Phoenix Noir

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.”

“Gotta call my commanding officer,” the kid said.

“Shut up!” Navarre roared, his eyes bright and primal like an animal’s.

I tried to catch Fisher’s eye. This seemed all wrong. Anna Becker had mentioned nothing about an ankle bracelet.

“Did you find the body?” I asked.

Navarre brandished the blackjack toward me. “We don’t need anything more than what we got to send this nigger to the gas chamber. Now get the hell out, bull.”

With that he advanced on me in three fast strides, raising the sap with one hand and reaching inside his coat with the other. I took a step backward and I was faster. He had a .38 Police Positive in his left hand, but it was frozen uselessly in mid-air. My Colt .45 was five inches from his broad, veiny, ugly nose. His eyes were obsidian, dead.

“Kill him!” Navarre commanded, but his voice shook.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

“I’ll kill you, Darrow!”

But his arm remained where it had been, the pistol pointed out into the room.

I aimed, staring at him down the heavy barrel of the automatic. “You like to hurt people … you like it …” Those were all the words that would come out.

Then I felt Joe Fisher next to me and the spell broke. “Let it go, Jimmy.” A stocky desk sergeant pushed Navarre away and I holstered the Colt.

“James, you’re walking like an old man. That’s not right.”

I turned to see Mose, resplendent in his immaculate sleeping-car porter uniform. We stood at trackside, and it was oddly quiet. The usual call of train whistles was silent. My eyes roved over the station tracks and saw spikes and blocks of wood driven into the switches that connected the array of tracks to the main line. Alarm shot through me: Secure the line.

“Why are the tracks spiked? No train can switch off the main line.”

“You’re gonna see, boy,” Mose said, his teeth huge and white.

“What are you doing here anyway, Mose? You should have departed an hour ago. Nothing seems to be moving.”

He gave his deep, melodious laugh. “Some things moving. The pilot train came through twenty minutes ago, right on schedule.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Mose clapped me fondly on my good shoulder. “Son, you would be the only person on the Espee who don’t know.”