City of Dark Corners

* * *

After Ong left, I scribbled his background information in the notebook I kept in my suit coat pocket. Then I walked through the east arches of the depot and past the garden with its immaculate grass, hedges, and flowers to welcome travelers. Phoenix was always in bloom.

To the east, most of the produce houses were dormant or working short-staffed. The big harvests began in the spring. I walked around boxcars spotted at warehouses and wholesale outfits along Jackson Street, making sure they weren’t attached to a locomotive and likely to move, with deadly consequences.

Ong’s information was useful, but I knew the story went deeper. Chinatown gambling was hardly benign. It was controlled by the Hop Sing Association, one of the most powerful of the tongs that had set up chapters in cities around the country. The tongs presented themselves as benevolent associations to protect their people against anti-Chinese prejudice, and we had plenty of that to go around. But they were also organized-crime gangs that controlled rackets in Chinatowns. The bloody tong wars of the early century were over. But the gangs persisted, although much diminished.

They had been especially quiet lately, after three tong soldiers were found dumped in the riverbed outside the city. This was around the time I was laid off from the cops last year. Each one had been tapped three times in the head. At the time, we wondered if it was retaliation from a Paris Alley gunfight in ’31 where the Suey Sing tong from L.A. tried to muscle in. We worried the assassinations could be a revival of the old tong wars. Now, especially given the manner of the latest killings, I wondered if they had been a message from the Chicago Outfit and Greenbaum, instead.

The landscape became grimmer, especially when I crossed Second Street and entered the Deuce, our city’s skid row. Paris Alley, between Jefferson and Madison streets, was a dense collection of barely concealed bars and gambling houses.

When I was a cop, it was a nightly cockfight, only with guns and knives, every hood a rooster until he was assuming room temperature on the cobblestones. The metal call box sitting at head level on a telephone pole, labeled POLICE TELEGRAPH and below it THE GAMEWELL CO. NEW YORK, made me feel strangely nostalgic. Every cop carried a key so he could open it and call headquarters for backup or a paddy wagon.

In an emergency, a blue light on a pole above headquarters lit up, and a horn sounded. You were supposed to drop everything to reach the nearest call box, open it with the distinctive Gamewell key next to your handcu

ff key, and find out what was going on. That emergency might be a fight or shooting somewhere—or it might be a killer on the loose. You never knew until you opened the door to the box and picked up the phone receiver. Downtown, the police call boxes were mounted on their own pedestals, neatly painted blue. The department was starting to put radios in the squad cars, the first such system in the state. But the boxes were still essential, especially for beat cops on foot. I patted this shabby one affectionately.

Walking on, I waved away the panhandlers, jive dealers, and flimflam men who frequented the alley. After dark, things got…interesting.

On the Third Street side, I ducked into the restaurant supply store. The radio was playing Ethel Waters singing “Stormy Weather.”

“Detective Hammons, it’s been too long.”

He hadn’t gotten the memo about me not being a cop, but I let it go and greeted Carl Sims, a young Negro who stood behind the counter. With exotic friendly eyes and a widow’s peak where his hair met his forehead, he had arrived from Texas a few years ago. He turned down the radio.

“This is my last day,” he offered. “I’m starting my own gardening and painting business.”

“That’s good, Carl. Tough times, though.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said. “But if I don’t start now, I might never have the guts. I’ve been saving.”

“Not in a bank, I hope.”

“No, sir.”

Theories about the dead blonde were floating around in my head like debris that had yet to form a planet.

“Let’s say I had a piece of beef,” I said. “How would I take a whack at it to separate it from the…” I hesitated, having never worked in a restaurant or slaughterhouse.

“Like a T-bone? A strip steak and a filet. It’s separated by a bone.”

“What if I want to cut through the meat and the bone?”

Carl looked at me oddly, but let it pass.

“Well, you could start with this.” He pulled down a meat cleaver, a medieval-looking tool with a wooden handle attached to twelve inches of stainless steel formed in a curved rectangle. He slid over a wooden cutting board and handed me the cleaver. I hefted it in my right hand, feeling its weight, then brought it down hard. The cutting board and counter shuddered. The impact left a quarter-inch crater in the wood.

“A skilled butcher can do a lot with that,” Carl said. “But he’d still probably use this instead.” He moved through the store and came back with something that looked like a hacksaw. “Butcher saw, twenty-inch blade.”

I held it closer, lightly running my fingers across the serrated edge. The blade was scary sharp.

“Planning on doing some cooking?” he said. “It’s safer to go to a butcher shop and ask for the cuts of beef you want. An amateur could lose a finger or worse.”

Or he could cut up a girl and dump her pieces by the railroad tracks.

“Been selling many of these things?” I asked.

Carl shook his head. “We haven’t been selling many of nothing. Mr. Johnson is worried about the store. The other restaurant supply, the one on Van Buren, closed last year.”