Infamous (21 page)

“Doesn’t mean he knows you,” she said. “You weren’t that known when we were up here. You were just the driver. I don’t think you made the papers once.”

George placed his big knuckles on the long glass cigar case and gave a low whistle. He called the tobacco shop steward over for a couple of these and a couple of those, and for that big solid-gold lighter, wondering if he could have it engraved.

“Are you even listening to me?”

The cigar steward grabbed what George pointed out and strolled back to the cash register and out of earshot. Toward the front of the cigar shop was a big, tall wooden Indian, standing dumb and silent and proud.

“You were the one who wanted to cut out the middlemen, so here we are. But now you want to doubt me and the plan, and now I’m thinking maybe this wasn’t such a smart idea. Do you have any idea how mad Verne and Harv are going to be when they learn we went to the Kid direct?”

“I just don’t see the logic in cutting those two fools in when they didn’t lift a finger.”

George shrugged and didn’t disagree. He walked over to the front counter—long stained wood and wavy glass—filled with hundreds and hundreds of cigars wrapped in rich, aged tobacco. The whole store smelled like the inside of an old cedar chest. Every few moments the bell above the door would jingle and in would walk a couple fellas, or a lone fella, and they’d nod to the steward and head back behind a curtain at the rear of the store. George plugged a cigar into the side of his mouth and thumbed his new lighter, having paid a big wad of cash for it. He smiled as he got the thing going, and told her to find a nice, comfortable chair and read the paper or something, he’d be right back.

And as much as it burned her up, she knew she couldn’t go behind the curtain, back to the cigar shop’s private club, where only dirty egg-sucking politicians, moneygrubbing bankers, and two-timing yeggs were allowed. All of ’em men, with their eye candy left on the settee to read the Saint Paul
Star
about the latest exploits of the Barker Gang and the Barrow Brothers, thousands of Joes showing up at a new agency for home loans, and about those big stores in Bay City, Michigan, being pummeled with stones for not jibing with the NRA work hours.
Ain’t that a hoot.
And there was Charles Urschel again, the sheriff in Oklahoma City criticizing the poor bastard for not running to a telephone when George released him.
If Urschel had called me instead of a taxi when he was turned loose, the kidnappers wouldn’t have had a chance in a hundred to get away. It was raining so hard that only two roads away from Norman were passable, and he would’ve found them in less than ten minutes . . .
She scanned the rest, but then her eyes caught the headline: TWO MILLION FOR CLARK GABLE. She passed on over Urschel and some bullshit about the police finding the shack where they’d hid out.

So the
True Story
of this shy and awkward farmer boy who came up from the low, who dreamed his dreams in a logging camp, who worked as an ad taker on a newspaper and as a clerk in a telephone company, fi nally to evolve as one of the greatest actors and the world’s greatest love on the screen, has knocked all records for “reprints” higher than a kite.

No kiddin’.
True Story
sold over two million issues just so the regular folks can read about Clark Gable. Kit could kind of see it but not see it, too. He had confidence and style, and good posture and height. But it would take some to get over those funny jug ears and the space between his teeth.

To the millions of younger men and women who are still dreaming their dreams while they go about the daily round of their ordinary work, this great
True Story
lends the start of hope without which those dreams cannot go on. And to the many thousands of older men and women who are enjoying their fi rst-time fruits of attainment, it lends courage to character, for in the amazing life of this eager young country boy who found himself suddenly without warning caught in the mesh of all the feminine wiles that Hollywood could produce, there has been the lure of enough temptations to shake the character of a saint.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Kathryn said, popping and stretching the paper and turning over the fold. She knew Gable was swimming in top-shelf tail, and even with the teeth and ears she’d go to bed with the son of a bitch. Mainly because the son of a bitch was Clark Gable, and every time she saw his picture in some dime-store rag or below the movie marquee she’d know she’d made him shake and quiver.

Kathryn lit a cigarette, crossed her legs, and dangled one leg loosely, rocking it back and forth, reading on and thinking that she could use a new pair of good shoes, until George came out of the back room smelling like a Mississippi smokehouse.

“They want it.”

“Want what?” she asked, bored and distracted.

“The money.”

“Well, of course the Kid wants the money.”

“He said it would be taken care of.”

“Is he here?”

“No,” he said. “They rang him up for me.”

“Then hell, no, no one is getting the money,” she said. “Tell those Jews you want to see Kid Cann himself, live and in person, or this deal ain’t going to happen.”

“But Kit . . .”

“Go on,” she said. “George?”

He turned around and looked over his shoulder.

“Trade them out a thousand.”

“Right now?”

“Right now,” she said, blowing some smoke into the ceiling fans. “I want to go shopping.”

AGENT JOE LACKEY ARRIVED ON THE MORNING TRAIN FROM Kansas City, his right arm still in a sling from where he took a spray of machine-gun bullets. But he wore a smile on his big-nosed face and stepped down onto the platform in a sharp gray felt hat and blue serge suit. Jones shook hands with him in an awkward fashion and grabbed his old friend’s grip as they headed toward the entrance and bright light.

“You sure you’re ready?” Jones said. “When Hoover said you were back on the job—”

“Don’t you know I’m left-handed, Buster?”

“That’s a lie.”

“Well, I’m left-handed now. So what does it matter?”

Doc White waited for the agents by the main entrance to the small station, only a couple miles from the Urschel house, deep in the warehouse district. White stepped up and met Lackey, pumping his hand. “I thought you really got hurt. Hell, they just winged you.”

“Good to see you, Doc.”

“I better get a beer for those flowers I sent,” White said. “I thought you were dying.”

Jones dropped Lackey’s luggage in the trunk and walked around to the passenger side of a brand-new Plymouth the local office supplied. He reached into a front seat and pulled out a folded map that he neatly pulled apart and spread flat across the wide hood of the car. The two agents joined him, the hood still hot as a skillet, and they all leaned over a big, sprawling view of the United States, with all its rivers and man-made borders, state lines, highways, and cat roads. Jones had drawn a big circle in red ink, and in several cities he’d penciled in phone calls, letters, and tips. Every crank, nut job, and honest tip was flagged.

“What we’ve got is a radius that stretches about six hundred miles,” Jones said. “We take in Saint Louis, Kansas City, extend over to Santa Fe on the west and Nashville to the east. I’d put the far point north being Davenport and down south somewhere around Corpus Christi. It’s a needle in a haystack for sure.”

“You don’t think the shack was far,” Lackey said in his funny Yankee accent.

“I think they took Mr. Urschel on a little joyride up and around,” Jones said. “Hither and yon. They telegraphed they were far to the north. The two yokels who watched him, not the gunmen, had to mention a half dozen times that Oklahoma and Texas were to the south. They furnished him with clothes with the goddamn labels still stitched in ’em showing Joplin, Missouri. This whole deal is south.”

“Down on the border?” Lackey asked.

“I don’t think that far.”

“Just ask Buster if you want to take a flight somewhere,” White said, leaning loose and lean as a stick on the fender. “He’s studied every airline’s flight schedule there is. ’Bout to make us both cross-eyed.”

“Saw the report,” Lackey said. “You can narrow down the flights?”

“We can narrow the ones that didn’t fly the night of the storm,” Jones said. “I have two airlines I like.”

They were on the fifth floor of the Federal Building ten minutes later. Colvin had given Jones his office, and he’d tacked schedules on a large board, along with maps of Okalahoma and Texas and Missouri. Telegrams and letters had been sorted in bins, and mug shots were tucked into a half dozen binders on the desk. Jones worked from a small black typewriter on the desk, and at his elbow there was a cup of cold coffee and his cold pipe.

“You’re going stir-crazy,” Lackey asked, “aren’t you?”

“I’m not much for secretarial work.”

Lackey took his hat and jacket off and hung them by the door. He closed the door behind the two of them with a light click, but you could still hear the telephone bells ringing and the hard clack of the typewriters and the chatter of Teletype machines. The air was smoky and stale, and all the action of the days since Urschel returned home made the office air smell sour with nervous sweat.

Jones sat on the edge of his desk and crossed his arms. He was in his shirtsleeves and wore a gun rig over his shoulder.

“I’d open a window, but they’re painted shut.”

“I’d shoot out the panes,” Lackey said. “How do you live like this?”

Jones shrugged.

“Listen,” Lackey said. “I haven’t put this in a report yet. But after you got reassigned, I picked up where you left off on the Union Station massacre.”

“Not much to follow,” Jones said.

“You remember requesting the phone records for Dick Galatas in Hot Springs? From the pool hall?” Lackey asked. “Well, the son of a bitch called Joplin twenty times after we picked up Jelly Nash.”

Jones nodded. “Let me guess.”

“That’s right, that old grifter Deafy Farmer. It’s taken me some time to run down the calls out of Farmer’s place, but the wires were burning up while me and you and Sheriff Reed were on that train. We didn’t stand a chance.”

“Who’d he call?”

Lackey leaned in and placed his elbows on his knees, his short red tie dipping from his neck. “A rental. False names. When we found the place, it was littered with cigarette butts and rotgut gin. They left plates of spaghetti on the counter half eaten.”

“You get a description?”

“Two neighbors saw a man ducking in and out. Never made a fuss. Never too social.”

“Floyd?”

Lackey shook his head. “Fella was described as pale-skinned with pale bluish eyes. Muscular and mean-looking. He carried golf sticks with him every night.”

“Son of a bitch,” Jones said. “Verne Miller.”

“The witnesses picked him straight out of a hundred photos. That rotten bastard killed Otto, those two detectives, and one of our own.”

“Who else?”

“No one saw him, but I’m hearing Harvey Bailey.”

“I figured that from the start.”

“Miller won’t go quietly,” Lackey said, working a cigarette from a pack and then finding a lighter in his sling. “Listen, Hoover’s been asking about how Nash was killed.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said there was a lot of confusion in that car.”

“He’ll have the bullet reports by now,” Jones said. “Hoover knows.”

“You think Sheriff Reed meant to kill him?”

“Gun went off while he was trying to set aim.”

Someone rapped on the pebbled-glass door, and a nameless young agent walked in and passed a typed note for Agent Gus T. Jones. “How ’bout we get you something to eat?” Jones said. “You like chop suey?”

“What’s that message?”

“This?” Jones said, adding the slip to the growing mound of paper on his desk. “Some detective in Fort Worth named Weatherford. I’ll call him when I get around to it.”

16

G
eorge drove Kathryn past all the old Saint Paul places, the Saint Paul haunts and whatnot, chattering on about
The times they had, the nights they danced
, and how all of it was coming around again, sister. The Boulevards of Paris nightclub. The Hollyhocks. Green Lantern Saloon, Plantation—George smiling like a bastard when they rode past the Plantation because he once screwed her there in a toilet stall—and then on to the big brick Hotel Saint Paul on St. Peter Street, where George said Leo Gleckman ran the show on the whole third floor, pointing out the floor like she couldn’t count from the bottom. Gleckman was Saint Paul, and the Kid ran Minneapolis, but sometimes those two Jews did business on each other’s turf, and in their ancient traditions this all made sense to them. But Kathryn said she could never understand trust between a couple of hoods. She’d met Gleckman once at the Boulevards of Paris, and about the only thing that struck her about the fella was the beautiful camel hair coat he wore and the ruby stickpin—big as a nut—pinned to his tie.

“Whatta you think?” George asked, pulling into the Hotel Saint Paul portico. “We get a suite?”