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

times I worked as a bodyguard for George Raft. It wasn’t what it seemed. George could take care of himself, and sober he was a good guy, tipped well, paid me generously. But he was a brawler, and my job was to keep him out of trouble. Maybe the stars knew the identity of my dismembered problem.

The phonograph was scratching and otherwise silent when a knock at the door startled me awake.

Victoria stepped in, holding a manila envelope.

“I figured you’d want this sooner than later.” She brought her lips up to mine, her coat fell to the floor, I met her kiss and pulled her inside, tossing the envelope of photographs on a table. They could wait.

I was glad once again that the landlord didn’t live in the building.

Four

The new office buildings were struggling to find tenants. Several building and loan institutions had failed, and even the biggest banks were teetering. The good news was that rents were low; the bad news was that nobody had much money.

When I set up my private detective agency, I got a great deal on the top floor of the three-story Monihon Building at First Avenue and Washington. This, a pre-statehood structure with a mansard roof, sat in the same block as Newberry’s, Kress, and J.C. Penney. Neon signs proclaimed Boehmer Drug Store and Funk Jewelry (“Confidential Credit”) on the first floor and Dr. Mapstone’s dental practice on the second. It lacked the art deco grandeur of the new Luhrs Tower with its uniformed elevator operators, but I could afford it.

The rain was gone and the sun bright. The sky was cobalt blue and the mountains, miles away, looked as if you could reach out and touch them. Awnings were down in the fronts of the buildings to shade the stream of pedestrians while cars jockeyed for parking spaces and streetcars clanged past. A couple of sidewalk elevators by stores were open and workers loading merchandise for the trip into the basement. My shoes stepped over the heavy glass embedded in the sidewalk to bring light into those underground spaces.

Even in the twenties, you’d still see horse-drawn wagons, but they were gone from downtown now. The stream of humanity was a mixture of businessmen, ladies shopping, and workmen from the produce sheds and warehouses to the south. It was almost as if a Depression wasn’t happening.

On Washington, the main commercial drag of Phoenix, the signs were more subtle: The man against the wall with “Brother, can you spare a dime” written on a scrap of paper, desperate faces and furtive eyes darting from business to business like dying flies, seeking jobs that weren’t there. Uniformed cops moved along hoboes who had wandered up from the railroad tracks. The sound of Rudy Vallee singing “As Time Goes By” wafted out a doorway. Walk around downtown and you’d see permanently closed doors from the places that had been forced out of business, a third of the city’s banks and thrifts closed, much of the music gone.

After paying for an Arizona Republic at the newsstand out front, I took the stairs to the third floor.

I shared a secretary with an accountant in the adjoining office. Gladys Johnson had a strained face that reminded me of my child-hating fourth-grade teacher. She oddly favored the flapper clothes and hairstyle that were already anachronisms in this more austere decade. Presiding over the outer office, she wore an out-of-fashion cloche hat and a sequined dress. It was like having a silent movie or paper shirt collar as my reluctant assistant.

She was machine-gunning the Remington typewriter when I came in, but looked up and nodded toward my door, where “Gene Hammons, Private Investigator” was etched in the frosted glass.

“You have a client waiting.”

She said it as if such a thing never happened.

I paused to open the newspaper. All caps across the top of the front page: FIVE ESCAPE COUNTY JAIL. So much for the lockup on the top floor of the nearly new county courthouse. The prisoners walked out at five in the afternoon, blending with the crowd.

Otherwise, it looked like the Japs and Russians might go to war. The City Commission was in turmoil again. Will Rogers had a quick unfunny take about banks and Japan taking more of China. Down at Fort Huachuca, the Army was investigating whether voodoo caused a colored private to kill two captains and their wives. On page four, I scanned “Little Stories of Phoenix Daily Life” in search of potential clients, but none revealed themselves.

Quickly paging through, I finally found a three-paragraph story deep inside, bottom of the page: “Woman killed in fall from train.” I read it slowly, saw nothing remarkable, and stuck the paper under my arm.

Stepping inside my office and tossing my fedora on the coatrack, I saw Kemper Marley seated in one of the secondhand chairs facing my secondhand desk. He turned his unsmiling face to me.

“You’re late.”

“I didn’t know we had an appointment.”

“I told you to come see me.”

I eased myself into my swivel chair.

Marley was wearing a Western shirt, dusty jeans, and cowboy boots, as if he had been riding the range rather than supervising a beat-down in the hobo jungle. His legs were spread wide beneath the Stetson on his lap.

He regarded me with coffee-colored marsupial eyes. “I want you to find some information on a man named Gus Greenbaum.”

“Can’t say I’ve heard the name.”

“You never heard the name? I thought you’d been a cop.” When I didn’t respond, he continued. “Well, the sign says private investigator. I assume you can investigate and keep it private.”

I asked him why I would want to do that.

He smirked. “When Prohibition is repealed, I’m going to get the first state license to distribute liquor. And it will be the best brands, thanks to Sam Bronfman. Seagram, you know.”

“But without Al Capone.” I smirked, too.

“Times change,” Marley said. “My distributorship will be totally legal. More than three hundred bars have already applied for liquor licenses since the state repealed its law