by Ross Thomas
“What you got on her, Victor?” Necessary said.
“I’m coming to that. Three years ago Mrs. Sobour started a large development of expensive, custom-built homes on some property that was located several miles from Swankerton. Apparently, she sank every cent that she had and could borrow into the venture. Costs skyrocketed, she ran into the usual unexpected delays, there were some zoning problems, and to sum it up she ran out of money.”
“So who’d she steal it from?” Necessary wanted to know.
“Homer, your habit of anticipating conclusions could become most irritating,” Orcutt said in the sharp tone of one whose punch line has just been ruined by the party buffoon. It didn’t bother Necessary.
Orcutt leaned forward and his dark blue eyes seemed to glitter a bit. “Now it really gets delicious,” he said, and I decided that he was a born gossip. Some people are. “Mrs. Sobour was desperate for funds. She’d exhausted all sources of credit. In the meantime, a Catholic order of nuns—Sisters of Charity or Mercy or Solace or something like that, I have the name here somewhere—had entrusted her with nearly half a million dollars to invest for them in some land in Florida. Well, she optioned the land with a token payment of fifty thousand dollars and used the remainder of the half-million to pay off her debts. The option expires in three months.”
Necessary leaned back in his chair and smiled at the ceiling. “That should get her kicked out of the realtor’s league or whatever they call it,” he said.
“Unless she picks up the option,” I said. “Can she?”
“Probably,” Orcutt said. “If we do nothing.”
“What’s the Catholic population in Swankerton?” I said.
“Forty-six percent,” Orcutt said.
“Well, the headlines won’t be too bad,” Carol said. “Reform Move ment Secretary Robs Sisters of the Poor.”
“You have all the necessary documents?” I asked Orcutt. He nodded. “Okay. She’ll do for the first ruinee. Old family, prominent Catholic, tied to the reform movement, and caught with her hand in the church poor box. The Catholics might vote for whoever you run in her place out of sympathy—or stubbornness. And the Protestants might vote for him—or her—because they probably hope that the widow’s successor will do the same thing to the nuns who, as everybody in the South knows, don’t do anything but shack up with the priests and sell their babies to wandering gypsies.”
“Now I’ve never heard that!” Orcutt said.
“Common knowledge,” Carol said.
“Lynch is going to like it all,” Necessary said. “Lynch and his crowd’ll like it just fine. Who’s next, Victor?”
The next sacrificial lamb was the father of four, a deacon in the First Methodist Church, a well-to-do pharmacist, and one of the Clean Government Association’s candidates for the city council. His name was Frank Mouton and he owned a chain of six drugstores that bore his name. “Sale of barbiturates without prescription,” Orcutt read from his notes.
“That’s not much,” Necessary said.
“In wholesale lots, Homer,” Orcutt said. “Fifty thousand at a time to the local pushers. It’s how he expanded from one drugstore to six.”
“How long ago was this?” I said.
“Long enough for the statute of limitations to keep him out of jail, but still recent enough to make a perfectly marvelous scandal.”
“How long’s the statute of limitations?” I said.
“Five years in the state.”
“What about Federal?”
“They probably won’t bother.”
“Another good headline,” Carol Thackerty said. “Prominent Deacon Branded Dope Pusher.”
“Well, at least we’re ecclesiastically impartial,” Orcutt said.
“What was he wholesaling the most of?” Necessary said.
Orcutt looked at his notes. “It seems to have been rather evenly divided between stimulants and depressants. Six year ago he sold a total of more than two hundred thousand capsules of phenobarbital sodium and another hundred thousand of secobarbital sodium. On the stimulant side, he disposed of one hundred twenty-five thousand capsules of amphetamine sulfate and one hundred sixty thousand capsules of dextroamphetamine sulfate. I think they’re called ‘bennies’ and ‘dexies.’ It should have netted him close to one hundred thousand dollars during that one year.”
“How good is your source?” I said.
“Unimpeachable, you might say.”
“You have solid evidence?” I said.
Orcutt nodded, “Take my word as an attorney, Mr. Dye. It’s solid.”
“Good. I’ll feed Lynch the woman first. A week or ten days later I’ll hand him the druggist.”
“What are your plans in the meantime?” Orcutt said.
“I thought I’d better take a look at the city.”
“You want a guided tour?” Necessary said.
“That sounds good.”
Necessary looked at his watch. “What about this afternoon?”
“All right.”
Orcutt rose and moved over to a window and stood there for a few moments before he turned with a thoughtful look on his face. “Something just struck me,” he said.
“What?” Carol Thackerty said.
He pushed his hands into his trouser pockers, looked at the ceiling, and rocked back and forth a little on his elevated heels. “You know, I don’t think that the Deacon Mouton would have made a very good city councilman anyway.”
CHAPTER 26
Swankerton had the outline of a squatty pear; its fat bottom sprawled along the expensive Gulf Coast beach and then tapered reluctantly north into quiet, middle-income residential areas whose forty and fifty-year-old elms and weeping willows cooled and shaded streets where parking was still no problem. In the warm evenings the owners of the neat houses came home, changed into bermuda shorts, and stood about, gin and tonic in hand, watching their creepy-crawler sprinklers wet down the thick green lawns and wondering whether it wasn’t the right time to sell and move to the suburbs, now that the place was looking so nice.
Farther up the pear, just below the neck, the neat homes and green lawns made way for ugly frame houses that once may have been bright green or blue or even yellow, but were now mostly a disappointed gray, ugly as old soldiers. The poor whites lived there, the millhands and the rednecks and their big-boned wives and tow-headed kids. The gray houses weren’t really old. Most had been built right after World War II to accommodate the returning warriors and they had been thrown up fast in developments that went by such names as Monterey Vistas and Vahlmall Gardens and Lakeview Acres. They had been cheaply built and cheaply financed with four percent VA loans and no money down to vets.
But the vets who had lived there right after World War II had long since moved away. The lawns had turned brown and some of the trees had died and the concrete streets with the fancy names were broken. Nearly every block had one or two or three rusting shrines to despair in the form of a ’49 Ford with a busted block or a ’51 Pontiac with frozen main bearings. Nobody admitted that the shrines even existed because admission implied ownership and it cost fifteen dollars to have them towed away.
The owners and renters here came home after work too, but they didn’t change into anything. Those who worked the day shift just sat around on the shady side of the house in their plastic-webbed lawn chairs that they got at the drugstore for $1.98 each and drank Jax beer and yelled at their kids.
The gray houses with their composition roofs kept on going block after block until they ran up against the railroad tracks which split Swankerton neatly in two about halfway up the pear. The tracks, which ran all the way from Washington to Houston, served as the city’s color line. North of the tracks was black. South was white.
When you crossed the tracks leading north you found yourself in another enclave of neat houses and emerald lawns and creepy-crawler sprinklers. It lasted for almost twelve blocks. The owners here were black and after work they came home and changed into their bermuda
shorts and stood around, martini in hand, and wondered whether they should buy their wives a Camaro or one of those new Javelins. They were Niggertown’s affluent, its political leaders, its doctors and dentists, its morticians, schoolteachers, lawyers, skilled workers, restaurant owners, insurance salesmen, policy men, and the Federal civil servants who worked out at the big Air Force depot.
Past these well-tended houses and still farther up the neck of the pear spread the rest of Niggertown, a collection of flimsy, gimcrack houses, often duplexes, whose sides were covered with Permastone or imitation brick and which often as not leaned crazily at each other. And on the edge of the city, just before the suburban sprawl began, was Shacktown, a fully integrated community, composed of packing-crate hovels, abandoned buses, and ancient house trailers that hadn’t been moved in twenty years. In Shacktown teeth were bad and bellies were swollen and eyes were glazed. Those who lived there had given up everything, but the last luxury to go had been the comforting awareness of racial identity. But now that had gone, too, and everyone in Shacktown was almost colorblind.
The stem of the pear was the Strip, a three-mile-long double strand of junkyards, motels, gas stations, nightclubs, roadhouses and honkytonks. Interspersed among these were the franchised food spots, all glass and godawful colors, that hugged the highway to offer fried chicken and tacos and hamburgers which all tasted the same but signaled the wearied traveler that a kind of civilization lay just a little way ahead.
The Strip sliced outlying suburbia neatly in two, skirted Shacktown, and when it reached the city limits they called it MacArthur Drive. Desk-top flat and six and eight and even ten lanes wide, it rolled and twisted all the way down from Chicago and St. Louis and Memphis, taking bang-on aim at the Gulf of Mexico. They called it the Strip sometimes but more often just U.S. 97. It was the river that Swankerton had never had, the route of the endless caravan of semis and articulated vans, big as box cars, that growled up hills in low tenth gear and roared down the other side, seventy and eighty miles per hour, black smoke snorting from their diesel stacks and their drivers praying for the goddamned brakes to hold. The teamsters rolled them night and day down the highway that linked the city with the North and the West and they handled more freight in a day than the railroads did in a week. They rolled down from Pittsburgh and Minneapolis and Omaha and Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, bringing Swankerton what it couldn’t grow and what it couldn’t make for itself, which was just about everything except textiles and vice.
“The trouble with Swankerton,” Homer Necessary said at the end of our two-hour sightseeing tour during which he had served as guide, social commentator, and economic analyst, “is that it ain’t got any harbor. They got that nice beach and all those hotels, but there’s no river, so there’s no harbor. They got that concrete pier that goes out about a mile and the tankers use that some, but that’s really why the town never grew as much as it should’ve. No harbor.”
We drove on in silence for a block or so and then he said, “Now I’m gonna show you something else that’s wrong with Swankerton. Or right. It all depends on how you look at it.”
He headed toward the downtown section, the older part, where the streets that ran east and west were named after such notables as Jefferson, Calhoun, Washington, Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Clay, Forrest, Hampton, Longstreet, Pickett and Early. The streets that ran north and south were numbered. We rolled down Third Street in the blue air-conditioned Impala that Necessary had rented, down to the edge of the commercial and financial districts. He pulled into a parking lot on Clay. “It’s about a block from here.”
We walked the block and I sweated in my too-heavy suit. We walked past the Texas Chili Parlor and Big Billy’s Inn and Emmett’s Billiard Parlor where “just a guy” supposedly hung out, past a TV repair shop, and turned into a narrow store front that had a black-and-white sign reading “Books and Movies.”
“I’ve buttered this guy up some,” Necessary said as we went in.
Most of the books were paperback and were written by authors with such alliterative names as Norman Norway and Jennifer Jackson and Paula Pale. The covers weren’t too well done, but they got their messages across. Often there were two girls of impressive physical proportions who went around in boots and whips and not much else. Sometimes there were two men and one girl or two girls and one man and they all seemed to have large, unmade beds in the background. The paperbacks’ titles were about as imaginative as the names of the authors. There was Red Lust and The Longest Whip and Broken Dyke and Fallen Devil. The paperbacks took up about three-fourths of the small shop and the rest was given over to magazines that featured extraordinarily well-built muscle boys or nude girls or sometimes both.
“Hello, Croner,” Necessary said to the man behind the tall counter that held a cash register.
“You remembered,” Croner said and looked first over Necessary’s right shoulder and then over his left.
“I remembered,” Necessary said.
Croner glanced at his watch. “Should be about fifteen minutes,” he said and darted another glance over Necessary’s shoulders. I looked this time and found two large, curved mirrors up at the ceiling corners in the rear of the store which gave Croner a view of the entire place.
Croner caught my look and said, “You know what the freaks steal? They steal two, three hundred dollars’ worth a week. I sometimes think when they boost it they get more of a jolt, you know what I mean?”
I told him that I did and Necessary said, “This is Lu; he’s a friend of mine.”
Croner nodded at me and then shot another glance at his mirrors. He had three customers, two well-dressed men of about fifty who browsed through a couple of magazines, one of which was called Bondage; I couldn’t see the name of the other. The third customer was about eighteen and wore hair down to his shoulders and some pink-and-white pimples on his face. He was moving his lips over some of the words in a paperback.
“So how’s business?” Necessary asked and leaned on the counter.
“Compared to what?” Croner said in a bitter tone. His complexion was the color of overcooked rice with dark eyes that reminded me of fat raisins. He was taller than I, almost six-four or six-five, and his thin elbows rested easily on the high counter. He talked out of the left side of his mouth because the right side seemed to be frozen. At least that corner didn’t move either up or down, although his dark eyebrows did. They jumped around in constant motion as if compensating for the immobility of his mouth. He had a long neck, extraordinarily long, and his shirt had a collar that was two and a half inches high and a monogram in the place of a breast pocket. I decided that business was good enough for him to afford custom-made shirts.
“Croner here used to write about two thousand bucks’ worth of numbers a day until Lynch came to town,” Necessary told me. “Now he sells dirty books and rents blue movies. He could still be writing numbers except he thought the dues were too high.”
“How much?” I said.
“You’ll see in a couple of minutes,” Croner said out of the side of his mouth and shot his eyebrows up and down a few times before flicking his glance at the two mirrors.
“Guy across the street in that dry cleaning place writes them now,” Necessary said. “Does a nice business. Just watch for a few minutes.”
It was a small shop called Jiffy Cleaners and it did seem to be doing a better than fair business. Every two or three minutes a woman or a man would go in, sometimes two and three at a time. They usually came out a minute or so later.
“Now what’s wrong with that picture?” Necessary said.
“Not much,” I said, “except that they don’t carry any clothes in or out.”
“Money in, a slip out,” Necessary said. “He writes maybe two to three thousand bucks’ worth a day. And in about five minutes he’ll pay his dues.”
We waited five minutes. A uniformed cop sauntered by and entered the dry cleaning shop. He came out forty-five seconds later according to my watch.
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bsp; “Every day about this time he goes in and collects his five bucks,” Croner said. “Except Sunday when he’s off. He’s off Monday too, but he still comes down for it. I only used to pay him a couple a day. Talk about your goddamned inflation.”
“That’s an extra thirty a week in take-home pay,” I said.
“Thirty shit,” Croner said. “He’s got another one six blocks down. He drags down at least sixty to seventy a week. Tax free.”
“Now watch this,” Necessary said. “Should be any minute.”
Some more customers without dry cleaning either to be done or to be picked up entered and left the shop. A Ford squad car with Swankerton Police Department on its side double parked in front of Jiffy Cleaners for a minute while one of its uniformed occupants went in and came out. He hadn’t dropped by to pick up his other suit either, and the squad car didn’t move off until the one who had gone into the shop handed something to the driver.
“They’re splitting the weekly take,” Croner said. “Three hundred bucks. I used to pay them two hundred.”
It was a half hour before something else interesting happened. Two more customers came into Croner’s store and the two middle-aged men left after buying a couple of magazines each. The teenager with the long hair and the pimples didn’t buy anything. The dry cleaning shop across the street continued to do a steady business.
An unmarked green Mercury double parked in front of the cleaning shop. Its single occupant entered the store, remained less than a minute, came out, and drove off.
“He just picked up the monthly take of seventeen hundred bucks for the brass down at headquarters,” Croner said. “His name’s Toby Marks and he’s regular bagman all over town.”
“Altogether, that’s about three thousand a month,” I said.
“About,” Croner said. “I figure that guy across the street’s working about ten or eleven days a month just for the cops. If he can’t cut it and goes out of business, that’s too damned bad for him. Somebody else’ll open up and pay off and the bastard cops are the only ones who’re guaranteed a profit.”