and survive on jerky and beans for weeks.”
I shook my head and walked to the car. He’d be a clown if he weren’t so dangerous. But I never much liked or trusted clowns.
Now, after lunch and back at the office, I saw Marley’s envelope on my desk again, wrinkled from its repeated journeys like an old man’s face. I’d heard of a bad penny. This was a bad five C-notes. Gladys said a delivery boy had dropped it off. I sighed and put it back in the safe.
More important matters required my attention. I tightened my gut and wielded my letter opener like a trench knife, mercilessly slitting open the envelope and letting the photograph and a sheet of paper spill onto my blotter.
It was her.
The black-and-white photograph showed an image of a ravishing blonde in a light-colored dress, sitting on a bench in a garden. She was stunningly alive, with a broad smile. I studied her features, trying to wish this ugly reality away like the morning after a vivid nightmare. But it was no good. The paper answered the basic questions I had asked: nineteen years old, five-feet-four inches tall, one hundred ten pounds, blue eyes, a birthmark on her left arm.
It was her.
The dead girl.
“Our body.”
I picked up the phone and dialed. For once, Don answered.
“Come to my office now, please.”
“On my way,” he said.
* * *
Don locked on the photograph. His shiny, expensive new shoes were propped up on my desk. He took his time.
Finally: “Ezra Thayer is big in mining. He sold the Monte Christo mines in Yavapai County back in ’26 for a million bucks. He might wi
sh he had them back if Roosevelt goes to silver coinage after he’s inaugurated in March. The man also lives in Phoenix.”
I remembered that now. Thayer was a major player in the Arizona mining industry. “How could he have a nineteen-year-old daughter? Thayer is older, right?”
“Mid-seventies.” He lowered his feet on the floor and reached for the phone.
“Long distance,” he said. That would be money I didn’t care to spend. “I want to speak to the operator in Prescott, Arizona.” He lit a nail while waiting and took a drag. “Hello, this is Detective Hammons of the Phoenix Police Department. Can you tell me if there’s a number in the Prescott exchange for an Ezra Thayer?” He spelled both the first and last names. “What about other Thayers?” Then he thanked her and dropped the earpiece into the cradle.
“No Thayer by any first name in Prescott.” He dropped his ash into the ashtray on my desk.
“What about at the St. Michael Hotel? That was the telegram address.”
He called again. No Thayer at the hotel.
I tried to conceal the squirm of my body in the office chair. “I’m being played.”
“Looks that way,” Don said. “Out of the blue, you get a telegram asking you to find this girl, Carrie. You ask for a photo and description, and it’s our homicide victim. The only person who would do that…”
“Is the murderer,” I completed the thought.
“Did you cash the money order for your fee?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t,” he said.
He was right, of course. I needed to distance myself as far as possible from this case. Still, the metronome of ambition and curiosity that had made me a good detective was swinging, leading me to want to follow this tune where it might go. Maybe the victim really was named Carrie, really was a student at the teachers’ college in Tempe. The next step would be to visit the school, talk to faculty and staff, go through yearbooks. Find her real last name—or full name, if not Carrie. Hell, maybe Victoria had photographed her class or some extracurricular club she belonged to. School shots were part of her business.