City of Dark Corners, page 1
Also by Jon Talton
The David Mapstone Mysteries
Concrete Desert
Cactus Heart
Camelback Falls
Dry Heat
Arizona Dreams
South Phoenix Rules
The Night Detectives
High Country Nocturne
The Bomb Shelter
The Cincinnati Casebooks
The Pain Nurse
Powers of Arrest
Other Books
Deadline Man: A Thriller
A Brief History of Phoenix
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Jon Talton
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by The BookDesigners
Cover images © Ivan Kurmyshov/Shutterstock, Virrage Images/Shutterstock
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Talton, Jon, author.
Title: City of dark corners / Jon Talton.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020036126 | (trade paperback) | (epub)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3620.A58 C58 2021 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036126
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A Note on Language
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Author’s Note
Excerpt from The Bomb Shelter
One
About the Author
Back Cover
For Susan
A Note on Language
This novel is set in America of nearly a century ago. I have generally used the vernacular of that era. But readers should be aware that this included commonly employed racial epithets that would be highly offensive today. Even polite references to ethnicity or gender in this era would sound hurtful or disrespectful to twenty-first-century ears and sensibilities.
—Jon Talton
One
JANUARY 1933, PHOENIX, ARIZONA
Night folded in early during the winter.
It was only half past six, the neon of the auto courts and curio shops on Van Buren Street giving way to the emptiness of the Tempe Road, indigo pushing against my headlights as I drove east. Only a few other cars were about.
Cars were fewer in general than they had been only a few years ago and seemed to fit the new times: fewer jobs, fewer businesses, fewer people getting by.
Just after crossing the bridge over the Grand Canal, I parked, shut off the Ford’s purring V8, and stepped out. I pulled down my fedora close to my eyes, a habit I kept from my police days on the Hat Squad, stuck a Chesterfield in my mouth, and lit it with the Dunhill lighter brought back from London years ago. I buttoned my suit coat against the desert chill and walked toward the cottonwoods to the south, which loomed like storm clouds on a moonless night.
After walking beyond the trees, I was suddenly inside the camp. It held perhaps fifty denizens. Okies. Workers laid off from the closed copper mines. A miscellany of hoboes. It was outside the city limits and away from the attention of the cops. One of several Hoovervilles that had sprung up during the past three years. Hoover himself seemed ever more isolated and powerless, even though he’d be in office until March. Calvin Coolidge just died. Hoover, the “Great Engineer” who was so popular when he won in ’28, might have wished it were him instead. Now he was reviled and rejected.
In the camp, people kept to their clans. The Okies drawn and clad in tattered clothing, the miners with beaten-down faces and muscular bodies in canvas pants, they clustered around campfires and next to cars on their last miles.
Charity wasn’t to be much found in Phoenix now; everyone from the county to the churches, Kiwanis and Rotary clubs was tapped out. The Municipal Woodyard to provide help to the “worthy local unemployed” was struggling. Businesses continued to close and lay people off. The lettuce harvest and shipping were complete. Only pink grapefruits were being picked, boxed, and shipped now through March. Any new work in the fields and groves was months away. Maybe some of the travelers would make it to California, the promised land, by road or freight train.
Even with the nighttime cold, the weather was better now than back east. It would be different come summer, and the population of the hobo jungles would plummet.
The campfires glared at gaunt faces. Beyond the next stand of trees, a Southern Pacific freight train trundled past eastbound, shaking the ground, the smoke of its locomotive rising into the night sky. I saw a young man watch it as if it was the fanciest passenger train, only awaiting his presence in the parlor car.
And me? I had a photograph and a hunch and a pocket of dimes. It was my job.
“Hey, buddy, you look too well dressed to be here.”
He came out of the shadows and had friends. He was almost my height and had a face that looked like a dry desert river: brown, pocked, and creased by lines that shifted as he spoke.
“Well, here I am,” I said, handing him a dime and showing him the photo. He kept staring at me, and I noticed what looked like silver rings on every finger of his right hand. But I knew better and unbuttoned my coat.
“Who dares not stir by day must walk by night.”
This came from a rail of a man at his right. He held out his arms as if to fly, then bowed. A thespian.
I ignored him and focused on the big man. His eyes were as barren as an abandoned house. I nodded toward the photograph. “Have you seen this fellow here?”
“We don’t truck with cops or cinder dicks.” His lips barely moved as the words came out. “You’re in the wrong place. Wrong time.”
His right hand came up fast. Brass knuckles wrapped around a fist headed my way. But I was faster, slashing my sap against his left temple. Training and experience had taught me how to swing the leather-covered piece of lead just enough to stop a man without killing him. It was all in the wrist.
I was in no mood to have my jaw rearranged or my brains scrambled. Experience had also made me especially wary of brass knucks; some of my former colleagues would have shot him for merely possessing them. His eyes rolled back, and he dropped straight down as if a trapdoor had suddenly opened beneath him. The others backed up.
I assessed them for a few seconds, the black come-along still dangling from my hand. “I’m not a cop or a railroad bull. This face. You seen him?” I showed the pic again and this time the men studied it.
“No need to get sore,” the thespian offered. “He’s about fifty yards that way, beyond the Okie truck with the piano in the bed. Give him a bottle, and he’ll tell you his life story. Claims he was a businessman, if you can believe that.”
I slid the sap back inside my belt, gave him a dime, and walked. I took a drag on the cigarette, which had survived the altercation, letting the tobacco settle my nerves. Sure enough, a Model T truck with wooden slats and an antique upright piano was parked beside a campfire. A raggedy family huddled next to it eating beans out of cans. Ten feet beyond, a man sat on h
I knelt down. He looked about my age with oily dark hair and a tattered muslin shirt, an army surplus blanket around his shoulders. His eyes took a moment to focus on me.
“Samuel Dorsey?”
“Sam. Who wants to know? I ain’t done nothing.”
“This is your lucky day, Sam,” I said. “Your family paid me to find you.”
“You a cop?”
“Private detective.”
“Well, gumshoe, I’ve got nothing for you or for them.” He used both hands to rub his face hard, as if he could rearrange his features into a different man. He was several days past a shave. “Lost my job when the plant closed and took to the rails. No greater shame than when a man can’t provide for his family.”
“Things change. Your wife wired me and said she’s come into an inheritance. She wants you to come home.”
He eyed me suspiciously, processing my words. Finally: “Her Uncle Chester. He was pushing ninety, and he was a rich man. Never did a thing for us.”
“Now he has.” I held out a wad of cash.
He reached for the bills, but I pulled them away.
“No, it doesn’t work that way. I’ll take you to Union Station and put you on the late train to Chicago. Back home.”
I’d be damned if he was going to use it on booze, whores, and gambling, ending up back here. Or being robbed by Mister Knuckleduster, once he got over the headache I’d given him.
He looked at me and started sobbing. “How can they want me now? After I walked out?”
“Maybe they love you.” I handed him a nail and lit it. He took a deep drag.
He didn’t think long. “Okay,” he shrugged. “I want to go home. You got a drink?” I shook my head. He hesitated, then stood, leaving the blanket on the ground.
Many people went missing in the Great Depression. Hardly any of it was as grotesque or glamorous as the Lindbergh kidnapping. Men lost their jobs and left their families. Sons and daughters disappeared. Bonus marchers were scattered and lost.
Looking for them was a big part of my business. It often started with a wire from Chicago or Cincinnati or Buffalo, then, if I thought I could help, a photo in the mail. I charged $25 to begin an investigation, another $25 if I found some usable information, and an even hundred if I found the person and could get them home. Money was tight all over, and happy endings were rare.
I walked him out of the camp and back up to the road.
“That’s a sweet flivver,” he said, indicating my red Ford Deluxe Coupe ragtop.
Opening the passenger door, I let him slide inside to admire it.
Then headlights caught me from behind, and a pickup slid in ahead of me to stop, throwing gravel like a hailstorm. “Stay here.” I closed the door.
Half a dozen tough mugs piled out of the truck bed. They were carrying baseball bats and cans of gasoline.
“Gene Hammons.” My name came from the driver walking toward me. I could have enjoyed an evening or a lifetime without seeing Kemper Marley.
“It’s dark for a ballgame, Kemper,” I said. “In fact, I don’t even see a baseball.”
“You always make me laugh, Hammons,” he said, unsmiling.
Kemper Marley was only twenty-six, but he looked older, with thin straight lips and a challenging glare in his eyes. In this light, one could see the old man he would turn into, if he lived that long. He had the posture and personality of a ball-peen hammer but decked out in a new Vic Hanny suit, bolo tie, and a gleaming Stetson, giving the lie to movie Westerns in which good guys wore white hats.
I folded my arms. “What are you going to do when Prohibition is repealed?”
“What Prohibition?” It was the answer I expected. Marley was the leading bootlegger in Phoenix.
His posse shifted restlessly behind him.
I said, “So what’s this?”
“We’re going to clear out this bunch,” he said. “Communists aren’t welcome in Phoenix. This country is on the brink.”
“And you’re going to roll back Bolshevism by burning out a bunch of poor Okies doing the best they can? There’s no Reds down there.”
He patted me on the shoulder, about as affectionately as a swipe from a mountain lion. “You were always naive, Hammons. Always. Sentimental.”
“Sentimental enough to know your thugs should leave those people alone. They’ve lost their farms and jobs. Mines have closed or are mothballed all over the state. Even the railroads have cut employees.”
He spat in the dirt. “I’m not a political man, Hammons, but this country’s in big trouble.”
“True, but maybe Roosevelt can turn things around.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But he doesn’t take office until March. If it even happens, I’m not sure I trust the man. You know, he’s a cripple. I saw him when he campaigned here in ’31 with Carl Hayden and Governor Hunt.”
“He had polio.”
Marley shook his head. “He’s a damned cripple, Hammons. People see that handsome head in the newspapers. They hear his voice on the radio. But they don’t see how he has the braces on his legs and needs to lean on someone or the podium to stand. I don’t trust a man like that.”
I stared at him.
He said, “Did you know that only about 20,000 Bolsheviks took over Russia, a country of more than a hundred million people?” His eyes blazed like a blast furnace of paranoia. “It can happen here. Look at Germany. Brownshirts and Reds fighting in the streets. This Hitler will put a stop to that if Hindenburg names him chancellor this month. Mussolini got it right in Italy.”
“I don’t care for dictators.” I lit another cigarette.
“Those are very bad for your health.” For a bootlegger, Marley could be quite a prig. He waved the smoke away. “Maybe we need a dictator. I’ll tell you this: No Reds are going to take away my property. No Huey Long, either.”
“Nobody in the camp down there wants your property,” I said.
“Well, I’m not taking chances, and we need that rabble gone. Sends a message. We have to stop these people from bumming their way from town to town. Gas moochers. Our help should only go to local taxpaying citizens.”
“It’s hard to pay taxes when you’ve lost your job,” I said.
“Look, there’s the worthy unemployed and the others.”
I couldn’t resist blowing smoke in his face. “And you’re the one to make that determination?”
He made a face and waved it away. “I agree with President Hoover, no federal relief for individuals. It will sap the American spirit. There’s plenty of work for a man who wants to show some gumption. This Depression, they call it, is only a passing incident. That’s what President Hoover says, and he’s right.” He tried to push me aside, but I didn’t move. “You want to stop me? Oh, I forgot, you’re not a policeman any longer.” His thin lips turned up.
I briefly considered shooting the SOB but thought better of it. I’d killed tougher men than him during the war. But I didn’t need the distraction tonight.
Reading my thoughts, he said, “I would have fought over there if I’d been old enough. Don’t think I wouldn’t have.”
Marley would have lasted about a day against the Huns. He’s the kind of idiot who would have stuck his head above the trench and had it turned to pudding. Or be badly wounded and end up a cripple himself, without Roosevelt’s leonine head, fine voice, and first-rate temperament. I let that pleasing thought go and stepped aside.
“Who’s that in your car?”
I spoke over my shoulder. “A lost soul I’m putting on the train back to Chicago.”
Marley shook his head. “I’ll never figure you out, boy. Come by and see me tomorrow. I have some work for you.”
I felt bile coming up my throat and walked back to the Ford. By the time I had made the U-turn to head for town, Marley and his gang had disappeared toward the tree line. Me, letting it happen.
Two
At Phoenix’s impressive new Union Station, I put Sam Dorsey on the eastbound Golden State Limited, escorting him to the Pullman berth I had purchased and slipping a ten and my business card to the porter to keep an eye on him. The train seemed only about half-full, another casualty of our “passing incident.” I stepped off as the locomotive signaled highball with two bursts of its whistle and its bell ringing like Sunday morning church.
