Hot Springs (18 page)

“Owney?”

“Yeah. That you, Sid?”

“Yeah.”

“So what the fiick, Sid? What the fuck is going on?”

“Owney, I tell ya. Nothing.”

“I got a boy busting my balls down here. Some hick exsoldier prosecutor who thinks he’s Tom Fuckin’ Dewey.”

“Not good.”

“No, it ain’t. But I can take care of it. What I’m worried about is that fucker Bughouse Siegel. Frank and Albert and Mr. Lansky all like the little fuck. Is he behind my trouble down here? Is he trying to muscle me out of the business? It might do him some good.”

“Owney, like you said, I asked some questions. What I hear is he is just pissing money away into a big hole in the ground out in some desert. That hot-number babe he’s got with him, you know, she ain’t too happy. She’s been talking to people about what an asshole he is. She has friends. She has a lot of friends and he leaves her alone in Hollywood to go out to the desert and piss some more money into a hole. Only I hear that broad ain’t ever alone. She still has the hotsies for Joey Adonis, among others.”

“So the Bughouse has that to worry about before he worries about my little action down here?”

“That’s what I hear. But Owney, I have to tell you the big guys do like him. They sent him out there. He has their ear. I’d look out for him. He thinks big.”

“Yeah, he thinks big, with my thoughts. I gave him his whole idea. He thinks he can fuckin’ build a Hot Springs in the desert. There’s nothing there but sand. Here, we got nature, we got mountains, we got lakes, we got—”

“Yeah, but in that state, gambling’s legal, so you don’t get raided. Remember that. That’s a big plus.”

“We’re not supposed to get raided here.”

“So you said. Owney, the guys, they always say, That Owney, he runs a smooth town. That’s why they like to go there. The baths, some dames, some gambling, no problem, no hassles with the law. That’s what they like. As long as you provide that for them, you will have no problems.”

“Yeah.”

“Owney. Best thing you can do is forget about Bugsy, and keep that town running smooth. That’s your insurance policy.”

“Yeah,” said Owney. “Thanks, Sid.”

It was on the way back that he had his big thought.

“Back home, sir?”

“No, no. Take me to the newspaper office. And then call Pap Grumley. Tell him to find Garnet Grumley’s mother. Or someone who looks just like her.”

“So tell me what happened up there Henderson,” Earl asked Carlo.

“I guess I screwed up. I thought I had it covered. I thought we done a good job.”

Earl nodded.

The raiders were headquartered in the pumping station of the Remmel Hydroelectric Dam, which blocked the Ouachita River and had thereby created Lake Catherine, and lay between Magnet and Hot Springs, on Route 65, not far at all from the Texaco station where Owney had gotten his call from New York. The pumping station, which was administered by theTVA and run out of Malvern, not Hot Springs, was a large brick building at the end of three miles of dirt road off U. S. 65; though most of its innards were taken up with turbines turning and producing electricity for Hot Springs, the upper floors had surprising space and provided room for fourteen cots, as well as hot showers and indoor plumbing. It was better than most places Earl had slept during the war. D. A. had thought all this out very carefully.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Well sir, we done our best. I am truly ashamed it wasn’t good enough. But we got up there fast, we nabbed that bird McGaffery on the steps, there was a goddamned pissing drunk in the men’s room, and we run him downstairs too, and we checked all the closets.”

“So Garnet Grumley could not have been up there?”

“I don’t think so,” said Carlo. “But if I missed him, then I missed him.”

“He was not up there,” said Frenchy. “Mr. Earl, we went all through that place. I even beat the lock off the closet door in the ladies’.”

“See,” said Earl, “I do not particularly care for having to shoot a boy dead, who was after all only doing his job and as it turned out had forgotten to load his shotgun. Either of you killed anyone?”

Both men shook their head no.

“I swear to you, Mr. Earl, that fellow did not come from up there,” said Frenchy. “He must have snuck in from the outside. Or maybe he came up from the cellar.”

“Wasn’t no cellar,” said Carlo. “And we’d have seen him in the alley if he’d been lurking up there. Mr. Swagger, I do believe it was my fault and I am very sorry it happened. It wasn’t Frenchy’s. I was number one on our fire team, so the job was mine, and I muffed it. If you give me a next time, I will sure try hard to do a better job.”

“Jesus, Henderson,” said Frenchy. “He wasn’t up there. It’s not your fault, it’s not my fault. It just goddamned happened is all and everybody is lucky it was him that got killed, and not one of us.”

Earl pushed something across the table at them.

It was the Hot Springs New Era, the city’s afternoon paper.

FARMBOY SLAIN IN COP “RAID”

Locals decry “Nazi” tactics

“He was a good boy,” Mom says.

“Christ,” said Frenchy. Carlo read:

Raiders from the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office shot and killed a local man while invading a local nightclub.

The incident occurred at the Horseshoe Club, on Ouachita Avenue in West Hot Springs, late last night.

Dead was Garnet Grumley, 22, of Hot Springs, shot by a raider as he wandered in from the upstairs bathroom.

“Garnet was a good boy,” said his mother, Viola Grumley, of eastern Garland County. “He did all his chores and milked his special cow, Billie. I wonder what he was doing in that downtown club. But I wonder why they had to shoot such a harmless, God-fearing boy.”

Fred C. Becker, Garland County Prosecuting Attorney, refused to talk to New Era reporters.

In a news release his office provided, he claimed that officers shot in self-defense while on a raid aimed at local gamblers.

See New Era Editorial, .

“Boy, I’ll bet that one’s rich.”

“Oh, it is,” said Earl.

The two young men flipped pages.

New Jayhawkers?

In the era preceding the Civil War it was common for night riders to terrorize Arkansans in the name of a just cause, which was more a license to hate. Town burnings, robberies, lynchings and other malicious acts were the order of the day.

History remembers these brigands as Jayhawkers and under that same name it consigns them to evil.

Well, a new plague of Jayhawkers is upon us. Unlike their predecessors they don’t ride horses and carry shotguns; no, they ride in modern automobiles and carry machine guns.

And, like their brethren from a century ago, they hide behind a supposedly “just” cause, the elimination of gambling influence and corruption from our beautiful little city. But, as before, this is a clear case of the cure being worse—far worse—than the disease.

“Ouch,” said Carlo. “Newspaper morons,” said Frenchy. “Well, they do leave out the fact that the late Garnet spent fourteen months in the state penitentiary for assault and that he had a juvenile record that goes back to before the war,” said Earl. “And D. A. says that Viola is no more his mama than you are, Short. He’s an orphan Grumley, raised at the toe of a boot in the mountains, and pretty much your legger attack dog, and little else. So if a man had to die, better it was him than you or me.”

“Yes sir,” said Carlo.

“Okay, let me tell you two birds something. You are the youngest, but that don’t bother me. You are probably also the smartest I got. I don’t hold that smart boys ain’t no good in combat, as some old sergeants do. But I do know your smart boy is easily distracted, and naturally doubtful, and has a kind of sense of superiority to all and sundry. So let me tell you, that if you want to stay in this outfit, you put all that aside. You put those smart-boy brains on the shelves and you commit to doing what you’re told and doing it well and thoroughly. Elsewise, you’re on your way back to where you come from, and you can tell your buddies there you were a bust as a raider.”

“Yes sir,” said Carlo.

“Now rack up some sleep. We’re going again tonight.”

The Derby was filled that night. At one of the booths, the young, leonine Burt Lancaster held court like a gangster king, surrounded by cronies and babes, his teeth so white they filled the air with radiance.

In another, the young genius Orson Welles sat with his beautiful wife, eating immense amounts of food, an actual second dinner, and downing three bottles of champagne. Rita Hayworth just watched him sullenly as he uttered the words that were to become his signature: “More mashed potatoes, please.”

Mickey was there, of course, though without his wife. He was with a chorine who had even larger breasts than his wife. He was smoking Luckies and drinking White Russians and looking for producers to shmooze, because he could feel himself, in his dreams at least, slipping ever so slightly.

Bogie was there, with a little nobody named Bill something or other, a Mississippi-born screenwriter who was lost in the rewrites of Ray Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Bogie called him “Kid,” got him good and drunk, and kept trying to get him to understand that it really didn’t matter if anybody figured out who did it.

And Virginia was there, with her swain Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and Ben’s best Hollywood friend, Georgie Raft.

“Will you look at that” said Ben. “Enrol Flynn. Man, he don’t look good.”

“He’s all washed up, I hear,” said Georgie, drunkenly. “Warner’s may drop him. Look at him.”

Errol Flynn was even drunker than Georgie Raft and his once beautiful face had begun to show ruination. It was a mask of beauty turning inexorably into a burlap sack hung on a fencepost.

“Yeah, well, they didn’t pick your contract up either, Georgie,” said Virginia.

“I bought my way out of my contract,” said Georgie. “I gave Jack a check for $10,000 and walked out of his office a free man.”

“I heard he would have paid you the ten long to take a hike,” said Virginia.

“Can it, Virginia,” said Ben.

Raft stared moodily into his drink. For a tough guy, he had an amazingly delicate little face, a nose as perfecdy upturned as any pixie’s.

“It ain’t been easy on him,” consoled his best friend from the old neighborhood, where they’d specialized in heisting apple carts.

“Why don’t you beat up a casting director, Ben? That is, if you could find one you could take. Maybe you could make Georgie big again.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with this bitch,” Ben explained to Georgie. “Ever since we got back from the South, she’s been acting funny toward me.”

He looked at her. But goddamn, she was still the female animal in all her surly glory, tonight with a huge wave of auburn cream for hair, meaty big-gal shoulders and breasts scrunched together to form a black slot in the ample flesh into which a man could tumble and lose his soul forever.

“Yeah,” she said, “maybe it has something to do with all the times you fly out to the fucking desert and watch

Del Webb pour Mr. Lansky’s money into a big hole in the ground.”

Another row was starting.

“Kids, kids, kids,” consoled Georgie. “Let’s enjoy ourselves. We have a great table at the Brown Derby in a room filled with movie stars. People would kill to get what we have. Let’s enjoy. Gar^on, another Scotch, please.”

The three friends each retreated briefly to his or her libation, tried to settle down and collect themselves, then returned to conviviality.

“Virginia, it’s a big thing I got going. You’ll see. The big guys all believe in it. It’ll be bigger than Hot Springs.”

“Hot Springs is supposed to be in Hot Springs, not in a desert. Owney Maddox is supposed to run Hot Springs. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, Ben. You ought to know that.”

Ben allowed himself a snicker.

“You think Owney’s so high and mighty? You think nobody would stand against Owney? Well, let me tell you something, Owney’s got some troubles you wouldn’t want.”

“Owney’s okay,” said Georgie. “He knew some people and helped me get started out here.”

“Owney’s finished,” said Ben. “He just don’t know it yet.”

“Owney’s a creep but he can take care of himself,” Virginia argued, then took another sip of her third screwdriver. She could outdrink any man in Hollywood except for Flynn. “He pretends to be a British snob but he’s an East Side gutter rat, just like you two pretty boys.”

“Virginia, Owney’s got troubles and the big guys know it. I heard about it all the way out here. He’s got some crusader raiding his joints and he doesn’t know how to get the guy. His grab on that town is shaky and once it slips, you just watch everybody walk away from him. It happened to him in New York, it’ll happen to him in Hot Springs. He lost the Cotton Club, he’ll lose the Southern. You just watch. He’ll end up dead or with nothing, which is the same thing.”

“And would you be the guy to take it from him?”

“I don’t want nothing in Hot Springs. But I don’t want Hot Springs being Our Toztm either. We need a new town, and I mean to build one in the desert. You just watch me, goddammit.”

“Ben, the only thing you’ve built so far is a hole in the ground for somebody else’s money.”

“Virginia, you are so rude.”

“Don’t you love me for it, sugar?”

“No, I love you for them tits, that ass, and the thing you do with your mouth. You must be the only white girl in the world who does that thing.”

“You’d be surprised, honey.”

“Hello, darling. Your bosom is magnificent.”

This was from Errol Flynn, an old pal of Virginia’s from some weekend or other. Flynn leaned into their booth, his famous handsome face radiating a leer so intense it could melt a vault door.

“Hit the road, you limey puke,” said Ben.

“Hi, Georgie,” said Errol, ignoring Ben. “Tough luck about Warner’s. They’ll drop me next.”

“I got some deals working. I’ll be okay. Errol, how’re you doing?”

“Well, there’s always vodka.”

“Errol,” said Virginia, “just don’t doodle any more fifteen-year-olds. Jerry Geisler might not get you out of it next time.”

“In like Flynn, old girl. Oh, Benjamin, didn’t see you there, old fellow. Still looking for buried treasure? There’s a very good map to it in Captain Blood.”