Infamous

13

Charlie had resigned himself to his own death for some time. He’d pretty much made sense and order of the affair after meeting up with Tom Slick in the wilderness and now being chained again in this blind purgatory; he knew these people were going to punch his ticket real soon. But life had been good and exciting. He’d been a successful man, raised a good family, and after becoming a widower did the sensible thing in marrying Berenice and joining their fortunes. He would not be maudlin about the day or try to conjure up a prayer. When that bullet hit his brain, he’d just be closed for business, and he knew damn well that time would continue. He just wished like hell he could remember what Tom Slick had told him out there in the vast stretches of land after he’d touched his staff to that parched earth and a black pool of oil had formed at his feet. He’d wanted Charlie to get off his knees and follow him up and over that hill, but as Charlie’d tottered and stumbled, Tom’s staff held high, he’d fainted and fallen and dropped in and out of consciousness, looking right into the face of that prize bull with a white face. That’s when Tom Slick changed into the figure of a limping man with silver hair and a bandanna across his face, saying, “Well, hello there, Mr. Urschel. Goin’ someplace?”

The old shack’s door squeaked open, and he was unchained again.

Here we go.

Charlie found his feet, holding on to the posts of a metal bed. He was told to turn around and take the bandages from his eyes. He complied and was led to a crude wooden bench, where he sat down.

He heard a click, and before his blurry eyes appeared the long, sharp blade of a straight razor. He wanted to think of a prayer but just couldn’t think of one that fit the situation.

He took a breath and swallowed, knowing it would be his last.

But instead of feeling the blade across his neck, he saw a mug of hot lather slid onto the table, and he looked up into the mirrored image of a man he didn’t recognize. Sure, he knew the features and eyes, they’d been with him since birth. But the gauntness and salt-and-pepper beard were those of a much older man.

“Shave those whiskers,” the big man said. “You look like a goddamn tramp. Whoa. Don’t turn around. Don’t you dare turn around. You know how this dance is done. We’ll bring you a change of clothes and a hat. It’s a new straw hat, and I’m pretty sure I got the size right.”

Charlie nodded.

He was free. They were taking him back.

He looked into the rust-flecked image of himself and lathered his face in the hot light coming from the west window. The razor was dull and old, and his whiskers took a good bit of pulling and coaxing till they’d be shaved away. Cuts and all, he felt like a hundred-dollar bill.

There was a knock on the door, and Charlie was told to face the wall.

His eyes were retaped, and he took the procedure like a sick man takes the dressing of his wounds. He heard the weathered voice of the old man now tell him that he had a fresh shirt and pants. He’d brought back the shoes he’d worn here.

Charlie didn’t answer. What was he supposed to do? Thank him?

He just nodded and stood there, blind and dumb. The most well-read man of women’s literature in the country.

And then he felt a pair of bony arms wrap his body and pull him tight, and an onion breath in his face told him, “You be careful, Mr. Urschel. Everything’s all right. Yes, sir. God bless you.”

The door opened and closed again.

“They’s gettin’ the automobile ready,” said Potatoes. “Mr. Urschel, how ’bout a smoke for ole time’s sake? I brung you a real good one. I can fetch you some hot coffee, too. It was fresh this mornin’.”

“Son?”

“Yes, Mr. Urschel?”

“You can stick that cigar up your ass,” Urschel said. “Tell that son of a bitch I want to be taken back to my home right now.”

“I’M NOT KILLING CHARLIE URSCHEL AT YOUR FOLKS’ PLACE.”

“Can you think of somewhere better?” Kathryn asked.

“For five grand, the boys will take Urschel back to Oklahoma City like we promised,” George said. “That’s on the level.”

“Fuck no.”

“ Harvey said if we don’t agree to the deal, they’ll just let Urschel out close by where he can lead the law back to the farm,” George said. “They said your dumb stepdaddy lost ’im and they found ’im wandering the road to Damascus nuttier than a squirrel, so they’re claiming they’re owed something.”

“Bullshit.”

“I know,” George said. “But Miller ain’t gonna let him go without a fight. What are you gonna do?”

“You’re gonna tell Harvey we’ll pay out five grand for a finder’s fee. And I’ll tell him to go fuck himself.”

“Kit.”

The boys worked out some kind of screwy handshake deal about meeting up at the Green Lantern, where they’d get their cut and change out the rest. Turns out those damn Jews wanted twenty percent to turn the bills, but Bailey was convinced the ransom money serial numbers had been recorded. And, of course, that was something that never even crossed the minds of George and Albert. George only thought a lot about how to spend the dough, not a thing about marked bills.

“Are we still gonna kill ’im?” she asked.

“We meaning me.”

“Either way.”

“Let me think,” George said.

“I’ll hold my breath.”

They left the next afternoon, and sometime past ten o’clock, it seeming like they’d been riding forever since Paradise, George slowed right outside the Norman city limits. He didn’t speak, neither of them being dumb enough to make a sound with Charlie Urschel all trussed up on the backseat floorboard.

George had finally gotten up the nerve. He stopped the big car, and they got out to whisper to each other.

“Why here?”

“You want to do it in your own backyard?”

“Over there,” she said. “Behind that billboard.”

A small light shone on a billboard of a little nigger boy eating a huge slice of watermelon and a white man with big clean choppers telling the boy to BRUSH WITH COLGATE, SAMBO!

George got back behind the wheel, and they followed a narrow, rutted path that jumped up and over some railroad tracks and crossed down into a wide, endless scrap-metal yard. Big, fat stacks of junked cars and oil barrels and wagon wheels sat in useless, rusted heaps. It had just started to rain, a few drops splatting the Cadillac’s windshield, but when he stopped the car and killed the engine the heavens sure opened up.

George just sat there like he was trying to figure out how to start necking. Kathryn crossed her arms over her chest and slid down in her seat. She stared straight ahead and bit into her cheek.

George reached for his hat with a sigh and crawled out of the big car. He opened the rear door and pulled Urschel out by his bound wrists and marched him down a narrow space between the walls of rusted cars, down an endless path, and out of sight of the windows.

Kathryn was damned if she wanted to see it anyway. Because if she was ever called to court about being there when Mr. Charles F. Urschel, president of the Tom Slick Oil Company, was killed, she could look that prosecutor right in the eye and say she didn’t see a goddamn thing.

The rain fell harder, the first bit of it she’d seen in months, sounding like impatient fingers drumming on the desk. And there was nothing but all that silver pinging on that big midnight blue hood of the Cadillac, Kathryn looking straight ahead past that old silver Indian and leaning forward, squinting to see just a motion or a bit of something. Son of a bitch.

Only rain and deep night. Rusted coils and spindles and gears. Old engines and parts of old machines. Stoves and toasters. Useless stuff from machines no one cared to recall.

What if someone was to come along? What if the owner of this goddamn graveyard was to come out of his hole and want to know who was driving this beautiful piece of machinery into his personal shithole? Goddamn, if it wasn’t raining, she’d go out and grab George, and, if he hadn’t done the deed, she’d take the damn gun and kill the bastard herself instead of sitting in the car like a dog and being left in Shit City… BLAM.

BLAM. BLAM.

Three sounds. Three strobe patterns.

The figure and shape of that big mug coming back through the wrecks, fedora down over his eyes, gun hanging loose and dirty by his side, and marching straight for the car and slamming the door hard.

“Did you do it?”

He didn’t answer.

“We shoulda buried him in a barrel of lime,” she said.

He cranked the sweet Cadillac and leaned forward to see through the whole goddamn mess till he bumped up and over the crest of the old rails and back onto the highway, fishtailing and sliding and heading north again.

“ Saint Paul?”

“I gave my word.”

“To a thief and a killer.”

“Verne Miller is a war hero, Kit.”

“How did it feel?”

“Why don’t you put a sock in it?”

“He was your first, wasn’t he?”

“Well.”

“Well, how did it feel?”

“Like something that had to be done.”

“Amen.”

“Turn on that lamp and read the map,” he said. “And why don’t you shut up till we get back to Saint Paul.”

JONES FINISHED WITH HIS REPORT, PECKING IT OUT ON AN L. C. Smith at the Federal Building and sliding it into the mail pouch to Washington. He grabbed his Stetson and returned to the mansion, only to receive a cable from Hoover chewing him out for not being in direct contact during the entire affair. Jones reread the cable, the words chapping his ass, and tossed it in the garbage, following Doc White to the front stoop under the portico, where the newsmen had turned the front lawn into a small tent city.

The pallor inside the house made it feel like a goddamn wake. Urschel should’ve been home hours ago.

The papers ran phone lines into a wild switchboard under an Army tent. Some of the newspapermen had now brought their desks and were sitting with their feet propped up and taking calls, all the while sweating through their shirts and ties, living through the long, hot night and all day with nothing to add to the Urschel story.

Tom Slick, Jr., and Charles Urschel, Jr., both about fifteen or sixteen, were back from a fishing trip in Mexico. And Betty Slick had decided to a bake a lemon pie for Agent Colvin, seeing to it that he ate at least two slices to make sure it was to his liking.

When there was nothing left to do, the family just sat in the salon and waited in silence. Every ring of the phone was like a jolt of electricity.

At nightfall, the wind blew in from the west and the rains came. The first rains in months, and Jones watched from the stoop as the newsmen scampered away, grabbing for their typewriters and copy, chasing stray notes and fallen hats. Tents tumbled down the road, and reporters and cops scrambled for their automobiles.

Colvin approached the men with a smile, watching the show.

“How was that pie?” Doc White asked.

Colvin’s face grew crimson. The rain streamed hard and violent across the road and atop the car hoods.

“She’s a fine young lady.”

“She sure has a crush,” Jones said.

“She’s just a girl.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven,” Colvin said.

“At twenty-seven?” Jones asked. “I was already married. That was back in aught-seven. I’d left the Rangers and joined up with Customs.”

Thunder and lightning, a full-out gully washer. Large tree branches shook and small freshly planted trees bent in the harsh wind. Jones took off his hat in fear of losing it.

“Y’all worked the border?” Colvin asked.

“Rode that river half my life.”

“You, too?” he asked White.

Doc White nodded.

“You ever see Pancho Villa?”

White and Jones smiled.

“Yeah, we knew Villa,” Jones said.

“You met him?”

“Sure thing,” Jones said.

“He was a real cutthroat.”

“Pancho?” Jones said. “One of the most pleasant sorts you’d ever meet. Would you say, Doc? He was an honorable man. Maybe what got him killed.”

They stood there and watched the rains for a while, Colvin and Doc White smoking cigarettes. It was black now, the sun probably not down but the dark clouds smudging out everything and keeping the neighborhood in a queer purple-black glow that usually preceded a tornado.

“The Kansas City office said the telephone call to the Muehlebach came from a local movie house,” Colvin said. “They sent an agent to the Newman Theater but came up with nothing.”

Jones rubbed his face with a handkerchief and cleaned thumbprints off his glasses.

“He should have been back hours ago,” Colvin said.

Jones nodded. He could see clearer without the smudges, the rain softening a bit, a heavy heat and humidity lifting from the ground.

“If they turn him loose,” Jones said, “it won’t be close to here. We’ll have to wait for Urschel.”

“When do we start to look?”

“Let’s give it till morning,” Jones said. “If he doesn’t show, we’ll understand the situation.”

A pack of newspapermen holding black umbrellas approached the front porch and shouted up a couple questions for the agents. Someone inside had tipped them off about the ransom drop, and, boy, they were angry it had taken them almost twenty-four hours to hear about it.

Was it really a million dollars?

Some people say the kidnappers may have taken the Lindbergh baby.

Agent Jones, they call you an Ace Investigator. Is it true you tracked down the last of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and forced Butch Cassidy down to Bolivia?

Jones ignored them, loaded his pipe, and strolled down the steps into the soft rain with Doc and climbed into the car supplied to them. They ate supper at the Skirvin, dropped by the local office for any new communiqués, and then headed back to Eighteenth Street and the now-familiar mansion. As the night wore on, the rains continued, and Mrs. Urschel turned on the radio just in case a report in some other state was to come over the wire. It took a few moments for the unit to heat up, and Jones found a comfortable place on the couch under that life-size portrait of Tom Slick, and smoked his cherry tobacco and listened to the Pabst Blue Ribbon Show on the radio, someway feeling odd that the nation was okay with alcohol again after spending so many years going after bootleggers.

The Urschel and Slick boys-dog-tired and sick from grief and worry-turned in some hours later. And in hushed whispers by the radio, Betty Slick told Agent Colvin that cotillion or joy of any type had to be canceled. And they soon left, too, and Jones didn’t study on it long. And then it was just Berenice Urschel, and the intimacy of them sitting so close with so few in the salon made Jones stand and walk into the kitchen.

She’d been crying a long time and seemed empty of tears and wasteful talk.

He poured a cup of coffee and noted the hour on a clock, growing close to midnight. He’d check in with the boys on the night guard and leave some orders. And then he’d head back to the Skirvin for a few hours of rest. He’d shave and be back here before sunrise.

That’s when he heard the commotion at the back door. One of the local agents was arguing with a man who wanted to come inside.

“Mister,” the agent said. “You better turn right back around and get back with the other newspapers.”

“But I’m not a reporter,” said the man wearing a straw hat and soaked short-sleeved shirt.

“No, he’s not,” said Jones with a smile, offering his hand. “Mr. Urschel, we’ve been waiting on you. My name’s Jones.”