Phoenix Noir (4 page)
I walked out of the Hotel Adams at 8:15. A dry chill was drifting in from the desert and the sidewalks were jammed with soldiers and airmen in town on liberty. I was wearing a fresh shirt and tie, and the chief special agent seemed pleased with my report. To me, there didn’t seem much to it. I had checked the line through town, run some bums out from under the Tempe bridge, and looked over the blocks of boxcars down at the SP yard, searching for broken seals on the doors or other signs of pilferage. I had left word for Joe Fisher where he would find Mary Becker’s luggage. I carried my own kind of bag and it was full of questions, maybe even a little kit of suspicions inside. Who was the punk who had slapped Anna, and why had she been so upset? She had yelled at him and said the name of her sister. And she had ended up at a place nice girls shouldn’t even know existed in this town. Now all I could do was buy an evening paper and read it as I walked vaguely in the direction of the depot.
I was about to cross Jefferson Street when a car nearly ran me down. I jumped back and recognized the familiar black Ford. I followed it into the driveway by police headquarters. It was full dark, but the streetlights showed Frenchy Navarre getting out of the backseat, then pulling out another man. The handcuffs on the man’s wrists glistened under the light. He was a kid really, a colored kid in fatigues, and his head and body slumped against the car. Navarre leaned in close and was talking to him. When the kid’s head came up, I could see a bloody membrane where his lower jaw should have been. Then Fisher came around from the driver’s side and they led him into the station. I let them get inside, and followed.
Navarre had the kid at the booking desk when he looked around and saw me. “Get lost, bull.” He momentarily turned back to his prisoner to punch him in the kidney. The boy crumpled in agony. Navarre’s hand looked odd, but then I saw it, a seven-inch blackjack protruding, and it had fresh blood on it.
“Here’s your murderer,” Navarre said. “Nigger playing soldier, really trying to rape a white woman.”
“No, sir, I swear I didn’t … don’t know nothing ’bout this,” the boy pleaded with me, slurring his words through his ruined mouth. He spat a bloody tooth to the floor.
“Well, how you explain this, nigger?” Navarre held out an ankle bracelet. It had dried blood on it. “Tried to pawn it after you raped that girl and put her on the train tracks.”
“No, no …”
“Wasn’t too smart coming into Phoenix, was it, boy? We make our niggers behave, keep ’em south of the tracks. So the government gives you a uniform, gives you a gun, makes you think you’re special. You’re just a black nigger, you murderous son of a bitch.”
“Gotta call my commanding officer,” the kid said.
“Shut up!” Navarre roared, his eyes bright and primal like an animal’s.
I tried to catch Fisher’s eye. This seemed all wrong. Anna Becker had mentioned nothing about an ankle bracelet.
“Did you find the body?” I asked.
Navarre brandished the blackjack toward me. “We don’t need anything more than what we got to send this nigger to the gas chamber. Now get the hell out, bull.”
With that he advanced on me in three fast strides, raising the sap with one hand and reaching inside his coat with the other. I took a step backward and I was faster. He had a .38 Police Positive in his left hand, but it was frozen uselessly in mid-air. My Colt .45 was five inches from his broad, veiny, ugly nose. His eyes were obsidian, dead.
“Kill him!” Navarre commanded, but his voice shook.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
“I’ll kill
you
, Darrow!”
But his arm remained where it had been, the pistol pointed out into the room.
I aimed, staring at him down the heavy barrel of the automatic. “You like to hurt people … you like it …” Those were all the words that would come out.
Then I felt Joe Fisher next to me and the spell broke. “Let it go, Jimmy.” A stocky desk sergeant pushed Navarre away and I holstered the Colt.
“James, you’re walking like an old man. That’s not right.”
I turned to see Mose, resplendent in his immaculate sleeping-car porter uniform. We stood at trackside, and it was oddly quiet. The usual call of train whistles was silent. My eyes roved over the station tracks and saw spikes and blocks of wood driven into the switches that connected the array of tracks to the main line. Alarm shot through me:
Secure the line
.
“Why are the tracks spiked? No train can switch off the main line.”
“You’re gonna see, boy,” Mose said, his teeth huge and white.
“What are you doing here anyway, Mose? You should have departed an hour ago. Nothing seems to be moving.”
He gave his deep, melodious laugh. “Some things moving. The pilot train came through twenty minutes ago, right on schedule.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Mose clapped me fondly on my good shoulder. “Son, you would be the only person on the Espee who don’t know.”
I was going to protest more but a thick, sharp whistle echoed through the dry air. I leaned over and could see a headlight in the distance. I pulled out my nearly empty pack of Luckies, offered one to Mose, and lit them both.
“I’ve got to go to the freight station, do Simms’s dirty work.”
Mose stared toward the black masses of the South Mountains. “You got your reasons, son.”
Now the train was close enough that I could hear the engineer start to sound the bell.
“There’s no goddamned justice in this town.” I said it in a conversational voice, to no one in particular, drowned out by the locomotive’s approach.
“You just finding that out?” Mose shook his head and laughed. “Oh, Jimmy, you a piece of work.”
Then the train was on us, passing quickly. It was double-headed, with two powerful steam locomotives. Then a pair of baggage cars rolled by, one with an odd set of antennae on top, followed by a pair of sleepers. The last car rumbled heavily. It had new dark green paint that glowed under the plat-form lights and fresh lettering on the side said,
PULLMAN,
but unlike every other car it had no number. The shades were down. Yet the rear window had light, and there … right there inside. The familiar patrician head, the jaunty jut to the chin, even the cigarette holder in his mouth, just like in the newsreels. He looked at us. Mose stiffly saluted.
Then the train was gone. Nothing was left but the red marker on the last car, which quickly went around the slight curve and continued east.
Mose put his arm around me. “On his way home from a tour of bases on the coast, and the Espee handled it all the way,” he said proudly. “See, boy, happy days are here again.”
I walked toward the freight station and the song was in my head. But my head played it too slow, like a dirge.
BY C
HARLES
K
ELLY
Hassayampa Valley
F
ather Carty O’Toole could see the hard-knocked Dodge pickup beating down on him from a half-mile away, dust huffing from its tires and settling on the mesquite, a tiny torpedo tracing the western edge of the White Tank Mountains. Walberto must have the goods today. Sweat clutched at O’Toole’s crotch beneath his black robes, his heart bounced. The buzzing of the cicadas in the crazy heat tweaked his nerves. He had a Colt .357 Python stuffed full of potential detonations hidden in the confessional. Fine. But the varnish smell of the sin-box was cut through by the stringency of Hoppe’s No. 6 gunpowder solvent, and that could give away O’Toole’s play. He steadied himself, fought for faith. Surely, God would not let that happen, assuming God wasn’t taking a day off. That happened from time to time in the Hassayampa Valley.
O’Toole stood well back in the shadow of the vestibule of Mission Santa Dolores, taking what comfort he could from the relative coolness offered by the packed-earth walls. Built in the 1920s, a replica of older and more-honored antiquities, the church had been long abandoned, replaced by a modern church twenty miles away with the soaring lines of a department store. The mission was too old and shabby and isolated to serve the spiritual needs of the population oozing westward from Phoenix, but O’Toole had not let it languish. Carrying out a bit of personal penance, he had set himself the task of dusting and polishing the pews, swabbing down the tile, cleaning the plaster angels and cherubs that festooned the reredos behind the altar. In this heat, it had been exacting work for a fat man pushing sixty. But the police were so bothersome in this part of the world. Better to stay out of their way.
He’d had to break the lock on the door to get in, but of course that was no problem for him. He’d been at the cleaning for a week, while he waited. It gave him a cover story if someone came by, but nobody did. And aside from the psychic payback it offered him, it was something to do. There was no television or even a radio in the abandoned priests’ quarters out back, his comestible needs and water supplied by a Coleman camp refrigerator, his literary cravings fulfilled by some dusty paperbacks replete with the adventures of hard-nosed men and abandoned women. A small electric generator fed the battery that kept his cell phone alive.
The truck was closer now, growing larger, a Dodge Ram driven with more enthusiasm than sense—that was Walber-to’s way. Slipping through thirsty desert scrub and sandy dirt, it looked shallow and indistinct. Twenty-five yards away, the snarling of its engine snapped off. It clanked and stopped near a paloverde on the perimeter of the dirt-track turnaround. Was there a passenger? Hard to tell because of the dazzling brightness. Apparently not, for only Walberto emerged, closing the door with a
thunk
. His hands were empty, no package. Disappointed, O’Toole examined the rest of him. A black ball cap, a Dallas Cowboys warm-up jacket over a white T-shirt, jeans, cowboy boots tooled in Texas. O’Toole didn’t like the warm-up jacket, not one bit. In this heat, it must feel like a microwave on full power. He examined Walberto’s bony outline, but the jacket flapped loosely, showing nothing. Walberto darted forward, swift without effort, merging with the darkness of the vestibule.
“You’re hiding, Father,” Walberto said, smiling into the shadow as his eyes adjusted, his mouth slashed across by gapped teeth.
“It’s the heat,” O’Toole said.
“The heat, of course.” He fell silent, making O’Toole ask.
“Did you bring it?” He glanced over Walberto’s shoulder at the pickup. Was there someone else?
“Sure,” said Walberto, stepping in front of O’Toole to cut off his view. “It’s in my pocket.”
O’Toole scanned the outline of the jacket. Those pockets seemed quite small. Without taking his eyes off Walberto, he jerked his head toward the darkness beyond them.
“Come in,” he said. “Let’s go deeper into the church.”
“Sure,” Walberto said. He moved closer, so his whisper would carry. “I had to kill the man.”
O’Toole’s heart went cold, and he cursed his own greed. This is what his self-imposed mission to the illegal migrants had come to. As if he hadn’t known it all along. Two months ago, he’d been at loose ends in Buffalo. No parish for him, nothing he could sneak into at any rate, even with the Catholic Church in America desperate for priests. Then he got a call from an old friend in Arizona. Opportunities existed. Migrants being held in safe houses in Phoenix—indeed, all over the Valley of the Sun—needed to hear the word of the Lord. The smugglers liked the idea—a dose of religion helped the migrants accept the rotten conditions—and the money for a bit of spiritual soothing was good, very good. The smugglers’ money, Walberto’s money.
O’Toole swallowed, but couldn’t lubricate his throat. His voice was a dry wheeze. “Let’s go deeper into the church.”
The black-robed man turned, and his feet clattered on the tile. He listened for Walberto’s feet. At first O’Toole heard nothing, and the sweat on his forehead gathered and flowed. His knees almost buckled, but he kept moving. Then he heard the tick-tock of the cowboy boots, and regained his movement. It’s all about appearances, he thought. Act strong, be strong. And get to the Python.
O’Toole was making for the shadowy alcove just short of the altar. That was where the confessional reared up, encompassing two upright boxes—one for the sinner, one for the dispenser of penance. But Walberto’s voice, very quiet, stopped him.
“Let’s talk here,” the coyote said. “I don’t like to get too far from the daylight.”
O’Toole turned, and Walberto waved to one of the splintered pews. Trying to think of a reason not to, O’Toole shuffled to a seat and settled down. He half-turned as Walberto slipped into the pew behind him, but the coyote put a firm hand on his shoulder and waggled his head. “Face front, Father. Kneel. Act like you’re praying. I’ll do the same. I’ll do my best, but you’ll probably be better than me. You’ve had more practice.”
O’Toole complied, clacking the kneeler down and settling heavily into place, though it was a pointless charade. The likelihood of anyone coming to this abandoned place, anyone who needed to be fooled, was quite remote. He was acutely aware of Walberto kneeling just behind him, like a Mafia assassin in the rear seat of a car. O’Toole knew that situation. The man in front had to pretend everything was all right, or the bullet would come quicker. But in facing front, the target had to fight the panic of not knowing. The muscles in O’Toole’s neck bunched. I’m getting a headache, he thought. Why? Will that help me survive? The stupidity of his bodily reactions confounded him.
Walberto’s breath poisoned the air. “Tell me the story again.”
O’Toole was incredulous. “You mean the story about the relic?”
“Umm-hmm. The relic. The reason I killed the man.”
Wonderful. Story time, as they both sat in the shadow of the gallows. Or was it the shadow of the lethal-injection gurney? Who cared? The result was the same: O’Toole on a slab. He found his voice, heard himself wheedling: “You were to pay him a little, promise him more when we did the deal.”
“He didn’t believe me, he thought I was going to stab him. He was right.”
O’Toole’s breakfast—a stale ham sandwich—rose dangerously. “That wasn’t necessary.”