Hot Springs (36 page)

“So tell me, Owney, tell me about these dark lads, and we’ll get to getting you your money’s worth.”

Owney explained details of the shoot-out at Mary Jane’s, confessing puzzlement at the victory of the men with the lesser guns over the men with the greater guns.

“See, your problem was your ambush site,” said Johnny. “The Maxim’s a fine gun, as all hearties found out in the Great War, but she’s got to have a wide field of fire and has to be laid just right. Shooting down some stairs don’t do a fella no good at all; it minimizes what you’ve got going for you. I can see you’ve never planned an ambush against trained men, eh, Owney? Nor had that border reiver scum from the mountains.”

“I guess not.”

“Your hero fellow kept his cool and understood that the ballistics of his weapon allowed him to shoot through wood. He waited till the belt clinked dry, then he enfiladed the stairwell. From that point you were doomed. As Herman will tell you when he gets here, properly deployed, pound for pound there’s not a better gun about than a Browning Automatic Rifle.”

“So what are we going to do? I’m running out of time. I’ve threatened to bomb Niggertown to keep them from raiding, but only the cowboy cares about the niggers. Sooner or later, that threat will lose its meaning and even he will have to go ahead. And if they get the Central Book, the money dries up fast, and I am in a world of trouble.”

“That would be the checkmate move, then?”

“Yeah, and we could do everything right and on the last day, they could hit that joint and we’d be fucked. So we have to act fast.”

Johnny’s face fell into a density of concentration. He thought out loud.

“The chances of bumbling into them in another raid are remote. The chances of jumping them in their home ground are also remote. Plus, difficult to handle. No, we’ve got to find a prize so sweet they’ll not be able to resist. We’ve got to lay a trap so deep they won’t ever suspect. We’ve got to find something that makes them unbearably agitated.”

“And what would that be?”

Johnny said, “This Becker. You say he likes to get his picture in the paper?”

“He does.”

“Then it’s got to be something with splash. Something with style. Something that would get the New York Herald Tribune out here and Life magazine.”

“Yes.”

“So much glory that Becker will not be able to turn it down.”

Owney thought hard. He didn’t have a clue.

Johnny looked at him with impatience.

“Come on, goddammit. Use that thinker you got up there. You’re like the Brit generals during the war, you can only think about moving straight ahead.”

“I just don’t—”

But Ralph was suddenly there, hovering.

“Ralph?”

“Mr. Maddox, Vince Morella is here.”

“Christ!” said Owney. “What the hell. It can’t wait?”

“He’s very insistent.”

“Jesus Christ!” He turned to Johnny. “Wait a second. These Arkansas boys, they can’t get nothing straight.”

He rose, went into the living room where Vince Morella stood, holding hat in hand nervously.

‘“What the fuck, Vince. I’m inna middle of an important meeting.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mr. Maddox, but I think you’d want to hear this right away.”

“So?”

“I get to the club this morning, go into my office, and there’s a guy sitting there. He’s already in. He says he wants to meet with you.”

“Jesus Fucking Christ, I told you—”

“You don’t get it. He’s one of them.”

Owney’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“He’s—”

“He went on all the raids, knows who they are, where they’re quartered, how they operate, what they’ll do next, how they communicate. He’ll give it all to you!”

Owney’s eyes narrowed. Now this he finally understood.

“For money, eh. Somebody always sings for the moolah.”

“Not for money. That’s why he had to see you. For something only you can give him. He’s a college kid. His name is Frenchy Short.”

Both men were grouchy, dirty and cranky. Road dust clung to them in a gritty film. A shower would be so nice, a sleep. This was their third trip to Hot Springs from Texas in as many days, with the bitterness of a bad scene with Becker and the sad scene with Frenchy Short yesterday. And today was a high killer. Above, the sun beat down, a big hole in the sky, turning the sky leaden and the leaves heavy and lisdess. No wind puffed, no mercy, as if they’d brought some godforsaken Texas weather with them.

Dressed in farmer’s overalls with beaten-up fedoras pulled low over their eyes and .45s tucked well out of sight, they sat on the front porch of the Public Bathhouse, that is, the pauper’s bathhouse, at least in the shade. Other poor people—genuine poor people—lounged about them, too sick to look anything other than sick, come co Hot Springs for the waters of life, finding only the waters of— well, of water. The Public was the least imposing of the structures on Bathhouse Row, but it looked across the wide boulevard of Central Avenue at the Ohio Club.

It was a thin, two-story building, wedged between two others, the Plaza Building and the Thompson Building; its big feature was a kind of mock-Moorish gilded dome, completely fraudulent, which crowned the upper story, and a dormer of windows bulging out over the first-floor windows. It was in the Ohio that he and the old man had observed Mickey Rooney and his big-busted wife number two throwing away thousands of bucks in the upstairs craps game.

“That’s going to be a hard place to bust,” said D. A.

“I’d hate to do it at night when it’s all jammed up,” said Earl. “You got all the traffic and pedestrians, you got all the gamblers upstairs, you got Grumley riffraff with machine guns, you got Hot Springs coppers real close by. It could make Mary Jane’s look like just the warm-up.”

“Night’s out. I don’t think that bastard Becker would go for another night raid, especially downtown. Too many folks about.”

“I’m thinking about five, before the avenue and the joint fill up. We rim some kind of cover operation. Maybe we could get our hands on a fire truck or something. Go steaming in with lights flashing and sirens wailing, be in on them before they figure it out and once we get it, we have the place nailed. Nobody dies. We close down that place, we put the word out among the Negroes to watch real careful for strange white people in their neighborhoods.”

The two men sat in silence for a while. Then the old man said, “Let’s go get us a Coca-Cola. My whisde could use a bit of wetting.”

“Mine too,” said Earl.

They walked south along Central, came finally, after oyster bars and whorehouses baking emptily in the noonday sim, the girls still snoozing off a night’s worth of mattress-backing, to a Greek place. They went in, sat at the fountain, and got two glasses of Coca-Cola filled with slivers of ice.

“It ain’t the how of the raid,” said D. A. “It’s figuring out the why of it. We have to justify it. Short was right on that one.”

“Maybe we lay up outside, pick up a runner, and sweat him. When we break him, we hit the place.”

“But we got it all set up first? Don’t like that. Also, Owney’d track down the runner and kill him and maybe his family as a lesson. I don’t like that.”

“No, I don’t neither. Maybe we find someone who works in the joint who’d testify.”

“Who’d that be? He’d become the number one bull’s-eye in the town. Sooner or later, we move along. Sooner or later, he’d get it. Some Grumley’d clip him for old timey sake.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Maybe a Grumley. Find a Grumley to talk. Turn on his kin for a new start.”

“But we ain’t got no budget to finance a new start. We can’t protect ‘em. There’s nothing we can offer that’ll make a Grumley turn. Finally, them Grumleys hate us. We put eleven of ‘em in the ground, remember? They might still come looking. It don’t matter that Pap up and died hisself off. Flem don’t have Pap’s grit, but he’s just as much a snake.”

“We got to find out where they’re weakest and attack ‘em there.”

“Give it to Owney, he knows his business. Ain’t no ‘weakest.’”

“He is a smart bastard. He’s been running things a long time. Goddamn, I hate being this goddamn close and not getting it done.”

“We’ll get it done, Earl. One way, the other, sooner, later. We’ll get it done. That I swear.”

They drove back, the long, grueling three-hour pull through southern Arkansas down U. S. 70, through Arkadelphia and Prescott and Hope, making Texarkana by 4:00 and the Red River Army Depot by 5:00.

The boys were sitting outside the barracks, looking disconsolate. There was an Arkansas Highway Patrol truck and three Texas Highway Patrol cars. A group of Highway Patrolmen seemed to be running some kind of operation.

Earl and D. A. walked up.

“What the hell is going on?” Earl said.

“They come to git our guns,” said Slim. “Got a piece of paper signed by the Arkansas governor, the Texas governor and a federal judge. Becker signed off on it too.”

“Shit,” said D. A., pushing past them. “What’s all this about? Who’s in charge here?”

“You’d be Parker?” said a tall Arkansas Highway Patrol officer. “Parker, I’m Colonel Jenks, commandant of the Arkansas Highway Patrol. Sorry about this, but at ten this morning, I got a call from the governor’s office. I went on over there and he’d evidently just chewed the hell out of poor Fred Becker and got him to issue an order. By eleven the governor’s staff had taken it before a judge, and by noon they’s on the phone, working out a deal with these here Texas boys. They want us to take charge of your heavy weapons and your vests. Y’all can still carry .45s, but—”

“Sir,” Earl said to the commandant, “we try and do this work without a base of fire and we will end up in a pickle for sure. That’s something I learned in the war, the hard way.”

“I ain’t saying what you done is bad. Nobody’s had the sand to go face-on with them Hot Springs Grumleys and their out-of-town mobsters till you came along. But the governor’s gitting heat from all sorts of folks, and that’s how governors work. We serve at his pleasure, so we do what he says. That’s the way it be.”

“Earl,” one of the boys called, “it don’t seem right. How can we do this work if we don’t go in well-heeled?”

“Yeah,” another said, “if we rim into more Grumley bad boys with big ol’ machine guns, what’re we supposed to do?”

“You got the best pistol skills in the state,” said Earl. “You will prevail. That I know.”

But it disturbed him nonetheless.

“Can’t we make some disposition so that if we get a big raid and it looks scary we can get our firepower back?” asked D. A.

“Sir,” said Jenks, “you’ll have to work that out with the governor. I can’t settle it at this level. Your Mr. Becker will be the one to make that case.”

“Only case he makes is to git his picture in the paper.”

“I have to get these guns up to Little Rock tonight, and locked in the armory at State Police headquarters. As I say, it ain’t my decision. I just do what I’m ordered to do. That’s the way it be.”

Now the guns came out: the Thompsons, looking oddly incomplete without magazines, three apiece under the arms of State Troopers. Then the Brownings, so heavy that a man could carry but one. Earl recognized, by a raw cut in the fore grip wood where he’d banged it against the doorjamb, the gun he’d carried as he walked down the hall, keeping up a hail of fire, Frenchy behind him, feeding him the magazines.

“Hate to lose that goddamn BAR,” said D. A. “That’s what keeps ‘em honest.”

“It ain’t fair,” screamed a boy, who turned out surprisingly to be Slim, the oldest and the most salty. “They can’t be asking us to continue on these raids without no fire support. That ain’t right.”

“It ain’t right,” said D. A. “I’ll be talking hard with Becker. We’ll get this worked out.”

“But we—”

“It’s not—”

“We depend on—” came a tumble of voices.

“Shut it off!” Earl bellowed, silencing his own men and shocking the Highway Patrol officers. “Mr. D. A. said he’d work on it. Now just back off and show these boys you’re trained professionals who obey your officer.” That was his command voice, perfected over hard years on parade grounds and harder years on islands, and it silenced everyone.

“Thanks, son,” said Colonel Jenks. “Can see you’re a man who knows his stuff. Bet I know which one you’d be.”

“Maybe you do, Colonel,” said Earl.

“Heard nothing but good things about the ramrod down here. They say he’s a heller.”

“I do a job if it comes to that.”

“Good man,” the colonel said, as if marking him for future reference.

A sergeant came to D. A.

“Sir, you’ll have to sign the manifest. And what about the carbine?”

D. A. scratched his chicken-track signature on the paper and said, “What carbine?”

“Well sir, in the original manifest you had six Thompsons, three BARs, six Winchester pumps and six M-l carbines. But you only got five carbines.”

“Hmmm?” said D. A. He looked over at Earl. This was a mystery, as the carbines had never been deployed, they’d simply stayed locked up down here in Texas. Earl didn’t like the carbine, because its cartridge was so light.

“We never used the carbine,” said Earl.

“Well sir, it says you had six, but we only rounded up five.”

“I don’t have no idea. Any of you men recall losing a carbine?”

“Sir, we ain’t touched the carbine since training.”

“The carbines was never up in Hot Springs.”

“Colonel Jenks, what do you want to do here, sir?” asked the sergeant.

Jenks contemplated the issue for at least a tenth of a second. Then he declared, “Call it a combat loss, write it off, and forget all about it. We don’t have to make no big case out of it. It ain’t even a machine gun. Now let’s get out of here and let these men git going on their training.”

It took a day to set up through the auspices of a friend of his who was an FBI agent in Tulsa and knew who to call. Carlo ended up paying for it himself, because he knew there was no budget and that D. A. would never approve. But he had to know.

He had never flown before. The plane was a C-47, though now, as a civilian craft, it had reverted to its prewar identity as a DC-3. It left Tulsa’s airfield at 7:30 A. M. and flew for seven hours to Pittsburgh. The seats were cramped, the windows small, the stewardess overworked. He almost threw up twice. The coffee was cold, the little sandwich stale. His knees hurt, his legs cramped. In Pittsburgh, the plane refueled, exchanged some passengers for others, and finally left an hour later. It arrived, ultimately, at National Airport just outside Washington, D. C., at around 4:00 in the afternoon.