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.
I was about to cross Jefferson Street when a car nearly ran me down. I jumped back and recognized the familiar black Ford. I followed it into the driveway by police headquarters. It was full dark, but the streetlights showed Frenchy Navarre getting out of the backseat, then pulling out another man. The handcuffs on the man’s wrists glistened under the light. He was a kid really, a colored kid in fatigues, and his head and body slumped against the car. Navarre leaned in close and was talking to him. When the kid’s head came up, I could see a bloody membrane where his lower jaw should have been. Then Fisher came around from the driver’s side and they led him into the station. I let them get inside, and followed.
Navarre had the kid at the booking desk when he looked around and saw me. “Get lost, bull.” He momentarily turned back to his prisoner to punch him in the kidney. The boy crumpled in agony. Navarre’s hand looked odd, but then I saw it, a seven-inch blackjack protruding, and it had fresh blood on it.
“Here’s your murderer,” Navarre said. “Nigger playing soldier, really trying to rape a white woman.”
“No, sir, I swear I didn’t … don’t know nothing ’bout this,” the boy pleaded with me, slurring his words through his ruined mouth. He spat a bloody tooth to the floor.
“Well, how you explain this, nigger?” Navarre held out an ankle bracelet. It had dried blood on it. “Tried to pawn it after you raped that girl and put her on the train tracks.”
“No, no …”
“Wasn’t too smart coming into Phoenix, was it, boy? We make our niggers behave, keep ’em south of the tracks. So the government gives you a uniform, gives you a gun, makes you think you’re special. You’re just a black nigger, you murderous son of a bitch.”