City of Dark Corners

He shook his head, and I immediately went to Carrie’s bedroom. Someone had obviously tossed it. Drawers were open, the mattress was disturbed as if the intruder had been looking underneath it, pillows askew, the trophy on its side. Beyond the door, I heard Victoria return and start to take photos.

I’d brought more than bad news. I’d brought a killer, who followed us. Sometime after we left Ezra alive, he knocked on the door. Thinking it was us returning, Ezra opened it without his previous…caution. Then the killer had tried to pry information about Carrie, about what we had told him. He was gathering intelligence, tying up loose ends.

Maybe he pretended to be a cop or was one. However it went down, Ezra appeared seated trustingly as the man kept talking, walked behind him, produced the razor. Or maybe Ezra had drunk himself asleep when the killer arrived. Either way, it was over quickly. And it was a damned good bet this was the same man who left the threatening note for me at the hotel.

To satisfy myself, I went into the bathroom. Sure enough, Ezra—who hadn’t seemed to have shaved in months—had his own straight razor, sitting peacefully inside the medicine cabinet. I pointed all this out to the chief, who ordered his minion to take notes.

“What now?” he asked.

I was on my haunches, looking around the living-room furniture, under tables and beside chairs.

“Yesterday, Ezra greeted us with a Tommy gun,” I said. “It’s gone.”

The young cop stared at his boss, whose cigar had long gone cold.

Fourteen

We returned to Phoenix overdressed and overheated in time for me to read that Jack Hunter had been stabbed to death at Florence Prison. A fight with another inmate. A baseball bat was involved, too. Otherwise, nobody saw anything or knew the origin of their quarrel. The shiv that killed him hadn’t been found.

This would be routine as prison violence goes if not for the note Hunter had sent me at Police Headquarters, promising information about “the train girl, Carrie.” He wanted me to visit, writing that it would be worth my time.

Now there would be no visit, unless I wanted to commune with a corpse. I was left to speculate. He knew her name and, apparently, something about her murder. Prisons were rich in gossip and intelligence. Did Jack know her killer’s identity? Had another prisoner spilled to him, leading him to write the detective who helped put him away? Would he want a deal—privileges, reduced sentence—if he informed?

I would never know.

Somebody was tying up loose ends. Three murders, and the case was still classified as a suspicious death. I was plenty suspicious all right.

Jack Hunter. Twenty-six and he’d never reach twenty-seven. What a waste.

The newspaper also reported that eleven men were jailed for violating narcotics laws. Somebody hadn’t been paid off. But, as McGrath assured me, crime was down during the Depression. Another article celebrated that thirty-five hundred men were employed in state mines as of this past December. Nowhere in the story did it tell how many thousands of miners were unemployed. I put Ezra Dell’s watch in my safe and dictated to Gladys a report for Captain McGrath on my Prescott assignment.

Not for the last time, I wondered if it was time to stop. I had performed the death knock. My work should have been done. Could have been. But, no. I was a stubborn SOB.

Victoria and I divvied up next steps. I would go to the Arizona Biltmore and ask about Carrie’s summer work there. Victoria would return to Tempe and try to find Carrie’s possessions, left behind at the end of the previous semester. First, she needed to complete a commercial job for the McCulloch Brothers. Commercial photography paid the best, and the McCullochs had the business cornered, so when they tossed her an assignment, she always took it. This one was for photographing a car dealership.

I put on my best suit, a fedora, and a topcoat. We brought the cold with us from Prescott. Certainly not as cold as up there, but cold for Phoenix. High of forty-eight and low of twenty-five, the kind of chill that only happened a few times a year here. The heater in the Ford made short work of the outside weather as I drove north. Crossing the Arizona Canal, I left the oasis behind and was in the desert. Nothing out here but the tuberculosis camps at Sunnyslope, a few played-out mines, and this new hotel amid the saguaros and beneath Squaw Peak.

The Biltmore was impressive, four stories tall with stylized geometric bricks, the work of architect Albert Chase McArthur and influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. It opened at the height of optimism, a few months before the stock market crashed. Now, I came up the curving concrete driveway flanked by plantings and surrounded by winter grass, then slipped the valet a quarter and let him take the car.

Inside, I went to the front desk and discreetly showed my badge to the clerk, asking for the manager. I wondered how many times I could flash that button before it backfired. McGrath had authorized me to poke into this case. But he had deniability. Nobody had my back.

Half a dozen guests were gathered in the swank lobby wearing expensive new Stetsons. They were grousing about the weather. Soon an officious little man in a gray double-breasted suit appeared and led me to his office. He was using a pearl cigarette holder. I took off my fedora and followed him.

“I hope there’s no trouble, Detective…”

“Hammons.”

“We scrupulously follow the liquor laws, Detective Hammond, even though Prohibition is on the way out.”

I thought about correcting him. Hammons was an unusual name. But I let it be. I said, “Scrupulously, except for the Men’s Smoking Room on the second floor.”

He smiled. “Oh, you know about that.”

“And I know about the red beacon on the roof you turn on when there’s a raid, and the secret passages that let speakeasy guests exit to their rooms. As I recall, a nearby suite was favored by Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.” Some of the best booze I kept at home was appropriated from periodic raids at the Biltmore.

“Look, Detective Hammond, we don’t want any trouble. The Depression is trouble enough…”

I cut him off. “I’m not here about hooch. It’s about her.”