Phoenix Noir

After I left them, I made a few checks with the dispatcher. He was already in a bad mood. Extra engineers and firemen had been called in and he didn’t know why. The section foreman had been out all day on the line. “Nobody gives me the word,” he mumbled. After a few minutes of commiseration, he told me that the train Mary Becker boarded in Los Angeles had arrived on time the night before. It had been divided into three crowded sections, the last one coming in shortly after 10. It stayed fifteen minutes then departed for Tempe, Mesa, Tucson, El Paso, and points east. Next I went to the baggage room through the double doors just beyond the ticket counter. Anna had described Mary’s luggage: a matching suitcase and overnight bag, burnt-yellow and streamlined, with three brown stripes. The baggage men let me be: they were loading carts for the Santa Fe. It only took a few minutes of prowling to find the set. It looked almost new and the tag said, M. Becker, with an address in Los Angeles. I told the head baggage man to set them aside and headed back to the waiting room.

The women were gone.

It would have to wait. I needed to check the line and report to the chief at 8 o’clock “sharp.” I pushed through the front doors and heard a woman yell. She sounded a lot like Anna Becker. Looking around an archway, I spotted her with a man, standing beside a roadster with the top down. The car glistened red in the afternoon sun. So did Anna’s golden hair. She was in an agitated conversation with the man, chopping the air with her hands. Twice I made out the name Mary, said with urgency. They couldn’t see me. The thick pillars and archways of the station portico concealed me. Anna moved enough that I could take him in: dark hair in a crooner’s hairstyle, a kid’s face but the muscular body of a twenty-five-year-old. He was wearing a leather jacket and driving gloves. I didn’t see many able-bodied men his age around, and I wondered how he’d bugged out of the draft. He didn’t look like 4-F material, but you couldn’t tell. He sneered at something Anna said and she screamed, “How could you! What kind of man are you?” That’s when he hit her, so hard that the sound echoed in the portico.

That was enough. I knew what kind of man he was. But when I stepped out, the car was already speeding up Fourth Avenue, Anna’s blond hair fluffing out in the wind. I tapped the roof of a taxi and got in. In only seconds the cabbie had caught up. They paused at the light at Jefferson, then turned right. I didn’t know what I was doing. At that moment, I would have showed the kid in the leather jacket what it was like to be hit by somebody his own size. By the time we reached Second Street, however, I had hold of myself again. They turned south and parked. I sent the cab half a block past, paid him, and got out.

We were a long way from Palmcroft. The sidewalk was filthy and 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.