Hot Springs (9 page)

“You tell that cowboy to watch out. The goddamn Bugman holds grudges. And tell that sugar boy if he ever comes to L. A. to look me up!”

Shordy, the train pulled out of the station, and Owney hoped that he was forever finished with Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who had come for a “vacation and a bath” at the urging of Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, who were big in New York.

“All right,” he said when the train pulled out, addressing Grumleys present and elsewhere, “now you know what’s going on. Find out who that guy is and find out fast. But don’t touch him! Something’s going on and I have to know what the fuck it is.”

He was troubled: change was coming, he knew, and to ride it out he had to keep things running smoothly down here. Hot Springs had to be a smooth little empire, where nothing went wrong, where boys from all the mobs could come and have their fun, and mix and get together, without problems from the law. That’s what he was selling. That was his product. Everything he had was tied up in that. If he lost that, it meant he lost everything.

“Mr. Maddox, he’s long gone,” said Rem Grumley, one of Pap Grumley’s sons and the eldest of these Grumleys. “He just melted so fast into the crowd, we didn’t get a fix on him. Who’d have thought a guy would have the balls to paste Bugsy Siegel in the ribs?” “Find him” was all Owney could think to say.

They drove away from the station in silence. Earl stared glumly into the far distance. His hand hurt a bit. He figured it would be bruised up some in the morning.

“Tell you what,” said D. A. finally, “I never saw one man hit another so hard. You must have boxed.” “Some” was all Earl said. “Pro?” “No sir.”

“Earl, you’re not helping me here. Where? When? How?”

““Thirty-six, ‘37 and ‘38. I was the Pacific Fleet Champ, middleweight. Fought a tough Polak for that third championship on a deck of the old battlewagon Arizona ‘m Manila Bay.”

“You are so fast, Earl. You have the fastest hands I ever saw, faster even than the Baby Face’s. You must have worked that speed bag hard over the years.”

“Burned a few speed bags out, yes sir, I surely did.” “Earl, you are a piece of work.”

“I’m all right,” he said. “But I made a mistake, didn’t

I?”

“Yes, you did, Earl.” “I should have let him hit me?” “Yes, you should have.”

“I think I know that,” said Earl, aware somehow that he had failed. He turned it over in his mind to see what the old man was getting at. “Do you see why, Earl?”

“Yes sir, I do,” said Earl. “I let my pride get in the way. I let that little nothing in a railroad station get too big in my head.”

“Yes, you did, Earl.”

“I see now what I should have done. I should have let him hit me. I should have let him smack me to the ground and feel like a big shot. I should have begged him not to hit me no more. Then he’d think I’se scared of him. Then he’d think he owned me. And if it was ever important, and he came at me again, he’d sail in king of the world, and I’d have nailed him to the barn door so bad he wouldn’t never git down.”

“That is right, Earl. You are learning. But there’s one other thing, Earl. You threw caution to the wind. That was an armed, highly unstable professional criminal, surrounded by his pals, all of them armed. You are unarmed. If you’d have hit him again, you’d probably be a dead man and no jury in Garland County would have convicted your killers, not with Owney’s influence on Bugsy’s side. So it was a chance not worth taking.”

“I’m not too worried about myself,” Earl said.

“No true hero really is. But the heroics are over, Earl. It’s time for teamwork, operating from strength, careful, professional intelligence, preparation, discipline. Discipline, Earl. You can teach these young policemen we have coming in discipline, I know. But you have to also show it, Earl, embody it. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir.”

“It’s not a pretty nor a right thing for me to address a hero of the nation in such a way, but I have to tell you the truth.”

“You go ahead and tell me the truth, sir.”

“That’s good, Earl. That’s a very good start.”

They drove on in silence for a bit.

“Now they know there’s a new fellow or two in town,” Earl finally said.

“Yes, Earl, they do.”

“And that would be why we are not heading back to the cabins?”

“That is it, exactly.”

They were driving out Malvern through the Negro section, and now and then the old man eyed the rearview mirror. On the streets, the Negro whorehouses and beer joints were beginning to heat up for a long night’s wailing. Mammas hung from the window, smoking, yelling things; on the streets, pimps tried to induce those of either race or any race to come in for a beer or some other kind of action. Now and then a Negro casino, usually smaller and more pitifully turned out than the ones for the white people, could be glimpsed, but mostly it was just black folks, sitting, watching, wondering.

“Tell me, Earl, what was in your room?”

“Some underclothes for a change, some underclothes drying in the tub. Some socks. Two new shirts. A razor, Burma-Shave. A toothbrush, and Colgate’s. A pack of cigarettes or two.”

“Any books, documents, anything like that? Anything to identify yourself?”

“No sir.”

“That’s good. Can you live with the loss of that stuff?”

“Yes, I can.”

“That’s good, because if I don’t miss my guess, starting now them boys are going to turn that town upside down looking for the Joe Louis that pole axed their special visitor. I paid for the cabins through next Monday; if we check out today or make a big folderol about packing and leaving in a hurry, that’s a dead giveaway as to who we are. It’s best now just to fade quietly. They’ll check everywhere for boys who’ve left suddenly, left in a lurch, left without paying up. So if we don’t do anything to draw attention to ourselves, we’ll keep them in the dark a little longer.”

“Yes sir,” said Earl. “I guess I’m a little sorry.”

“Earl, in this work, sorry don’t matter. Sure is better than sorry. Remember: the mind is the weapon. Think with the mind, not the fast hands.”

Owney’s Grumleys turned the town pretty much upside down. He had a gang of former bootleg security boys and did all the heavy hitting he found necessary. There were a bunch of Grumleys, all related, including several Lutes, more than a few Bills, and not less than three and possibly as many as seven Slidells, as well as a Vern and a Steve. The Slidell Grumleys were by repute the worst and they had to be kept apart, for they would turn on each other murderously, given half a chance.

A Grumley visited every hotel, tourist court and campground to examine, sometimes sweetly, sometimes not so sweedy, the registration books. Another Grumley or two—usually a Bill and a Lute—traveled the whorehouse circuit. Madams and girls were questioned, and a few sexual adventures were worked in on the sly by this or that Grumley, but such was to be expected. Grumleys were Grumleys, after all. And still another couple of Grumleys checked the bathhouses. Other Grumleys tracked down numbers runners and wire mechanics and instructed them to keep their eyes open double wide. Owney even had some of his Negro boys—these were most definitely not Grumleys—wander the black districts asking questions, because you never could tell: times were changing and where it was once impossible to think of white people hiding among, much less associating with, Negro people, who knew the strangeness of the wonderful modern year 1946? Even the police were brought in on the case, but Owney expected little and got little from them.

In the end, all the efforts turned up nothing. No sign of the cowboy could be unearthed. Owney was troubled.

He sat late at night on his terrace, above the flow of the traffic and the crowds sixteen stories below on Central Avenue, in the soft Arkansas night. He had a martini and a cigarette in its holder in an ashtray on the glass table before him. Beyond the terrace, he could see the tall bank of lighted windows that signified the Arlington Hotel was full of suckers with bulging pockets waiting to make their contributions to Owney’s fortune; to the right of that rose Hot Springs Mountain with its twenty-seven spigots of steamy water for soothing souls and curing the clap.

He held a pigeon in his hands—a smooth, loving bird, its purple irises alive with life, its warmth radiating through to his own heart, its breast a source of cooing and purring. The bird was a soft delight.

He tried to sort out his problems and none of them seemed particularly difficult in the isolate, but together, simultaneously, they felt like a sudden strange pressure. He had been hunted by Mad Dog Coll, he had shot it out with Hudson Dusters, he had felt the squeeze of Tom Dewey, he had done time in New York’s toughest slammers, so none of this should have really mattered.

But it did. Maybe he was growing old.

Owney petted his bird’s sleek head and made an interesting discovery. He had crushed the life out of it when he was considering what afflicted him. It was silently dead.

He threw it in a wastebasket, gulped the martini and headed inside.

August 1946

On the first morning. Earl took the group of young policemen out to the calisthenics field in the center of a city of deserted barracks miles inside the wire fence of the Red River Army Depot. The Texas sun beat down mercilessly. They were all in shorts and gym shoes. He ran them. And ran them. And ran them. Nobody dropped out. But nobody could keep up with him either. He sang them Marine cadences to keep them in step.

I DON’T KNOW BUT I BEEN TOLD

ESKIMO PUSSY IS MIGHTY COLD

SOUND OFF

ONE-TWO

SOUND OFF

THREE-FOUR

There were twelve of them, young men of good repute and skills. In his long travels in the gardens of the law, D. A. had made the acquaintanceship of many a police chief. He had, upon getting this commission, called a batch of them, asked for outstanding young policemen who looked forward to great careers and might want to volunteer for temporary duty in a unit that would specialize in the most scientifically up-to-date raiding skills as led by an old FBI legend. The state of Arkansas would pay; the departments would simply hold jobs open until the volunteers returned from their duties with a snootful of new experience, which they could in turn teach their colleagues, thus enriching everybody. D. A.’s reputation guaranteed the turnout.

The boys varied in age from twenty to twenty-six, unformed youths with blank faces and hair that tumbled into their eyes. Several looked a lot like that Mickey Rooney fellow Earl had seen in Hot Springs but they lacked Mickey’s worldliness. They were earnest kids, like so many young Marines he’d seen live and die.

After six miles, he let them cool in the field, wiping the sweat from their brows, wringing out their shirts, breathing heavily to overcome their oxygen deficit. He himself was barely breathing hard.

“You boys done all right,” he said, and paused, “for civilians.”

They groaned.

But then came the next ploy. He knew he had to take their fears, their doubts, their sense of individuality away from them and make them some kind of a team fast. It had taken twelve hard weeks at Parris Island in 1930, though during the war they reduced it to six. But there was a trick he’d picked up, and damn near every platoon he’d served in or led had the same thing running, so he thought it would work here.

He named them.

“You,” he said, “which one is you?”

He had the gift of looming. His eyes looked hard into you and he seemed to expand, somehow, until he filled the horizon. This young man shrank from him, from his intensity, his masculinity, his sergeantness.

“Ah, Short, sir. Walter R,” said the boy, dark-haired and intense, but otherwise unmarked by the world at twenty.

“Short, I’ll bet you one thing. I bet you been called ‘Shorty* your whole life. Ain’t that the truth?”

“Yes sir.”

“And I bet you hated it.”

“Yes sir.”

“Hmmmm. ” Earl made a show of scrunching up his eyes as if he were thinking of something.

“You been to France, Short?”

“No sir.”

“Well, from now on and just because I say so, your name is ‘Frenchy.’ Frenchy Short. How’s that suit you?”

“Uh, well—”

“Good. Glad you like it. All right, ever damn body, y’all say ‘HI FRENCHY’ real loud.”

“HI FRENCHY” came the roar.

“You’re now a Frenchy, Short. Got that?”

And he moved to the next one, a tall, gangly kid with a towhead and freckles, whose body looked a little long for him.

“You?”

“Henderson, sir. C. D. Henderson, Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

“See, you’re already a problem, Henderson. Our boss, his name is D. A. So we can’t have too many initials or we’ll get ‘em all tangled up. What’s the C stand for?”

“Carl.”

“Carl? Don’t like that a bit.”

“Don’t much like it myself, sir.”

“Hmmm. Tell you what. Let’s tag an O on the end of it. But not an S. That would make you a Carlo. Not a Carlos, but a Carlo. Carlo Henderson. Do you like it?”

“Well, I—”

“Boys, say Hello to Carlo.”

“HELLO CARLO!”

In that way, he named them all, and acquired a Slim who was chunky, a Stretch who was short, a Nick who cut himself shaving, a Terry who read Terry and the Pirates> a smallish Bear, a largish Peanut, a phlegmatic Sparky. Running short on inspiration, he concluded the ceremony with a Jimmy to be called James and a Billy Bob to be called Bob Billy and finally a Jefferson to be called not Jeff but Eff.

“So everything you was, it don’t exist no more. What exists is who you are now and what you have to do and how Mr. D. A. Parker himself, the heroic federal agent who shot it out with Baby Face Nelson and put the Barker Gang in the ground, will train you. You are very lucky to learn from a great man. There ain’t many legends around no more and he is the authentic thing. You meet him tomorrow and you will grow from his wisdom. Any questions?”

There were probably lots of questions, but nobody had the guts to ask them.

For a legend, D. A. cut a strange figure when at last he revealed himself to the men, this time at one of the old post’s far-flung shooting ranges. If they expected someone as taut and tough as jut-jawed, bull-necked, rumble-voiced Earl, what they got was a largish old man in a lumpy suit, beaten-to-hell boots and a fedora that looked as if it had been pulled by a tractor through the fields of Oklahoma, who seemed to do a lot of spitting.