Black Night Falling

by Rod Reynolds

  I ran that thread out some more, thought about his car. If they had it, the police would have been able to identify Robinson through his registration plate; the fact they still believed his name to be Clark indicated they hadn’t located it yet. So either he’d travelled to Hot Springs by some other means – or he’d stashed his car somewhere away from Duke’s. I thought about his frame of mind – paranoid, drunk, living under a false name in a flop above a bar – and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine him wanting to keep his valuables somewhere safer. Somewhere like his car.

  The trouble with that line of thought was that it also sounded like the kind of man who could conjure up a bunch of lies about dead women and maybe even delude himself into believing they were true.

  Then his own words came back to me, and I saw something I’d missed. ‘A trunkful of evidence’ to show me: maybe not the exaggeration I’d taken it for, but instead a literal description. I let the notion play in my head a minute, and it felt solid. My blood was pounding through my veins now, a familiar sensation – the rush at having a lead to run down. As long as no one had beaten me to it.

  *

  The saloon bar was locked up when I got to Duke’s, no sign of Tucker. I banged on the doors, rattling them in their frames, but the joint was still. The smell of smoke and damp was potent even on the outside, and I backed away.

  There were cars parked all along the street, forty-five degrees to the kerb, a few of them black Fords similar to the one Robinson had driven when I was in Texarkana. I couldn’t be sure if any of them were his – and that assuming he’d kept the same one. Duke’s adjoined a drugstore on one side, but was separated from the building on the other by a narrow alley. I walked down it a little way to see if there was a parking lot out back, but it led all the way through to the next block. I stopped and put my hand on the side wall of Duke’s, my finger tapping double-time against the redbrick, frustrated at stalling so soon. The smell of the fire was masked there, overpowered by rotting food.

  I hurried back around front and looked up and down the street again. There was a click in my mind as I did – couldn’t say what prompted it. I set on going car to car, knew it would be futile, but felt I had to try. I made to start, but then I saw the sign on the diner down the street. The click became bells in my head, and suddenly I had an idea where Robinson had stashed it.

  I ran down to the diner, and the parking lot next to it. Close enough to Duke’s that he could get to it whenever he needed, hence the visits to the diner at all hours, but anonymous enough that no one would take notice of it. I scanned the lot, saw a dirty black Ford between five other cars in the middle row. It had an Arkansas plate, and the dashboard was buried under various pieces of detritus – newspapers, a soda bottle, a flattened cigarette carton. It was how I remembered Robinson’s car. I went to the back of it and tried the trunk. Locked.

  I circled around to the front of the car. One of the newspapers was a copy of the Texarkana Chronicle.

  I glanced around, my heartbeat like a piledriver now. From outside the diner looked busy, but I was alone in the lot. I moved on instinct, adrenaline carrying me. I grabbed a rock, wrapped my jacket around my fist, and caved the passenger window. I popped the door latch and used my jacket to brush the broken glass into the footwell, then slid across the bench seat behind the wheel. I hit the ignition switch and took off.

  *

  I made one stop on the way out of Hot Springs – a hardware store close to the Oaklawn Race Track – then pushed on past the limits. Clear of the town, I kept going, following an empty rural road a good distance until I found a turnoff among the trees where I was confident I wouldn’t be disturbed. I parked there. The crowbar I’d purchased at the store was next to me; I took it up and stepped out to go to the trunk.

  I jammed the crowbar under the lid and wrenched, metal screeching on metal. My palms were clammy. I whispered under my breath, imploring the damn thing to give – and for my instinct to be right.

  The lock snapped and the trunk lid came loose. I threw it open wide.

  The inside was like a snapshot of Robinson’s mind. It looked like it had been rifled, papers scattered everywhere, three overflowing notebooks laid among them – but his desk had been the same way in Texarkana. I snatched up one of the journals and sifted through it. At first glance it was impenetrable. Robinson used his own mix of shorthand and cursive, all of it a messy scrawl that was almost illegible. I recognised some of the entries as interview notes, dates and times recorded in the top corner. No names, only initials – cautious Jimmy protecting his sources. There were details cribbed from reports – newspaper or official, hard to tell. There were lists of things to do: Quiz F. re. H; C.B. – AGAIN. One item that jumped out: Call C.Y.

  Read individually, none of the pages made sense, but I was getting the feeling there was truth in what he’d told me – and then came the clincher. A photograph fell from between the pages; it showed a young woman in a light-coloured print dress sitting at a table. She had dark, shoulder-length hair, pinned back from her face and tied with a ribbon just visible at the back. Her jaw was square and she wasn’t smiling, but there was a hint of joy in her expression, as though she’d been told to keep a straight face and couldn’t quite hold it. I flipped it over, found the note Robinson had written on the back – not his usual scribble but block capitals, obvious care taken over the lettering. It made my guts sink, the proof that what he’d told me was true:

  THEY KILLED HER APRIL 8 1946

  YOU OWE IT TO HER

  Chapter Four

  I used the crowbar to clear the remaining glass out of the passenger window. I had to keep my side rolled down to match it; the weather was just warm enough that it wouldn’t look unusual. Robinson’s papers were still in the trunk, but I kept the woman’s photograph in my inside pocket. The attention he’d paid to making the note legible had me wondering if it was meant for my eyes. I’d never seen her before, so it seemed unlikely; best I could come up with was it was a reprimand to himself he didn’t want to forget.

  I raced back to the Mountain Motor Court and parked right by my room. It took two trips to get the contents of the trunk inside; I dumped it all on the floor, closed the drapes and then stood there looking at it.

  Robinson’s evidence. The dead women.

  I set the notebooks to one side and started organising the heap of loose papers. I plucked sheets to read at random as I stacked them in two piles. Nothing made sense. I flipped through the books – pages and pages of scrawl. I skim-read for an hour. My eyes blurred. The little that was legible meant nothing without context or a place to start. Or Robinson to guide me.

  A few sets of initials recurred, and I made a note: J.R. and C.Y. – easy enough to crack. Less obvious: E.P. and N.G. When I’d been through them all, I set the notebooks aside and rested my head against the wall. I had the sense the notebooks were summaries of what was contained on the loose papers, but it was only a hunch. I took the picture of the print-dress woman from my pocket and studied it. For some reason it brought Lizzie to mind, and I wanted her to be close. I wanted to call her, hear her voice, but I knew the relief wouldn’t be there now when I did, because I couldn’t tell her what she’d want to hear.

  Only this instead: that I thought someone had murdered Robinson, and I couldn’t come home until I knew for sure.

  *

  The photograph and its inscription were the closest I had to a lead. Next morning, I drove to the public library and sought out the archives. The paper serving the town was the Hot Springs Recorder; I pulled out every edition from April 8th to the end of that month and whizzed through each copy, looking for a picture of the dead woman, or at least a murder story. My hope for easy answers drained as I got to the bottom of the stack. My hands were grubby with ink, but I found nothing – no murders reported at all.

  I remembered the cop, Layfield, telling me there were only two killings in Hot Springs in a bad year. If that was the case, I couldn’t make sense of how this woman�
��s murder didn’t garner some ink.

  Two murders a year – seemed a good chance he’d remember the woman in the picture therefore. But showing it to him would throw up all kinds of questions about where I got it from, and I had no easy answers for that.

  Then I figured on a smarter way to come at matters.

  *

  The address for the Hot Springs Recorder located the paper just off Bathhouse Row. When I got there, I found a squat redbrick warehouse with offices at one end of the building. The other end was taken up by a loading bay, two flatbeds waiting half-inside of it, ready to roll out with the next edition. The Recorder’s premises took up a block on their own, and were overlooked by the towering building that marked the southern end of the main drag.

  My press card got me into the newsroom as a professional courtesy. The receptionist wasn’t sure what to do with me once she’d led me inside, eventually depositing me with an apology at the desk of a hack named Clyde Dinsmore. Dinsmore was tall and rangy when he stood, his arms hanging slack at his sides. I introduced myself and we shook hands. It was like shaking the branch on a sapling.

  ‘I’m here to see about a friend of mine, died in the fire at Duke’s the other night.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that. What can I do for you?’ He surprised me when he spoke, his mouth working a mile a minute, in the way smart people’s sometimes did.

  I described Robinson – giving his name as Clark – and asked if he’d come by the paper at all.

  ‘Doesn’t sound familiar. Hold on.’ He called out to two of his colleagues and repeated the name and description; both men shook their heads. He turned back to face me. ‘Not ringing any bells.’

  ‘You hear any talk about someone sniffing around town? He had a way of making his presence known.’

  ‘Bar talk you mean? Nope, nothing like that. What was he doing here?’

  ‘On the level? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. He told me he was investigating three murders, but I don’t have any more details. The police tell me they’ve got nothing on the books right now.’

  He was nodding along. ‘Can’t say anything springs to mind. Had a Garland County Sheriff killed here a few years back, that got a lot of play – no one was ever charged for it.’ He looked to the man at the desk next to his. ‘Sheriff Cooper was shot in ’forty-one, right?’ The man nodded and Dinsmore turned back at me. ‘Biggest story since I been working this rag.’

  I shook my head. ‘I think it’s something more recent. To do with dead girls – my friend was talking about three dead girls.’

  A woman popped up in front of Dinsmore and handed him two typewritten pages to read, then loitered by him, waiting for his approval. Dinsmore shook his head distractedly as he skimmed over the sheets, saying to me, ‘Like the cops told you, nothing to report. Sorry.’ He handed the papers back to the staffer and told her they were fine to run.

  ‘Would you take a look at something for me?’ I reached into my pocket for the photograph and held it up. ‘Do you know who this woman is?’ He took it from me, examining it. ‘I think she was murdered. Back in April.’

  He shook his head – slowly at first, then with certainty. ‘No. I’ve never seen her before. Who is she?’

  I took the picture back from him. ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘Sorry, Yates, but I’ve never seen the broad.’

  I looked around the office, seeing white-grey walls and pea-green linoleum on the floor, the desks arranged around a central bank of tall flatplanning tables like spokes on a wheel. ‘What about the fire, anything about that come across your desk?’

  ‘Not to sound like my needle’s stuck, but nothing at all.’ He tilted his head. ‘What makes you ask?’

  I spread my hands. ‘I’m always suspicious. Comes with the job, right?’

  He flashed a smile. ‘Sometimes. Depends what deadline I’m working to.’

  I mirrored it, irritated by his glibness, but trying to keep on terms with him. ‘I hear that. But a man died – doesn’t that warrant a cursory pass?’

  ‘We ran it, sure. But the fire department report said it was an accident. That gets three hundred words on an inside page. Unless you know something I don’t? In which case I’m all ears.’

  I shook my head, nothing to tell beyond a hunch.

  Dinsmore tapped his finger on his desktop. ‘Now, I’ll grant you the fire department were always going to call it that way.’

  I focused on him again. ‘How come?’

  ‘With the election coming and all. The mayor’s fighting for his life against these GI boys – last thing he needs is a suspicious death right before folk go to vote.’

  ‘The mayor could make the fire department change their report?’

  ‘Be ironic what with the corruption allegations they’re tossing around, but why not? He’s got a band of war heroes trying to kick him out of office, maybe even indict him if the prosecuting attorney has his way. Getting a little fire glossed over would be small potatoes – especially at a dive like Duke’s.’ He held his hand up. ‘No offence.’

  I waved it away. ‘What are the corruption charges? He’s done this kind of thing before?’

  He screwed his face up. ‘No, not so I know of, but he’s never had cause like this before. But the corruption talk is just politics. It’s easy to level at Teddy Coughlin because he’s been mayor going on twenty years and the casinos and cathouses survive on his say-so. But they were here long before him – Hot Springs has always been a wide open town.’ He reached for a mug on his desk and took a drink, holding it against his chest when he was done. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Coughlin takes his piece of the action, I’m sure, but that’s the same in any town – you ever seen a mayor lives in a shack? Calling him out for allowing casinos is like calling the Pope out for allowing churches. Hell, it’s what he campaigned on.’

  ‘I hear you, but taking dirty money isn’t the same as covering up a man’s death. That’s a different ballgame.’

  ‘Is it? It’s a word in someone’s ear and a stroke of a pen. It’s not as though I’m accusing him of starting the fire himself – it’s just protecting his image. You think there’s an elected official anywhere wouldn’t do the same if they were losing their grip on office?’

  I rubbed my face, thinking Coughlin sounded like a walking story. I’d want to pursue it if I was in Dinsmore’s shoes, and I wondered why he wasn’t more interested. Could be it was just a symptom of the sordid town he lived in. ‘How could I find out if someone got the fire report changed? Who can I speak to – off the record?’

  He laughed the idea off. ‘Out-of-town reporter? No one’s going to give you the time of day.’ He saw my face, must have seen me tense my jaw, because he tried to make nice. ‘Look, I’m just flapping my gums here. Chances are it went down just like they said. But I’ll ask some discreet questions, let you know if I get a sniff of any scuttlebutt.’

  ‘Think I could get a carbon of the report at least?’

  He put his hands on his hips. ‘Let me see what I can do. No promises.’

  I nodded, held my hand out to shake.

  He took it. ‘You know there’s a quid pro quo, right?’

  I grunted, should have seen it coming. ‘Try me.’

  ‘You dig up anything suspicious about the fire or what your friend was working on, and it looks like a story, you give it to me. You’re playing in my sandbox, after all.’

  I nodded and let go of his hand. ‘I’m not working a story here, this is strictly personal. I find something, you can have it.’

  I thanked him for his time, but it struck me he was being disingenuous about his side of the deal. Dinsmore was the local; he’d have the inside track on any story to be had here. I wondered if what he really wanted was the opportunity to bury anything I turned up. Who knew what sources or connections he wanted to protect? He wouldn’t be the first hack with a private agenda.

  I turned to go, then thought to throw out one last pitch. ‘Hey, Dinsmore, do the ini
tials E.P. or N.G. mean anything to you at all?’

  ‘In relation to what?’

  ‘Anything. Names, maybe.’

  He scratched the side of his face, considering it. ‘No. Not a thing. What’s it about?’ I watched his expression but it was deadpan.

  I shrugged like it wasn’t important, then headed for the street. I didn’t trust the man enough to tell him anything more.

  *

  I drove back to the Arlington, this time noticing Teddy Coughlin’s election signs and posters. The mayor’s bills took the form of a list of questions for his opponents to answer, most of them accusing the GI Ticket of pandering to the Negro vote. Bathhouse Row was busy now, droves of out-of-towners ogling the sights and crowding the sidewalks. I eyed the Ohio as I passed, figuring these clubs – and what they represented – had to be what the election fight was really about. Money and power, same as anywhere else. The Ohio’s plain green awning was like a sun visor, hiding its face. Above it, bay windows protruded from the building, topped with an Ottoman half-dome. The architecture was an extravagant mishmash, and the opposite of how things would be in New York or Chicago. In either city, a gambling joint or brothel would do everything to keep a low profile; a place looking as garish as the Ohio would be raided inside of five minutes. But somehow the rules were different in Hot Springs. I thought about Robinson and what he might have got caught up in here; whether he’d stumbled into something without understanding how this town worked, and it’d got him killed.

  I cut short thinking along those lines, the parallels to what I was doing too obvious.