Hot Springs (32 page)

Immediately Carlo saw that the documents were mere photo duplicates of the one he’d already read. But the older man grabbed an envelope, opened it, looked at it, and then handed it over.

“Take a gander,” he said, “and learn a thing or two.”

And Carlo beheld the horror.

“Them two,” said Vince Morella, who managed the Southern.

“Yes, I see.”

“Shall I send some boys over?”

“No. Not at all. Send over a bottle of champagne. Very good stuff. The best, in fact.”

It was between sets in the grillroom at the Southern, beneath the cavernous horse book and casino upstairs. This week’s act: Abbott and Costello.

“You sure, Owney?”

“Very.”

“Yes sir.”

Vince called his bartender over and whispered instructions. Shortly thereafter, at the bar where two men stood drinking club sodas, the barkeep approached with a bucket full of ice and a green bottle.

“Fellows,” he said, “this is your lucky day.”

“We already ordered drinks,” said the older man.

“You didn’t order no alcoholic drinks. So the owner wants everybody happy and he sent this over, his compliments. Enjoy.”

He worked some magic and with a pop the bottle was pried open, its cork caught in a white linen towel. He poured some frothy bubbly into two iced glasses.

“Bottoms up,” he said.

The younger of the men, with tight, ferocious eyes, picked up the glass and poured it back into the bucket.

“I drink what I like,” he said.

It was the cowboy and his older partner. Owney recognized them now clearly from the train station, where the cowboy had smashed Ben Siegel. They reeked of aggression as they sat at the bar, especially the cowboy. Strong of frame, erect, his bull neck tense, his dark, short hair bristly. Darkness visible: he had a look of darkness, dark eyes, dark features, a gunman’s look.

A space had cleared away around him. Though elsewhere in the room, elegant men in dinner jackets ate dinner with their begowned wives and mistresses, here at the bar it was quiet and tense. The bartender swallowed, smiled pathetically and said, “I don’t think Mr. Maddox is going to like that.”

“I don’t give a shit,” said the cowboy, “what Mr. Maddox likes or what he don’t like.”

The bartender slipped away, reported to Vince, who in turn reported to Owney.

“They’s asking for it,” said Flem Grumley. “We should give it to ‘em.”

“Yes, yes, let’s shoot up the most beautiful and expensive spot between St. Louis and New Orleans. And while we’re at it, let’s shoot up my roomful of brand-new Black Cherries, clanking away upstairs and paying the house back 34 percent and buying you and yours clothes, food, cars and your children’s medicine. How clever.”

He fixed Flem with a glare; Flem melted in confusion.

“They want something, else they wouldn’t be here, eh, old man? Let’s see what it is.”

He inserted a Nat Sherman into his onyx cigarette holder, lit it off a silver Dunhill and stood.

“You boys stay here. I don’t need any beef around.”

“Yes sir,” said Flem, speaking for the phalanx of Grumleys who surrounded Owney ever since the Mary Jane’s shoot-out.

He walked over.

“Well, fellows,” he said, sitting down at the bar, but facing elegantly outward, “isn’t this a little brazen, even for you? I mean, my chaps could polish your apples in about seven seconds flat, eh what?”

Neither of his antagonists said a thing for a bit. But then the cowboy spoke.

“You try something fresh and tomorrow they’ll bury ten more Grumleys. And you too, friend. And you won’t care whether we made it out or not.”

As he spoke, he pivoted slightly to face Owney, and his coat fell open, revealing a .45 in a shoulder holster. The thickness of his belt suggested it supported another 45.

Owney looked him over. He had a little Mad Dog to him, with the glaring eyes and the total absence of fear, regret, doubt or hesitation. But he also had a command to him. He was used to people doing what he said.

“Who are you? Still playing mysterious? We’ll find out soon enough. You won’t remain anonymous much longer. Somebody’ll talk. Somebody always does.’

“You’ll be finished by that time. You can read our names in the fishwrap at the penitentiary in Tucker.”

“I won’t serve time at Tucker. Or Sing Sing. Or anywhere. That’s what lawyers are for, old man. They can get a chap out of anything. Now, really, what do you want? Are you measuring this place for a raid? Yes, do come, guns blazing, and kill a doctor or a judge or a politician. That’ll do Becker no end of good.”

“listen here, Maddox,” said the old man. “We come to talk straight out. You can’t scare us, you can’t bluff us, you can’t stop us. We mean to keep coming at you. The more you squawk, the more killing there’s going to be. Why don’t you just cash in and get out now. You’ve got your millions. Move off to Mexico or Switzerland or out to Nevada or someplace.”

“Well spoken, old fellow. He’s got a bit of the philosopher to him, doesn’t he? But you see the analysis is faulty: this isn’t about money. We all know that. It’s about some other thing. It’s about who’s the boss.”

“We don’t care much about that,” said the cowboy. “We just mean to rim you out of town or bring you down. Them’s the only two possibilities.”

“A third: you could die.”

“It ain’t likely,” said Earl. “‘Less you get some real bad boys.”

“A fourth,” said Owney. “For the old fellow, a nice retirement contribution. A nice nest egg. Well invested, he could live grandly. As for the cowboy here, he comes to work for me. I’ve heard the reports. You’re a good gunman. They say as good as Johnny Spanish, maybe better. You come work for me.”

“I bet you even think that’s possible,” said the cowboy. “See, here’s the thing. You’re a bully. You like to push people around. I don’t like that, not even a little. In fact, it gets my blood all steamed.”

It was amazing, and truly rare. Here was a man who seemed literally fearless. His own death had no meaning to him. Owney could read his essential nihilism in the blackness radiating from his eyes. He had Vincent the Mad Dog’s contempt for life and willingness to risk his own anytime for any stake in any fight in any street or alley. Memphis Dogood was right: he didn’t fear death. And that made him very dangerous indeed.

“Do you really think you can scare me?” said Owney. “I’ve fought on the street with guns and knives. I’ve shot it out with other gangs in the most brutal city on earth. When you’ve had a crazy black Irish boyo named Mad Dog out for your blood, and you’re alive and he’s dead, let me tell you, you’ve done something. And Mad Dog’s only one.”

“Yakkity-yak’s cheap. We talk lead.”

“You listen to me, cowboy. Oh, hello Judge LeGrand”—he waved his champagne glass in salute to the politician and issued a wondrous smile at the judge and Mayor O’Donovan, who accompanied him—”and you listen intently. The day after the next raid, a bomb will go off. In the Negro town. It’ll kill twenty or thirty Negroes. Everybody will think some night riders did it, or some fellows in hoods. The investigation will be, I think one can safely predict, feckless. But you and I, friend, we’ll know: you killed those Negroes. And you’ll kill more and more. So I’m afraid you’ll have to be the one who leaves town. Or turn the streets red with Negro blood and think about that for the rest of your life, old man. Enjoy your champagne. Cheers.”

He rose and walked away.

“Why are you showing me these?” said the doctor, his face pained.

“Well, sir,” said Carlo, “I went to the library and I looked up medical journals. I spent three days. Shoot, a lot of it I couldn’t even understand. But you wrote a paper published in 1937 called ‘Certain Patterns in Excessive Discipline in Situ Domestico.’ I read it. You seemed to be talking about a similar thing.”

“It’s the same/’ said the doctor, who was head of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma, in Norman, in whose office Carlo now sat.

The doctor—his name was David Sanders and he was in his forties, balding, with wire-frame glasses—looked squarely at Carlo.

“That paper didn’t do me a bit of good, except that it got me laughed at. A man has a right to beat his children, everybody says so. Spare the rod, spoil the child. To suggest that a child has a right not to be beaten, well, that’s radical. I even got some letters accusing me of being a communist.”

“Sorry to hear that”

“So I gave it up. It was infinitely depressing and nobody wanted to hear about it. So I gave it up.”

Carlo said, “I see you won a Silver Star. It’s up there on your wall. So you can’t be a coward.”

It was, next to degrees and other professional awards, books and photos of fat, smiley babies.

“That was a war. It was different.”

“Still, if anybody can help me, maybe you can.”

“You want a lot. Officer Henderson.” Sanders sighed and looked at the photographs.

There were eight of them. The boy, naked on a morgue slab, from various angles. The rope burn was livid, and his neck was elongated, strangely wrong, clear testament to asphyxiation by hanging. But that was only part of it.

“The welts,” said Carlo.

“Yes. This boy has been beaten, many times, with a heavy strap or belt. There’s second-degree scar tissue all over his back, buttocks and upper thighs. He’s been beaten beyond all sense or reason. Almost daily, certainly weekly, and nobody cared or intervened.”

“Was he tortured? Them spots on his chest. Look like cigarette bums to me.”

“Oh, I think to his oppressor, the beatings were satisfying enough. The cigarette burns were almost certainly self-inflicted. When I was looking into these matters, I saw a lot of it.”

“I don’t get it. Why would he do that to himself? Why would he want more pain?”

“The victim comes to believe that somehow it’s his fault. He’s the problem. He’s no good. He’s too weak, stupid, pitiful. If only he were gone, it would be all right. So he finds himself guilty and sentences himself to more torture. He finds small, cruel, barely bearable rituals for inflicting the punishment upon himself. He is blaming himself for the crime, not the person who is beating him. It’s a fairly predictable pathology. I gather from the elongation of the neck he finally ended it?”

“Yes sir,” said Carlo. “This was all back in 1940.”

The doctor turned one of the photos over, where the date had been stamped: OCTOBER 4, 1940, POLK COUNTY

PROSECUTING ATTORNEY’S OFFICE.

“Well, at least the pain stopped.”

“Do most of them commit suicide?”

“It’s not uncommon, from my preliminary survey. But the rest? Well, go to any prison and ask the right questions and you’ll find out. You raise a child in great pain, he comes to believe pain is a normal condition of the universe. He feels it is his right to inflict it. From what little research I did, I saw what looked to be a frightening pattern: that our most violent criminals were beaten savagely as children. They simply were passing the lessons of their childhood on to the rest of the world.”

“Who would do that to a boy?”

“Oh, it’s usually the father. I see a father who secredy hates himself, who almost certainly has a drinking problem, who quite possibly works in a violent world, who was almost certainly savagely beaten himself. He considers it his right to express his rage at the world for disappointing him in the flesh of his son. But he’s really expressing his rage at himself for knowing that he’s not the man the world thinks he is, and he’s feeling the strain of maintaining the facade. I don’t know. I only know he’d be pitiful if he weren’t so dangerous.”

“Suppose he was a policeman?”

“Again, I’m just speculating. But he’d be a man used to force. He’d believe in force. His job was to use force.”

“This one used it a lot. Not just on his sons. The people in his town consider him a damned paragon, a hero.”

“Again, not surprising. Almost banal. Who knows why, really. That’s the difference between public and private personalities. We consider that what goes on at home, in the privacy of that casde, to be nobody’s business.”

“Suppose this boy had an older brother. Would he have been beaten too?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think this kind of behavior pattern just starts up suddenly, out of nothing. It’s ancient, almost omnipresent. My guess is, he’d have been beaten too.”

“That boy—the older brother. He left home at sixteen, went and joined the Marines, and never went home again. What would he feel?”

“Mr. Henderson, I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I have no X-ray vision. This is all speculation.”

“No sir. But ain’t nobody know this business like you.”

“Well, I’d say, this older brother would feel grief and rage and deep survivor’s guilt. You’d expect him to be emotionally crippled in some respect. You’d expect him to have an unhealthy view of the universe—he’d believe that at any moment the world was about to shatter and some huge malevolent force would break in and whip him savagely. That would be difficult to live with. He could easily become a monster.”

“Could he become a hero? An insane hero who took amazing risks?”

“Well, I hadn’t thought of that. But I can see how the war would be the perfect vessel for his rage; it would give him complete freedom. And when he was in battle, he wouldn’t be haunted by his past. So other men would be frightened, but he’d be so preoccupied, he’d actually feel very good because his memories were effectively blocked for once. Was he in the war?”

“He won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima.”

“Very impressive. What happened to the fadier?”

“He was a law officer who got himself killed. I guess he was a little too used to whacking people in the head, and he whacked one boy who had a gun.”

“Sometimes there is justice.”

“I never thought I’d say it about a dead police officer, but, yes, sometimes there is justice.”

“It’s there.”

“How do you know?”

“I went, I saw.”

“How do you know?”

“If you look at it from the outside, you’ll see that there’s four windows across the back. But if you go where they have the slots and the gambling stuff, you can only see three windows. There’s a kind of dead space to the rear. It has to be there.”