He left in a hurry, making his way east toward the harbor. He was supposed to meet a police detective there; the fellow had news about warehouse pilferage he would pass on-for a price. Potter had also fed him a thing or two over the years; such balances, useful to both sides, had a way of evening out.
'Clarence!' The shout made Potter stop and turn back.
'Jack Delamotte!' he exclaimed in pleasure all the greater for being so unexpected. 'How are you? I haven't seen you in years. I wondered if you were dead. What have you been doing with yourself?'
Delamotte hurried up the street toward him, his hand outstretched and a broad smile on his face. He was a big, blond, good-looking man of about Potter's age. His belly was bigger now, and his hair grayer and thinner at the temples than it had been when he and Potter hung around together. 'Not too much,' he answered. 'I'm in the textile business these days. Got married six years ago-no, seven now. Betsy and I have a boy and a girl. How about you?'
'Still single,' Potter said with a shrug. 'Still poking my nose into other people's affairs-sometimes literally. I don't change a whole lot. If you're…' His voice trailed off. Delamotte wore a handsome checked suit. On his left lapel, a Freedom Party pin shone in the sunlight. 'I didn't expect you of all people to go over to the other side, Jack. You used to cuss out Jake Featherston just as much as I did.'
'If you don't bend with the breeze, it'll break you.' Delamotte shrugged, too. 'They've been coming up for a long time, and now they're in. Shall I pretend the Whigs won the election?' He snorted. 'Not likely!'
Put that way, it sounded reasonable enough. Potter said, 'I just saw a couple of Freedom Party stalwarts getting ready to beat up a shopkeeper because he didn't want to fly their flag. How do you like that?' He kept quiet about what he'd done to the stalwarts.
'Can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,' Delamotte answered. 'I really do think they'll put us back on our feet. Nobody else will… Where are you going? I want to get your address, talk about old times.'
'I'm in the phone book,' said Potter, who wasn't. 'Sorry, Jack. I'm late.' He hurried away, hoping Delamotte wouldn't trot after him. To his vast relief, the other man didn't. Clarence wanted to puke. His friend-no, his former friend-no doubt thought of himself as a practical man. Potter thought of him, and of all the other 'practical' men sucking up to Featherston's pals now that they were in power, as a pack of sons of bitches.
He met the detective in a harborside saloon where sailors with a dozen different accents got drunk as fast as they could. Caldwell Tubbs was a roly-poly little man with the coldest black eyes Potter had ever seen. 'Jesus Christ, I shouldn't even be here,' he said when Potter sat down on a stool beside him. 'I can't tell you nothin'. Worth my ass if I do.'
He'd sung that song before. Potter showed him some brown banknotes- cautiously, so nobody else saw them. 'I can be persuasive,' he murmured, as if trying to seduce a pretty girl and not an ugly cop.
But Tubbs shook his head. 'Not even for that.'
'What?' Now Potter was genuinely astonished. 'Why not, goddammit?'
'On account of it's worth my badge if I even get caught talkin' to you, that's why. This is good-bye, buddy, and I mean it. You try to get hold of me from now on, I never heard of you. You're on a list, Potter, and it's the shit list. I were you, I'd cut my throat now, save everybody else the trouble.' He jammed his hat back onto his bald head and waddled out of the saloon.
Clarence Potter stared after him. He knew the Freedom Party knew how hard he'd fought it, and for how long. And he knew the Party was taking its revenge on opponents. But he'd never expected it to be so fast, or so thorough. He ordered a whiskey, wondering how he'd crack that pilferage case now.
After a lifetime of living in Toledo, Chester Martin remained disbelieving despite several months in Los Angeles. It wasn't just the weather, though that helped a lot. He and Rita had gone through a winter without snow. They'd gone through a winter where they hardly ever needed anything heavier than a sweater, and where they'd stayed in shirtsleeves half the time.
But that was only part of it. Toledo was what it was. It had been what it was for all of Chester's forty-odd years, and for fifteen or twenty years before that. It would go right on being the same old thing, too.
Not Los Angeles. This place was in a constant process of becoming. Before the war, it hadn't been anything much. But a new aqueduct and the rise of motion pictures and a good port had brought people flooding in. The people who worked in the cinema and at the port and in the factories the aqueduct permitted needed places to live and people to sell them things. More people came in to build them houses and sell them groceries and autos and bookcases and washing machines. Then they needed…
Chester had to walk close to half a mile to get to the nearest trolley stop. He didn't like that, though it was less inconvenient here than it would have been in a Toledo blizzard. He could see why things worked as they did, though. Los Angeles sprawled in a way no Eastern city did. The trolley grid had to be either coarse or enormously expensive. Nobody seemed willing to pay for a tight grid, so people made do with a coarse one.
A mockingbird sang up in a palm tree. Martin blew a smoke ring at it. It flew away, white wing bars flashing. A jay on a rooftop jeered. It wasn't a blue jay like the ones he'd always known; it had no crest, and its feathers were a paler blue. People called the birds, scrub jays. They were as curious and clever as any jays he'd known back East. A hummingbird with a bright red head hung in midair, scolding the jay: chip-chip-chip. Hummingbirds lived here all year round. If that didn't make a place seem tropical, what did?
Hurrying on toward the trolley stop, Martin ground out the cigarette with his shoe. A motion caught from the corner of his eye made him turn his head and look back over his shoulder. A man in filthy, shabby clothes had darted out from a doorway to cadge the butt. Things might be better here than they were a lot of places, but that didn't make them perfect, or even very good.
Some of the eight or ten people waiting at the trolley stop were going to work. Some were looking for work. Chester didn't know how he could tell who was who, but he thought he could. A couple, like him, carried tool chests. The others? Something in the way they stood, something in their eyes… He knew how an unemployed man stood. He'd spent months out of work after the steel mill let him go, and he was one of the lucky ones. More than a few people had been looking for a job since 1929.
The trolley clanged up. It was painted a sunny yellow, unlike the dull green ones he'd ridden in Toledo. By the way they looked; they might almost have been Army issue. Not this one. When you got on an L.A. trolley, you felt you were going in style. His nickel and two pennies rattled into the fare box. 'Transfer, please,' he said, and the trolleyman gave him a long, narrow strip of paper with printing on it. He stuck it in the breast pocket of his overalls.
He rode the trolley south down Central to Mahan Avenue, then used the transfer to board another for the trip west to a suburb called Gardena. Like a lot of Los Angeles suburbs, it was half a farming town. Fig orchards and plots of strawberries and the inevitable orange trees alternated with blocks of houses. He got off at Western, then went south to 147th Street on shank's mare.
Houses were going up there, in what had been a fig orchard. The fig trees had been knocked down in a tearing hurry. Chester suspected more than a few of them would come up again, and their roots would get into pipes and keep plumbers away from soup kitchens for years to come. That wasn't his worry. Getting the houses up was.
He waved to his foreman. 'Morning, Mordechai.'
'Morning, Chester.' The foreman waved back. It was an odd wave; he'd lost a couple of fingers from his right hand in a childhood farm accident. But he could do more with tools with three fingers than most men could with five. He'd spent years in the Navy before returning to the civilian world. He had to be close to sixty now, but he had the vigor of a much younger man.
'Hey, Joe. Morning, Fred. What's up, Jose? How are you, Virgil?' Martin nodded to the other builders, who were just getting started on the day's work.
'How's it going, Chester?' Fred said, and then, 'Look out-here comes Dushan. Get busy quick, so he can't suck you into a card game.'
'What do you say, Dushan?' Chester called.
Dushan nodded back. 'How you is?' he said in throatily accented English. He came from some Slavic corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his last name consisted almost entirely of consonants. And Fred's warning was the straight goods. Dushan made only a so-so builder (he liked the sauce more than he might have, and didn't bother keeping it a secret), but what he couldn't persuade a deck of cards to do, nobody could. Chester would have bet he picked up more money gambling than he did with a hammer and saw and screwdriver.
