The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

  “Looking around. Taking a market survey. Sizing things up. The word’s got out that Lynch has slipped. The New Orleans crowd knows goddamn well something’s slipped and I hear they’re unhappy about it.”

  I rose and moved toward the door. “I’ll go see him.”

  “Lynch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give him my best.”

  “He’ll want a meeting.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Let’s see what happens this morning.”

  “Okay,” Necessary said.

  I paused at the door. “Is Lieutenant Ferkaire still keeping a check on arrivals?”

  Necessary nodded.

  “You might tell him to keep an eye out for one.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Tall, redheaded, and wears a pipe and Phi Beta Kappa key.”

  “Name?”

  “Carmingler.” Necessary made a note of it.

  “Hard case?”

  I nodded. “About as hard as they come.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Two unfriendly strangers met me at the door of Lynch’s Victorian house. About the only difference between them was that one was bald and the other wasn’t. The bald one stood squarely in the doorway while the one with hair took up a protective flanking position. Neither of them said anything. They stood there and looked at me and their expressions made it clear that they didn’t want any today, no matter what it was.

  “Where’s Boo?” I said.

  “Who’s Boo?” the baldheaded one said.

  “The mayor’s son.”

  “We don’t know any mayor.”

  “Tell Lynch I’m here.”

  “Tell him who’s here?”

  “Dye. Lucifer Dye.”

  “Lucifer Dye,” the bald one said slowly, as if he couldn’t decide whether he cared for its sound. “We don’t know you either, do we Shorty?”

  Shorty was close to five-eleven so something else must have earned him the nickname, but there was no point in dwelling on it. “I never knew nobody named Dye or Lucifer either,” Shorty said. “Where’d you get a name like Lucifer?”

  “Out of a book,” I said. “A dirty one.”

  “And you want to see Lynch?” the baldheaded one said.

  “No,” I said. “He wants to see me.”

  They thought about that for a moment until they got it sorted out. “I’ll go see,” Shorty said and left. I stood there on the screened porch with the man with the bald head. We had nothing further to say to each other so I admired his dark green double-breasted suit, his squared-off black shoes, and his green-and-black polka dotted tie. A bumblebee had fought its way through the screen and buzzed about the porch. When we got tired of admiring each other, we watched the bee.

  “They ain’t supposed to fly,” he said. “I read somewhere that the guys who design airplanes say bumblebees ain’t built right for flying.”

  We pondered the mystery of it all until Shorty came back. “This way,” he said. The baldheaded man took two steps backward so that I could enter. He waved a hand in the direction of the dining room. They didn’t seem to want me behind them.

  Ramsey Lynch looked as if he hadn’t been getting enough sleep. His eyes were bloodshot and had dark smears under them. He wore an ice cream suit that made him look fatter than he was. He didn’t smile when I came in, but I hadn’t expected him to. Three of them sat at the far end of a table. Lynch wasn’t in the center; he was on the left side. The man on the right side wore glasses and had an open attaché case before him. The man in the center stared at me and I thought that he had the oily eyes of an unhappy lizard.

  “Sit down, Dye,” Lynch said, so I sat at the opposite end of the table, near the sliding doors. Neither Shorty nor the baldheaded man had followed me into the room.

  “So you’re what we paid twenty-five thou for,” the man in the center said, and from his tone I could tell that he didn’t think I was much of a bargain.

  “Twenty-five thousand so far,” I said. “The final bill is for sixty.”

  “You know me—who I am?” he said.

  I knew, but he didn’t wait for my answer.

  “I’m Luccarella.”

  “From New Orleans,” I said.

  “You’ve heard of me, huh?” He didn’t seem to care one way or another.

  “Giuseppe Luccarella,” I said, “or Joe Lucky.”

  “That Joe Lucky’s newspaper stuff,” he said. “Nobody calls me Joe Lucky, but if they did, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t care about things like that anymore. You wanta call me Joe Lucky, go ahead.”

  “I’ll call you Mr. Luccarella,” I said.

  He shrugged. “This is my lawyer, Mr. Samuels.”

  I nodded at the lawyer and he nodded back and said, “Mr. Dye.”

  Luccarella leaned over the table, resting his elbows on it. He had a narrow, crimped face that looked as if it had been squeezed so hard that his lizard eyes and gray teeth threatened to pop out of his skull. His skin had an unhealthy yellowish tinge to it, as if he had just suffered a bad bout with jaundice. The deep lines in his face, especially his forehead said that he was somewhere past fifty, but his hair was still thick and black and glossy and he wore it long. He looked like a man who worried a lot.

  “Lynch works for me,” he said. He had that New Orleans Rampart Street accent that borders on Brooklynese and makes works come out close to woiks and for sound like fah. “You work for Lynch, so that means you work for me, right?”

  “I don’t work for anybody,” I said. “Particularly Lynch.”

  “He pays you, don’t he?”

  “He pays me a fee in exchange for information. I don’t work for him. We’d better get that straight at the start.”

  “Possibly Mr. Dye would prefer the word retained,” the lawyer said in that smooth, conciliatory tone that the expensive ones seem to be born with.

  Luccarella gestured impatiently. “Works, retained, who the hell cares? All I know is that since Lynch’s been paying you this town’s gone to hell.”

  “Well, it’s not quite that bad,” Lynch said.

  “I say it’s gone to hell and when receipts are down sixty-five percent I don’t know what it’s done if it hasn’t gone to hell.”

  “Sixty-eight percent, Mr. Luccarella,” the lawyer said.

  “It’ll be even worse next week,” I said.

  Luccarella frowned. “What do you mean worse?”

  “Necessary busted Henderson down to the Missing Persons’ Bureau.”

  “There isn’t any Missing Persons’ Bureau,” Lynch said.

  I smiled. “There is now.”

  “What was Henderson?” Luccarella said.

  “Vice squad.”

  Luccarella threw up his hands and flopped back into his chair. “That’s the fucking end!” he yelled. He turned on Lynch and the fat man seemed to cower in his chair as if afraid of being struck. “You can’t even keep a line on a goddamned vice-squad cop! What are you doing to me, Lynch? I hand you the sweetest setup in ten states and you just sit around and piss it away. What are you doing it to me for?”

  Before Lynch could answer, I said, “You might have some competition, too, but I suppose Lynch has already told you about that.”

  Luccarella pulled himself together with a visible effort. “I shouldn’t do that,” he said in an apologetic tone. “I shouldn’t fly off the handle like that. My analyst tells me that it’s inner-directed rage that should be channeled into something constructive. So that’s what I’m gonna do. No, Mr. Dye, Lynch hasn’t told me about any competition. Lynch doesn’t seem to know what’s going on anymore. He seems to have let things sort of slide. Ever since that tame police chief of his shot hisself, Lynch seems to be sort of out of it, you know what I mean?”

  “I’ve tried to keep him informed,” I said.

  Lynch glared at me, but said nothing. “Sure you have,” Luccarella said. “I bet you’ve kept him right up to date, but maybe you can sort of bring me u
p to date, if you don’t mind too much?” He was trying to be very polite and constructive and perhaps the tight grip that he had on his end of the table helped.

  “By competition I mean that Swankerton’s got some visitors. Chief Necessary says that they’re making a market survey and he seems to think that they might move in. Or try to.”

  Luccarella squeezed his eyes shut. “Who?” he said. Then he said it again without opening his eyes.

  “I think I remember most of them,” I said. “Jimmy Twoshoes of Chicago is one. The Onealo brothers, Roscoe and Ralph out of Kansas City. Nick the Nigger from Miami. Tex Turango, Dallas, A guy named Puranelli from Cleveland.”

  “Sweet Eddie,” Luccarella said, his eyes still tightly closed.

  “You didn’t tell me none of this,” Lynch said.

  “I just found out.”

  Luccarella opened his eyes and looked at me. “I want things back the way they were, Mr. Dye. I want things nice and calm and peaceful. I want to know how much that will cost me.” He gripped his end of the table so hard that his knuckles turned white. “You notice I’m being constructive.”

  “Your analyst would like it,” I said.

  “He’s an interesting guy. I had a lot of the worries and that’s why I went to him. I still have the worries, but I don’t mind them so much now. He said that most people have got the worries, but when they find out that they got them, then they can live with them. He said worrying about having the worries is what really gets you down. So you see why I don’t want to have any of the worries over here in Swankerton.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “That’s good. That’s real good. So how much is it gonna cost me?”

  I leaned back in my chair and smiled at Luccarella. I hoped it was a friendly one, the kind that wouldn’t worry him. “Chief Necessary said he would be willing to meet Friday to discuss things.”

  Luccarella shook his head. “I have to be at my analyst Friday. What about today?”

  “No chance today. Tomorrow’s a possibility.”

  “Set it up with Lynch.”

  I shook my head. “As you said earlier, Lynch has sort of lost touch.”

  Luccarella smiled for the first time, a big, buck-toothed smile. He even chuckled. Then he looked at Lynch and chuckled some more. It was turning into his kind of a meeting after all.

  “You agree with him, Lynch?” he said. “You agree that you’ve sort of lost touch?”

  Lynch looked at me and moved his head slowly from side to side as if he could see seven chess moves ahead to the end of a game that he couldn’t possibly win. The lawyer looked a little embarrassed and busied himself with some papers. Luccarella chuckled some more. I smiled at Lynch. Everyone knew what was coming, but only Luccarella seemed to have any relish for it. Perhaps I did too, but I’m still not sure.

  “I asked you something,” Luccarella said.

  “You asked me if I thought I’ve lost touch,” Lynch said, still looking at me.

  “That’s what I asked you.”

  “I’ve only made one mistake, Joe, and you’re about to make the same one. I haven’t lost touch. I just made that one mistake.”

  “Sometimes one mistake’s one too many,” Luccarella said, looked around for confirmation, and got it from Samuels, the lawyer, who nodded automatically.

  “The only mistake I made,” Lynch said, “was to believe one word that lying sonofabitch down there at the other end of the table ever said.”

  “I told you I was a liar,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Lynch said. “You did. And I believed that, too.”

  “So your price is gonna cost me Lynch, huh?” Luccarella said to me.

  “That’s right.”

  “What else?”

  “I name his successor.”

  “What about this new chief of police, what’s his name—Necessary?”

  “What about him?”

  “What’s he gonna cost me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He sets his own price.”

  “He’ll probably come high.”

  “Probably.”

  “But all you want to do is name Lynch’s successor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Luccarella nodded. “What time?”

  “Ten o’clock. My room in the Sycamore.”

  Luccarella shook his head. “My room. It’s six twenty-two.”

  “Your room,” I said.

  “You’ll bring Necessary?”

  “I won’t bring him; he’ll come with me.”

  Luccarella turned to Lynch. “There’s a plane out of here this afternoon for New Orleans. Be on it. Just make sure you hand all the records over to Samuels.”

  Lynch didn’t argue. He nodded his understanding and then in a mild tone said, “You’re making a goddamned bad mistake, Joe.”

  “At least I’m making it and not letting somebody do it for me.”

  “I’m not fixing to dispute that,” Lynch said. “I’m just saying that if you try to make a deal with him, you’re gonna regret it to your dying day.”

  “You don’t think I’m smart enough to do a deal with him?”

  “I’m wasting my breath,” Lynch said.

  “No. I want to know. You don’t think I’m smart enough, do you?”

  “Being smart don’t have anything to do with it. I’ve skinned lots of guys smarter than Dye is, twice as smart, and so have you, but like I said, smart has got nothing to do with it.”

  “What’s got to do with it?” Luccarella said.

  Lynch stared at me some more. “I’ll tell you what it is. He’s a loser who doesn’t expect to win. You don’t have to worry about losers who think they’ll win because that always gives you the edge. But you haven’t got any edge on the loser who’ll play by your rules and not give a damn if he wins or loses or breaks even. He doesn’t really give a damn if he even plays, so that means that you never hold the edge on him and it means that you never really win. And that matters to you, but it don’t to him, so that puts you in the hole, I don’t care what happens.”

  Luccarella nodded after Lynch finished and slumped back into his chair as if winded. “You know what my analyst would call that?” he said. “My analyst would call that insight.”

  “Or projection,” I said.

  “You got an analyst, Mr. Dye?” Luccarella asked in a hopeful tone, as if he wanted to compare notes.

  “No.”

  “What do you think of what Lynch said?”

  “Not much.”

  “But you do want something, despite what he said. You want to name his successor, like you said.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can tell you who it’s gonna be,” Lynch said.

  “You want to let him guess?” Luccarella said. “After all, it’s his own successor.”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “Okay, who?” Luccarella said.

  Lynch stared at me again. He seemed to find something about me fascinating. “It’s gonna be you, isn’t it, Dye?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “It’s going to be me.”

  CHAPTER 36

  “What do you think you should call yourself at this particular point in time, Mr. Dye?” Victor Orcutt asked. “Are you Swankerton’s vice lord apparent? Or would vice lord designate be more appropriate?”

  Four of us had just lunched on some more of Orcutt’s homecooking, thin slices of veal swimming in a thick sauce whose principal ingredients seemed to have been sour cream and a heavy Marsala that I thought had been too sweet. I had eaten all of mine anyway.

  “Either one,” I said.

  Orcutt flitted over to the coffee and poured himself another cup. He wore a blue blazer with gold buttons, striped blue and white trousers, white buck shoes with red rubber soles, and another Lord Byron shirt, whose open neck was partially filled by a carelessly knotted narrow paisley scarf. He looked all of twenty-two.


  “The only thing that disturbs me is Senator Simon’s speech,” he said as he glided back to his chair by the window that looked out over the Gulf.

  “What about that magazine piece?” Homer Necessary said. “What’s that thing got, about nine million circulation?”

  “Six,” Carol said.

  “You know, Mr. Dye, you were right,” Orcutt said. “I really did place too much trust in Gerald Vicker. This grudge he has against you seems almost pathological.”

  “His brother doesn’t like me much either,” I said.

  Orcutt almost bounced up and down on the seat of his chair. “Oh, I would have given anything to have seen Lynch this morning! You give excellent reports, Mr. Dye, but you never include all the little spicy details. You’re really not much of a gossip, you know.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No matter. It just means that we’re going to have to move our schedule back—or is it up? I never could get that straight.”

  “Back,” Carol said.

  “Up,” Necessary said.

  “Never mind,” Orcutt said. “What we hoped and planned would happen will now have to happen earlier than we had hoped and planned. All right?” He didn’t wait for a vote. “Senator Simon will speak Friday after next, that’s ten days from now, and the main thrust of his speech will charge that Mr. Dye’s former employers are now engaged in domestic politics and Swankerton will be his proof. Data on this and other details relating to Mr. Dye’s past activities were furnished the senator by Gerald Vicker and his brother, Ramsey Lynch. Am I correct so far?”

  “So far,” I said.

  “Good. Meanwhile that awful magazine—I simply never could read it, especially its editorials—will publish an article buttressing and embellishing the senator’s speech. It also will appear a week from Friday. It will not only attack Mr. Dye and his former employers, but it will also carry an account of Victor Orcutt Associates’ involvement here in Swankerton. Incidentally, Homer, have you heard of any of the magazine’s writers or photographers being in town?”

  Necessary nodded. “They’re around, but they’ve been working with Lynch.”

  “Isn’t it strange that they haven’t called any of us?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why?”