City of Dark Corners, Jon Talton [top 10 best books of all time TXT] 📗

as if angry steam monsters were chained to its insides and exhaling black curses. I braced myself, put my hands in the pockets of my slacks, ahead of what was coming. Out of sight, they coupled to more cars with a metallic boom. A pleasant breeze filled the space. I hardly flinched at all. After the two birds that were my hands stopped fluttering, I pulled them out and lit a cigarette. I was pretty good at concealing the little bag of shell shock I had brought home from France. Thunderstorms, car backfires, unexpected sharp noises—that was where I had to be careful. No one who has survived an artillery barrage can adequately explain it to a civilian—not only the sounds but the way it tears men to bits or buries them alive in shell holes. And the terrible helplessness.

My companion didn’t notice. “Chinese people here who built the railroads are spreading out from Chinatown. We own grocery stores and restaurants all over the city. That’s not to say things are perfect. Any time the city fathers want to please the chamber of commerce, they raid the opium and gambling houses in Chinatown. They don’t touch the east side, where the action is controlled by the whites, city commissioners, so-called respectable businessmen. Even though those Chinese owners pay off the cops like everybody else.” He shook his head. “Then things go back to normal, because there’s demand. Who comes to Chinatown to gamble, smoke opium, buy cocaine? The whites.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Don Hammons was probably the perfect example, especially when he worked vice. You can’t pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Wing Ong was one of the smartest people I knew. If he wasn’t a Chinaman, there was no telling how high he might rise.

“Sorry to go off on a tirade,” he said. “There’s corruption everywhere. One hand washes the other. And I didn’t mean to imply anything about you. You were always very fair with Chinese people.”

I waved it away. “I have plenty of tirades in me, too. And just so you know, I left the police department last year.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’ve got better jokes than that,” I said, and explained my new private eye business without hanging out the dirty laundry that had caused me to lose my badge.

“I like the freedom of being on my own,” I lied. It was time to change the subject. “You have a new store?”

“The Golden Gate Grocery, Eleventh Street and Van Buren. Come by.”

I promised him that I would. He was about to leave when I said, “Speaking of gambling, have you ever heard of a man named Gus Greenbaum?”

Six

The locomotive huffed away to the east, to the SP yard to find fuel oil and water, blowing its whistle as it crossed Third Avenue. Beyond the yard was the dumping ground of my cut-up blonde. I liked blondes who were cutups, but not this way. The silence was so pronounced we could hear songbirds from the tall oleander hedges to the north, separating Union Station from the Warehouse District.

“If you go to Chinatown or the places on the east side, you can gamble,” Ong said. “But it’s small stuff. Craps, poker, slot machines. Sic bo or dominoes in Chinatown. Or you can go in the back room of a cigar store or a poolroom or a bar and place a bet with a white or colored bookie. Again, small-time and local compared to what Gus Greenbaum has going. I’m surprised you don’t know about him.”

I explained that my time handling vice cases was mostly over by ’28, when Greenbaum arrived.

“Just as well,” he said. “Gus is Chicago mob, sent to oversee the Southwest branch of their national wire network, the Trans-America News Service. Don’t be fooled by the name. It’s the latest thing and is going to put the old operations out of business. The idea is to use Western Union to get an edge, so the network instantly transmits the results of horse races around the country. It gives the gangsters a monopoly. It’s a vertically integrated business, same as General Motors. At the bottom is the average bookie, who once worked for himself or was part of local organized crime. They depended on the newspaper or radio for results on a race, a game, or a prizefight.”

“Now they work for the Outfit.”

“Indeed.”

“What if the local bookie doesn’t want to?”

“They pay him a friendly visit and tell him he can make more money as part of the national syndicate. If he refuses, the next visit isn’t so friendly. Broken arm. Burned-down shop. Stuck in a mine shaft out by Squaw Peak with a bullet in his head as an incentive for his compadres to understand things have changed.”

“Nice people.” I smashed my cigarette butt in the ashtray beside the bench.

Ong offered his shiny wide smile, like a sunny Phoenix day. It didn’t last. He shook his head. “On the other hand, the bookie who goes along gets protection from shakedowns.”

“How does Greenbaum’s racket work?”

“Trans-America News Service. Sounds like the Associated Press, right? Officially, it transmits sporting news by telegraph. Except the only news it actually carries is racing, especially the results. It doesn’t deal directly with the bookmakers but uses a distribution network. Trans-America’s news is the complete information on every race: the horses set to run that day, the jockey, weight of the horse, odds, all of it. The morning of the race, it wires out the track conditions and if anything in the lineup has changed. Have the odds changed? Has a horse been scratched? It wires the positions of the horses once the race starts, at the quarter and in the final stretch, then the finish.”

“The sport of kings,” I said.

“And the vice of commoners,” he said. “Now, the basic race information is available to the AP, United Press, and International News Service—they’ll send it to the Republic and the Gazette, the radio stations. But Trans-America is faster. At a lot of