The Fools in Town Are on Our Side (39 page)

“Is that a fact?”

“You goddamned right it's a fact. This afternoon, Lynch. This very afternoon, not more than a couple of hours from now.”

Lynch got up from his chair and bent over the table. He carefully assembled the papers and the carbons in two neat stacks and slid them back across the table to Loambaugh.

“Write it out, Cal, for your sake,” he said in a soft tone.

Loambaugh shoved his chair back and rose. “You can get me fired, you sonofabitch, but you ain't about to get me to resign. Ever. You'll like it back in Atlanta, Lynch. And that's where you're headed sure as shit stinks.” He turned to leave.

“Little Timmy Thornton,” Lynch said in a low, soft voice that still managed to stop Loambaugh in midstride. “Little Timmy Thornton, five years old, with a torn up rectum where somebody cornholed him.”

Loambaugh turned slowly and his face was pale and his hands began to shake. He looked at his hands as if they belonged to somebody else and then rested them on the back of a chair. But the shakes were in his arms now and they seemed to travel up them slowly until they reached his shoulders. He quivered visibly, but seemed unaware of it. His face was no longer white, but almost gray instead, and his eyes were fixed on Lynch in an unblinking stare as if he had just peered into the future and didn't much like what he'd seen.

Lynch wouldn't look at Loambaugh. He gazed at the surface of the
table instead, and when he spoke again, his voice was still low and soft as if he were talking to himself and was comfortable doing so. “Well, we've been talking about a lot of threats here this afternoon, haven't we, Cal? So I'm going to talk about something that I thought I'd never have to. I'm going to talk about little Timmy Thornton with his torn asshole and little Beth Mary Fames, all of six and a half, with her little pussy chewed up so much that they had to take twelve stitches in it, and maybe I should mention little Barbara Wynnewood, who got it both front and rear and then had all of her upper teeth knocked out because she bit it. Now these are the ones that I got evidence to prove, Cal. I admit that there are a couple of others that are nothing but pure D speculation and rumor, but the ones I mentioned, well, I got the facts and even some nigger witnesses to back them up. Now I suggest you sit yourself down and write out that resignation and then we'll just forget about everything that's been said and done in this room this afternoon.”

I watched Loambaugh disintegrate as Lynch spoke. He slumped, caved in really, I suppose, and I wondered if he would ever get his posture back. His eyes glazed, but they never left Lynch, and they seemed to watch the words that came out of the fat man's mouth. He continued to tremble and his mouth opened and his swollen tongue played around his lips, but he didn't seem aware of it. His color went from gray back to pasty white and a couple of red spots appeared high up on his cheekbones. When Lynch stopped talking, Loambaugh looked around warily as if he might have stumbled into the wrong room. Then he pulled out a chair, sat down on it cautiously, like an old man, reached for the paper and carbons, interleaved them in a mechanical fashion, and began to write. His hand still shook and he wrote large, bearing down hard on the paper with the pen. I watched him sign his name. He did it carefully and slowly, as if these were the last times he would ever sign it. All five copies. He put the pen down slowly, pushed the papers toward Lynch, rose, and walked out of the room. He moved blindly, bumped against two chairs, and fumbled with the sliding doors.

Lynch watched Loambaugh leave and when he was gone, the fat
man said, “Now, by God, I hated to do that to old Cal.” He slipped the carbons from between the sheets of paper and handed me one of the copies. “I'll turn the rest over to the mayor and the city council. You drive a hard bargain, Dye. Mighty hard.”

I folded the carbon of the resignation and put it in my pocket. “You haven't heard it all yet.”

Lynch turned slowly in his chair until he could face me. He looked as if he expected to chew something that would taste bad. He swallowed once and coughed. “I haven't heard it all?” he said.

“No. There's more.”

“You better tell me what it is then, hadn't you?” He was using the same low tone that he had used on Loambaugh. I didn't like it.

“I name the new chief of police.”

“You?”

“That's right.”

“You name the new chief of police,” he said slowly, spacing the words so that he could savor each one. “You.”

“Me.”

“Well,” he said. “Huh. That's really something, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Part of the whole deal, huh?”

“Part of the deal.”

“I suppose you got a candidate?”

“That's right.”

“Can I ask who?”

“Sure.”

“Who?”

I smiled and tried to make it a reassuring one. I don't think I succeeded. “Who?” Lynch said again.

“Homer Necessary,” I said.

 

 

There were five messages under my door when I returned to room 819 in the
Sycamore and all of them urged me to call Mr. Gorman Smalldane. I tossed them into the wastebasket, stretched out on the bed, and made a careful study of the ceiling. In my mind I could still hear the sound of my voice which, in retrospect, had all the warmth of a mechanical duck as it quacked away the afternoon, first with Lynch and Loambaugh, and later, for another hour, with Orcutt, Necessary, and Carol Thackerty. It had taken that long to describe how Homer Necessary would be sworn in as Chief Necessary at a special meeting of the Swankerton City Council come next Friday afternoon, which was three days off.

“You'll receive a hand-delivered letter from the mayor tomorrow offering you the job,” I told Necessary.

“How far did you have to bend?” he said.

“Over backwards.”

“Be more precise, Mr. Dye, please,” Orcutt said.

“I know what he means,” Necessary said. “He means I clear it all with Lynch.”

“That's right,” I said. “You might be able to fix an overtime parking ticket without checking, but that's all.”

“Did you have to concede so much?” Orcutt said.

“Once he's chief, I don't think Homer's going to give a damn what I conceded.”

“Lynch knows that, of course,” Orcutt said.

“Sure. But he still needed the concession. It was a matter of pride. Face. He'll make his own deal with Homer when he thinks it's time. Knowing Lynch, that'll probably be fifteen minutes after the swearingin ceremony.”

“Now that deal's something I really look forward to,” Necessary said. “Lynch say anything else?”

“About you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There was one thing.”

“What?”

“He said to tell you that you'd have to buy your own uniforms.”

That was the day or evening that
The News-Calliope
broke the story on the Widow Sobour. An eight-column banner read:
REFORM LEADER BILKED THEM, NUNS CHARGE
and old man Phetwick's editorial was also featured on page one in a two-column box bang under the picture of Mayor Pierre (Pete) Robineaux, bug-eyed and gap-mouthed. The photo had a cute little caption line that read: “… not surprised …” Phetwick's editorial was self-righteous and sonorous, but the news story was well-written, simple, even trenchant. It also left no doubt in anyone's mind that Mrs. Sobour was guilty as hell.

I tossed the paper aside, lay back on the bed, studied the ceiling some more, and tried to decide how I felt about the culmination of my efforts, which that afternoon had helped wreck the lives of a couple of none too-innocent persons, not to mention their families. I consoled myself with the discovery that while I felt no remorse, neither was there any pride nor any sense of accomplishment, which must have balanced things out in the record book of whoever was bothering to keep score. I wasted some more time wondering if Victor Orcutt ever thought of himself as a spiderlike genius who spun his web of intrigue and coercion only because it served some impossibly lofty ideal, and if he did think of himself as such, whether he realized that his web only caught a few emotional cripples, such as me, whom he
apparently liked to have around for company. I had noticed that Orcutt spent very little time by himself and then I wondered if anyone ever called him Vic, decided probably not, but promised myself that I would the next time I saw him. I was thinking some additional, similarly rich thoughts when the phone rang and Carol Thackerty wanted to know if I'd like to take her to dinner.

“I have to see an old friend,” I said.

“The one from New York—Gorman Smalldane?”

“You keep busy.”

“That's what I'm paid to do,” she said. “Smalldane's in room seven-nineteen and he called you four times this afternoon according to my spies at the desk and on the switchboard.”

“How's Vic?” I said.

“Who?”

“Orcutt.”

“Nobody calls him Vic.”

“I didn't think so, but I had to make sure.”

“He's fine, if you still want to know. He and Homer are meeting with Phetwick and one of his reporters tonight. The reporter's going to write a profile-type piece on the aging boy wonder who's to be Swankerton's new chief of police. Orcutt and Phetwick are sitting in to make sure that Necessary doesn't mention too many facts.”

“I think both of you underrate Homer,” I said.

“Victor may; I don't. I don't underrate him for a second.”

“That's about how long he'd need.”

“If that.”

I told her that I would call later to see whether she wanted a nightcap and she said that if it were after twelve not to bother, and I said that I wouldn't, and we hung up. I thought about Carol for a while and decided, or felt, or whatever it was that I did, concluded perhaps, which implies at least a little emotional involvement, that if I needed a temporary entangling alliance, it might as well be with her. It was the nicest thought I had all day.

Because I couldn't postpone it any longer, although I wasn't sure
why I'd delayed as long as I had, I picked up the phone and asked for Smalldane's room. When he answered, I said, “Let's have dinner and get a little drunk.”

“Why a little?” he said.

“Because I'd only have a little hangover. I can't stand the regular brand anymore.”

“You want to come down or do you want me to come up?”

“I'll come down.”

I hadn't seen Smalldane in more than ten years and I don't quite know what I expected, but certainly not what opened the door to my knock. Age smooths many by rounding off craggy edges with personal growth which the unkind sometimes call fat. It dehydrates others by squeezing out most of their life juices, leaving nothing but dry husks. The cosmetics of age occasionally dignify a few past all recognition by anyone who knew what clunks they were when young. Age simply ravages some, and Gorman Smalldane was one of those.

When I'd first seen him more than a quarter of a century ago in Tante Katerine's courtyard, he'd been a broad-shouldered man with a nipped-in waist who topped my present 6′ 1½ by at least 2″. He then had a long mop of light blond hair that always needed a trim and kept falling down over the pale blue eyes that had questioned it all. His mouth, I remembered, had been wide and sardonic and out of it had come some of the world's most infectious laughter.

The hair was gone now except for some white tufts above his ears. His skull was the color of old putty and I seemed to top his height by almost half a foot because of the bent way that he held himself. He had gone to fat in his forties and fifties, which he had then carried well enough, but now the fat was gone too and the skin stretched tight across his face, but raddled around the neck. He must have weighed no more than 125 pounds. Only his eyes remained the same, set a little farther back in their sockets perhaps, but still bright pale blue and as skeptical as ever. So was his voice.

“Well, one of us looks healthy,” he said. “Come on in.”

I went in and watched him move across the room to the Scotch
and the ice bucket. He walked slowly, as if he had to remember how to do it. With his back to me he mixed two drinks and said, “You've seen it before.”

“When did you find out?”

“Two months ago. They cut me open and there it was. Big as a grapefruit, they said.”

He crossed the room with the drinks and handed me one. “I keep going on booze and pills. I think the pills have opium in them because my dreams have been rather interesting lately. I get to screw some real dolls.”

“Well, I won't say how are you.”

“That's apparent, isn't it? I never thought I'd be an ugly old man with the eagle pecking away at my liver. They say that I've got a couple of months left. That means a month.”

“You still don't like hospitals?” I said.

“That's where they want me so they can stick tubes up every hole they can find. I might last three months that way, but I won't go through the indignity of it all. I don't find life quite that precious.”

He eased down into a chair carefully, but it still made him wince.

“Bad?”

“You goddamned right it's bad. Don't ever let them tell you it's not.”

“I won't,” I said.

He took a long swallow of his drink and then looked at me and grinned with most of his former skepticism. “Now just what the hell are you doing in Swankerton?”

“I'm corrupting it.”

“I hear it doesn't need much, but if it does, you ought to be better than a fair hand. After all, you did have a fine upbringing.”

“There's that,” I said.

“Well, tell me about it.”

I told him the entire story, partly because in telling it I brought it into focus, but mostly because I knew that he'd enjoy it and there were few enough things left that he could.