Blue City (5 page)

She leaned her head against the back of the chair and looked at the ceiling. Her body, stretched out before me, seemed lost in a dream of its own power and beauty. I could have reached out and taken it, I thought, like a ripe fruit from a tree. But then she was my stepmother and that would be incestuous. Besides, I hated her guts.

I said as casually as I could: “Just what happened to J.D.?”

Her head came erect and her dark emotional eyes looked at me. “He was shot down on the street. Nobody knows who did it. It was a hideous thing. I’m not sure I can talk about it—even yet.” Her voice broke.

“You must have loved him very much.”

“I was mad about him,” she said throatily. “He was the man in my life.” She was sitting straight up now. Her white hands on the arms of the chair and her crowning hair made her look like a tragic queen.

“Wasn’t he a little old for you?”

She watched me for a moment and decided that I meant nothing by it. “Some people thought so,” she said defiantly, “but I never did. Jerry had the secret of eternal youth.”

“If not eternal life. Property lasts, though. He left a good deal of property, didn’t he?”

I hadn’t been feeding her the right lines and she seemed a little confused. “What do you mean? He left me well provided for, of course.”

“That’s fine. It must be almost as fine for you as if he’d gone on living.”

She regrouped her forces and fell back to her original lines of defense: “Johnny, you don’t hate me, do you? I hadn’t even the slightest idea what was in his will before he died. I know it’s rough on you.”

“He didn’t die. He was shot. It was rough on him. Have you an idea who shot him?”

“How should I know?” She made a face like a little girl, pursing her lips in an artificial rosebud. “He must have had enemies, Johnny. He had so many different business interests.”

“You think it was assassination for business reasons, then? Who do you have in mind?”

The question frightened her. Her white face remained composed, but her whole body stiffened. “Why, nobody. I know so little about his business.”

“Did you post a reward for the murderer?”

“No, I didn’t. I was advised not to.”

“Who advised you?”

“I don’t remember. One of his friends, it must have been. They said the police wanted a chance to work on the case quietly.”

“They worked quietly, all right. This case has closed up so quietly I feel as if I’ve gone deaf.”

“I think the police did their best, Johnny. Inspector Hanson worked on it for weeks.”

“Sewing it up at the seams, probably. Sealing it hermetically so no air would ever get in. Where were you when J.D. was shot, or is that part of the secret archives?”

I had given her cause for genuine anger, but she was doped by the histrionic emotion she had been feeding me. She covered her face with her hands and said brokenly between them: “How can you make such an utterly horrible insinuation? I was home helping the cook to prepare his dinner—a dinner he never ate.”

The defensive unreality of her reactions was too much for me. I decided to play along with her and see where it got us: “I didn’t really mean that, you know that. It’s just that I haven’t been able to find out anything, and it’s getting me down.”

She took her hands away and peered into my face with dry eyes. “I know. It got me down long ago. I’ve had two years of this dreadful uncertainty.”

“About what, exactly?”

“About what happened to Jerry. And what might happen to me. I’ve been carrying on his business, you know.”

“I heard you sold the hotel.”

“Yes, I had to let it go.” She seemed embarrassed. “But I’m still running the Cathay Club, and the station. That used to be my work, you see. I’ve been in radio for years. Jerry hired me in the first place to look after his radio interests.”

“What about the slot machines?”

“I keep out of that side of the business. They’re not really a woman’s field. I had to hire a business agent. He manages the Cathay Club, too.”

“I suppose that’s Kerch.”

“Oh, do you know him?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“If you’d like to meet him I could arrange it. Though I don’t see what interest you’d have—”

“I’m interested in anybody that got anything out of J.D.’s death.”

She looked at me uncertainly. “Surely you’re not still interested in me—in that way?”

I stared frankly at her red mouth, let my stare drop to her full bosom and taut waist. “I’m interested in you in all sorts of ways.”

“I was afraid for a while you were going to act like a stepson. But you’re not talking like one now.” She let her lips remain parted when she finished speaking. A little flicker of triumph danced in her eyes. She stood up and expanded her body. “Let me make you another drink.”

“Thanks. I don’t think I’ll have another drink.”

“You’re not leaving again, so soon?” She spoke as she moved across the room.

“I’ve got a lot of things to do that won’t wait. A lot of people to see.”

She turned from the bar and faced me. Her right hand twisted a bracelet on her left wrist, almost as if she were clutching at herself for support. “What people?”

“Maybe you can make some suggestions. You know what I’m looking for.”

She filled a double pony with bourbon and drank it quickly. “No, I can’t offer any suggestions. I’m as much in the dark as you are. Don’t you believe me?”

“Why should I?”

“But you’ve got to believe me.” She recrossed the room towards me. Her arms hung straight down by her sides now, lending her body a queer, stealthy dignity.

I stood up and looked into her face. It was deceptively calm, like the frozen surface of a dark stream. In the bottom of her eyes I could see the shifting play of hidden currents, without being able to guess their meaning.

“If you want to see Kerch,” she said rapidly, “I’ll take you to him tomorrow.”

“Do I need a formal introduction?”

“No, of course not. But you can’t do anything tonight. It’s getting late. You might just as well sit down and have another drink.”

“Maybe it would suit you better if I waited till next year or the year after.”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem very eager to have me do nothing at all. I’d expect you to have some interest in the matter of who killed your husband. Curiosity, anyway.”

“You don’t understand, Johnny. You can’t understand how hard it’s been for me to live here, since Jerry died. I just can’t bear the idea of your stirring up more trouble.”

“He didn’t die. He was killed. And I’m not making trouble. I’m simply not dodging it.”

“You think I don’t know he was killed? You think I could ever forget it? I know what the old ladies say about me behind my back. And the stodgy wives at their bridge parties, who think they’re so goddam respectable! They think their husbands are such solid citizens, but most of them are
too stupid to know where their money comes from. My husband was killed, but I get no sympathy from them. I wasn’t born here, you see, and I made my own living before I was married, so I’m a suspicious character. It hasn’t been easy for me. Sometimes I thought I’d go crazy with nobody to talk to.”

“You shouldn’t have such a hard time finding someone to talk to.”

“Men, you mean? They’ve come sniffing around. I could have their men, if I thought they were worth having.”

“Why don’t you leave here, if you don’t like it? There are other cities. Where did you come from?”

She didn’t answer for a minute. She went to the bar and poured herself another shot of whisky. When she had drunk it, she said: “I’ve got a business to run here. I’m carrying on.”

“You got rid of the hotel fast enough.”

“I told you I had to. Anyway, that’s no concern of yours.”

“Where did the money go?”

Alcohol had refueled her fires. She said fiercely: “I’m not answerable to you.”

“I understand I’m next in line for J.D.’s property.”

“As long as I’m alive I have a perfectly free hand.”

I got up and walked toward her across the room. “Now I know where we stand,” I said. “What makes you certain you’re going to be alive very long?”

With my shoulders coming towards her, it must have sounded like a direct threat. Her face went to pieces finally. She moved back into the corner between the bar and the
wall, watching me with a basilisk grin, the breath hissing in her nostrils.

“Get away from me,” she whispered.

I leaned on the bar and smiled as cheerfully as I could. “You scare easily, don’t you? You’ve got a lot of fear inside you, but I didn’t put it there. I’m just the peg you’re hanging it on for the moment. Now I wonder where all that fear came from?”

Her whole face was twisting, trying to cover the nakedness of her emotion. “Go away,” she whispered again. “I can’t stand any more of your talk.”

“I’m not crazy about it myself, but there isn’t much else I can do. Now, if you’d do a little of the talking and tell me what you’re afraid of—”

“You came here to torment me, didn’t you?” she said in a low monotone. “You thought you could break me down. You hate me because your father left me his money, and you think you should have it. Get out of here, you overgrown bully!”

I was young enough to be hit hard by the epithet. But before I walked out of the house I threw her something to chew in bed:

“What you need is a good psychiatrist. I hear there’s a good one in the state penitentiary.”

A faded sign in the window of Kaufman’s secondhand store stated: “We Buy, Sell, and Exchange Anything,” and the contents of the window supported the statement. There were old coats, cameras, military medals, an old fox neckpiece, which looked as if it had been gnawing itself to death, a Western saddle, a shotgun, a pair of Indian clubs, a rusty pair of handcuffs, a thirty-day clock in a bell jar, a complete set of the
Waverley
novels, a bird cage, a greasy truss. The strangest object in the window was a lithographed portrait of Friedrich Engels, surveying with a cold eye the chaotic symbols of the civilization he had criticized.

The store was dark, but a thin line of light shone under a door at the back. I knocked. The door at the back opened, and a bulky shadow appeared in the rectangle of light, walking not quite like a man. He switched on the store lights and hobbled towards me, through a junk heap of rusty stoves, baby carriages whose original occupants had long since graduated from high school, fly-specked dishes, and battered furniture—the detritus of broken homes and the leavings of people bettering themselves on the installment plan.

He was a heavy old man who swung one leg stiffly from the hip and rolled as he walked. He flattened his broad nose against the window in the front door and peered at me. Then he shouted through the pane: “What do you want? I’m all closed up.”

I shouted back: “Are you the man that writes the letters to the newspapers?”

“I’m the man. You been reading them?”

“Let me in. I want to talk to you.”

He unsnapped a key ring from his belt, unlocked and opened the door. “So what do you want to talk to me about? Ideas?”

The smile which swallowed his eyes was wide, bland, and simple, like the smile on a Buddha’s stone face. The naked crown of his head was level with my chin, but he was almost as wide as the door. He swung his stiff leg and moved back out of my way.

“What’s Engels doing in the window?” I asked.

“You know his face? Almost nobody in this godforsaken burg knows him. They ask me who’s that, is that your father? So I tell them who Engels was. I tell them what he stood for. I educate them without their knowing what I’m doing.” He sighed heavily. “The exploited masses.”

“A good many of the exploited masses must come in here. You’re in a good spot to spread your gospel.”

“You come in the back.” Without touching me, his right arm moved in the circular gesture of embrace. “I like to talk to a man who knows ideas.”

He led me down a narrow aisle to the back of the store, through a tiny office containing a high bookkeeper’s desk,
into his living apartment. The room where he invited me to sit down was a combination of living-room and kitchen. There were a deal table, a few old leather chairs and some painted wooden ones, a bookcase in one corner, a gas plate on the shelf beside the sink. Above the bookcase there was an amateurish pencil sketch of Karl Marx.

“Why don’t you put Marx in the window?”

“Then not so many people would ask me who he was, because they know. I wouldn’t have a chance to educate them.”

“You’ve been in this town a long time, haven’t you, Mr. Kaufman?”

“Nearly all my life. I’ve been right here in this location for the last thirty-five years.”

“You should be able to tell me something about the municipal government. Where’s the real power in the town?”

“You a reporter? Or writing a book?”

“I’m gathering material,” I said.

He didn’t ask me what kind of material. He smiled more blandly than before, and said: “You want it the way they spell it out in the papers for the exploited masses? Or do you want it the way I see it? Sometimes I think, especially since they threw out the labor organizers in the rubber factories—I think I’m the only man in town who isn’t stone blind.”

“Spell it out your way.”

He leaned back in his wide chair and bent his good leg over his stiff one. “According to the city charter the city’s laws are made by a city council of twelve members elected
annually by the people, voting according to wards. The mayor, elected annually by the people at large, is the head of the executive branch of the city government, and he administers the city laws as passed by the council.”

“Who runs the police?”

“A police board, of which the mayor is an ex-officio member. The other three members are appointed for overlapping periods of three years by the city council. All that is the way it’s written down in the charter.”

“And who actually runs the town?”

“Alonzo Sanford dominates the town. But you can’t say he actually runs it. For a good many years he had a working alliance with a man called J.D. Weather. Weather got hold of a slot-machine concession for this area, and over a period of years he developed into an old-fashioned city boss. He spent money in the right places and got his hands on the council and the police force. At the same time he was pushing down roots, staging political picnics, helping the little people out of jams, getting them medical care when they couldn’t pay for it, helping families to get on relief, contributing to campaigns run by the Poles and the Serbs and the Italians and the other minorities. It got so everybody in town knew him, and most of them liked him. They knew they could count on J.D. Weather in a pinch, and they voted the way he wanted them to. He never held any office himself, but the last fifteen years no mayor or councilman could get elected in this town unless he gave him the nod.”