Infamous (20 page)

“I don’t know,” Miller said, shrugging again. “I didn’t say much. Just stuck a .45 inside his mouth and asked if he’d like to see how little brains he’s got.”

“He may hold a grudge.”

“You think?”

“I do, Verne,” Harvey said. “Things like that can stay with a person.”

The hot wind off the barren earth felt good on the men’s faces, and you could smell the hard earth and dust and dry land. The farm had a familiar old L-frame and a big red barn with a roof painted with the words MERAMEC CAVERNS U.S. 66 STANTON MISSOURI. The shadows were long and smooth across the rough-hewn boards, and the sunlight painted the side of the barn in a soft yellow glow.

“Vi’s got you wrapped tight, Verne,” Harvey said. “And don’t take no offense in this, but if you don’t watch your pecker, she’s gonna lead you right into a trap.”

“What’s a man to do?”

“Love.”

“Yeah,” Miller said with that cruel, twisted mouth. “It’s worse than the Spanish flu.”

“Now, take George,” Harvey said. “That’s another matter. He can’t even see the trap he’s in.”

“The pussy trap.”

“Snap.”

“You’re going to thieve their money, aren’t you?” Miller asked.

Harvey smiled and pinched the Chesterfield between his thumb and forefinger. He shrugged a bit and smiled again.

“You’re gonna get the Kid to switch out the cash on the bank job with Kelly’s dough, and we’re going to take it all.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“I don’t have any love for those people.”

The Buick sat in the slanting shadow of two big silos crawling with vines. A couple Ford tractors lay rusted and turned upside down in a gully. As the men stepped on the porch, they found a busted door held upright by an old padlock. A note from the bank ruffled in the wind.

“This country is turning to shit,” Harvey said, snatching the notice from the tacks and tossing it on the ground.

“Everything is turning to shit.”

“They took my gas stations,” he said. “They took goddamn everything.”

“Who?”

“Fat men.”

“Who?”

“Men who feed at the trough of our goddamn sweat.”

“You’re talking like a communist,” Miller said.

“Maybe I am.”

“Communism is for suckers, too.”

“What do you believe in, Verne?”

“Myself,” he said, his face not changing expression.

Harvey Bailey excused himself and walked along the beaten porch of the house, the wind making rattling noises through the broken windows. A door kept drumming with the shotgun wind, and every one of Harvey’s steps through the haunted guts of the home was counted until he reached the back stairs and walked out onto that wide expanse of cleared land, an old familiar path now grown up with weeds and destroyed and hidden. But he could walk that path in his sleep, feeling that draw and pull to a shadowed little grove of walnut trees blooming with nuts wrapped in green.

You wouldn’t know it to see it. The headstone simply read J. HARVEY BAILEY / SEPTEMBER, 5 1920-JULY, 12 1923. Bailey felt a shooting pain as he got to his knees and pulled away the weeds and vines and straightened the small stone lamb, storm-beaten, and now resembling more rock than animal. He stayed there, smoothing away the moss with his hand-painted tie, until he heard Miller calling for him, and, using the solid trunk of the tree for balance, he got back on his feet.

“You think Harry Sawyer’s back up there?” Verne Miller asked as he walked close, toting a shovel.

“Where else would he go?” Harvey asked, rolling the sleeves of his white shirt to the elbow and lighting another cigarette. “We’ll head to the Green Lantern first thing. I sure wouldn’t mind one of his pork chop sandwiches.”

“And maybe Nina’s?”

“How can a man go to Saint Paul and not stop by and say hello to the girls?”

“Right here?”

“Right here,” Harvey said. “Hand it to me.”

Harvey Bailey felt the hot wind push a cloud over the sun, sliding a cool shadow over his face. He slid the tip of the shovel to the known spot and began to dig.

“How much is buried?” Miller asked.

“Just enough.”

JONES THUMBED SOME TOBACCO INTO HIS PIPE AND EYED Mr. Charles Urschel. Urschel’s face was gaunt and hollow, the flesh around his eyes reddened and blistered. He had changed into fresh clothes that morning—lightweight navy trousers and a white short-sleeved linen shirt. Jones could tell he’d showered and shaved, had his breakfast and coffee. But despite the morning routine, Urschel hadn’t stopped tapping his foot and checking his timepiece since he’d sat down.

Jones struck a match and got the bowl going, the cavernous study empty besides Jones and SAC Colvin. The young boy displaying his talents as notetaker, keeping quiet and letting Jones take the lead, the interview continuing from where they stopped late last night, when Berenice Urschel begged Jones to let her husband get some rest. Jones had complied, but then had shown up at six that morning, and had waited damn-near two hours until Urschel said he was ready.

“I hope this won’t take long.”

“Could take a while, sir.”

“I haven’t set foot at my company.”

“You’ll have some time this afternoon.”

“But I didn’t see anything,” Urschel said. “Everything I could know I told you last night. I even told you about the well and how bad that water tasted. You seemed to take great interest in the mineral quality of it last night. Perhaps that will lead to something.”

“Yes, sir,” Jones said, walking and smoking and moving about in the room, lined from bottom to top with leather-bound volumes of old stories and old tales of murder and adventure, and very serious men taking things very seriously. “Tell me about the boy.”

“He was a boy.”

“You said he went by ‘Potatoes.’ ”

“I doubt that was his real name. Probably something those crooks made up.”

“You never know,” Jones said. “I knew a boy in El Paso that everyone called ‘Turd Head.’ ”

“Well, I doubt the moniker.”

“But he watched you most?”

“He did.”

“And read to you?”

“He did. Yes.”

“What sorts of material?”

“Magazines.”

“What sort?”

Urschel was quiet for a moment and then said, “
Ladies’ Home Journal
.
McCall’s
. Frivolous things in which I had no interest.”

“Wasn’t your kind of reading?”

“It passed the time,” Urschel said. “The boy also had some kind of brochure on the World’s Fair and read from that quite often. In fact, I would say he was obsessed with it. Liked to read a portion about native dancers who dance in the nude.”

“Did he offer anything personal from the Fair?”

“Just that he planned on going.”

“Isn’t everybody?”

The more he smoked, the more Jones paced. A flurry of questions came to mind as he paced, smoke breaking and scattering with his steps.

“What about the old man?” Jones said. “You conversed with him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“About?”

“Nothing of consequence. We had some bad weather the night before they released me. There was wind and rain, and I asked them if they had tornadoes.”

“What did they say?”

“Said they had a lot more tornadoes down in Oklahoma and Texas.”

“That was a plant,” Jones said with certainty. He strolled behind Urschel’s desk and pulled back a thin layer of drapes, seeing the newsmen gather around E. E. Kirkpatrick, who read a statement from the family that he’d typed out over breakfast. The statement basically read that Mr. Urschel didn’t recall a goddamn thing about his kidnappers, which was a view that old Charlie kept on sharing with Jones.

“Could you even sneak a peak? Of something? Anything?”

“A few days after they took me, I got the bandages loose. I was able to peer around a bit. They kept me in a shack, like I said. The outhouse was nearby.”

“Hold on,” Jones said. He sat at Urschel’s desk and pulled a small notebook from his satchel. “How many rooms in this shack?”

“Three?”

“Which way did the boards run in the house?”

“The boards?”

“Floorboards.”

“Judging on the heat from the sun,” Urschel said. “East and west.”

Jones nodded. “What about the outhouse? Which direction?”

“West,” Urschel said. “I’m sure of it. But, sir, I really don’t see the point in . . .”

Jones kept the pipe in his teeth and held up his left hand as he sketched a bit, adding the three rooms to a modest shack, an outhouse, the road Urschel had mentioned last night. That old well where they drew the mineral water. “Did you see animals?”

“Heard them,” Urschel said. “Pigs, chickens. The old man and the boy spoke of a prize white-faced bull, and I saw the animal’s face when I ran. It was about all I saw when I was running.”

“Sun blind?” Jones asked.

Urschel nodded. “I think I lost control of my mind a bit, too.”

“Happens with heat.”

“The boy spoke of a woman of loose character who lived nearby,” Urschel said. “He joked about it often.”

“What did he say?”

“Only that there was a teenage whore in the vicinity. I guess she only charged a quarter for intercourse.”

Jones nodded. He sketched some more, adding arrows and asking a bit more about where Urschel had heard the farm animals. The man had forgotten about an old cornfield and something he’d heard about a melon patch with fruit just turning ripe. Jones asked about the direction cars arrived from and how they departed, and then he came all the way back around and asked more about the storm and how long it lasted and what he did during the rains.

“I know the rain started before five-thirty.”

“And how’s that?”

“Well, at five-thirty is when the airplane would pass.”

“The airplane.”

“Yes, sir,” Urschel said. “I really must be going, Mr. Jones. Might we—”

“Tell me more about the aircraft.”

“An airplane would pass every day at nine in the morning and again about five-thirty,” he said. “I’d ask the boy for the time several minutes after the plane sounded so he wouldn’t get suspicious. But I didn’t think much of it. Planes fly all over this nation these days.”

“What about the rain?”

Urschel looked at him and crossed his legs. His face looked drawn, his dark eyes hollow and void.

“Did that second plane fly the day of the storms?”

Urschel looked up at the ceiling and rubbed his jaw. He thought for a moment and then shook his head. “No, sir. I didn’t hear that plane.”

Jones nodded.

“Is that of importance?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Jones said, puffing on the pipe. “It most surely is.”

15

T
hey arrived in Saint Paul a little before nightfall. Kathryn knew the town, had lived there for a couple of frigid years in a crummy apartment with George, a real honeymoon special, with a Murphy bed and pullout ironing board, him talking her into that frozen wasteland because of his connection with Harvey Bailey, Verne Miller, and the dear departed Jelly Nash. Said they owed him, and that Saint Paul was a wide-open town, the kind of city where those goddamn yeggs could live without ever having to look over their backs. You paid off the detectives, the chief of police, and you were polished gold. Kathryn had liked Saint Paul okay right when George had first gotten out of Leavenworth, and she’d been dazzled a bit with those first few bank jobs—although now, thinking back, they didn’t make them rich—and how the big mug would take her out shopping on Main and to R. H. Bockstruck for some baubles and jewels. There were nights at the Parisian, where they had a dance floor as big as two football gridirons, and summers at Harry Sawyer’s place out on the lake, skinny-dipping under the moon. The blind pigs and speakeasies were on every city block and in basements, and when George would go down for a meet at the Green Lantern he’d bring her with him, decked out finer and more beautiful than any of those whores of Bailey’s or Nash’s. About the only one that could come close in looks was Vi Mathias, but Verne had put her on the run, and she wouldn’t be in Saint Paul. And maybe since Prohibition was long, dumb history, the whiskey and gin wouldn’t taste so damn good as when you knew you were doing something bad and wrong.

Sometimes those were the only things that felt like doing.

“You think he’s even here?” she asked.

“It’s his place.”

“It was his place,” Kathryn said, whispering. “It’s been a few years.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Did you ever meet the Kid?”

“Yeah, I met him.”

“Does he know you?”

“I said I met him.”