Phoenix Noir Read online

  “It was found in the middle of the tracks, right back there.” Fisher pointed to where the brass had been standing. “Cut off neat as can be. Mexican found it.”

  It had been a pretty foot once, pale, petite, with tiny well-shaped toes and the kind of ankle that gives men the shakes when it’s attached to a live woman. It was held in a new strap-around black shoe, with a medium heel made of leather. And all had been sliced off at the shin. A railroad car will do that. This was no hobo.

  “Where’s the rest of her?”

  Fisher spat into the dust. “Beats the hell out of me. We’ve been a mile up and down the tracks in either direction, looked in the ditches, nothing. There was blood on the tracks but no woman. Trail of blood didn’t even go as far as the road.” He pulled out a handkerchief and ran it over his forehead before replacing his fedora. “She musta been a looker.”

  The Westward Ho Hotel was the tallest building in Phoenix. It had sixteen stories and refrigeration. When I walked in a little after noon, the lobby was crowded with men in pricey suits and expensive cigar smoke. There wasn’t a single uniform. You’d think the world was at peace and nice girls weren’t getting their feet cut off by trains. Actually, I wasn’t sure she was a nice girl, which was one reason I had come to the hotel. I crossed the lobby and told the elevator operator, an ancient colored man, to take me to the eighth floor. I walked down the hall past three doors on carpet so soft it massaged my feet through the soles of my shoes. I put my hat in my hand and knocked on the fourth door once.

  Strawberry Sue might have struck you as the prettiest girl you’d ever seen, if you saw her from behind and the dress fit right—and maybe twenty years ago it would have been true from the front too. But the sun had ravaged her skin, leaving her face rough and cut with lines and creases. Her face looked like the desert. I thought her figure was nice, but it went out of style in the ’20s. She was small, so thin I could almost touch my middle fingers if I wrapped my hands around her waist, and her hair was bright orange, worn unfashionably in a ponytail like the child of the ranch she was. Her real name was Ruby, but she hated it. The radio was talking about the big Allied landings in North Africa. I asked her to turn it off. She poured me a Scotch while I took off my shoes. As I sipped the drink, she pulled down her hair and took off my tie real slow.

  Afterwards, we lay on the soft bed and I stroked her hair while she had her head in the notch where my neck met my shoulder. “My spot,” she called it. She didn’t seem to mind the scar there that looked exactly like the shape of the Grand Canyon. I had to smoke Chesterfields because that was what Sue smoked and I was out of my brand.

  “You could fall asleep and get some rest, Stuck-On,” she said. “I’d take care of you. You wouldn’t have to be scared of nothing.”

  “I’m doing good, Sue.” I let out a long blue plume of smoke and talked a little business.

  “She doesn’t sound like the kind of girl I associate with.” Sue was like that, using big words, reading books, trying to better herself. I admired it.

  “She looked like she could have been a high-end call girl, from what I saw of her. Nice shoe. Pale, nice skin.”

  “Why would she end up under a train?”

  “Maybe she steamed up a certain friend of yours.”

  She made a small, indeterminate sound.

  “He’s done it before, when a girl crossed him,” I said.

  She stroked the hair on my chest with her small hands. “Don’t talk about that now, Stuck-On … You know why I call you that?”

  I knew why but just ran my hand against the softness of her red hair and tapped some ash in the direction of the ashtray.

  “Cause I’m stuck on you, silly,” she said. “Why don’t you get a real job and we can run away?”

  Instead of answering her, I climbed out of bed and walked to the window. It faced north and I studied the palm-lined streets below, where neat bungalows had crew-cut lawns. They gave way to citrus groves and fields, dairies and livestock, and finally the desert. Camelback Mountain was miles away but it looked like I could lean just a little out the window and touch it. Phoenix was an oasis. It was a shame, some of the people an oasis attracts.

  “What about it, Sue?”

  She lay there naked, her small arms wrapped around her smooth young-girl breasts. “I haven’t heard anything, Stuck-On. Honest. I’d tell you. There’s lots of new people in town. Maybe it was the Japs?”

  I looked back out at the crisp blue sky. “Most of the Japs are gone, you know that. They sent ’em to the camps. Their land’s just dying out there.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with call girls, or him.”

  I used her fancy shower and felt better than I had in a month. Downstairs, I stopped at the smoke shop and nearly made it out the door. But he was fast for a fat man and suddenly his big saggy face was inches from mine.

  “Well, Frank Darrow’s son. How’s Strawberry Sue this fine day?”

  I moved back a step so I didn’t have to smell his cologne. “I’m sure she’s good.”

  He laughed, a disconcerting gurgling sound, and offered me a cigar. I shook my head. Duke Simms was in his fourth term as a Phoenix city commissioner, but he wore suits and smoked cigars that didn’t come with a municipal paycheck. I wished I’d never met him.

  “Who are all these people?” I indicated the crowded lobby.

  “Businessmen, entrepreneurs. You know what that word means?”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Yes, indeed. This is a business-friendly city, Jimmy.”

  “Why the hell aren’t they in the service?”

  “Now, don’t be that way. They’re supplying the air bases, building our defense plants.” His chest swelled and he ran his stubby fingers down his lapels. “This town is changing, son. You’re not even going to recognize it.”

  I shook my head and tried to walk past him, but he blocked my way.

  “Come outside, son,” he drawled, “I was just thinking of you.” He wrapped an arm around me and steered me out onto the sidewalk, far enough away from the door to give us some privacy. Simms wore a bright red tie and had a matching handkerchief in his coat pocket. An American flag sprouted from his lapel. “What’s going on down at the Espee these days?”

  “What do you want, Simms?”

  “Such a blunt young man, and after having had a good time just now.”

  My fingers ached from making a fist.

  “I need a little reciprocity,” he went on. “Just a little shipment coming to the freight station tonight.”

  “Things are different,” I said. “It’s wartime.”

  The gurgling came again from the back of his throat. “Is that why I had to pay to bring in thirty new clean girls from Texas and Oklahoma? Wartime, yes, indeed. Now, son, we have an understanding.”

  “Tell me about a girl who had her foot cut off by a train west of town.”

  He ignored me and put his hand on my bad shoulder, digging his fingers in. I set my face so the pain wouldn’t show. “Our understanding is you get to be entertained by Miss Sue complimentary, and you do some things for me. It’s worked out well. And it’s not as if Strawberry Sue is a spring chicken. Get it? If you went back on our deal, who knows …?”

  He released my shoulder and the sensation of knitting needles probing somebody else’s flesh replaced the pain. I managed, “You’re a son of a bitch.”

  “I am,” he agreed. “But you have to live with certain disagreeable realities.” He smiled through yellow teeth. “Here’s what I need.”

  I rode a crowded streetcar back downtown, then waited for a long string of boxcars to be pulled along Jackson Street before I could walk the block to the depot. They told of faraway places: Baltimore and Ohio, New York Central, Pennsylvania, Frisco, Missouri Pacific, Burlington, Denver, and Rio Grande Western. Anywhere but here. The station sat at the end of the street, gracefully reigning over the surrounding hotels and warehouses. Mail and Railway Express Agency trucks crowde
d before the long building adjacent to the waiting room.

  The Western Union sign hanging from one arch of the building was like a beacon for me. I wasn’t sure what the hell the brass wanted me to do about the girl attached to the foot, but I could send wires to station agents east-and westbound from Phoenix. Had anyone reported a passenger who didn’t arrive? Had any conductors noticed anything funny on their trains? Later, I’d take a car and check the rail yards, the Tovrea stockyards, Pacific Fruit Express icing docks, the bridge over the Salt River—make sure the line was secure, whatever the hell that meant. It didn’t seem to have much connection with the severed foot. Logan was conveniently gone.

  When I was finished, I walked back downstairs to the waiting room which was nearly deserted. Out on the tracks, a switch engine was moving baggage and mail cars, but the next passenger train wasn’t due to depart until 4:30. The high ceiling of the room held a fog of cigarette smoke and dust, caught in the rays of the sunlight. Over by the newsstand, a couple of young GIs were horsing around, their uniforms new, their faces untouched by death. For just a second I saw myself in a magic mirror, May 1918, and my shoulder throbbed and everything in the world seemed broken. A bird colonel brushed past, glaring at me as if he expected to be saluted. The big wooden benches looked lonely. On one of them, a bum pretended to snooze under a sweat-stained Panama hat. One of the ticket agents watched me from under his eyeshade, then cocked his head as if he were trying to toss it as a shot put. From that direction, two women were coming my way.

  “You’re the railroad police?”

  I said I was. The question came from a short, stooped old woman in a blue dress that was too light for the season, even in Phoenix. With her was a younger woman, blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and pretty in a damaged way, like a china bowl that had been shattered but carefully glued back together, the cracks showing only on close examination.

  “That man said you could help us. It’s our Mary.” The old woman stared at me as if I should understand, and somewhere something crawling in my gut winked at me.

  “It’s my sister Mary,” the blonde said. “She was coming home from Los Angeles. She’s been in school, you see, and she was coming home for a visit. She was supposed to be on the train last night. She sent us a telegram telling us to expect her.”

  The old woman grabbed my sleeve. “We’ve been here all night waiting!”

  “She never showed?”

  Two heads shook in unison, and I wondered if it could be that easy.

  “Do you live here in town?”

  “We live out a ways,” the mother said, sticking her chin at me. “In Palmcroft.”

  I nodded: nice big houses by the new city park. She wanted to let me know money was involved. She didn’t bother with anything so unsavory as introducing herself to me. I sat them down on a bench.

  Fifteen minutes later, Joe Fisher and Frenchy Navarre walked in and heard the story for the second time. Mary Becker took a train out of Los Angeles, due to arrive in Phoenix just past 9. The girl was nineteen. The younger woman, Anna, did most of the talking, with the mother nodding. Becker. I knew the name. They owned big cotton farms west of town.

  “She’s a very sweet, innocent girl,” Anna said. “I just can’t bear to think that anything could have happened, that someone might have taken advantage of her.”

  “Wouldn’t have been the first time,” the old lady said.

  “Mother!” Anna looked at the two cops, then me. “You have to help us.” She reached in her handbag and passed us a photograph. It showed a pretty girl with curly dark hair and large, knowing eyes. She was standing on a pier, smiling at the photographer. “That’s Mary.”

  Navarre took it and studied it, handed it to Fisher, who tucked it in his pocket. “Go up to the station house and make a missing person’s report,” Navarre said. “We’ll see what we can do. But you gotta understand, it’s wartime. Lot of people coming through, lot of people on the trains.”

  “Maybe she was just delayed,” Fisher said softly.

  The cops rose in unison and I followed. Navarre turned on his heel once we were through the front doors. “I can’t believe you’d waste our time with this shit.”

  “I dunno, Frenchy. You have a missing girl and so do they. Maybe that’s too complicated for you.”

  He pushed up his chest, showing the crossed shoulder holsters. “Don’t think you’re special because you’re with the railroad, you cocksucker. Any time you want to find out, let me know.” He strode angrily to the car.

  “Show them the shoe, Joe. That’ll settle it, one way or another.”

  Fisher looked at me sadly and said, “He thinks he’s got a lead. What’re you gonna do?” He handed me the snapshot.

  I went back in and sat down with Anna and her mother. The benches were starting to fill up for the afternoon Santa Fe train.

  “Anybody in Los Angeles you can call? Any friends of Mary’s?”

  “She lived with three other girls in a very nice apartment,” Anna said. “We talked to them long distance this morning. They drove her to the depot and saw her get on the train.”

  I asked why she was coming home. The old lady’s face had hardened into a sullen mask while Anna and the cops had talked. Now she looked at me fiercely. “That’s none of your concern. My daughter is missing from one of your trains. That should be your concern.”

  Anna touched my arm. “Mother is very tired. Mary was coming home on family business. It’s nothing.”

  I found myself studying the blonde’s ankles. She probably thought I was just being fresh. They were nice ankles, naked thanks to the nylon shortage. I pulled out my smokes and offered them. Anna took one and I studied her face while I lit her cigarette. It looked like a face that might tell me things if the mother wasn’t there. Then I asked her what her sister might have been wearing on her trip home.

  After I left them, I made a few checks with the dispatcher. He was already in a bad mood. Extra engineers and firemen had been called in and he didn’t know why. The section foreman had been out all day on the line. “Nobody gives me the word,” he mumbled. After a few minutes of commiseration, he told me that the train Mary Becker boarded in Los Angeles had arrived on time the night before. It had been divided into three crowded sections, the last one coming in shortly after 10. It stayed fifteen minutes then departed for Tempe, Mesa, Tucson, El Paso, and points east. Next I went to the baggage room through the double doors just beyond the ticket counter. Anna had described Mary’s luggage: a matching suitcase and overnight bag, burnt-yellow and streamlined, with three brown stripes. The baggage men let me be: they were loading carts for the Santa Fe. It only took a few minutes of prowling to find the set. It looked almost new and the tag said, M. Becker, with an address in Los Angeles. I told the head baggage man to set them aside and headed back to the waiting room.

  The women were gone.

  It would have to wait. I needed to check the line and report to the chief at 8 o’clock “sharp.” I pushed through the front doors and heard a woman yell. She sounded a lot like Anna Becker. Looking around an archway, I spotted her with a man, standing beside a roadster with the top down. The car glistened red in the afternoon sun. So did Anna’s golden hair. She was in an agitated conversation with the man, chopping the air with her hands. Twice I made out the name Mary, said with urgency. They couldn’t see me. The thick pillars and archways of the station portico concealed me. Anna moved enough that I could take him in: dark hair in a crooner’s hairstyle, a kid’s face but the muscular body of a twenty-five-year-old. He was wearing a leather jacket and driving gloves. I didn’t see many able-bodied men his age around, and I wondered how he’d bugged out of the draft. He didn’t look like 4-F material, but you couldn’t tell. He sneered at something Anna said and she screamed, “How could you! What kind of man are you?” That’s when he hit her, so hard that the sound echoed in the portico.

  That was enough. I knew what kind of man he was. But when I stepped out, the car was already speedin
g up Fourth Avenue, Anna’s blond hair fluffing out in the wind. I tapped the roof of a taxi and got in. In only seconds the cabbie had caught up. They paused at the light at Jefferson, then turned right. I didn’t know what I was doing. At that moment, I would have showed the kid in the leather jacket what it was like to be hit by somebody his own size. By the time we reached Second Street, however, I had hold of myself again. They turned south and parked. I sent the cab half a block past, paid him, and got out.

  We were a long way from Palmcroft. The sidewalk was filthy and broken. The buildings were seedy single-story affairs with fading paint and dark entrances, broken up by seedier three-and four-story hotels. It was the heart of the Deuce, where the bars, brothels, hock shops, and flop houses intersected with the remains of Chinatown and the busy produce warehouses. It had enough to interest soldiers on liberty, Indians, old cowboys without pensions, off-duty farmers, miners, and railroad men. The street was crowded, so Anna and the kid didn’t notice me. He walked around to the passenger side, opened the door, and yanked her arm sharply. She came out of the car flashing a pale leg up to her thigh. Then they disappeared into a doorway. I didn’t need to walk close to see where they’d gone. It was a bar I knew well, the Phone Booth, and it was sure as hell a long way from Palmcroft. A cop walked by twirling his billy, a reminder that I could mind my own business, the railroad business I got paid for. I lit a cigarette and leaned against a brick wall, covering up the Pepsodent ad, hating some of the things I knew. One was that the Phone Booth was quietly owned by Duke Simms, and that he used a private room in the back for special meetings. I hated knowing about those too. Even with 65,000 people, Phoenix was still a very small town.

  I walked out of the Hotel Adams at 8:15. A dry chill was drifting in from the desert and the sidewalks were jammed with soldiers and airmen in town on liberty. I was wearing a fresh shirt and tie, and the chief special agent seemed pleased with my report. To me, there didn’t seem much to it. I had checked the line through town, run some bums out from under the Tempe bridge, and looked over the blocks of boxcars down at the SP yard, searching for broken seals on the doors or other signs of pilferage. I had left word for Joe Fisher where he would find Mary Becker’s luggage. I carried my own kind of bag and it was full of questions, maybe even a little kit of suspicions inside. Who was the punk who had slapped Anna, and why had she been so upset? She had yelled at him and said the name of her sister. And she had ended up at a place nice girls shouldn’t even know existed in this town. Now all I could do was buy an evening paper and read it as I walked vaguely in the direction of the depot.