Infamous (2 page)

Special Agent Gus T. Jones of the U.S. Department of Justice checked his gold pocket watch.

It was three a.m.

Four more hours until they’d meet the Special Agent in Charge in Kansas City, where he, his partner Joe Lackey, and Sheriff Reed would hand off the son of a bitch for a short trip back to Leavenworth, from where he’d escaped three years before.

Jones would want a shower and a shave and some sleep, but first he wanted a meal at the Harvey House, a big plate of eggs and bacon with hot coffee, served by a lilac-scented Harvey girl who’d flirt with him despite Jones being fifty-two years old and needing a pair of bifocals to read the menu. He’d call Mary Ann, find a hotel, and then ride the rails back to San Antonio, where he worked as the Special Agent in Charge.

“If you let me go, I’ll just tell people I escaped,” Nash said. “To my grave, I’ll tell people I hopped out the crapper window.”

Jones filled his pipe from a leather pouch and dusted loose tobacco from his knee.

He stared over at Joe Lackey—a good fella, for a Yankee—who sported a gray fedora over his Roman nose and small brown eyes. Jones still preferred a pearl gray Stetson, the same kind required when he’d been a Ranger and later worked for Customs years back, riding the Rio Grande on the lookout for revolutionaries, cattle rustlers, and German spies.

The night flew past.

The seats in the train jostled up and down, metal wheels scraping against rail, anonymous towns of light and smoke flying by the window, just slightly cracked. Joe Lackey crossed his arms across his chest, his chin dipping down to his red tie in short fits of sleep. Sheriff Reed sat closest to the window and watched the lean-tos, farmhouses, and hobo jungles ablaze with oil-drum fires whiz by, exchanging a glance or two with Nash. The old bandit would give him the stink eye and turn his head, disappointed that Jones would be so hardheaded as not to take a bribe.

“How’d you find me?” Nash asked, his bald pate stark white. Face beet red from the sun. “Doesn’t matter much now.”

Jones looked at him across the haze of pipe smoke with a wry smile. Jelly Nash was chained to a bunk and couldn’t even scratch his ass.

“But you’re not going to tell me.”

“Guess not,” Jones said.

“Hey, where’d you get those boots?”

“El Paso.”

“You still got a horse?”

“Why don’t you get some sleep.”

“Just making some conversation.”

“You got a lot of friends in Arkansas.”

“Sorry about that,” Nash said. “I thought that roadblock was my ticket out.”

“So did I.”

“Probably be some friends waiting on me in Kansas City.”

“I doubt it.”

“You want to put some money down?”

“You wanna fill me in?”

“People talk.”

Jones stood as the train shifted onto another track, and he found purchase on an overhead rail. He emptied his pipe out the open window, feeling the hot summer wind on his face. Without much thought, he fingered the loose bullets in his right pocket, keeping the .45 revolver in a holster under the hot coat, despite the Justice Department’s policy about agents not carrying weapons.

“I think a federal cop is a screwy idea,” Nash said.

“Who asked you?”

“What makes you all any different from those goons in Spain or Germany?”

“I’d like to know what makes a con so damn stupid as to return to the prison where he escaped. If you hadn’t busted them boys outta Lansing, you might be sleeping on satin sheets at some hot pillow joint.”

“That wasn’t me.”

Joe Lackey raised his head and knocked up the brim of his fedora from his eyes with two fingers and said, “Sure thing, Jelly. Sure thing.”

Jones looked over at his old buddy Otto Reed and watched him sleep. Sheriff Reed looked ancient, out of step off a horse, out of place with the times. They only brought him along because he’d know Nash on sight. The old man was cut from the same cloth as Jones’s mentor, old Rome Shields back in San Angelo, who’d taught Jones to fight and shoot after his father’s heart had been pierced by an Indian’s arrow.

Jones clicked open his gold timepiece again, feeling the heft of his holstered gun.

Frank Nash watched him, looking like a circus clown with that naked white head and reddened face, smiling at Jones, knowing. Slats of light shuttered his profile as they passed under a wooden bridge and came out again in moonlight.

Jones didn’t like the look. It was the kind that always made him fold a hand.

HARVEY BAILEY KNEW THE MEET WAS ON THE LEVEL, A LITTLE diner right around the corner from Union Station in Kansas City, Verne Miller sending the signal that Jelly Nash needed a friend. And, brother, there was a lot you could say about Jelly Nash, but that bald-headed son of a bitch was there for Harvey when Harvey was serving a ten-stretch for bank robbery in Lansing, helping bust him out last month with a set of .38s smuggled into boxes of twine. Harvey, Jim Clark, “Mad Dog” Underhill, and a few more thieving sonsabitches walking out with the warden pretty as you please, Underhill holding him with a garrote like it were a leash.

Jelly Nash.

That was all Verne Miller had to say, and there was Harvey sitting beside a redheaded woman in a red dress at the counter. The woman wanted some eggs and bacon after a little late-night action with Harvey, who’d picked her up at a colored joint where they’d watched Cab Calloway and his orchestra till three o’clock. When Miller walked in the door, the woman kept studying her nails, not even noting the two men were friends. Of course she didn’t know Harvey was married and had a kid, or even his real name. He’d told her that he was a traveling salesman of women’s nightgowns, wondering if the action could’ve been better if she’d known she was with the dean of bank robbers, the gentleman bandit who’d been knocking over jugs for more than ten years. She surely had read about some of his work, two million in cash and stocks from the National Bank and Trust in Lincoln a couple years back, or the U.S. Mint in Denver in ’22.

She’d liked his gray hair, his tailored navy suit and crushed-felt hat, and his jokes at the hotel when they’d finished up the first time and he’d hummed “I’ve Got the World on a String” as they cooled down under the sheets.

At the diner, he handed the gal some bus fare, patted her backside, and she was gone, the girl knowing the score as much as he did. Harvey moved onto a stool close to Miller and smiled as a goofy-looking fella in a paper hat refilled their coffee and seemed to be real impressed that Jean Harlow was in town, asking if they knew she was a hometown girl.

Miller just looked up from his coffee, and the boy shut his mouth and headed back to the kitchen.

“You sure know how to make friends.”

Miller shrugged.

Harvey had known Miller for years. He was a retired bootlegger, a part-time bank robber, and a full-time button man for the Nitti Syndicate in Chicago and the Jew Outfit in New York. Miller had been a war hero who’d come home from the trenches to be elected sheriff somewhere in South Dakota. And then he decided to take a nice cut of the county purse for himself and was run from town. Harvey met him after all that, when they’d been running whiskey down from Canada into Minnesota.

He was blond-haired and gray-eyed, movie-star handsome, a stone-cold killer who hated foul language—most of all when you used the Lord’s name in vain.

“Goddamn, it’s good to see you,” Harvey said.

Miller shifted his eyes to him. He’d yet to take off his gray hat.

The two men sat in front of the plate glass of the diner, the small space feeling like a fishbowl, brightly lit in the middle of the night. Miller shuffled out a cigarette from his pack of Camels and tossed the rest to Harvey.

“So what’s the score?”

“They got Jelly in Hot Springs at Dick Galatas’s place,” Miller said.

“That was kinda showy, wasn’t it? Prancing around Hot Springs like nobody would see him.”

Miller shrugged. “Two federal agents and some old sheriff.”

“What time?”

“Seven.”

“Who’s meeting them at the station?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

“You got guns.”

“I got guns.”

“We got help?” Harvey asked.

“Working on it.”

“How’s it looking?”

Miller shrugged.

“Goddamn.”

“I don’t like that kind of talk, Harvey.”

“I got a gun,” Harvey said. “A helluva gun that was supposed to help with some bank work, make some dough, and get me out of this lousy racket.”

“I can handle a Thompson.”

“I don’t want trouble,” Harvey said. “I don’t want any trouble. This can be as smooth and easy as we like.”

“I don’t like trouble,” Miller said, squashing out his cigarette. “I hate it.”

“Jesus, I just wanted to make a little dough and cash out,” Harvey said. “And this doesn’t do nothing but turn up the heat on all us.”

“It’s a square deal.”

“Am I arguing?”

THE MISSOURI PACIFIC STOPPED ONCE IN COFFEY VILLE AND rolled on through Roper and Garnett, curving east to Osawatomie and Leeds. The gray morning light hit the side of unpainted barns leaning hard into the wind and brushed across the windows of the train car. Jones watched Frank Nash startle himself with a hard snore and come alive with a start, reaching for a gun—like a man on the run was apt to do—but only getting a few inches and finding bound wrists.

He looked up at Jones, and Jones winked back.

Jones fingered bullets into the cylinder of his .45, spinning the wheel and clicking it back into frame. Joe Lackey was in the washroom shaving with a straight razor he’d bought from the negro porter.

“How ’bout some breakfast?” Nash asked.

“I hear they make a mean slop of grits in Leavenworth,” Sheriff Otto Reed said. Reed was a pleasant man with a stomach large enough to provide a good rest for crossed arms. He chuckled a bit at his own joke, and Jones smiled back at him.

Nash said, “Otto, sometimes you can be a true, authentic asshole.”

“Think of me when you’re being cornholed, Jellybean.”

Nash looked like he’d sucked a lemon.

The light turned gold and hot, shining over endless rows of green cornstalks about to ripen in the high summer. Nash began to complain about the manacles hurting his wrists and asked if he could please put his hairpiece back on because he knew the
Star
and Associated Press would be waiting when he got off the train.

“Come again?” Jones asked.

“You know, that reporter fella who chatted you all up in the station and knew who I was and where we’re going? Yes, sir, I bet my story is all across the wire.”

Jones looked over at Sheriff Reed, and Reed said he didn’t know what he was talking about. Lackey came out of the head, drying off his face with a little towel and then sliding back into a wrinkled shirt, knotting his tie high at the throat.

“Did I miss something?” Lackey asked.

KANSAS CITY UNION STATION WAS A BIG, FAT STONE CATHEDRAL with a sloping roof and Greek columns, a weigh station, a purgatorial crossroads where tracks from all over creation mishmashed and met and then bent and whipped out to the next turn, the following bend. Big, wide schedule boards, shoeshine stands, soda fountains, and fancy clocks, and even a Harvey House restaurant that Harvey had always liked because of the name.

They could turn right back around, head out of the city, and rob a dozen banks, fattening their rolls and leaving Jelly Nash to his own mire of shit. Sure he’d been a good egg and come through with those .38s, but sending along some guns while you sit back and read the newspapers on the crapper ain’t the same as putting yourself out there, waiting outside a train station, sweating from worry, with barrels aimed at detectives and federal agents. Harvey wasn’t so sure that Nash would go that far, truth be told.

“Where’d you get the Chevy?” Harvey asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Gonna be tough with just two,” Harvey said, spotting the entrance where they’d watch and wait, windows down in all this heat.

“Says who?” Miller asked. “That Thompson’s a beaut.”

“Belongs to George Kelly,” Harvey said. “Kit bought it as an anniversary gift.”

“And he let you borrow it?”

“Hell, I said I’d give it back.”

“George Kelly,” Miller said, smiling as much as Verne Miller ever smiled. “
‘Machine Gun’
Kelly.”

“I know, I know,” Harvey said. “You remember that little bank in Ottumwa? He got so scared he puked all over himself.”

“He’s getting a name.”

“I don’t want a name. Gettin’ a name gets you killed. If I hadn’t been so damn stupid carrying those bonds with me, I’d never been pinched.”

“Next time don’t play golf with Keating and Holden.”

Harvey slid into a parking space by the entrance and killed the engine. Two black sedans pulled by the doors, four men gathered and talked. Two of them held shotguns. One showed a badge to a porter when the porter gave some back talk.