BLUE CITY                                                      Spoiler Alert

 

                                                      Part Seven

 

              

 


                 YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT AFTER WE BEAT YOU TO DEATH

 

Chapter nineteen recounts the interactions between Weather and Officer Moffat, as well as other members of the city police force.  The conversations take place in the interrogation cell and the word “truncheon” appears with some frequency.  Readers will be glad to know that his repeated beatings do not diminish his capacity for glib wisecracks.  Or perhaps you were hoping he would at last shut up.  The highlights:

  • Hanson, the detective who originally investigated the murder of Weather’s father, meets with Weather and terminates the interrogation before Moffat and the others can finish him off.
  • Weather insults Moffat repeatedly. Habits die hard.
  • Hanson informs Weather that Garland, whom Weather left alive at the house in the woods, was strangled to death.
  • Hanson expresses interest in Weather’s suggestion that Kersch was at least one of the persons involved in the death of Weather’s father.
  • Sanford appears towards the close of the chapter and Weather reveals what he knows—particularly, that since his stepmother was not legally married to his father, Weather is a wealthy man and anyone who bought anything from Floraine is in trouble.
  • Weather talks to the weak mayor, Allister, and assures him that if Allister can get the incriminating letters between Allister and Sault’s sister out of Kersch’s safe, Kersch will no longer be able to blackmail him.

 

                                           Things change a lot in chapter twenty:

  • Hanson, with assistance from Weather, interviews Rusty, one of Kersch’s thugs. Rusty admits that he was the getaway driver when Weather’s father was killed and says that although he did not see it himself, as far as he knows, Garland was the shooter.
  • The “doctor” who tended to Floraine’s injuries is interviewed and implicates Kersch in her death.
  • Hanson and Weather go to the Cathy Club to arrest Kersch but find that he is already dead, with a single bullet to the forehead. Also at the Club is Carla, Weather’s girlfriend/client, with a less serious bullet wound to her chest.
  • The chapter ends with Weather heading to the apartment of Francie Sontag, Sault’s sister.

                                              Chapter twenty-one wraps it up:

  • The chapter opens with an eavesdropping of a conversation between a man and a woman. Weather assumes, correctly, that the woman is Francie, Sault’s sister, whom Weather assumed to be a prostitute. The man is the mayor, Allister.
  • When Weather breaks down the door, Allister fumbles for his gun but Francie gets to it first.
  • Allister had retrieved the letters from Kersch’s safe and now Weather takes them from him.
  • In addition the love letters we expected to see is one from Allister addressed to a judge in Chicago admitting that he killed Weather’s father.

The exposition is so complicated it deserves a post of its own . . .

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