The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees by Thomas B. Dewey

Author:Thomas B. Dewey [Dewey, Thomas B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, detective, crime, sleuth, murder
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2015-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A sand-and-gravel town gets its name, not because it’s made of cement, but because it grows up around a sand-and-gravel location. A big contractor works an outlying gravel pit—a wasteland. A batch of workers move in, mostly in trailers, to be near the job. The workers have to eat and have something to do in their spare time, so a store opens and a café and that brings more people and a community develops. Now when a community has five hundred or more inhabitants, it can incorporate and become a city. The city then gets to take care of itself, and to run its own affairs, within limits. It gets to levy taxes and issue licenses, hold elections and so on. Naturally, somebody has to run for office, and that gives rise to a political organization. Or to put it another way, somebody has to “run” the town.

It often happens that the only people who are interested in running such a town are fast buck artists. You can take quite a lot out of even a very small town, with a little luck and knowhow, and a strong stomach. A sharp operator does it in two ways: one, by collecting more taxes than are required for the services rendered; and two, through certain operations in the “entertainment” or “vice” category, depending on how you look at these things.

For instance, gambling, in California, is a matter of local option. It’s restricted to draw poker, but an operator can take a good percentage out of a couple of poker parlors legally, while running other games behind a screen as long as he can get away with it. He can also operate in prostitution and he can dabble in burlesque and the “arcade” business—so it pays expenses.

The contractor who started the whole thing is either too busy or, let’s face it, too honest, to be interested, so he leaves the field to whoever will take it. Usually he’s “realistic” enough to keep his hands out of the government, as long as the political boss gives him a fair shake. All he wants is to work his gravel mine. And if you are wondering how a sand-and-gravel business can be such an attractive proposition, you haven’t been doing your homework on highway and commercial construction in California. One mile of freeway requires half a million cubic feet of sand and gravel, and every mile costs the people of California from one to three million dollars.

Anyway, that’s what happened to Hibbard and during the fifteen or twenty minutes it took me to reach the city limits, I organized the hearsay stored in my mental file. You could get most any kind of action in Hibbard, though some of it was restricted to an “in” group. The general public could play draw poker, watch a lively burlesque show and engage in loving dalliance at rates ranging from moderate to outrageous. The “ins” could shoot craps, play roulette and blackjack, buy esoteric art and literature and indulge in loving dalliance at ridiculous rates.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.