The taker became the taken.
Afterward, when I told him I was a virgin, he didn’t believe it. He was wondering what lovers—mythical Adonises in his head—had me before him, were handsomer and more skilled than him. I could tell. And I ain’t telling. It showed me I could make him jealous, too. Oh, if he only knew the truth.
I’ll wrap him around my thumb.
CARRIE DELL’S DIARY 11/1/32
Big Cat is my best lover and my biggest risk. Tonight he exploded on me, slapped me. I punched him in the nose and I thought he was going to kill me. I’m not making it up. I could see the murder in his eyes, and I know he’s capable of it. He could do it and nobody would ever know, he’d get away with it. But I was able to play sorry girl and cry and pretty soon we were in bed. “I’ll make you laugh instead of cry, baby girl,” he said. I’m nobody’s baby girl.
Big Cat has muscled in to take a bigger share of profits. I don’t like it. This isn’t the agreement. But, as he said, “What are you going to do about it, baby girl?” For the first time, I feel over my head. How will he react if I tell him that I’ve missed my period?
Seventeen
The next morning, I woke up with Carrie’s diary on my lap and the phonograph needle scratching. As I bathed, shaved, and dressed, I thought about the diary. Navarre was mentioned by name. But who was Big Cat, a man Carrie was afraid of?
Carrie-Cynthia wrote with a tone far beyond what I expected from a nineteen-year-old girl. But Pamela said she had literary aspirations. Maybe I’d known the wrong nineteen-year-old girls.
I stuffed the letters, journal of writing, and diary in my briefcase and headed to work.
Downtown, people were talking about it on the street before I got to the newsstand outside the Monihon Building. Two black decks in capital letters on the front page of the Arizona Republic:
ROOSEVELT ESCAPES DEATH
AS ASSASSIN SHOOTS FIVE
The president-elect was visiting Miami when an Italian bricklayer opened fire at the Bay Front Park. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was expected to die. Four others were wounded, including a detective shot in the head.
I had never been to Florida. The attempted murder of Roosevelt, and a sidebar about the Secret Service detail at the White House being doubled, added to the sense of dread as the Depression worsened. Even Will Rogers’s pithy two paragraphs didn’t ease the feeling.
This wasn’t the only news. Outside Los Angeles, a bandit boarded the eastbound Sunset Limited and robbed passengers until he faced an armed conductor. Both men exchanged fire, with the robber killed and the conductor badly wounded. The story said the Southern Pacific would combine the Sunset with the Golden State and the train would arrive in Phoenix at 7:15 a.m. today—old news, because it was already past nine. Crime was down in the Great Depression.
It was a good thing the national morticians’ group was going to hold its convention at the Hotel Westward Ho. At least the cold wave was easing, with Phoenix forecast to hit 72 degrees today.
Upstairs, Gladys nodded toward my office.
“Your friend is back.”
I doubted it was a friend, and sure enough Kemper Marley was pacing around the room, fussing with the safe combination. He showed no contrition when I caught him.
“Going into the safecracking business, Kemper?” I put my hat on the coatrack and sat at my desk. “Phoenix is notorious among safecrackers. The detectives interrogate them with blows from phone books. Hurts like hell. If you do it the right way, it never shows a bruise. Safecrackers avoid Phoenix.”
He barely heard me before launching into a lather. “You hear about that damned Frank Roosevelt? Almost got himself killed. Then where would we be? I’m telling you this country is on the verge. Immigrants like the assassin in Miami. Communists everywhere. Fascists. At least fascists believe in free enterprise. You watch how Herr Hitler turns Germany around, cleans up those Reds and Jews. It might come to that here, you know. Blood in the streets. We’re closer to it than most people realize.”
The ball-peen hammer sat in the client chair. He was in his come-to-town outfit of a black suit, vest, and tie.
“I want to get some private investigating from my retainer, Hammons.”
“How’s that?”
“Frenchy Navarre. What do you know about him? Is he trustworthy?”
I leaned back and considered my approach. How about straight on?
“Frenchy, huh? I hear he’s Greenbaum’s man, collecting from the bookies in Darktown. One of his runners got his throat slit yesterday, body dumped in a junkyard by the tracks. Was that your work, Kemper? Send Gus a message?”
Navarre had killed Zoogie Boogie. I wasn’t feeling charitable. And I was armed with the information I picked up while listening to Kemper lay into Frenchy yesterday.
Marley was momentarily thrown off-balance. That gave me time to light a coffin nail, as much to irritate him as for my pleasure.