Hot Springs (34 page)

“Sounds like you want Marines.”

“Nah. What I want is armed robbers. I want the best armed robbery crew. They’d be the boys who could run a thing for me. They could plan and wait and spring a trap and shoot the shit out of it. They’d have the discipline, the long-term, wait-through-the-night guts. Okay. You know who I want, Mr. A. I want Johnny Spanish and his crew. They worked for me before. They worked for me in ‘40.”

“Johnny’s retired, Owney.”

“Johnny owes me. He hit a big fucking score in ‘40. Biggest caper of his career. I set that job up for him.”

“Whyn’t you just call him? I could find the number.”

“Mr. A, coming from you, it would be better. He’s black Irish. You know, I come from England. The Irish, they got a thing about the English.”

“Just ‘cause you tried to starve them to death.”

“Hey, I didn’t starve nobody. All the time I have these problems with the Irish. That goddamned Vincent the Mad Dog, another black Irish, want to bust my balls. God, was I glad when he got his ass blown to shit.”

“All right, Owney. I can make a call. I can ask a favor. But you know, Johnny and his people don’t work cheap. Johnny goes first-class. He deserves first-class.”

This, of course, was Owney’s problem with Johnny. Johnny and his crew—that would be Jack “Ding-Dong” Bell, Red Brown, Vince “the Hat” de Palmo and Herman Kreutzer—took 60 percent of the take, leaving 40 for the local setup guy. This was unprecedented: in all other similar transactions, the armed contract robbers only got 50 percent. But they were the best, if a little aged by now. So if Johnny came down here for a bit of business and there was no up-front promise of a take, Johnny would need a cash down payment and a big backside splash.

“It has to be Johnny,” said Owney.

“It’s done. He’ll be there before the week is over.”

“You got to hurry, Mr. A. These guys are one strike from taking over down here.”

“Owney, Owney, Owney. Johnny will take care of it all. You can trust Johnny. We’ll look out for you, Owney. You can trust your friends.”

Junior Turner, the sheriff of Montgomery County, looked at Carlo Henderson with a grimace of the purest dripping scorn. Junior was a big man in his thirties, with a face that looked like old possum hides hung on a nail in a barn somewhere. His fat belly exploded beyond the perimeters of his belt and there were stains of a disagreeable nature on his khaki shirt. He wore a big Smith & Wesson Heavy Duty .38/.44 in a fancy belt, the only fancy thing about him. Then he turned and launched a majestic gob of Brown Mule from his lips. It took off with a disgusting slurping sound, seemed to elongate as it followed the parabola of its arc, a yellowish tracer bullet glistening with mucus, tobacco curds and spit, until it struck dead center into the spittoon with a coppery clang, rocking the vessel on its axis.

“This here’s a small town, my friend. We don’t much cotton to outsiders stirring up our business.”

Mount Ida, a smear on the roadside consisting of a bar, a general store, a Texaco station and a sheriff’s office, stood in the trackless Ouachitas, encapsulated almost totally in a wall of green pine forest, about halfway between Blue Eye and the more cosmopolitan pleasures of Hot Springs. It united the two by a sliver of road called 270, mostly dirt, occasionally macadam, all of it lost and lonely through the high dense trees.

“Sir, I am on official business,” said Carlo.

“You say. The official bidness of Garland is bidness. So why’n hell’s a little old boy like you rutting around in a crime done happened in our county four years back? It was open and shut. If you read the papers, you know ever goddamned thing.”

“I am just following up a loose end.”

“Now what loose end would that be, son?” asked Junior, casting a yellow-eyed glance around to his two deputies, who guffawed at the sheriff’s rude humor.

“I am not at liberty to say, sir,” said Carlo, feeling the hostility in the room.

“Well, son, I ain’t at liberty to just open my files to any joe what comes passing this way,” the sheriff said. “So mebbe you’d best think ‘bout moving on down the road.”

“Sir, I—”

But he saw that it was useless. Whatever grudge this man had against Garland County and its representatives, it was formidable and unbridgeable. He knew he was out of luck here. He rose and—

“So you tell the Grumleys if they want to check out Montgomery, they can just go on straight to hell,” the sheriff said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You tell the Grumley clan Junior Turner of Montgomery says they should go suck the devil’s own black goat’s milk. I said—”

“You think I’m working for the Grumleys? You think I’m a Grumley?”

“He got that Grumley look,” said one of the deputies, evidently called L. T. “Sort of narrow-eyed, towheaded with a yellow thatch all cut down. Them eyes blue, long of jaw, a rangy, stretchy boy.”

“I think I smell a damned Grumley stink on him,” said the other deputy. “Though I ‘low, Grumleys most usually travel in packs.”

“It ain’t common to see a Grumley on his lonesome,” said Sheriff Turner.

“I killed a Grumley,” Carlo said.

“You what?”

“A couple, actually. It was hard to tell. Lots of dust flying around, lots of smoke. Mary Jane’s, it was. I see they’re now calling it the greatest gunfight in Arkansas history. I fired a lot, I know I hit at least two, and they went down.”

“You kilt a Grumley?”

“I know you heard about that raid. That was us. That was me. That’s what this is all about. The Grumleys. Putting them out of business for good. Driving ‘em back into the hills where they can have sex with their cousins and sisters and be no bother to good folk anymore.”

“L. T., you hear that? He kilt a Grumley,” said the sheriff.

“He must be one of them boys working for that new young Becker feller,” said the deputy.

“I figgered he worked for Owney and Mayor O’Donovan and that Judge LeGrand and the gambling boys, like all the Grumleys these days. That ain’t so?”

“I almost got my butt shot off fighting gamblers with machine guns,” said Carlo. “Grumleys all. A Peck and a Dodge too, I believe.”

“Grumley cousins,” said L. T. “Just as hell-black low-down mean too. Maybe meaner.”

“Damnation! Damnation in the high grass! Damnation in July! He’s okay! He’s goddamned okay,” said the sheriff, launching another naval shell of yellowish gunk toward the spittoon, where it banged dead bull’s-eye, a rattle that reached the rafters.

“Sheriff’s brother was a state liquor agent,” said L. T “That’d be my Uncle Rollo. In ‘37, some ole boys set his car aflame. He was in it at the time. Burned up like a fritter that fell into the stove hole.”

“No man should die the way my brother did,” said the sheriff. “Since then, it’s been a war ‘tween the Turner and the Grumley clan. Which is why ain’t no Grumley in Montgomery County.”

“I think he’s okay, Junior.”

“By God, I say, he is okay. He’s more’n okay. He’s goddamned fine, is what he be. Son, what’s it you want?”

Did Carlo want recollections? The boys provided them. The files, the photos, the physical evidence. It was his for the asking. Did he want to examine the crime scene? Off they went.

In a few hours of cooperation, Carlo learned what was to be learned, which, as Junior said up front, wasn’t much. In the crime scene photos, Charles Swagger lay face forward in his automobile, his head cupped against the wheel, his one arm dangling, fingers languid, pointed downward. A black puddle of blood lay on the floor of the Model T, coagulated at his feet. His old six-gun, a Colt’s Army from 1904, was in the dust, one of its rounds discharged. Marks in the dust indicated no kind of scuffle. The back door to the warehouse behind Ferrell Turner’s liquor store had been pried open, though nothing taken. There really wasn’t much to go on, but the final conclusion reached by the Mount Ida detective, one James Fields, seemed to sum it up as well as anything.

“It appears the decedent saw or heard something as he drove through town late. He pulled around back, put his spotlight on the door, and saw some movement. He got out, drew his gun, called, then started forward. He was shot, returned fire once (probably into the air or ground, as no bullet hole was found), then returned to his car as if to drive to the hospital or a doctor’s, but passed out. The recovered bullet was a .32 caliber, lodged in his heart. A manhunt and exhaustive search for clues unearthed nothing; the case remains open, though until this officer returns from wartime service it will go on the inactive list.”

It was dated January 20, 1943, the day before Jimmy Fields went off to the war he never returned from.

“Ferrell found him the next morning, early,” recalled L. T. “Just lying there, like in the photo.”

“Nobody heard the shots?”

“No sir. But that don’t mean nothing. Sound is tricky this deep in the woods. Ferrell slept about three hundred feet away in his general store but he was a drinking man. He could have slept through anything. Jimmy done a good job. He worked that case hard. If there’d a been anything to find, he’d have found it.”

They went to the crime scene, only a couple of hundred feet from the office. There, Carlo stood in the dust behind the liquor store and saw that the warehouse was really more of a shed, secured with a single padlock, which itself could easily be pried loose.

“What’s he keep in there?”

“The beer, mostly. It’s cool and once a day a truck delivers the ice. It’s the only place ‘round here that sells cold beer.”

“I suppose I could talk to Ferrell.”

“Sure, but Ferrell didn’t see nothing. But I know you want to be thorough. So, yeah, let’s go talk to Ferrell.”

That talk was short; Ferrell did know nothing. He’d gone out back early in the morning to open up for the ice delivery and the milk truck and been surprised to find Charles Swagger’s old Ford there, old Charles Swagger dead in it. He’d heard no shots.

Carlo asked modem, scientific questions that couldn’t be answered by any living man, about bloodstains and trails and fingerprints and footprints and whether there was dust of the kind that was from the ground here found on Charles’s boots. Ferrell had no idee; he just called the polices and the boys all come over and Jimmy Fields done took over. The only answers to those questions died with Jimmy in the hedgerow country.

He asked as he had asked everybody: Did you all know Charles?

Charles was a great man, they said. We seen him every damn month on his way to prayer meeting at Caddo Gap.

As the afternoon wore on, poor Carlo began to see his time was wasted and whatever he learned really was of no importance in regard to his original mission, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Swagger, his angers, his violence, his fury, his death, but with Earl Swagger, his melancholy, his courage, his baffling behavior, his possible he about being in Hot Springs before. It almost made him dizzy. He felt he’d wandered into a madhouse and didn’t belong, was learning things best forgotten, that meant nothing except obscure pain in years back, not worth recalling.

At nightfall, he went to say his farewells to Sheriff Junior Turner and thank him for his cooperation. After all, in the end, Junior had done all right by him, once the original misunderstanding was cleared up. But Junior had other ideas. Did he want to come up to the house and eat dinner with all the Turners? Er, no, not really, but Carlo now saw no polite way out of it, and Junior and his boys seemed really to want his company, a rare enough occurrence in his life. So in the end, he meekly said yes, and was husded off.

And what a dinner. Whatever the Ttirners did, they ate well. Squirrel stew in a black pool of bubbly gravy, like a tar pit, collard greens, turnips, scrapple, great slabs of bacon all moist with fat, taters by the long ton, in every configuration known to man, chicken-fried steak, big and gnarly and soaked in yet a different variation on the theme of gravy, com on the cob or shelled and mushed, a mountain of grits slathered in a snowcap of butter, hot apple dumpling, more coffee, hot, black and strong, the attention of flirty little Turner girls, somebody’s female brood of cousins or nieces or something (never too clear on exactly who these girls were) and, after dark, com likker and good storytelling.

It was night. Mosquitoes buzzed around but the Turner boys, all loquacious, were sitting about on the porch, smoking pipes or vile cigars imported from far-off, glamorous Saint Louie, in various postures of lassitude and inebriation. In the piney Ouachitas, crickets yammered and small furry things screeched when they died. Up above, the stars pinwheeled this way and that.

The subject was set by the day’s events and it turned out to be the man who was both god and devil to them, who but Charles Swagger, former sheriff of Polk County, a man who walked high and mighty and treated such as them as the scum of the earth.

“He was a proud man,” an unidentified Turner said, from the gray darkness of the porch, in a melancholy of recollection, “that you could read on him. But you know what the Book sayeth

The dark chorus supported this point.

“Yes sir.”

“You do, you do.”

“That’d be the truth, that would.”

“That’s what she says. You listen, young feller. Luke’s a preacher, he know the Book.”

“The Book sayeth, pride goeth before the fall.”

“And you know what?” said Junior Turner. “After the fall, it hangeth around too!”

Everybody laughed, including slightly overwhelmed and slightly overstuffed Carlo.

“You saw him often?” he asked, amazed that Charles was so big to them, for after all, this wasn’t his county, and his office was forty miles of bad road to the west.

“Ever damn weekend in four,” said a Turner. “He’d go on over to that Baptist prayer camp. He been a good Baptist. He been Baptist to the gills. He’d come on through in that old Model T of his, with the big star on it, and he’d stop at Ferrell’s store, and have hisself a cold Coca-Cola. You’d see him watching and keeping track.”

“He was great at keeping track.”

“He stand there in that black suit and he’s all glowery-like, you know. Big feller. Big hands, big face, big old arms. Strong as a goddamned blacksmith. Wore the badge of the law. Brooked no nonsense from no man. You’d as soon poke a stick at a bear as you’d rile up Charles Swagger.”