Blue City (22 page)

“What big teeth you got, Grandmother,” he said. “You got too many teeth for good looks. Stan, give me the knuckles.”

The sergeant handed him a piece of molded brass, which he slipped over his fingers. Then his armed fist invaded my mouth. I felt a sharp piece of bone on my tongue and spat it out between numb lips.

“You better not hit him again, Dave,” the sergeant said. “Judge Simeon don’t like it when they’re all marked up.”

“Don’t worry, Stan. He was resisting an officer, wasn’t he? He tried to escape, didn’t he?”

He drew back his dully shining fist. “You want to dictate a statement while you still got the use of your mouth?”

I leaned back and kicked him in the groin. He grunted and bent double, clutching at himself. “I’ll kill him,” he said between gritting teeth. “The bastard ruptured me.”

The sergeant’s truncheon swung in a quarter circle to my forehead, and a whirlpool of shattered light sucked me down a drain and underground. Later, someone exhumed my consciousness—someone who said in a blurred voice:

“I hope I ruptured you properly. Then you’ll be the last of the Moffatts.”

Someone kicked a man who was lying on a floor. Pity for the man on the floor coursed through my body as real as pain. I’m learning some fine humanitarian lessons, I thought, but somebody should put a stop to this.

“Somebody should put a stop to this,” the man on the floor said. My tongue moved awkwardly in my mouth and scratched itself on a broken tooth.

“So you’d resist an officer of the law in the performance of his duty,” some clown said.

The man on the floor tried to get up but his stomach was weak and the handcuffs interfered with the use of his hands. I thought it would be nice if another whirlpool would take me down another drain, and immediately a whirlpool began to turn in my head. I lay back and waited for the blackout.

“Get up, get up,” I said to the man on the floor. “You’ve got to get up and fight.”

I opened my eyes and looked steadily at the leg of a table beside my head. Gradually it took on solidity, became
realer than the whirlpool, realer than pain. From its reality I deduced the reality of my own body lying on the floor. My pity changed to anger and my head cleared.

I managed to sit up then, but a man standing over me planted his foot on my chest and flung me backwards. My very real head grazed the indubitable leg of the table. I rolled my head aside and lay quietly, fighting off self-pity. The repetition of physical violence, I told myself, is beginning to bore me. But boredom was another thing I had to fight.

A door opened and a ceiling light was switched on.

“What goes on here?” somebody said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“He tried to escape,” Moffatt said. “He kicked me in the balls.”

“You’re not on duty, are you, Moffatt?”

“No, sir.”

“Go home, then, before I lose my temper.” I recognized the bitter, twanging voice of Inspector Hanson.

Moffatt went out and Hanson bent over me and looked into my face. “The bastard fixed you, didn’t he!” He stepped behind me and helped me to my feet. I would have fallen again if he hadn’t held me.

“Bring that chair over here, Sergeant,” he said. “Then you can get out.”

I sat down in the chair and he leaned against the table facing me. “I warned you last night, Weather. I told you you were heading into bad trouble.”

“I’m doing all right,” I said. “There’s nothing the matter with me a good dentist can’t fix.”

“And a good lawyer?”

“Don’t talk crap. The worst lawyer in the state could spring me from this kind of a frame-up. Who is the worst lawyer in the state, by the way? I’d like to talk to him.”

“You want a lawyer?”

“Maybe I don’t need one. Did you catch Garland?”

“He didn’t run away very fast,” Hanson said. “On account of he was dead.”

“Dead?”

“You choked him, didn’t you? When you cut off somebody’s air supply it causes them to become dead.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“You were the one that was manhandling him, weren’t you? You manhandled him a little too rough.”

“I didn’t choke him. I knocked him out. I broke his wrists so he couldn’t shoot me. That’s all.”

“You’re a rough boy, Weather. You seem to like hurting people.”

“Whether I like it or not, sometimes it has to be done.”

“Did it have to be done to Floraine Weather?” he barked.

“If you thought I killed her, you wouldn’t be talking to me this way.”

“What I think isn’t here or there,” he said. “I let the facts do the thinking for me.”

“Facts can be arranged. Kerch murdered her. I saw him do it, and so did Garland and Rusty Jahnke. You’ve got three witnesses.”

“One,” he said sourly. “You don’t count, and there isn’t any Garland.”

“What happened to Jahnke? I suppose you dropped him at some convenient street corner.”

“He wasn’t at the Wildwood. Maybe you have been having bad dreams? They say murderers have bad dreams.”

“Go and find him, then. The city isn’t paying you to sit in a room and make comical remarks.”

He stood up and looked down at me with hot, green eyes. “Are you trying to tell me how to do my job?”

“It sounds like it. Climb off your high horse, Hanson, and be yourself. I think you’ve got the makings of a good cop. Allister seems to think so, too. Isn’t it about time you did something about it? Your friend Kerch committed two murders last night—”

“Kerch is no friend of mine,” he growled. “What do you mean, two murders?”

“Floraine Weather and Joe Sault. Maybe three: somebody killed Garland, and it wasn’t me. Rusty Jahnke was his accomplice in both murders. If you’re afraid to go after Kerch himself, you can bring in Rusty. You’ll do it, Hanson, if the graft hasn’t spread all the way down to the soles of your flat feet.”

“Where did you get the idea you could give me orders?”

“As of today I’m paying part of your salary. I own property in this town, as of today, and I pay taxes. Does that make any sense to you? You’ve been taking lousy orders all your life. Take some decent orders for a change. Go and get Rusty Jahnke.”

“I don’t know where he is,” he said uncertainly.

“You’re afraid of Kerch,” I taunted. “To hell with you, Hanson!—”

He slapped me across the face.

“To hell with you, Hanson!” I repeated. “Beat me up and toss me in a cell, you rotten, lily-livered grafter. I’ll get the best lawyer in the state and tear this reeking town wide-open from gullet to gut. Get somebody to take me away, for Christ’s sake. You stink in my nostrils, Hanson.”

He trembled like an old hound after a long run. He didn’t hit me again.

“Why don’t you sock me some more, Hanson? There’s no danger in it. I’ve got handcuffs on. Now Rusty Jahnke might take a shot at you, and scare the living daylights out of you.”

“Shut your yap,” he said. “I’m going to bring him in.”

He walked stiffly towards the door, chewing his long lips.

“While you’re at it, there’s another witness against Kerch. You know Professor Salamander? You should be able to handle him, Inspector. He’s very little and old.”

He whirled on me savagely. “I said shut your yap! If you don’t shut up, I’ll shut you up for good!”

He turned again abruptly, and went out the door. The sergeant came back into the room, unlocked my handcuffs, and led me downstairs to the cells. I wasn’t sorry when the iron door clanged shut. There was a wooden cot hinged in the concrete wall of my cell, and that was all I needed. I stretched out, found a section of my head that wasn’t too sore to rest against the boards, and went to sleep.

A minute later—I found out afterwards it was more than an hour—I was wakened by a hand on my shoulder.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Are they attacking?” Then I remembered that it wasn’t France or Germany, even
though I was sleeping on wood, even though my whole body was stiff and sore.

“Wake up, Mr. Weather,” the policeman said. “Mr. Sanford wants to see you.”

“Tell him to go chase himself.”

“Aw, come on now, Mr. Weather. You know you wouldn’t want to talk like that to Mr. Sanford. He’s waiting upstairs to see you.”

I sat up carefully, balancing my head as delicately as if it were high explosive. My lips felt raw and puffed, and one of my broken teeth was aching viciously. “He can come down here.”

“Come on, Mr. Weather. You wouldn’t want to talk to him down here.”

Alonzo Sanford was waiting in the room where Moffatt had questioned me.

“Here he is, Mr. Sanford,” the guard said with forced enthusiasm. He went out and closed the door behind me.

“So good of you to return my call so soon,” I said. “Please don’t think me inhospitable if I fail to offer you a drink.”

He walked towards me slowly, looking into my face. “Good God, John, what have they been doing to you? Your mouth—”

“Yeah, it makes me lisp a little, doesn’t it? But I can still sound off.”

“Who is responsible for this brutality?”

“You are, as much as anybody, I’d say. The man that used the brass knuckles on me doesn’t matter. I’ll take care of
him myself one of these days—the way he needs to be taken care of.”

“You must be hysterical, John. To claim that I have any responsibility—”

“Maybe I’m a little hysterical. Hysteria isn’t such a bad thing. It makes you see things very clearly and simply, in black and white. You support a system in this town under which this kind of thing can happen to anybody—to anybody but you and your friends, that is. There are only two kinds of police systems, Sanford, when you look at it hysterically. The kind that exists to uphold the law and to treat everybody equally under the law, and the kind that exists to serve private interest. Your idea of a useful police force is the second kind—a police force that will lay off your friends, and bear down hard on your enemies, a force of strikebreakers, and bully boys, a Swiss Guard for the elite.”

“You make it hard for me, John,” the old man said, “but I do not consider you my enemy.”

“That’s not because I’m a man, is it? It’s because I’m a property owner. You came over here this morning to talk property. Property has to stick together. The only reason you see the marks on my face is because it’s got property behind it.”

“Believe me, John, I sympathize with you. You’ve been violently mishandled, and it’s only natural for you to be upset. Still, I fail to understand why you number me among your enemies. I came here to help you. You know that your father and I were close friends.”

“No doubt you found him useful, as you hope to find me useful, perhaps?”

“He was closer to me than anyone.” He spoke with the shallow sentimentality of the old.

“He was your political lieutenant, wasn’t he? He built up the machine through which you kept the rubber workers in line and indirectly controlled the municipal government. I’m not concerned with personal blame—though I blame you both—but with the fact that the two of you saddled the town with a corrupt machine. The trouble is that corruption isn’t something you can have a little of. It’s like cancer; inject it into a political organism and it’s bound to spread. It’s almost an axiom that power that has been taken out of the hands of the people is bound to grow progressively more corrupt.”

“You haven’t seen as much of life as I have,” Sanford said wearily. “Your picture is oversimplified and terribly one-sided. I admit that I’ve exercised political power in this city and state, and I’ve worked unceasingly to retain that power. But my motives have been purer than you suspect, I think. My industry is a small one, and it has not been easy to keep it from being swallowed up by its immense competitors. It has been my lifework to survive, so to speak, merely to keep my plants in operation. The Sanford plants are the economic heart of this city and of this whole area. If they were to close, as they are not going to do so long as I am alive, this city would become a ghost town. They would not be operating today if I had not deliberately developed my political power for the last fifty years. I’m not talking only of municipal politics, of course. But, if I lost political control of this city, I would have no weight at all in the state legislature, and very little influence in Washington.”

“You wouldn’t be able to survive, as you call it—by which you mean survive very comfortably, even luxuriously—if you gave political power back to the people?”

“If I had to pay union wages, if the city government got out of hand and raised my assessments and taxes, I wouldn’t be able to survive.”

“Isn’t it possible, then, that you’re an anachronism? You’re trying to stay on top of the heap by forcing conditions to remain as you determined them fifty years ago.”

“I have done what I have had to do,” he said soberly. “My own hands are clean.”

“Your picture is more oversimplified than mine, Mr. Sanford. You’ve stayed on top of the heap and assumed that everything was fine because you were on top. Meanwhile, the heap rotted away from under you. I’ve been in some rotten towns, but never a rottener one than yours.”

“Original sin, John. You can’t change human nature. I’ve tried to set an example of decency in my own life.”

“Don’t go theological on me, and don’t go self-righteous. You’re the better half of a working partnership with the underworld. You’re propped up by pimps, thieves, blackmailers, and murderers.”

“Good morning, John. You can’t expect me to remain here and listen to your wild nonsense.”

He started around me towards the door, walking with the incontestable dignity of lifelong authority and wealth. I stood in his way.

“Just a minute,” I said. “Let me tell you what’s happened in this city in the last two years.”

He stood still and regarded me coldly. I went on:

“You and my father built a machine to control the town. One pole of the axis was your wealth and social position, the other was my father’s slot-machine graft and his influence with the ordinary people. Two years ago my father was shot, and you’d have expected the axis to bend a little. But that didn’t happen, because the axis was more important than a man’s life, or justice, or anything else at all. You took a new partner to hold up the other end of the axis, because you were old and tired and wouldn’t dirty your own hands. The new partner was the very man who muscled in on my father and killed him—”