City of Dark Corners

I lifted it out and proceeded to read.

* * *

I spent the next week discreetly interviewing the clients of Summer Tours.

A state senator, Superior Court judge, bank president, city commissioner and other big wigs.

Whether in their offices, over lunch at the Arizona Club, or in more hidden nooks such as the Original Mexican Café on East Adams Street, each confessed to consorting with the college girls provided by Carrie. All were “summer bachelors” because they had the means to send their wives to cooler climes. They happily paid the steep fees for companionship they could have only dreamed of in the past. None seemed capable of killing.

I sewed it up with another trip to Tempe, where Pamela, the auburn-haired smoke-ring blower, admitted she had been one of the dozen girls who stayed for the hot months and made money. She fiercely denied being a roundheels and offered up the justifications of the young and attractive. As I’ve said, I’m not a moralist. I could not have cared less if murder were not involved. Pamela finally came to realize that she might have been cut up beside the railroad tracks, too.

The problem after all this gab was that I felt no closer to finding Carrie’s killer.

Twenty-Eight

Victoria’s latest letter was the one I most anticipated: An invitation to Los Angeles. I grabbed it and told the Central Methodist choir director I would be missing some rehearsals.

That night, I boarded the westbound Sunset Limited and let the porter show me to my Pullman berth as the lights of Phoenix, then the orchards and farms, slipped away. Afterward, I went to the dining car for a delicious meal served on fine Southern Pacific china as we sped through empty desert.

Later, I went to the lounge-observation car at the end of the train, lit a smoke, and let the bartender fix me a martini. This was definitely a sign that Prohibition was on the way out. As I sipped my drink, I studied the photographs Victoria had sent me from Los Angeles. Her photographs. The majestic Los Angeles Coliseum from the 1932 Olympics. Griffith Park with a sweeping view of the city, where she wrote that an observatory was being planned. Downtown with dense, multistory commercial buildings, movie palaces, and crowds. A massive Union Station under construction. The towering new City Hall. Santa Monica Pier and the Pacific Ocean. Tony Beverly Hills. The HOLLYWOODLAND sign.

She also had an assortment of crime photos taken on scenes with the LAPD.

Phoenix had nothing like this, and I was pleased with the artistry of her photographs. Yet I wondered if she could ever be happy in little Phoenix again. Or happy being with me, a small-town shamus with uncertain prospects.

Should I have proposed to her a long time ago? Would that have made a difference? I never wanted to stand in her way. I hoped to be a part of her future, wherever it was, but the tone of her letters from California was slightly more distant with each one. As for me, I never found how to assemble the truest and best words I knew, to explain how I felt about her. Now I suspected this trip would be goodbye.

I ordered another drink and mulled over the case as the car rocked. A speedometer on the wall said we were racing along at eighty-five miles per hour. My pop had taught me that the farther back from the locomotive, the rougher the ride. Still, the quality of this car was such that most passengers wouldn’t notice. Suspect after suspect had been eliminated. Although I had learned much about Carrie Dell and her enterprise, I didn’t know the ultimate answer: Who killed her.

After finishing my cocktail, I wandered the train, read in my seat before the porter made my bed, and we rolled into Yuma for a short stop. Soon after leaving, the conductor found me.

“Detective Gene Hammons?”

I showed him my badge. “That’s me.”

He handed me a telegram from Phoenix.

I opened it. And I finally knew.

Detraining at Indio and catching the next train back to Phoenix seemed the prudent thing to do. I thought about wiring the news to Captain McGrath. But how would I make the many explanations—about pilfering evidence from the murder scene, secretly matching prints with confidential police personnel files at the top of the list? And I badly wanted to see Victoria.

In the rear of the train again, the observation car was nearly empty. The conductor let me open the rear door and step out onto the open observation deck. Beneath and behind me, the Sunset Limited sped west, the steel rails polished by a full moon. The train swayed. If anything, we were going faster than eighty-five now. Everything I saw was fleeing behind us, gone, in my past, as we rushed to reach Los Angeles by morning.

Although it was cold, I sat down, zipped my jacket, and let the solitude arrange my thoughts.

The telegram in my pocket was from Don. He had finally matched the prints found on my business card that had been placed in Carrie’s purse. They corresponded to the latents taken from the razor that killed Zoogie Boogie, secreted as insurance in Navarre’s safe-deposit box, as well as those dusted by the Prescott Police from the murder weapon that slit Ezra Dell’s throat. The killer was the same man.

But I wasn’t alone for long. I felt a strong hand on my shoulder.

“May I join you?”

For the tiniest moment I was afraid for the first time since the Western Front in 1918. But I tightened my gut. After we flashed past a freight train waiting on a siding, I found my voice.

“Please do.”

He sat in the adjacent chair and lit a cigarette. “It was my dearest hope that you wouldn’t follow this case so far. Or that I could throw you off, draw the voodoo symbol to point at Navarre as prime suspect.”

“But you know me better than that.”