Infamous (46 page)

George snickered.

“Sure you don’t want some moonshine?” he asked.

“Shush,” she said. “Who are those people anyway?”

“Just some cheap fillin’-station thieves,” George said. “Fella’s brother got filled with lead a few weeks back. It made all the papers. Don’t know his woman.”

Kathryn stayed awake for a long time, the couple up in the loft not waiting but a few minutes before getting back to it, or continuing with it, and then finally they were asleep, too, and she was left with only the sound of the nickering horses and the hot wind through the barn cracks. The little girl sounded soft and light, gently snoring in the front seat.

Kathryn put the flat of her hand to George’s chest and felt his heart beat until it lulled her asleep.

LUTHER ARNOLD CRACKED OPEN THE DOOR TO HIS SUITE IN the Skirvin Hotel and peered over the safety chain into the face of Gus T. Jones. “Evenin’, Mr. Arnold. You mind if we might have a word?” Jones heard laughter and giggles inside, and figured it to be from the two hefty women spotted with Arnold at the hotel bar. Arnold told Jones he didn’t care for whatever it was he was sellin’ and tried to close the door, instead finding Jones’s boot.

“Won’t take long, sir,” Jones said, keeping an eye on Arnold from over the chain.

“I said I ain’t buyin’.”

Jones stepped back beside White and Colvin and then kicked in the door and sent the short, stubby little Luther Arnold down on his ass.

The fat women, one in a silk robe and the other with a towel strained about her girth, both ran for a corner. Empty bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon fell from a nightstand, a half dozen lying unopened in buckets of ice.

Arnold looked up at Jones and wiped his lip. His skinny, hairy legs splayed, the front of his Skirvin robe halfway open.

“Hell,” Jones said. “Cover your peter, son.”

Arnold stood, tying the robe with his sash, trying his best to stand tall and take charge of the situation. “I’m a guest of this here ho-tel. And I paid my bill in cash.”

The men heard water running, and White pulled his thumb buster from his belt, cracking open the bathroom door. A big bathtub, fashioned of marble and gold, overflowed with bubbles onto the tile floor, some of those suds caught in Arnold’s ears and in the big girls’ hair. White turned off the faucet and dried his hands on his pants.

“Sir, are you acquainted with George Kelly?” Jones asked. “We’re agents with the Department of Justice.”

Arnold’s mouth hung open, and he slowly shook his head.

Jones slapped the man’s face. “Speak up, son.”

One of the women screamed, and the other began to scoop up their dresses, shoes, undergarments, and purses, neither of them a stranger to a raid. The women smelled the way whores do, with perfume so sweet and strong that it made your eyes water.

“Agent Colvin, would you escort these ladies downstairs?”

Colvin motioned his chin to Arnold.

“We’ll be down,” Jones said. “First, me and Doc gonna have a heart-to-heart with Mr. Arnold.”

The young man just stood there, looking from Jones to Doc White. Only when Jones shot him a hard look did Colvin grab each woman by the elbow, leading them from the gilded suite.

“High time in O.K. City, ain’t it?” Jones asked.

“You slapped me,” Luther Arnold said, wiping his pug nose.

“Start talkin’.”

“I don’t know no George Kelly.”

“You know Kathryn Kelly?”

“I don’t know no one named Kelly.”

“Son, you’re tryin’ my patience here,” Jones said. “Aren’t you the go-between with the Kelly gang and that old attorney?”

Arnold ran a hand over his wet hair and rested a hand on the wall. “That’s none of your concern.”

“Doc, I think Mr. Arnold here might be in need of the cure.”

Arnold looked to the older man, and White walked around him and snatched his arms behind his back, forcing him into the bathroom and tossing him back into the claw-footed tub with a hard splash. Jones followed and slowly took off his suit jacket, rolling his shirtsleeves to the elbow, Arnold flouncing and kicking in the bubbles. Doc White snatched his ankles and jerked him backward.

Jones got to his knees and held a washcloth.

“Son, me and you gonna have a come to Jesus,” Jones said. “Kelly and his gang killed a friend of mine, and they’re threatenin’ to murder a fine family. That’s somethin’ that we won’t abide.”

Arnold, eyes wide, held his torso upright with elbows perched on the tub lip, while his ankles were still held high by Doc.

“Are you associated with the Kelly gang?” Jones asked again.

“There ain’t no Kelly gang,”

“Doc.”

White yanked Luther Arnold up by his ankles while Jones smothered his mouth with a washcloth and dunked him deep in the tub, holding him to the count of twenty and then snatching him up by the hair on his head. The little man heaved and vomited sudsy water while Jones held him aloft and asked him again about the Kelly gang.

Arnold shook his head.

Jones kept him down in the tub for a count of thirty, the heaving and vomiting even worse when he brought him back up. And Jones let him get it all out before he asked just how did a cockroach like him come into the employ of a professional like George R. Kelly, expert machine gunner.

“All I did was pay the lawyer,” he said. “That ain’t no crime.”

“Where are you meeting with the Kellys?” Jones asked.

“Sweet Jesus. I cain’t say.”

“Doc, hold ’im straight.”

This time, Arnold took himself a big breath of air before Jones smothered his mouth and forced him back into the sudsy water like a traveling preacher. When the thrashing and tossing suddenly came to a stop, White said, “Think he’s had enough, Buster. Buster?”

But Jones’s mind had drifted from the Skirvin to a train station with long shafts of morning sunlight, to a box canyon ringed by horse thieves and vultures, to the old, weathered hands of Sheriff Rome Shields, passing on his father’s old .45.

“Buster?”

Jones turned to White, and White looked downright concerned. Jones pulled up Arnold, but the man had gone limp. They hauled him out of the tub and set him on the cold tile floor. Jones slapped Arnold’s back and Arnold came to, heaving water and twisting onto all fours and gagging out a few gallons.

White sat on the lip of the tub and lit a cigarette. He wouldn’t look at Jones.

“I met her at a fillin’ station in Itasca,” Arnold said. “I didn’t know who she was till she give me fifty dollar to locate this attorney in Fort Worth named Sayres. My family needed the money. We hadn’t et in days.”

“When was that?” Jones asked.

“Last week.”

“What day?”

“Sunday,” Arnold said. “I recall ’cause we was in church.”

“Quit your lyin’.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you kept the money?”

“No, sir,” Arnold said, rolling to his butt, covering himself up with a bath mat, trying to catch his breath. “I give the lawyer his money and gone back to Cleburne to see Mrs. Kelly.”

“You said Itasca.”

“We met in Itasca, but she rode my family out to this tourist camp in Cleburne.”

“How’d you get to Fort Worth?”

“Trailways bus, sir.”

“And you came back to the tourist court.”

“The lawyer didn’t have no good news about her kin, and she got a little hot about that and wanted me to go back and fetch her machine. Next day, Mrs. Kelly drove me and my wife and daughter to Fort Worth on their way to San Antone. She let me out at the bus station and tole me to get her Chevrolet back and then go on and hire this attorney I know’d in Enid.”

“But you didn’t go to Enid.”

“Not right away,” Arnold said. “I couldn’t find Mr. Sayres, and my resolve had withered,” Arnold said, shaking his head with great sadness. “Did I tell you I’d been traveling with my family? We hadn’t et in days.”

Jones nodded.

“We’d been tossed off our family farm, sir, and didn’t have nowheres to go. I hadn’t had a square meal in some time, making sure any money we found while trampin’ went to my sweet daughter. I guess I’d grown weak in my body and my spirit. Mrs. Kelly give me five hunnard dollar, and when I couldn’t find Mr. Sayres that night, well, I found myself goin’ to a beer hall. I’m a weak man, sir.”

Jones looked up at White. White tried not to grin and just shook his head with the damn shame of it.

“Well, sir,” Arnold said, “one beer led to two beers, and three beers led to a dozen. And when I get to drinkin’, I get to feelin’ lonesome.”

“So you got yourself a whore,” Jones said.

“Miss Rose ain’t no whore,” Arnold said. “I made sure when I asked the barkeep for some company he didn’t call up some damn ole whore. Just wanted some company, is all. A fine lady. What’s the matter with some company in this coldhearted world?”

“Quit your blubberin’,” White said. “When’d you see George Kelly last?”

Arnold shook his head and looked down at his pruned toes. “No, sir.”

“You ready, Doc?”

Doc turned on the faucet.

“I seen ’im Saturday in San Antone,” Arnold said. “First time I’d ever met the feller. He’d been aways, and Mrs. Kelly wasn’t too pleased with him, me, being a married man, understandin’ the whole situation.”

“Why’d you come back?”

“Mrs. Kelly wanted me to pay out her new attorney.”

“So you picked up two more whores and rented out the presidential suite?”

“Now, hold on there,” Arnold said, gripping the edge of the toilet to stand, bath mat held in his fingers over his genitalia. “I’ll have you know these were the same dang whores—I mean, ladies—I picked up last week. They was company, that’s all. Who of us don’t have sin in our heart?”

“You drove back through Fort Worth to pick ’em up?” White asked. “Must’ve been worth it.”

“Hell, it was on the way,” Arnold said. “Sir.”

“Your wife and child still with the Kellys?” White asked.

“My wife’s still in San Antone,” Arnold said. “The Kellys took my baby girl with ’em. Figured it would make ’em look like a family ’case of roadblocks and the like. Promised they’d wire us once they got to where they was goin’ and send Gerry back on the train. Lord in heaven, I’m sick with worry.”

Jones reached onto the towel rack and dried his hands, rolling his sleeves back down to the wrist and slipping back into his jacket, noticing the wet splatter on his pants that would dry quickly in the summer heat. “Come on.”

“Where we goin’?” Arnold asked.

“San Antonio,” Jones said. “To wait on that cable from the Kellys.”

33

Sunday, September 17, 1933

T
hey drove into Chicago at early evening, finding a furnished apartment in the
Chicago Tribune
classifieds right on State Street down from the Chicago Theatre. They paid the woman a week’s rent, and Kathryn lay across a narrow bed while Gerry explored the kitchenette. George just peeked out a window, watching the El train rattle past, glass shaking in the frame, and said, “It ain’t the Stevens.”

“You said we couldn’t stay in a hotel.”

“I said we couldn’t stay at the Stevens, ’cause we always stay at the Stevens and they know us.”

“They know the Shannons. Or were we the Colemans?”

“They know our faces.”

Kathryn rolled over on her back and unbuckled her shoes, kicking them onto the floor. “God, I’m hungry.”

She looked down at her foot, feeling something strange, and noticed three dime-size holes in her stockings. George stayed at the window, the curtain crooked in his finger, and said, “There’s a joint on State that sells waffles.”

“I don’t want a goddamn waffle,” Kathryn said.

“Looks good. Virginia’s Golden Brown Waffles. I sure would like a waffle. That’d hit the spot. What’d you say, Gerry? How about a waffle?”

“Can you get a waffle with ice cream?” the kid asked.