“Becoming. It matches your left eye.”
“You want one?”
“Not unless it has a Sam Browne belt.”
“We can put in a special order.”
“Let me think about it,” I said.
Necessary’s office on the twelfth floor of the new municipal building was richly carpeted, contained a large desk and some comfortable chairs, two flags on standards, the stars and bars of the Confederacy, and the stars and stripes of the U.S.A., a country to which Swankerton’s allegiance was nominally pledged. The room also had a small bar, an autographed photograph of the mayor, and an unsigned one of the President. Through the black-tinted windows there was a gloomy view of the Gulf of Mexico.
Necessary had quickly recruited himself a staff of young, able persons who handled the paperwork and left him free for “standing at the window and nodding yes or no,” as he put it. His secretary was a young Negro girl whose appointment had stirred up considerable comment, none of it favorable, and when anyone even vaguely alluded to it, Necessary would smile, slip into his best mushmouth drawl, which wasn’t bad, and say, “I sho wouldn’t have hired her either if she wasn’t my wife’s youngest sister.”
Captain Warren Gamaliel Henderson was born in Ohio the year that they elected his partial namesake President. His family moved to Swankerton the following year in 1921, switched quickly to the Democratic party, and started calling their youngest son by his initials.
Now somewhere past his fiftieth birthday, W.G. had run the Swankerton vice squad for a dozen profitable years and it had rubbed off on him. He was a big man with a red, rubbery face and neatly cropped, thick gray hair. His nose was purpling at its blunt tip and there were networks of deep lines at the corners of his eyes that had all the warmth of old pieces of slate. His big bony chin, freshly barbered, underscored a stubborn mouth that seemed frozen halfway between a smirk and a snarl. He also had gaunt, sunken cheeks whose insides he liked to suck on when he was thinking. He didn’t carry any spare fat that I could see and his uniform had cost him more than the city paid him in two weeks. He looked exactly what he was: tough, mean and nasty, and none of it bothered Homer Necessary in the least.
“Time we had a little private talk,” Necessary said, leaning back in his high-topped executive chair.
“I like private talks in private,” Henderson said and stared at me.
“You mean my special assistant bothers you?”
“If that’s what you call him.”
“I call him Mr. Dye and I have a lot of confidence in his judgment and I think you should too.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
It was a bleak and wintry smile that Necessary gave Henderson. “Mr. Dye calls me Chief Necessary, Captain Henderson, and I think you’d better call me that, too.”
“Whatever you say, Chief Necessary.”
“How long have you been head of the vice squad?”
“Twelve years.”
“Now that’s a long time, isn’t it?”
“I like it.”
“I’m sure you do,” Necessary said, “but didn’t you ever get just a little sick of all those whores and the pimps and the fags and the rest of the lot?”
“It’s my job,” Henderson said. “I never thought about getting sick of it.”
“Well, maybe you’re a little sick of it, but just don’t know it.”
“You got a complaint?”
“I don’t know if you’d call it a complaint or not,” Necessary said and turned to me. “You got those figures, Mr. Dye?”
“Right here, Chief Necessary,” I said, the way an up-and-coming special assistant should say it.
“Read off some of the highlights for Captain Henderson. These are statistics, Captain, that tell how our crime rate’s going. They only deal with the past month. Go ahead, Mr. Dye.”
“Armed robbery, up seventeen percent,” I read. “Auto theft, up twenty-one percent; homicide, up sixteen percent; assault, up twenty-seven percent; extortion, up nine percent, and what’s generally called vice, down four percent. These are only percentages as compared with the previous month’s figures.”
“Vice down four percent,” Necessary said. “And everything else up. You seem to be keeping on top of things, Captain.”
“I do my job,” he said.
“Now I’ve had talks with just about every ranking officer in headquarters except you and they’ve all agreed to cooperate one-hundred percent and I think these figures reflect that cooperation. Our crime rate’s up about fourteen percent and I call that progress, don’t you?”
“No.”
“That a fact?” Necessary said. “Well, I thought that everybody thought that getting at the truth was progress and that’s just what these figures are, Captain Henderson. The truth. All except yours.”
“You calling me a liar?” Henderson demanded, his tone thick and phlegmy.
“That’s right, I am. You’ve been lying about the number of vice violations and if you want me to prove it, I will. That’s why the crime rate’s gone up. The rest of the squads have quit lying, all except yours. They’re reporting actual figures — or near actual. I expect they’re still fudging a little, but that’s to be expected. But Jesus Christ, mister, you’re giving yours six coats of whitewash.”
“I report the figures as they’re given to me,” Henderson said.
“Sure you do. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I’ve got some more figures down pretty good. A fag can buy himself off for fifty bucks. A whore, ten. Gambling’s fifteen for each player and a hundred for the house. A pimp’s not good for much more’n fifty and a disorderly house will bring a hundred. I can go on.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Henderson said.
“You’re surprised?”
“Yes.”
“Shocked?”
“Sure.”
“You’ve heard of the Sarber Hotel?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“You know it’s a wide-open whorehouse?”
“No.”
“Did you know that a police private, Benjamin A. Dassinger, badge number two-four-nine-eight is regularly on duty there from seven P.M. till three A.M. to keep order and to make sure the customers pay up? You know that?”
“No,” Henderson said, “I didn’t know that.”
“For a vice cop you don’t know a hell of a lot, do you, Captain?”
“I do my job.”
“Well, if you do, maybe you know that the Sarber Hotel is owned by one Mary Helen Henderson and this Mary Helen Henderson is the wife of Warren Gamaliel Henderson who happens to be a captain in the Swankerton Police Department. Now, goddamn it, tell me you didn’t know that?”
Henderson said nothing and sucked on the insides of his cheeks.
“There’s a crap game that’s been running in this town for seven years. It used to float, but it doesn’t anymore. It’s the oldest crap game in town and it’s open every night from nine till two on the second floor of a bakery at two-forty-nine North Ninth Street. You know about that?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s funny, since the guy that runs it says he pays you five hundred a week to let him alone and, God knows, that’s cheap because it’s a hell of a big game and it draws the high rollers from as far away as Hot Springs and Memphis, but you wouldn’t know about that either, would you?”
“No,” Henderson said and sucked on his cheeks some more.
“The last count I got was that there are thirteen regular table-stakes poker games going on in town with an off-duty patrolman playing doorkeeper at each one. That’s on this side of the tracks. God knows what goes on in Niggertown, but you don’t know anything about those thirteen games or about the three hundred dollars-a-week payoff that each of them makes, do you?”