Blue City by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online

gesture of embrace. “I like to talk to a man who knows ideas.”
    He led me down a narrow aisle to the back of the store, through a tiny office containing a high bookkeeper’s desk,into his living apartment. The room where he invited me to sit down was a combination of living-room and kitchen. There were a deal table, a few old leather chairs and some painted wooden ones, a bookcase in one corner, a gas plate on the shelf beside the sink. Above the bookcase there was an amateurish pencil sketch of Karl Marx.
    “Why don’t you put Marx in the window?”
    “Then not so many people would ask me who he was, because they know. I wouldn’t have a chance to educate them.”
    “You’ve been in this town a long time, haven’t you, Mr. Kaufman?”
    “Nearly all my life. I’ve been right here in this location for the last thirty-five years.”
    “You should be able to tell me something about the municipal government. Where’s the real power in the town?”
    “You a reporter? Or writing a book?”
    “I’m gathering material,” I said.
    He didn’t ask me what kind of material. He smiled more blandly than before, and said: “You want it the way they spell it out in the papers for the exploited masses? Or do you want it the way I see it? Sometimes I think, especially since they threw out the labor organizers in the rubber factories—I think I’m the only man in town who isn’t stone blind.”
    “Spell it out your way.”
    He leaned back in his wide chair and bent his good leg over his stiff one. “According to the city charter the city’s laws are made by a city council of twelve members electedannually by the people, voting according to wards. The mayor, elected annually by the people at large, is the head of the executive branch of the city government, and he administers the city laws as passed by the council.”
    “Who runs the police?”
    “A police board, of which the mayor is an ex-officio member. The other three members are appointed for overlapping periods of three years by the city council. All that is the way it’s written down in the charter.”
    “And who actually runs the town?”
    “Alonzo Sanford dominates the town. But you can’t say he actually runs it. For a good many years he had a working alliance with a man called J.D. Weather. Weather got hold of a slot-machine concession for this area, and over a period of years he developed into an old-fashioned city boss. He spent money in the right places and got his hands on the council and the police force. At the same time he was pushing down roots, staging political picnics, helping the little people out of jams, getting them medical care when they couldn’t pay for it, helping families to get on relief, contributing to campaigns run by the Poles and the Serbs and the Italians and the other minorities. It got so everybody in town knew him, and most of them liked him. They knew they could count on J.D. Weather in a pinch, and they voted the way he wanted them to. He never held any office himself, but the last fifteen years no mayor or councilman could get elected in this town unless he gave him the nod.”
    “Where does Alonzo Sanford come into this?”
    “For one thing, because a man like Weather couldn’t getaway with corrupting the city government without help. The so-called better people would run him out of town. Sanford was his high-class protection.”
    “I don’t see what Sanford got out of the deal.”
    “Everything he wanted,” the old man said—“men in office who wouldn’t tax his real estate too hard, police who would help to keep union activity out of his plants. And, working through J.D. Weather, he could stay in the background and pose as a grand old citizen. As long as they didn’t touch him, the maggots could eat up the town.”
    It was painful to hear my father talked about like that. I had never lost the conception of him that I had formed as a boy: leading citizen, square businessman, straight talker, everybody’s