Hot Springs (4 page)

She ignored him and continued to jiggle ever so seductively to the music, as if in a dream world of rhythm. Her dance partner smiled nervously at the boyfriend and Our Host. He was a small, pale boy, weirdly beautiful, not really a good dancer and not really dancing with the woman at all, but merely validating her performance by removing it from the arena of sheer vanity. He had thin blond hair; his name was Alan Ladd, and he was in pictures too.

“I better watch her,” said the sport to our host, “she may end up shtupping that pretty boy. You never know with her.”

“Don’t worry about Alan,” said Our Host, who knew such things. “It’s not, as one would say, on Alan’s dance card, eh, old man? No, worry instead about the blackies. They are highly sexualized. Believe me, I know. I once owned a club in Harlem. They like to give the white women some juju-weed, and when they’re all dazed, give them the African man-root, all twelve inches of it. Once the white ones taste that pleasure, they’re ruined for white men. I’ve seen it happen.”

“Nah,” said the sport. “Virginia’s a bitch but she knows if she fucks a schvartzer I’ll kick her ass all the way back to Alabama.”

Our Host aspired to British sophistication in all things, and made a slight face at this vulgarity. But, unfazed and in his own mind rather heroic, he kept on.

“Ben,” he said. “Ben, I must show you something.”

He took his younger compere through the party, nodding politically at this one and that one, touching a hand, giving a kiss, pausing for an introduction, well aware of the mysterious glamour he possessed, and led his guest to an alcove.

“Uh, I don’t get it,” said Ben.

“It’s a painting.”

“I understand that it’s a painting. Why is it all square and brown? It looks like Newark with a tree.”

“I assure you, Ben, that our friend Monsieur Braque has never seen Newark.”

“You couldn’t tell that from the painting. Looks like he was born there.”

“Ben, try to feel it. He’s saying something. Use your imagination. As I say, one must feel it.”

Ben’s handsome face knitted up as if in concentration, but he appeared to feel nothing. The painting, entitled Houses at UEstaque, depicted a cityscape in muted brown, the dwellings twisted askew to the right, a crude tree stuck in the left foreground but the laws of perspective broken savagely. When Our Host looked at it, he did feel something: the money he’d spent to obtain it.

“It’s the finest work of early Cubism in this hemisphere,” he said. “Painted in 1908. Note the geometric severity, the lack of a central vanishing point. It predates Picasso, whom it influenced. It cost me $75,000.”

“Wow,” said Ben. “You must be doing okay.”

“I’m telling you, Ben, this is the business to be in. You cannot lose. It’s all here and the rule of numbers says over the long haul each day is a profitable day, each year a profitable year. It just goes on and on and on, and nobody has to get killed or blown up and sent for a swim with the fishies of the East River.”

“Maybe so,” said Ben.

“Come, come, look out from the terrace. At night, it is so impressive.”

“Sure,” said Ben.

Our host snapped his fingers and instantly black men appeared, one with a new martini and the other with a long, thick Cuban cigar, already trimmed, and a gold lighter.

“Light it, sir?”

“No, Ralph, I have told you that you don’t hold the lighter right. I have to light it myself if I want it done correctly.”

The Negroes disappeared silently, and the two men slipped between the curtains and out into the sultry night.

Pigeons cooed.

“The birds. Still with the birds, eh, Owney?” said Ben.

“I got to like them during Prohibition. A pigeon will never rat you out, let me tell you, old man.”

The pigeons, immaculately kept in a rack of cages against one wall, cooed and shifted in the dark.

Owney downed his martini with a single gulp, set the glass on a table, and went over to the cages. He opened one, reached in and took out one bird, which he held close to his face, as he stroked its sleek head with his chin.

“Such a darling,” he said. “Such a baby girl. So sweet. Yes, such a baby girl.”

Then he put the pigeon back in the cage, plucked the cigar out of his pocket, and expertly lit it, scorching the shaft first, then rolling the end through the flame, then finally drawing the smoke through the thing fully, letting it bloom and swell, sensing each nuance of taste, finally expelling a blast of heavy gray smoke, which the breeze took and distributed over midtown.

“Now come, look,” he said, escorting the younger man to the edge of the terrace.

The two stood. Behind came the tinkle of the jazz, the sounds of laughter, the clink of glasses and ice.

Before them curved a great white way.

lights beamed upward, filling the sky with illumination. Along the broad way, crowds hustled and milled, too far to be made out from this altitude, but in their masses recognizable, a great, slithering sea of humanity. The traffic had slowed to a stop, and cops worked desperately to unsnarl it. Beeps and honks rose with the exhaust and the occasional squeal of tires. Along the great street, it seemed the whole world had come to gawk at the drama of the place, and the crowd seemed an organism its own self, rushing for one or another of the available pleasures.

“Really, it’s a good place,” Owney said. “It works, it hums, everybody’s happy. It’s a machine.”

“Owney,” said Ben, “you’ve done a great job here. Everybody says so. Owney Maddox, he runs a great town. No other town rims like Owney’s town. Everybody’s happy in Owney’s town, there’s plenty of dough in Owney’s town. Owney, he’s the goddamn king.”

“I’m very proud of what I’ve built,” said Owney Maddox, of his town, which was Hot Springs, Arkansas, and of the grand boulevard of casinos, nightclubs, whorehouses and bathhouses that lined it, Central Avenue, which curved beneath his penthouse on the sixteenth and highest floor of the Medical Arts Building.

“Yeah, a fellow could learn a goddamn thing or two,” said his guest, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, of Los Angeles, California, and the organized crime confederation that had yet to be named by its investigators but was known by its members, in the year 1946, simply as Our Thing—to those of them that were Sicilian, “Cosa Nostra.”

The bar of the Carlton was one of those rooms that made Earl immediately uneasy. It was full of shapes that had no place in nature, mainly circular ones—round, inscribed mirrors, a round cocktail bar, round little tables, rounded chairs with bold striping. It was the kind of a bar you’d expect on a rocket ship to the moon or Mars.

It mi-IGHT as we-ELL be spaRING some pretty boy sang over the radio, getting a strange upward twist into words where no such thing could logically be expected. Everyone was young, exuberant, excited, full of life. Atop the prow that lay behind the bar, stocked with enough bottles to besot a division, a young goddess and her pet fawn pranced. She was sculpturally frozen in Bakelite, the struts of her ribs showing, the struts of the fawn’s ribs, all of it gleamy, steamy and wet, from the spray of water, somehow rigged to float across her tiny, perky breasts.

“Hey, look at that,” said the older man. “Don’t that beat a World’s Fair in St. Louie?”

Earl hardly glanced at the thing. It seemed wrong. The sculpture was naked. He was drunk. The world was young. He was old.

The three scooted to the last table in a line, nestled into the corner, under a mirror clouded with inscribed images of grapes, dogs and women. It was very strange. Nothing like this on Iwo.

A girl came; Becker took a martini, the old man a soda water and Earl his regular poison, the Jim Beam he’d grown so fond of.

“You don’t drink, sir?” he asked the older man.

“No more,” said the fellow. “No more.”

“Anyhow,” said Becker, returning to business, “I just won a special election that we got mandated because we proved that the poll tax was unjustly administered by the city administration. We being myself and twelve other young men, all of us veterans with overseas duty and a sense of mission. As of next Tuesday, I become the prosecuting attorney of Garland County. But of the twelve, I was the only one to win. So until the next election, in the late fall, let me tell you where that leaves me. Out on a limb. Way, way out.”

Earl appraised him. He was so handsome a man, so confident. In fact, he was oddly mated with the sad-sack old teetotaler with the watchful eyes and the big hands. Who were they? What did they want?

“So I’m in a tough situation,” Becker continued. “I’m getting death threats, my wife is being shadowed, it’s getting ugly down there. Hot Springs. Not a happy place. Totally corrupt. It’s run by an old gasbag mayor and a judge, but you can forget about them. The real power is a New York mobster named Owney Maddox who’s got big-money boys behind him. They own everything, they have a piece of all the pies.”

“I still don’t see where Earl Swagger fits in.”

“Well, what I’m getting at, Sergeant, is that Owney Maddox doesn’t want anybody messing with his empire. But that’s what I’m sworn to do.”

“You must think I’d be a bodyguard,” Earl said. “But I ain’t no bodyguard. Wouldn’t know the first thing about that line of work.”

“No, Sergeant, that’s not it. In order to survive, I have to attack. If I’m on the defensive it all goes away. We have a chance, a window in time, in which we can take Hot Springs back. They’re complacent now, they don’t fear me because the rest of the slate lost. What can one man do, they think. If we move aggressively, we can do it. We have to blitz them now.”

“I ain’t no reformer.”

“But you know Hot Springs. Your daddy was killed there in 1942 while you were off fighting the Japanese.”

“You been lookin’ into me?” Earl said narrowly. He wasn’t sure he liked this at all. But then this man was the law, after all, by formal election.

“We made some inquiries,” said the old man.

“Well, then you learned it wasn’t Hot Springs. It was a hill town way outside of Hot Springs, closer to his home territory. Mount Ida, it was called. And I wasn’t fighting the Japs yet. I was on a train with two thousand other suckers pulling cross-country to begin the boat ride out to the ‘Canal. And I don’t know Hot Springs. My daddy would never take us. It was eighty miles to the east, over bad roads. And it was the devil’s town. My daddy was a Baptist down to his toes, hellfire and damnation. If I’d gone to Hot Springs, he’d a-whipped me till I was dead.”

“Yes, well,” said Becker, running hard into Earl’s stubbornness, which on some accounts just took him over, for no good reason.

Earl took another hit on the bourbon, just a taste, because he didn’t want his brain more scrambled. But he just didn’t get a good feeling about Becker. He glanced at his Hamilton. It was getting near to 7:30. Soon he had to go. Where were these fellows taking him?

He looked at the silent old man next to Becker. What was familiar about him?

“Well, Sergeant—”

But Earl stared at the old man, and then blurted, “Excuse me, sir, I don’t know if I caught your name.”

“Parker,” said the old man. “D. A. Parker.”

And that too had a ring somehow.

“You wouldn’t be related to—nah.”

“Who?”

“You wouldn’t be related to that FBI agent that shot it out with all them Johnnies in the ‘30s. Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde. Went gun-to-gun with the bad boys of the Depression. Famous, for a while. An American hero.”

“I ain’t related to that D. A. Parker one damned bit,” said the old man. “I am him.”

“D. A. Parker!”

“Yes, that’s me. I’m not with the Bureau no more. And, no, I never shot it out with Johnny Dillinger, though I come close once or twice. I had nothing to do with Bonnie and Clyde. Them was Texas Rangers operating on the fly in Louisiana that caught up with that set of bad apples and did a day’s worth of fine work. I tracked Ma and her boy Freddie to Floriday, but I don’t think it was my burst that sent Ma to her grave. We believe she killed her own self. I did put eleven rounds into Freddie, and that finished his hash forever. And I did run into the Baby Face twice. We exchanged shots. I still carry not only a .45 bullet that he put into my leg, but the .45 he put it in there with.”

He leaned forward, letting his coat slide open. Earl looked and saw a stag-gripped .45, with a bigger set of sights welded into the slide. The gun hung close to D. A.’s body in a complicated leather shoulder holster and harness, well worn. It was even dangerously cocked, sure sign of a real pistolero.

“Anyhow, Swagger,” said Becker, trying to regain control of the conversation, “what we’re going to do is raid.”

“Raid?”

“That’s it. I’m setting up a special unit. It’s young, unmarried or widowed officers from outside of Arkansas, because I can’t have them being tainted by the state’s corruption, or having their families hunted. This unit will report only to me, and it won’t be part of any police force, it won’t be set up within a chain of command or anything.

We will hit casinos, whorehouses, sports books, anyplace the mob is running, high-class or low. We will be very well armed. We will squeeze them. That’s the point: to squeeze them until they feel it and have to shut down.”

Becker spoke as if he were quoting a speech, and Earl knew right away that only a part of what the young man planned was for the citizens of Hot Springs. It would be especially for one particular citizen of Hot Springs, namely Fred Becker.

“Sounds like you’ll need a lot of firepower,” said Earl.

“We do,” said D. A. “I have managed to horse-trade for six 1928 Thompsons. Three BARs. Some carbines. And, since I spent the last four years working for Colt, I talked a deal up so we get a deal on eighteen brand-new National Match .45s. Plus we have over fifty thousand rounds of ammunition stored down at the Red River Army Depot, where we’ll train for a while. Twelve men, myself, and the only thing we lack is a sergeant.”

“I see,” said Earl.

“We need a trainer,” said Becker.

“I’m too old, Earl,” said D. A. “I been thinking about this for a lot of years. I’ve been on raids not only in the FBI but in the Oklahoma City Police Department before then. I been in twenty-eight gunfights and been shot four times. I’ve killed eighteen men. So what I know, I learned the hard way: it’s my opinion that when it comes to gun work, the American policeman ain’t got a chance, because he ain’t well enough trained. So what I mean to do is put together a professional, well-trained raid team. Lots of teamwork, total backup, rehearsal, preparation, train, train, train. I include the FBI, especially now, when all the old gunfighters have been booted out. When the Baby Face went down, he took two fine young FBI agents with him, because they weren’t well enough trained to deal with someone as violent and crazy-goddamn-bull-goose-brave as him. Lord, I wish I’d been there that day. They put seventeen bullets into him and he kept coming and killed them both. He was a piece of work. So I want this unit trained, goddamn it, trained to the eyebrows. But I need someone who can ramrod ‘em. I get to be the Old Man. I get to be wise and calm. But I need a 100 percent kick-ass piece of gristle and guts to whip their asses into shape, to beat the lessons into them. I need someone who ain’t afraid of being hated, because being hated is part of the job. I need someone who’s faced armed men and shot ‘em dead. I need a goddamned 100 percent hero. Now, do you see what this has to do with Earl Swagger?”