The Expendable Man (36 page)

Othy was on his feet. “Shut your mouth, you fat slob!”

Doc Jopher's eyes became venomous stones. “She walked out of there with him. She was just as live as him or me when she walked out with him.”

Marshal Hackaberry said dispassionately to Othy, “The lab's found some dog hairs in your mother's car. You folks don't have a dog. Doc does. Might be they'll match up.”

Othy shouted, “I didn't kill her. It was the doc!” The officer restrained him.

The marshal raised a decisive voice. “She was killed by a blow on the head. It was inflicted while she was alive. There was no debris in the canal. The Zanjaros checked after the locks were closed for the night. The locks were still closed when the girl's body was found. Nothing could have gone through them.”

Doc Jopher's words quavered. “You know I didn't kill that poor little girl, Marshal. I wouldn't do a thing like that. Maybe I tried to help her in a way I oughtn't. Like I've tried to help other poor little girls that come crying to me. It's not my fault I got a soft heart. I can't stand to hear them crying when I'm a doctor and know I can help them. But I wouldn't kill anybody.”

It could have been a performance, the tragedian now. But at least a part of it was real. And it was real later when the deputy started to take him away.

“If you lock me up, who's going to take care of poor old Duke?” He began to cry. Real tears.

The marshal said brusquely, “Don't worry about that, Doc. We'll see to Duke until you get back.”

For he would come back. Even if it came to complicity in murder, he wouldn't serve too long. He knew the ropes, the ingratiating deeds, the good behavior, the sentiment he could engender. He'd come back to carry on with his butcher's business.

Before that, a cursing Fred Othy had been led out. Last of all, Ringle and Venner went away. Ringle, stolidly; so he'd made one miscalculation, but on the whole he wasn't dissatisfied. He'd helped run Othy and Jopher to ground, not by risk and chance but by unspectacular routine. Venner departed with the hate still ugly in his eyes, with more hate for an innocent Hugh than for a guilty. The Venners would not be changed in their generation.

Hugh witnessed it all. And the aftermath hubbub of Ellen and Skye and the marshal filling in details. He didn't want to spoil their celebration but he knew he couldn't hold on much longer. If he could get outside to the car, he could lie down and wait.

He heard the marshal's slow western twang. It wasn't triumphant. “With any luck, we'll send Doc Jopher up for a longer spell than usual. But there'll be another Jopher. And another telephone number. And another old woman. Another and another and another. There'll always be abortionists just as there'll always be prostitutes and pimps and pushers. When man wants an evil, he'll always find someone evil to supply him.”

Carefully, Hugh lifted himself from the chair. He took one step, and the floor rose up and crashed into his face.

SUCH A SHORT TIME AGO
, he had traveled this road from Westwood to Phoenix. Now, such a long time later, he was traveling it from Phoenix back to Westwood. He had been light-hearted then; he wondered if he would ever again know that same careless happiness. He wondered if he would ever be cleansed of his innocent guilt.

By mid-afternoon he would be in Blythe; before sundown, in Indio. He would not stop in either place. After being treated as an invalid for almost a week, he was in pretty good shape. Even if his face did still bear considerable resemblance to that of a broken-down prizefighter's. By evening he would be making the rounds at Med Center. Just as if nothing had happened. Just as if he'd never been away.

His name had been in the papers. Not in the headlines, not as a suspected criminal, not as a Negro. Embedded in the story of the arrest of Fred Othy and Dr. Oren Jopher was a paragraph:

“Marshal H. C. Hackaberry stated that the discovery of Dr. Jopher's part in the case was made through the co-operation of Dr. Hugh Densmore of Los Angeles, a visitor in Phoenix. Dr. Densmore first became suspicious of Dr. Jopher's activities after learning from a friend, Skye Houston, attorney, of the conflicting stories given the police by the suspect, Fred Othy.”

No more than that. It all might have to come out at the trial. He would return as a witness. Along with little Lora and bewildered Mr. Crumb and a handful of bus drivers and Doc Jopher turning state's witness. But he wouldn't be afraid to speak up then. He was no longer the expendable one.

Fred O. continued to deny killing Bonnie Lee. And why had he? She must have threatened to expose him, as they sat there in the car on Indian School Road after it was over. She hadn't come to Phoenix for this ugly thing; she had come with her secret hoard to buy a beautiful wedding dress, to begin a grand new life. Had she demanded that he free himself and marry her? Or did she make what would be the first of interminable demands for money? Whatever it was, he had panicked and killed her.

There was so much to remember. Not just the sad and the bitter moments, but the good ones as well. You'd think he was a bloody hero the way the family carried on. And Skye. And a friendly marshal. Everyone but Ellen. She didn't care to talk about it.

The road was winding through Wickenberg. Hugh spoke to her. “Hungry?”

Her smile was wide. “After your grandmother's breakfast?”

He wondered if she had been remembering too. The big farewell dinner his grandmother served last night. With Skye the honor guest. And Skye and Ellen silhouetted in the doorway as they said good-bye to each other.

Hugh had walked away, leaving them together. That was when Edward, just emerging from the dining room, put an envelope in his hand. “Houston asked me to give you this.” The bill. Hugh didn't open it until he was alone. Not that he was afraid to see it. Whatever the amount, he could pay. He had a future ahead. When he did look at it, he couldn't believe. Carefully itemized, the total read: $10,000. Across it was stamped:
Paid in Full
. And scrawled, by Skye's own hand, was the notation. “I told you I was expensive. I didn't tell you my war chest was already full. I don't need your money. I'll take it out in trade when I get my ulcer.”

Remembering so many things he would never forget. They were in open country again. Sand and horizon and the far-off hills. Hugh said, it had to be said, “If things had been different, it might have been you and Skye, mightn't it?”

She didn't hesitate. “They would have had to be very different.”

“If he hadn't been married—”

Her words were simple. “If he hadn't been white.”

Somehow it surprised him. “That would matter to you?”

“Yes,” she said. “It's too soon. I'm not that strong.”

“You have more strength than any woman I know.”

“Not enough for that.”

She was silent for a little while. Then she said, “I love Skye. I'll always love him. There are different ways of loving. Even if he weren't white, even if he weren't married, I wouldn't marry him unless I couldn't have the man I want.”

Hugh couldn't look at her. There was a truck ahead, he had to keep his eyes on the road. He waited until the truck driver gave him the signal to come around, and until he had negotiated the passing. Then he spoke, quite casually, he hoped.

“How long will you be in Los Angeles?”

“It depends upon how interesting I find your campus.”

“I won't have much time,” he despaired. “I've two weeks' vacation to make up.”

“I'm in no hurry,” she said.

For an instant, he took his eyes off the road. She was smiling. Not at him, but at the certainty of the coming-true of the plans they both were making.

Place names in this book are factual, but locations such as Three Oaks and Dr. Jopher's country acreage are invented, and to the best of knowledge, there is no motor hotel in Phoenix named “The Palms” and no café in Scottsdale called “Victor's.”

All characters are entirely fictional; any fancied resemblance to any persons, living or dead, can only be the product of imagination. Marshal Buster Shaver and the deputy marshals, who so generously furnished information on law enforcement in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, can vouch for the fact that no law officer in this book bears even an imaginary resemblance to the actual officers of the area.

In the comparatively brief time it takes to produce a book, a number of landmarks in the Scottsdale area have given way to progress, including the police headquarters as described herein. A handsome new police station now stands next door to the Town Hall.

1963

A WHITE CADILLAC
is on the road from Los Angeles to Phoenix, driven by a young man on his way to a family wedding. The young man is single, on the rise in his medical career, a good son and brother. His car, borrowed from his mother, is one my father would have admired: a solid and luxurious example of American engineering.

Behind him is Los Angeles, a modern city of new beginnings and glossy stars; a desert city that pipes in enough water to transform itself into a false paradise. The world this car moves through, once it leaves Los Angeles behind, is a different kind of desert, the American West that still remembers old myths about tough men finding justice in their own way. It's a hard-edged landscape that looks abandoned, primeval. It's a dangerous place for this particular young man at this particular moment in our history, something he knows instinctively—and yet he ignores this instinct.

Trouble begins when he notices the girl, a young woman, at the edge of the road and stops to give her a ride.

With its spare language and depictions of men and women and their outsized desires,
The Expendable Man
is the epitome of American noir—but there's something more beneath the surface. Dorothy B. Hughes, a white woman working as a book reviewer in Los Angeles and New Mexico, captures an unease under the skin of everyday life in a way that is all her own. Her understated description of the young driver's rising nervousness as he moves through this world has us wondering: Why is he questioning himself, what is he afraid of? She calibrates the tension carefully: What could be more innocent or decent than this young doctor helping out a young woman in a dusty town?

By the time he has reached his family we know all too well what could and will go wrong. Race has come into the equation and will distort everything in much the same way that the desert light and its heat does the perception of anyone caught outside their air-conditioned offices and homes. Hughes captures in her seemingly straightforward mystery a signal truth of mid-twentieth-century American life: under the fa\cl\cade of equality the uglier divisions of racism have their own story to tell about who will pay for the death of a runaway white teen.

Not unlike the characters Hughes portrays in
The Expendable Man
, my father came to Los Angeles to create a new Jim Crow-free life after World War II. He understood though that every rung he climbed up that American ladder into a world of owning real estate and having middle-class aspirations was going to be negotiated by race. Los Angeles might on its surface seem like the promised land, but at its back door was that other America, that place that still wanted the old narrative to hold true where black men and women had no right to that dream of true freedom. My father understood: born in Louisiana, grown to adulthood in Houston, he would have been on guard driving that car to Phoenix.

The poison this too-little heralded writer uncovers is as lethal as arsenic. Hughes's hero wants to believe in the country Los Angeles represents to him. He wants to believe that his education and his family's hard-won social position will protect him. He talks about his family's connections; he worries about social status and the circles his family's success has yet to propel him into—is he good enough for the beautiful woman from Washington, DC, he's just met and has begun to fall in love with? But that distance—between his hopes and what he encounters—is much greater than he imagined.

He doesn't want to be beholden to a powerful white lawyer to save him from injustice and so he tries to unravel the strands of the story of the girl's death himself. He takes us to the secret places where illegal transactions are only periodically checked. We feel the sun on our skin, disorienting and dispiriting, as he walks the long blocks trying to work out how he can protect his family from the shame this bogus crime will entrap him in. We are with him and become him as he regards the world he thought he knew come undone.

A white woman writing of a young black man's problems with the law was certainly a kind of gamble—but Hughes often chose to write from perspectives far from her own. She studied to be a journalist, actually plied that trade in Missouri, New Mexico, and New York. Though married to a man with long roots in New Mexico, she moved to Los Angeles, was one of the founding members of the Screen Writers Guild. More than a decade before she wrote
The Expendable Man
, she wrote
In a Lonely Place
, a book adapted for film and made famous by Humphrey Bogart's performance. The story is told both in the third and first person, a complex dance of characters whose failures have left them all marked in some way—the reader isn't sure until the end who is murdering the young women in postwar LA. Hughes wrote about men and women of means—a fashion designer, a doctor—and she also wrote about poor white girls, ex-GIs, jazz musicians, and a war profiteer. What she brought to them all was a poet's eye for detail and feel for language. Her first book had in fact been a collection of poetry, published in the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Hughes only published that one book of poetry and then turned away to invest herself in the mystery genre, ultimately writing fourteen novels and a scattering of short stories. Then just as her novels began to move from the standard motifs of noir and started taking on the politics of the cold war and race, she quit. The reason she gave was that she needed to tend an ailing mother and grandchildren. She never stopped writing about that literature—she was a book critic for almost forty years. She wrote an acclaimed biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, the writer known for his Perry Mason series, in 1978. And that same year, more than a decade after she stopped writing novels, she was anointed Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.