City of Dark Corners

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 last year, and I’ll be supplying them when the stupid Eighteenth Amendment is gone this year.”

“And why would the State of Arizona grant you this? You’re just a kid.”

He struggled to hide his irritation. “Because important people patronize the disorderly house I own on the east side. And they wouldn’t want their wives to know about it, especially about the pretty colored girls they consort with. I have photographs.”

He let out a high-pitched laugh like a girl’s, a sound I never wanted to hear coming from him again.

“I see.”

“And it will be in your interest to have me as a friend and client.”

I didn’t think Marley had any more friends than a Gila monster. The difference was that the big lizard was prettier and shy. Having him for a client seemed freighted with corruption and complications. When I said nothing, he pulled a wad from his jeans pocket and peeled off five C notes, slapping them on my blotter. I hated to admit it, but now he was talking more persuasively.

“Consider it a retainer.”

My considerations were these: Marley was a punk, a thug, maybe a killer. I saw that in action when his bully boys took baseball bats and gasoline to the Okies. On the other hand, I didn’t need him as an enemy, especially not with a dismembered blonde carrying my business card hanging over me. What if one of the clients of Marley’s “disorderly house,” as he called it, was the county prosecutor? I might end up hanging like Ruth Judd. That could disorder my life in a hurry.

Also, clients were sparse now that I had the wire that Samuel Dorsey had reached Chicago. I still needed to pay seven bucks a week for my share of Gladys’s resentful time, fifteen a month for the office, another twenty for rent at my apartment, plus some walking-around money for haircuts and shaves, shoeshines and newspapers, and taking Victoria dancing.