City of Dark Corners
“God, I have no idea.”
I thanked her and stood.
“May I have one of your cards?” she smiled. “Never know when I might need a private dick.”
I hesitated, then handed her one.
“If you think of anything else, call me. And be careful.”
She smiled. “All honey, honey.”
* * *
I drove back to Phoenix, past the Insane Asylum, with too many clues in my head.
Frenchy Navarre buying butcher tools.
The mysterious telegram and photo of Carrie.
Kemper Marley knowing about a murder that the police department was keeping on the down low.
Jimmy Darrow seeing a Packard parked by where the body was found.
A voodoo marking in the dirt of the crime scene—had the killer returned or was something else going on?
Carrie’s boyfriend working at a slaughterhouse.
The fast crowd.
Carrie was pregnant.
A naive girl turned into a fast girl, a hard girl—or a wronged girl?—then into a dead girl.
How much misdirection and coincidence were hiding in all this?
I caught sight of Zoogie Boogie shuffling along by the auto courts and pulled into a driveway in front of him. He tried to turn and make a run for it, but I got out.
“Don’t you rabbit on me. Get in the damned car.”
His shoulders drooped and he complied.
Zoogie Boogie aka Henry Joshua Porter. He was thirty-five, average height and build with a pinched face. Today he wore a cream sportscoat with dirt on the edges and tan flannel pants well past their prime and way too inadequate for the cool weather. His shoes were blown open at the toes. You could tell the Depression in how many people wore shoddy shoes. He was one of my snitches.
“You get out of Florence, Zoogie?”
He wobbled his head up and down like a child’s toy. “I did.”
“Only a four-year jolt for knocking over that candy store with a gun. You’re a lucky man. Staying clean?”
“Straight and narrow.” He held his hands eight inches apart in front of his face and moved them up and down in formation. “Keepin’ it straight and narrow. Except, when I went in the joint the economy was roaring along and now…” He dropped his hands in his lap.
“Well, it’d be a shame if I patted you down and found some reefers. Your probation officer would have you back on the next bus to prison.”
“Please, Detective Hammons…”
It was so convenient that few people knew I had been cut loose from the cops. I actually felt sorry for Zoogie Boogie. He was a vet and came back from France with severe shell shock, which probably contributed to his inability to keep a real job.
America was forgetting its Great War soldiers. The grand monument in Kansas City was dedicated in 1926. The British did it better with the inscription on so many of their memorials: “Their names liveth forever more.” They lost 744,000 to combat deaths, the French almost 1.2 million, the Germans 1.8 million. In America, where combat deaths totaled 116,500, people were eager to move on.