Hot Springs (21 page)

“Look, Vic, we go way back. You know me to be a man of my word. I’m fuckin’ dealing with this. I will take care of it. A week, maybe two, that’s all, then we’re back exacdy doing what we’ve been doing since ‘32.”

“Bugsy says, once he gets his joint up and running, that’s the kind of shit would never happen. He guarantees it. Gambling’s legal out there.”

“Yeah, but it’s a fucking desert. It’s full of scorpions and lizards and snakes. Great fan. I can see what you’d be telling Mr. Fabrizzio after a snake bit him onna ass!”

“Well, you got a point there, Owney. Just get it taken care of. And this is advice from a friend. Imagine what your enemies are saying.”

Owney hung up, only to get a new call. It was from the lobby, saying that Mayor Leo O’Donovan and Judge LeGrand were here, they had to see him.

“Send them up.”

This was troubling. By time-honored fiat, meetings with Hot Springs officials were conducted on the sly, never in observable public spots, particularly a casino. This meant that the two men, who more or less administered the town under his benevolent guidance, were seriously spooked.

He turned to the girl, whose face was pretty but vacant.

“Honey, you go now. You come visit Owney later tonight.”

She smiled a bright, fake smile, so intense that he thought he might already have had her. Maybe he had. He couldn’t remember.

In any case, as she ducked out, the two town officials ducked in, and didn’t even notice Pap and Flem Grumley, who under normal circumstances they would have avoided like a disease. After all, the Grumleys were a disease.

Owney offered them a drink, a cigar, and an earnest demeanor.

“Owney,” said Leo O’Donovan, His Honor, a watery-eyed old hack who liked to parade around the town in his cabriolet behind horses named Bourbon and Water, “I’ll come to the point. People are unsettled with this kind of violence. Suddenly, the town is turning into Chicago in the ‘20s.”

“I’m working like hell to locate these characters! What do you think I been doing, Leo, sitting on my hands? You think it’s fuckin’ good for me when two boys get clipped on my own fuckin’ territory? Next thing, we won’t be getting the Xavier Cugats and the Perry Comos and the Dinah Shores down here, and then we’re screwed.”

“Jeez, Owney,” said Leo, dumbfounded. “I thought you were British.”

Under the intense pressure of his situation, he had slipped and let his New York persona show in front of people not in the inner circle.

“Well,” he said, somewhat archly, “when one finds oneself in a gangster movie, one must act the gangster, no? No, Garry?”

F. Garry Hurst said, “Absolutely, old toff. Mr. Maddox sometimes pretends to be an East Side gangster for the amusement of his staff.”

Pap chimed in with, “He’s a proper English gent, the finest in these here parts, Mr. Mayor.”

The mayor looked at Pap as if he’d just been addressed by a large hunk of dogshit, sniffed and turned back to Owney.

“You have to do something, Owney. The town is coming to a stop.”

“Oh, I hardly think that’s quite the case, Leo. The girls are still doing their mattress-backed duties, the alcohol is still flowing, the horse wire still thrums with electric information, the fools still bet the horses, the wheel and the dice, Xavier continues to wow them, and Dinah is scheduled for next week. I’ve just replaced my old Watlings here at the Southern with brand-new Mills Black Cherries, the very latest thing. Fresh from the factory in Chicago, seventy-five of them, the most beautiful machine you’ve ever seen. I’ve got the best room in the country. So you see, we really haven’t been affected a bit. We’ve lost two houses out of eighty-five, and less than $100,000, plus around sixty-five slots. It’s nothing. It’s a trice, a trifle, a gossamer butterfly wing.”

The two officials were hardly consoled.

“Owney,” said Judge LeGrand, “the mayor is onto something. Like FDR said, the main thing we have to fear is fear its own black-assed self. If people lose their confidence in the town, Hot Springs goes away. It disappears. It turns into Malvern or Russellville or some other bleak little nowhere burg. Like many cities of fabled corruption, it is sustained merely by the illusion of vice and pleasure, which is to say, the illusion of security that such human weaknesses ain’t only tolerated, they are encouraged. If that image is damaged, it all goes away.”

The judge spoke a harsh truth.

Publicly Owney could only say, “I swear to you both, we will work on this issue.”

Privately a million thoughts poured through his head.

“What I’m saying,” the judge continued, “is that this problem had better be dealt with quickly. I think for our business interests, what we need is a show of force, a stand, a victory.”

“Judge, old man, your sagacity is unmatched. And I say in a response hardly as eloquent but equally as heartfelt: I will take care of this. As I said, we are working on it. For your part, I expect the following: business as usual. The same payments in the same pickups. You enforce discipline with yours so I do not have to enforce it with mine. That is clear?”

“It is,” said Leo. “We’ll do our part.”

“We are all taking the right steps,” said Owney, to signify that the meeting was over.

The two men left.

“Any bright guys got any bright ideas?” he asked. “Or do I have to fire you mutts and bring in some heavy fuckin’ hitters from Cleveland or Detroit or KC?”

“Now, sir,” said Pap, “ain’t no damned call to be talking to a Grumley like that. You know us Grumleys go to the goddamn wall fer you every damn time you need us, Mr. Maddox. That’s God’s honest truth.”

He hitched up his pants, stiff with indignity, and launched a gob of something blackish toward the spittoon, which it rattled perfecdy.

“Telephones,” said Hem.

“What?” said Owney.

“Goddamn telephones. If’n them boys is hiding in secret, and if we follow Mr. Becker but don’t never see him leavin’ town, and he’s there every goddamned time, he’s got to be reaching them boys by telephone. You know the boss of the phone company. So whyn’t we tap into his lines, and listen to his calls. That way we get to know where they gonna be striking next. And we’d dadgum be waiting for ‘em. Radio intelligence, like. We done it to the Krauts in Italy, toward the end of the war. Intercepted their messages, sure as shit.”

“You know, Owney, that’s very good,” said F. Garry. “That’s quite good, actually. I’m sure Mel Parsons could provide technical guidance. After all, he’s an investor too, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he is. Goddamn, that is good. Pap, you raised a fuckin’ genius.”

“I knowed about what happened in Italy in ‘45,” said Flem proudly. “That’s whar they court-martialed me.”

“They court-martialed you?”

“Yes sir. The second time. Now, the third time they…”

It was D. A.’s idea but it was Earl who figured out how to make it work.

He called Carlo Henderson the next morning.

“Henderson,” he said, “how’d you like to go on a little trip?”

“Uh. Well, sir—”

“No big deal. Just a little lookie-see party.”

“Sure.”

“You got a straw hat?”

“Here?”

“Yeah?”

“No sir.”

“How ‘bout some overalls, a denim shirt, some clodhopper boots?”

“Mr. Earl, I’m from Tulsa, not the sticks. I went to college. I’m not a farmer.”

“Well, son, that’s fine, because guess what’s in this bag?”

He handed over a paper sack, much crumpled, weighing in at around five pounds.

“Uh… overalls, a denim shirt, some clodhopper boots and a straw hat?”

“Exacdy. Now I want you all dressed up like Clyde the Farmer. I’m going to have one of these federal dam workers drive you downtown. Here’s what I want. You just mosey around the block City Hall is on, where Mr. Becker’s office is. And the blocks a couple each way.”

“Yes?”

“Here’s what you’re looking for. A phone company truck and man. Parked somewhere in that vicinity, working probably on a pole, but maybe under the street or at some kind of junction box. Now the thing is, you can’t let him see you watching him. But if you see him, you watch him close, see, because I think you’ll see he ain’t really working. He’s actually playing at work. But he’s got earphones and a rig set up to the pole knobs or some such, don’t know what it’d be. But he’s really listening. He’d be all dialed into calls coming out of Mr. Becker’s office.”

“But we don’t get calls from Mr. Becker’s office.”

They got pouches delivered by a fake postman, with the information for that night’s raid encoded, a system put together by D. A. with the express intention to avoid a wiretap.

“That’s right. We don’t. You know it and I know it. Mr. Becker knows it and we both know D. A. Parker knows it, because he thought it up. But they don’t know it. We could let him tap his butt off, but Mr. D. A. came up with an idea to turn their little game against them. This one could turn into some real damn fun and I don’t know about you, Henderson, but goddammit, I could use me some fun.”

GANGSTERS SLAIN IN HOT SPRINGS read the headline in the Little Rock Arkansas Democrat two days after the raid.

Prosecuting Attorney’s Raiders Send Two “Most Wanted” to County Morgue

Hot Springs—Officers from the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office shot and killed two highly dangerous wanted men in a nighttime raid on an illegal gambling establishment here tonight.

The shootings occurred at the Belmont Club, on Oakland Boulevard in South Hot Springs, at approximately 10:30 P. M.

Dead were Thomas “Tommy” Malloy, 34, of Cleveland, Ohio, a bank robber who was listed as No. 1 on the FBI’s most wanted list, and Walter “Wally Bud” Budowsky, 31, also of Cleveland. Budowsky was No. 7 on the list.

Both men were pronounced dead at the site.

Malloy, a career criminal since his teens, was wanted on several charges of armed robbery, including the July 5, 1945, robbery of a Dayton, Ohio, bank and trust that left two officers dead and two more wounded. That crime catapulted him to No. 1 on the FBI’s list, but he is wanted in connection with at least 12 other charges, including a kidnapping, two counts of assault with attempt to kill and several more counts of fleeing across interstate lines to avoid prosecution.

Budowsky is also suspected of taking part in the Dayton job, as well as several other crimes. Both men served time in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

The editorial was even better.

Becker: A Man of His Word It seems that when Garland County Prosecuting Attorney Fred C. Becker gives his word, that word is as good as gold.

Elected in a controversial election just last month, Becker has moved aggressively against organized crime interests in Arkansas’ shameful bordello town 35 miles to the south, raiding two casinos in the past week. Long a haven for gamblers, gunmen and ladies of the night. Hot Springs is becoming downright dangerous for such folk, owing to Becker’s crusade.

At the same time, it’s becoming a place of pride for citizens who obey the law, worship God and go to church on Sunday.

Becker is to be commended for his efforts and maybe Arkansas would do well to think about hitching its wagon to his star in the 1948 gubernatorial race. If he can clean up Hot Springs, a Herculean labor if ever there was one, then who knows how far he can go?

This was a good day for Becker. The Arkansas Democrat was the only paper with a reputation outside the state; it could get him noticed nationally. Who cared what die Garland county rags screeched about or their demands for indictments against the raiders; they had no circulation outside the county, no influence on party politics, no reach to the state’s bosses, no connections to the national press.

Already that seemed to be happening. He was onto something. The winds of change were in the air; the tired old men who’d rim the country while the boys were off fighting had to step aside now, and whoever saw that first and seized that opportunity would go the furthest. If he became governor in 1948, he would be the youngest governor in the history of Arkansas, one of the youngest governors in the United States. The sky was the limit; who knew where that could take him, particularly if the radio networks began picking up on it.

Already Life was sending a man down, and that meant Time would follow and probably Time’s imitator, Newsweek. Those magazines were read in Washington, where it really counted. Maybe … Senator Becker. Maybe … even bigger.

So after his morning news conference—a love celebration, really, in which the little Rock boys pulled rank on the snippier Hot Springs bumpkins and asked flattering, Softball questions—he went back to his office to luxuriate in his success. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t an aggressive prosecutor so much as an ambitious politician. There were a number of routine matters before him—moves to prosecute traffic offenders, county statute violators, petty criminals in the Negro section—but all of them could wait.

Instead, he loaded up the bowl of his English briarwood with a fine mild Moroccan tobacco, lit it up, and enjoyed the sweetness and the density of the smoke and the pure pleasure: he concentrated on enjoying the moment, and more than a few minutes passed in this state of high bliss before a knock came at the door.

It was Willis O’Doyle, his number-one clerk, who had ambitions of accompanying his chief as far as his chief could go. O’Doyle had a communique from D. A., an out-of-schedule communication unusual in and of itself.

It said, when decoded, “Please call us at 2:00 P. M. tomorrow and order us to raid Mary Jane’s, in the Negro section out Malvern Avenue. This will pay very big dividends.”

Hmmm, he thought. What the hell is this about?

Earl came to them that very morning.

“All right, fellas,” he said. “You want to gather ‘round?”

The raiders, sleeping on cots, spent lazy days when they weren’t actually scheduled to hit some place. Earl had plans to keep them in shape with various dry-fire exercises but it seemed so poindess because there was so little room in the pump-house station and they couldn’t work outside, because of fear of discovery. So he let them sleep, stay clean, clean their weapons and otherwise occupy themselves until the word came on the target that night.