by Ross Thomas
Necessary didn’t seem to be listening anymore. He was busy strapping on an open holster that held a .38 caliber revolver. When he was through with that, he reached into his desk drawer, brought something out and offered it to me. I just looked at it. “It’s a gun,” he said. “A Chief’s Special.”
“I know what it is,” I said.
“You may need it.” He gazed at me curiously. “You know how to use it.”
“I know.”
“Then take it, for Christ sake, and let’s go.”
My hand moved toward the gun and an hour or so later I was holding it and when I looked at it, that was all that it was, a gun. I dropped it into my coat pocket.
“Just you and me?” I said.
“That’s right, Dye, just you and me.”
CHAPTER 43
By the time we got to the old Victorian house eleven ambulances jammed the street and their white-coated attendants were wandering around looking for someone to cart off to a hospital—or the morgue. A crowd of around two hundred or two hundred and fifty persons had formed and they were all telling each other what had happened. One of the ambulance attendants spotted Necessary and pushed through the crowd toward him.
“I can’t find anything or anybody, Chief,” he complained in a whining, nasal tone. “Everybody says they heard a lot of shots and there’s sure as hell a lot of blood on the sidewalk, but there’s nobody dead. There’s not even anybody sick.”
“Must have been a false alarm,” Necessary said.
“With all that blood?”
“That’s right,” Necessary said, “with all that blood. Now tell the rest of those ambulances to get on out of here.”
The attendant shrugged and disappeared into the crowd. We pushed through it and made our way up the walk, skirting the bloody spot where Schoemeister must have died. I wondered if the man with the white pillowcase had been his oldest sister’s kid, Marvin.
I let Necessary do the pounding on the door. It was opened cautiously by the man called Shorty. He grinned when he saw who it was and opened the door wide. “Worked out real nice, didn’t it?”
“What worked out nice, friend?” Necessary asked.
“Yeah. Well, come on in—he’s expecting you.”
We followed him into the stiff parlor where the man from New Orleans with the squeezed-together face wore the broadest smile he could manage. There was a magnum of champagne on the coffee table. Samuels, the lawyer, was fiddling with its cork.
“Just in time,” Luccarella said happily. “You just made it for the celebration.” He nudged Necessary in the ribs. “The way you got rid of the cops out in Niggertown. That was something, Chief, really something, let me tell you.”
“There could have been a riot,” Necessary said.
Luccarella snuffled. “A riot,” he said. “I thought it was a real riot when I saw old Schoemeister’s face. You should’ve seen it—it was really something.” He turned to Samuels. “Give the chief a glass of champagne. We’re gonna celebrate, by God, because it all worked out so nice. It worked out so nice that I even sent all the boys back home except what you see right here.”
There were six of us in the room now. Necessary, Luccarella, Samuels, the man called Shorty, and another one whom I didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to meet. He leaned against the wall across from me and smiled pleasantly at everything.
“I haven’t got time for champagne, Mr. Luccarella,” Necessary said.
“What do you mean, you haven’t got time? And what’s this mister shit? You don’t have to call me mister. I don’t like it that you should call me that.”
“You’re under arrest for the murder of William Morze, Mr. Luccarella,” Necessary said just as Samuels popped the cork out of the champagne bottle. The lawyer looked up quickly. The man across the room from me stopped smiling. Luccarella’s face colored—a bit purplish, I decided. Necessary raised a small, typed card that he’d palmed and started to read Luccarella all about his rights. Then he looked at Samuels and said, “Does Mr. Luccarella understand these rights?”
Samuels nodded slowly. “He understands them.”
“Let’s go, Mr. Luccarella,” Necessary said, reaching for the man’s arm. Luccarella danced away, his mouth working furiously, but making no sound.
Finally he stopped dancing around and pointed a finger at Necessary. “You crossed me, you sonofabitch!” he yelled. “You swore you wouldn’t and you crossed me. I didn’t have nothing to do with killing any Morse or whatever his name is. You goddamned well know I didn’t. You’re putting the frame on me, Necessary, you and that slick buddy of yours.”
Necessary turned to Samuels again. “Maybe as his lawyer you should inform him of his rights and make sure that he understands them.”
“I don’t think—” Samuels made a helpless gesture with his hands and moved away from the champagne bottle and toward the door to the hall. He looked around once frantically and then darted through it.
“Let’s go, Luccarella,” Necessary said again.
“No, by God! It’s a frame. I got friends—I got friends just like anybody else.” He hurried over to a small desk and yanked open a drawer. He pawed through it and almost got the revolver out, but Necessary moved over quickly and slammed the drawer on his hand. Luccarella screamed and sank to the floor, clutching his injured hand. Necessary reached down, got hold of an arm, and yanked him to his feet. Luccarella squirmed loose again and danced over to the man by the wall, the one that I kept watching.
“Shoot him, goddamn you! Kill him!” Luccarella was screaming now. “You saw what he done to me!” The man looked at Luccarella and then at Shorty who stood near the door. They nodded at each other. The man against the wall came up with his gun and I shot him twice and then turned and shot Shorty once. Then I looked at the gun for what seemed to be a long time and laid it carefully on a table. Necessary had his revolver out now and was looking around, as if for someone to shoot. He aimed it at Luccarella.
The thin man’s face contorted and his mouth worked and he screamed again. No words, just sounds. His analyst wouldn’t have liked those sounds. Luccarella jerked open his coat and held it wide from his chest as he stumbled toward Necessary, still screaming. Necessary slapped him hard across the face and it stopped screaming and lost its distortion. It just looked old and crumpled now. “You shoulda shot me,” he muttered. “You shoulda killed me.”
Necessary turned to me. “You all right?”
“Sure.”
“You didn’t bring any cuffs along, did you? I forgot to bring any.”
“You shoulda shot me, you sonofabitch,” Luccarella said. He was whimpering now and I thought he sounded very much like William Morze.
“No,” I said, “I didn’t bring any cuffs.”
“Christ,” Necessary said, “I wish I’d thought to bring some cuffs.”
The crowd outside the Victorian house had grown by another hundred persons or so when we came out the front door and walked down the steps that led from the screened-in porch. I pushed my way through the crowd and Necessary followed, his left hand clamped on Luccarella’s right arm. Necessary had his gun out and clasped firmly in his right hand. Someone in the crowd wanted to know who the guy in front was and somebody replied that he was with the FBI and then someone else wanted to know why the FBI man didn’t have no gun like the chief of police had.
We were halfway to the Imperial when Necessary yelled: “Look out, Dye!” I turned just in time to see him. He was coming at me fast, the familiar triangular-bladed knife held in the acceptable style and I remember thinking that he knew all the tricks that I knew, and then some, and that there wasn’t one goddamned thing I could do about it but watch. So I did and, fascinated, heard the sound of the two shots and watched the twin holes appear in his vest. Just above the Phi Beta Kappa key. It was Carmingler. The one they sent when they sent their very best.
He stumbled backwards and dropped the knife and looked down curiously at the two holes in his vest. H
e didn’t touch them. He looked at me and there was surprise and, I suppose, sorrow in his face. I remember thinking that he looked like a sorrowful horse. His mouth worked a little, but no words came out. He lurched toward me then and there was nothing else to do but try to catch him before he fell.
I caught him, but he was dead weight, and I knew I couldn’t hold him up for long. He looked at me again, his face no more than a few inches from mine. The sorrow in his gaze seemed to have been replaced by contempt, but you can never really tell. It may have been just pain. His lips worked and finally he got it out, what he very much wanted to tell me.
“You still aren’t very important to us, Dye,” he said. I nodded, but he didn’t see it because he could no longer see anything. I lowered him to the sidewalk gently, but it didn’t matter anymore how I did it because he was already dead.
Necessary, still clutching Luccarella, yelled at the crowd to move back. He picked out somebody and told them to call an ambulance. “Call three of them,” he added.
He and Luccarella moved up to me as I stood there staring down at Carmingler. “The hard case?” Necessary said.
“As hard as they come,” I said.
“That was a goddamned fool thing of me to do in a crowd like this,” he said. “I could have shot somebody.”
“You did,” I said.
“I mean somebody else.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “You shot him.”
“If it doesn’t matter, then what the hell are you crying for?”
“I didn’t know that I was,” I said.
CHAPTER 44
Three things happened Saturday, the day after the crime wave. First, as a special favor to the Swankerton Police Department, the First National Bank let me visit my safe-deposit box. They may have felt that it could help them get their stolen $50,000 back. It didn’t.
The second thing happened after I left the bank. I called a private number at Police Headquarters and said: “I’m all done.” Five minutes later Swankerton’s chief of police submitted his resignation.
The third thing was the telegram that I got from New York. It read: “I died by my own hand last night. Just thought you might like to know. Regards. Gorman.” A postscript read: “Mr. Smalldane left instructions insisting on the wording of this telegram.” The postscript was signed by Gorman Smalldane Associates, Inc., and I wondered who they were.
CHAPTER 45
I sometimes still take out a rather crumpled copy of that Sunday’s edition of The Swankerton News-Calliope. Because it never published on Saturday, it was full of news that Sunday. There was the one-day crime wave, of course, and six or seven shootings and killings to recount and speculate about. There was also the resignation of the chief of police to announce. But in the center of the front page was a large three-column picture of a rather puzzled looking man and underneath it in very black, very bold forty-eight point type is a headline which asks the question:
WHO IS THIS MAN?
I sometimes read the story over because it’s quite long and it goes into great detail about someone called Lucifer Dye. According to the story, Lucifer Dye was the man who corrupted Swankerton. All by himself. He was, if one were to believe the story, a onetime spy, a hired gun, a crooked cop, a confidence man, a crime czar, and an agent provocateur for some unnamed foreign power. He was also a long list of other things, none of them fashionable, and The News-Calliope hated the man and urged its readers to hate him and to undo the evil that he had done by going to the polls in November and electing good men to office. If they didn’t, the newspaper implied in an editorial signed by Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III, they were fools. The editorial then thoughtfully listed a number of men who, it said, deserved the votes of all those citizens of Swankerton who weren’t absolute fools.
I like to reread the long article about Lucifer Dye because it promises to tell who he really is, but it never does. I keep hoping that it will. Clipped to the fading newsprint is a shorter article, only a couple of inches long, that was torn from a copy of the international edition of Time. It’s about how the citizens of Swankerton elected a last-minute, write-in slate to fill all of the major municipal offices. It has a kicker, of course, or Time wouldn’t have printed it. The kicker is that one of the new city councilmen is Buford Robineaux, only son of the city’s defeated mayor.
I live in Mexico now and I’ve quit smoking and I run a store in a seaport-resort town that sells books in English about Mexico to tourists who can’t read Spanish. There seem to be a lot of them. It doesn’t cost much to live in Mexico and the bookstore earns enough to support my wife and me. My wife’s name is Carol and her best friend is a twenty-three-year-old stunner from the Midwest whose husband runs a boat marina. Sometimes her husband and I go to a local cantina and drink beer with a redheaded Mexican who’s the chief of police. The Mexican feels that there’s nothing unusual about his hair, but he thinks that my friend has rare eyes because one is blue and one is brown.
We sit there and drink beer in the afternoon and talk about crime in far off places. We never talk about a place called Swankerton.