Blue City (6 page)

“Where does Alonzo Sanford come into this?”

“For one thing, because a man like Weather couldn’t get
away with corrupting the city government without help. The so-called better people would run him out of town. Sanford was his high-class protection.”

“I don’t see what Sanford got out of the deal.”

“Everything he wanted,” the old man said—“men in office who wouldn’t tax his real estate too hard, police who would help to keep union activity out of his plants. And, working through J.D. Weather, he could stay in the background and pose as a grand old citizen. As long as they didn’t touch him, the maggots could eat up the town.”

It was painful to hear my father talked about like that. I had never lost the conception of him that I had formed as a boy: leading citizen, square businessman, straight talker, everybody’s friend. “Was J.D. Weather that bad?”

“He was bad for the town. I don’t think he ever took direct graft himself, but he made it possible for others to take it. Once corruption starts, it always spreads, right down to the policeman on his beat, taking a cut from a floozie or protecting a petty thief. Personally, J.D. Weather wasn’t a bad man. He did a lot of good for individuals—that was one of his holds on the town. But he interfered with the democratic processes and corrupted this city from the top down—all so he could rake in a thousand a week from his slot machines, and feel generous and powerful in the bargain.”

“You didn’t like him much.”

“Why is this town twenty years behind the times?” he snorted. “Underpaid men and women in the rubber plants, working for fifteen-twenty dollars a week. They try to do something for themselves, and the cops take their leaders
to the edge of town and give them a beating and send them up the road. Slot machines and poolrooms and whorehouses, instead of playgrounds and community houses to keep the juvenile delinquents from going delinquent. Some of the worst slums in the country, with Alonzo Sanford taking in high rents from them. Why do things stay that way? Because they conspired to keep ’em that way. I thought things might start to be different when Allister got in the year before last—”

“It’s funny,” I said. “I asked you about the town, and you give me past history. J.D. Weather’s been dead for two years.”

“But the melody lingers on, boy. That’s what I can’t understand about Allister.”

“He’s the mayor now, isn’t he?”

“He’s been mayor for nearly two years. He ran on a reform platform. He promised to clean up the town. He was a young lawyer out of the D.A.’s office, and he talked like a fighter, and I thought he meant it. So did a lot of other people; he got the support of the honest middle-class elements, and the workers that had any idea what was good for them. After J.D. Weather got killed, he practically swept the town. He knew the facts of municipal corruption, and he didn’t pull any punches. That was during his campaign for election. But when he got in, things went on as before. Last year he came up for re-election, and he toned down his talk a lot. He didn’t go in for facts any more, he went in for high-sounding generalities. But he got in by a whopping majority, because there wasn’t any opposition worth talking about.”

“How do you account for that? You’d expect Sanford to oppose him.”

“I think Jefferson was right,” the old man said gravely. “Power corrupts. Why should Sanford and the forces of reaction oppose a man if they can absorb him and use him? I don’t know a darn thing about it, but I’m suspicious Sanford is grooming him to take J.D. Weather’s place. All I know is this. Allister hasn’t moved a muscle in nearly two years in the mayor’s office. He rants about evil in the city, but he never seems to put his finger on any of it. He spends his time building up his political machine. I guess power corrupted him, or maybe Sanford’s money hypnotized him. I don’t know. Anyway, it’s an example of the difficulty of reform by constitutional methods. I’m not a gradualist myself.”

“I didn’t expect you’d be.” I glanced at the picture of Marx on the wall. “But anything else is pretty precarious, isn’t it? You’re liable to lose what freedom you’ve got while you think you’re fighting for more freedom.”

“What freedom have they got?” he demanded. “Freedom to slave in the factories, vote and think the way the radio and newspapers and political bosses tell them to vote and think, freedom to befuddle their brains in the taverns and the moving picture shows: freedom to be exploited and dispossessed. Let them stand up and fight for their rights!”

“I was wondering,” I said slowly, “I was wondering if J.D. Weather could have been shot by somebody who disapproved of him for political reasons.”

“You’re a cop!” He levered himself to his feet with a hoarse grunt. “I thought I knew all the dirty cops in the
town, but you’re a dirty cop I didn’t know.” His face was massive and calm, and he was breathing heavily through his nose.

“Were you accused of killing him at first?”

“I said my say long ago,” he growled. “A dirty cop coming to me, pretending to be interested in ideas. You can get out.”

I stayed in my chair. “What I’ve seen of the cops here, I don’t like them any better than you do. I came to you for information.”

“Who are you then?” His key ring clinked on his belt with the angry heaving of his belly.

“John Weather is my name. We were talking about my father.”

He sat down heavily in his chair and blinked his innocent old eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me? I wouldn’t talk that way to a son about his father.”

“I guess I didn’t know my father very well,” I said. “I was only twelve when I saw him last, and, even then, I spent most of my time away at school. But I wanted information, and I got it. There’s some other information I want. The gun that killed him came out of your store.”

For the first time a glaze of cautious insincerity came over his eyes. “That revolver was stolen from my store. It was in the window, and somebody stole it from there.”

I said: “You talk a good fight, Kaufman. You rant about cleaning up this city. But when you have a chance to help catch a murderer, you back down. I didn’t think a man like you could be scared so badly.”

“Scared, phooey!” he exploded. “Why should I talk to a
Cossack like Hanson? He put me in the clink one time for addressing a meeting. He drove some of my best friends out of town.”

“You’ve never seen me before tonight. You can talk now.”

“What are you doing in this town?”

“I came here to look for a job, and I found one waiting for me—the job of finding out who killed my father.”

“I can’t tell you that, boy. If you think it was me, you don’t know me. It’s the system I want to see destroyed.”

“You’re helping to keep things the way they are by clamming up.”

“Understand this, if I talked to you I’d be taking a chance. I’d be taking a chance on you. If you ran to the cops with your story, they’d have something on me, and they’ve been trying to get something on me all my life. I got too many ideas in my head. If you went to certain other people, maybe I wouldn’t live very long.”

“Maybe you won’t live very long anyway. You’re nearly seventy, aren’t you?”

“Seventy-five,” he said with a smile. “I’m old enough to take a chance.”

“I’m twenty-two—young enough to make trouble. You might be able to help me make a lot of trouble.”

“Joey Sault’s about your age. He used to spend a lot of time in this store before my granddaughter left.”

“Joey Sault?”

“He went to the reformatory for shoplifting when he was still a juvenile. I never thought he’d try it on me, though. He was going straight, and I thought Carla and him were going to get married.”

“If this Joey Sault took the gun, why didn’t you tell the police?”

“I already told you one reason. I don’t trust the police, and I don’t like them. There’s another reason. Joey could have got a long term in the pen for larceny. Maybe for accessory to murder.”

“Or murder.”

“Maybe so. But I happen to know he didn’t do it.”

“You seem sure of yourself. How do you know?”

“He told me he didn’t. I asked him.”

“And you believed what he told you?”

“He’s no good at lying,” the old man said. “If he had been lying, I would have known. He stole the gun and sold it. He refused to tell me where he sold it. What could I do?” He spread his thick hands.

“So you held up a murder investigation because a small-time thief wanted to marry your granddaughter.”

“You simplify too much,” he said with weary patience. “I tried to save him from the consequences of his own actions. They were more serious consequences than he deserved, at least that’s what I thought then. Anyway, he never married Carla. It turned out later all he wanted to do was ruin her and pimp for her. Maybe he’s pimping for her now. I heard she’s been out at the Cathay Club the last few months.”

“I don’t like the sound of Sault.”

“Joey is a product of conditions,” the old man said gravely. “His father was a cheap bookie, his mother left him young, the gangs in the south-side slums brought him up. His sister is a prosperous whore. Naturally he should want
to be a pimp. What other use would he have for his good looks?”

“Where can I find this good-looking boy?”

“He used to live with his sister. Her name is Mrs. Sontag—Francesca Sontag. In the Harvey Apartments, on Sandhurst, three blocks south of Main.”

I got up and said: “You’re not taking a chance on me. I think some of your ideas are screwy, but you’re the first honest man I’ve talked to here. I won’t let you down.”

He reached out and took hold of my arm. “Wait until you’ve lived seventy-five years and tell me what you think of my ideas. And be careful of Joey. He carries a knife.”

“I have a feeling I’ll probably live to be seventy-five,” I said before he closed the door.

The Harvey Apartments was one of the newer buildings in the belt of apartments between the downtown business section and the south-side factory district. It couldn’t have been built more than seven or eight years before, but already its stucco skin was beginning to crack and peel. Already its jerry-built pretentiousness was warping and fading into harmony with the streets of dismal tenements that flanked it, like a middle-class dream subsiding into lower-class reality. People would live here, I thought, whose finances, or whose morals, barred them from the good residential districts. Still, it could seem like a lot of class to a slum-bred petty shoplifter.

Baby carriages gave the lower hallway a family air of struggling respectability. But many of the cards over the rusting mailboxes on the wall bore the names of married women living, it appeared, alone. Mrs. Sonia Weil. Mrs. Dorothy Williams. Mrs. Francie Sontag was among them. Her apartment number was 23, and I climbed to the second floor and found it. The mutter and growl of two voices behind the door, a man’s and a woman’s, ceased when I knocked.

But it was a full minute before the door was opened. Mrs. Sontag was in a pink silk negligee which revealed and exaggerated the amplitude of her figure. Her heavy, black hair was down her back. Her bold, soft face might once have been very handsome, and might still have been amiable.

“What do you want?” she said in a brisk, forbidding voice, which implied that I was entitled to no wishes. Over her frilled shoulder I could see a dark-gray pinstriped coat laid across one arm of the red satin chesterfield. I couldn’t be sure in the dim, aphrodisiac light of her rose-shaped lamps, but it looked like the coat of a man’s suit.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Joseph Sault. Your brother?”

“Joe isn’t here.” She made a move to shut the door in my face.

“Can’t you tell me where I can find him?” I said quickly. “It’s business I want to see him about.”

“What kind of business?” Her bright black eyes looked into my face with caution. A movement of air in the apartment behind her flooded my nostrils with her perfume. It was good perfume.

From somewhere out of sight a man’s voice called: “Who is it, Francie?”

“Somebody wants to see Joe.”

“I’m in the market,” I told her. “There’s something I want to buy from him.”

It made no sense to me, but it seemed to make sense to her. “He should be in back of the poolroom. You know, where they run the poker game.”

I picked a name out of my memory of the neon signs on Main Street: “Weber’s?”

“No, Charlie’s.” She closed the door so sharply it cut my “Thank you” in half.

She went back to her strenuous profession, and I went back to the street. My drive was a long way from running down, but I was beginning to feel just a little like a salesman of something nobody wanted. Or a billiard ball looking for a carom and finding nothing to hit.

But I still felt like a special kind of billiard ball, not subject to the forces of gravity and friction. I walked the three blocks to the corner of Main Street in three minutes. Without seeming to go anywhere, the night crowds were thinning out, as if there were trap doors in the pavement. But there was a higher proportion of drunks, and fewer unassorted couples. The bars were beginning to empty, and the night-blooming floozies were steering their catches to the walk-up apartments and sleazy hotels they called home.

There was a tall, blue policeman on the corner, watching the crowds benevolently like a pagan god at a carnival in his honor. He was very tall and very fat, looking the way a cop should look if he isn’t expected to catch anything.

I planted myself in front of him, and after a minute he looked down at me with a pained expression on his serene stultified face. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Can you tell me where Charlie’s poolroom is?”

“Ain’t it a little late for playing pool?” He winked with an effort that twisted the corner of his mouth.

“What time does it close—at twelve? There should be time for one game.”

I had amused him. He laughed and slapped the holster on his hip. “Sure, there is. But watch yourself, kid. You
don’t look any too well heeled. The stakes are pretty high in Charlie’s game.”

“Where is it?” I said sharply.

“All right, don’t get peppery. I was just going to tell you.” He pivoted on his base and pointed down West Main Street. “Two blocks down to your left. I warned you, don’t forget.”