Infamous

14

What the hell, George?” Kathryn said. “Urschel’s alive? You lied. I can’t believe you lied to me, you rotten son of a bitch.” George mumbled something, his mouth full of eggs and ham, at a ham-and-eggs, no-name joint in some no-name town. Kathryn wasn’t even sure what state they were in. But they sure were hungry and had stopped off on the ride north when they’d seen the hand-painted signs for EATS, REST-ROOMS, GAS. When she’d come back from the can, she’d seen the front of a Kansas City Star someone left with a nickel tip. URSCHEL FREED.

Son of a bitch.

“What did you say?” she asked.

He finished chewing, and leaned in and said real low, “Excuse a fella for not wanting the Chair. What’s the point of stirring the pot? We got what we wanted. Why risk it? ’Sides, he almost shit his drawers running away.”

Kathryn read on about Charles F. Urschel, head of the Tom Slick Oil Company, bravely making his way from a scrapyard outside Norman to Classen Barbecue, where he calmly got a cup of coffee and telephoned for a cab. He paid the driver a small tip, the newspaperman drawing out that fact to show he was cheap, and was stopped at the back door of his house by a federal agent who didn’t recognize his face.

“Says here the kidnappers gave him ten dollars,” she said. “Is that true?”

“Why don’t you go ahead and broadcast it after Little Orphan Annie?”

“Ten whole dollars. You are a sucker.”

“Who’s that little chatter box?” George sang. “The one with pretty auburn locks?/ Whom do you see? / It’s Little Orphan Annie.”

Kathryn frowned and fished a pack of Luckies from her purse, lit one with shaking hands, and used the ruby red tip of her index finger to skip from story to story. Charles Urschel’s big, dumb hangdog face took up most of the space above the fold.

She smoked the cigarette down to a nub and squashed it out as the waitress in a little paper hat refilled her coffee. George asked for some more toast.

She lit another Lucky and leaned back into her seat. The diner was empty, far too early in the morning for normal folks, and she leaned into the paper and read on. “Says right here that ‘FEDERAL ACE GUS T. JONES LEADS MANHUNT.’ You ever heard of him? Says he tracked down the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and was a personal friend to Pancho Villa. Jesus H. How old is this guy?”

“Too old to catch us,” George said with a wink. “I bet he still rides a horse.”

“Says here he has a government airplane at his disposal.”

She turned the page and above an advertisement for Lux soap-Is Your B.O. Offending Your Husband?-was a picture of the Federal Ace. Wire-framed glasses, fat man with thinning hair. “Well, son of a bitch.”

“What?”

“It’s the bastard from the Sooner,” she said, laughing. “I knew he was the law. Damn, I knew it.”

“The one with Kirkpatrick?”

“No, George. The nigger porter.”

“They just put that stuff in the paper to rile us up,” he said. “Eddie Bentz says nervousness will trip you up every time. Keep your mind clear and everything is copacetic.”

“You can’t even spell copacetic.”

“Come on now, Kit.”

“I mean it,” she said. “Ed Weatherford is still out there, too. You know he’s gonna turn rat.”

“Ed Weatherford doesn’t know diddly-squat,” George said, scraping some egg onto his toast. He pointed the loaded toast at her. “You wanted me to drive all the way to Fort Worth just to kill a fella ’cause you don’t like his smile.”

“He’s a snake.”

“Oh, Ed’s all right,” he said, grinning. “I think he’s a little sweet on you, too.”

“You sure are a bright boy, George.”

The waitress walked back from the kitchen with more toast and jam and butter. George smiled and winked at her, and the woman blushed because, hell, she had to be at least forty and hard and weathered. But Kathryn Kelly was smart enough to know that There but by the grace of God, because if she didn’t have a plan, she damn well could be slinging hash in a few years.

“The beauty with these kidnap deals is that no one has to die,” George said, wiping his mug with a napkin. “You take the gravy from some rich mug who’s swimming in cash while average hardworking Joes out there can’t afford a cup of coffee. It’s a solid, respectable line of work.”

“Since when are you hardworking?”

“How long has it been since you wanted for anything?”

“You made me leave Chingy.”

“We don’t need a little yapping dog on this excursion,” he said.

“How long is this gonna take?”

“Couple days tops.”

“And you trust this Kid Cann?”

“He’s a businessman.”

“He’s a crook.”

“Harvey’s cashin’ in his chips with him, same as us.”

George nodded and straightened his short red tie. He looked off in the wide, empty space of the restaurant spreading out in a crazy chessboard of blue-and-white linoleum. The place smelled of cigarettes and frying bacon and coffee left on the burner too long. In the darkness outside the glass window, a long, sweeping arrow made of tiny lightbulbs beckoned in the weary traveler.

“Then what?” she asked. “When do we get the money back?”

George smiled. “We relax. Have some laughs.”

“I want to go back to Cleveland.”

“What the hell for? I want to take you down to Biloxi and put our feet in the sand. We can drink beer on the beach and go dancing on the boardwalk at night. I wouldn’t mind doing a little fishing, too.”

“Before we do anything, we have to pay off the Cadillac.”

“Are you joking?”

“Do you have any idea of how embarrassing it is to get all those telephone calls and telegrams about falling behind on those payments? When we bought that big baby out there, we said we’d be paying by year’s end in cash. And now we have it, I want to march right into that dealership and tell ’em to stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

“That won’t prove a thing, Kit.”

“You got that damn loan in the name of Boss and Ora! You said your name was Mr. Robert G. Shannon.”

“Would you shut up.”

“You shut up.”

George let out a long stream of smoke from the side of his mouth. He looked her over like he was appraising just how long she’d keep this gag running, and the decision didn’t take long as he rested his meaty fist on the table, cigarette burning down to his hairy knuckles, and nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, Saint Paul to trade with the Jews and then down to Cleveland so you can play big-time with that two-bit car salesman. Say, I know why you want to do this. You didn’t like the way his wife treated you when we had dinner with them. When you told her about the kind of gowns you liked, and she laughed a little like she didn’t believe you.”

Kathryn nodded. “She was mean to Chingy.”

“That goddamn rat shit on her Oriental rug.”

“It was an ugly rug.”

A few truck drivers walked in through the glass door, a bell jingling above their heads. More bacon frying. More loose talk. Cigarettes and coffee. Hash and eggs. Kathryn picked up the Star again and read back over the front page about the Urschel story.

“Does it bother you that your name isn’t here?”

“Are you crazy? That’s pretty much the point, sweetheart.”

“It bothers me,” she said. “I read a story last week about Jean Harlow coming to Kansas City to visit her family. They had her picture on the front of the paper just because she came to town. Now, that’s something.”

“She’s a damn movie star with big tits.”

“I’m prettier.”

“Maybe,” George said. “But she’s known.”

“And now because of us that fat old man is the Federal Ace.”

“So what?”

“So, it must be nice.”

“What’s that?” George asked, grabbing his hat and tossing down some coin. “To get your picture in the paper?”

“For everyone to know you,” she said. “Look at ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd. He’s like some goddamn Robin Hood.”

“To hell with Floyd.” George stood, tipping the fedora’s brim down over his dark eyes as he frowned at her. “Let’s see him ever pull a job like this.”

“HOW ’BOUT YOU HANDLE KID CANN,” VERNE MILLER SAID. “THAT little Jew has problems with me.”

“About what?” Harvey asked.

“One night at the Cotton Club, we had a little talk.”

“A talk?”

Verne Miller shrugged and scratched the back of his neck. They were out of the Buick now-Harvey always preferring to buy or steal big, solid Buicks-and they walked in the falling sunlight of an abandoned farm close to the Iowa line. Harvey’s heel felt stiff and sore, and he had some trouble keeping pace with Miller’s strong, long-legged gait.

“The Kid made a pass at Vi,” Miller said, staring straight ahead. His blue eyes like ice. “He told her he’d like to place his pecker right between her titties and ride her like a mule.”

“The Kid said that?” Harvey asked, lighting up a Chesterfield and fanning out the match. “I don’t even know what that means. ‘Like a mule’?”

“He’d been drinking.”

“What’d you say?”

“I don’t know,” Miller said, shrugging again. “I didn’t say much. Just stuck a.45 inside his mouth and asked if he’d like to see how little brains he’s got.”

“He may hold a grudge.”

“You think?”

“I do, Verne,” Harvey said. “Things like that can stay with a person.”

The hot wind off the barren earth felt good on the men’s faces, and you could smell the hard earth and dust and dry land. The farm had a familiar old L-frame and a big red barn with a roof painted with the words MERAMEC CAVERNS U.S. 66 STANTON MISSOURI. The shadows were long and smooth across the rough-hewn boards, and the sunlight painted the side of the barn in a soft yellow glow.

“Vi’s got you wrapped tight, Verne,” Harvey said. “And don’t take no offense in this, but if you don’t watch your pecker, she’s gonna lead you right into a trap.”

“What’s a man to do?”

“Love.”

“Yeah,” Miller said with that cruel, twisted mouth. “It’s worse than the Spanish flu.”

“Now, take George,” Harvey said. “That’s another matter. He can’t even see the trap he’s in.”

“The pussy trap.”

“Snap.”

“You’re going to thieve their money, aren’t you?” Miller asked.

Harvey smiled and pinched the Chesterfield between his thumb and forefinger. He shrugged a bit and smiled again.

“You’re gonna get the Kid to switch out the cash on the bank job with Kelly’s dough, and we’re going to take it all.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“I don’t have any love for those people.”

The Buick sat in the slanting shadow of two big silos crawling with vines. A couple Ford tractors lay rusted and turned upside down in a gully. As the men stepped on the porch, they found a busted door held upright by an old padlock. A note from the bank ruffled in the wind.

“This country is turning to shit,” Harvey said, snatching the notice from the tacks and tossing it on the ground.

“Everything is turning to shit.”

“They took my gas stations,” he said. “They took goddamn everything.”

“Who?”

“Fat men.”

“Who?”

“Men who feed at the trough of our goddamn sweat.”

“You’re talking like a communist,” Miller said.

“Maybe I am.”

“Communism is for suckers, too.”

“What do you believe in, Verne?”

“Myself,” he said, his face not changing expression.

Harvey Bailey excused himself and walked along the beaten porch of the house, the wind making rattling noises through the broken windows. A door kept drumming with the shotgun wind, and every one of Harvey’s steps through the haunted guts of the home was counted until he reached the back stairs and walked out onto that wide expanse of cleared land, an old familiar path now grown up with weeds and destroyed and hidden. But he could walk that path in his sleep, feeling that draw and pull to a shadowed little grove of walnut trees blooming with nuts wrapped in green.

You wouldn’t know it to see it. The headstone simply read J. HARVEY BAILEY / SEPTEMBER, 5 1920-JULY, 12 1923. Bailey felt a shooting pain as he got to his knees and pulled away the weeds and vines and straightened the small stone lamb, storm-beaten, and now resembling more rock than animal. He stayed there, smoothing away the moss with his hand-painted tie, until he heard Miller calling for him, and, using the solid trunk of the tree for balance, he got back on his feet.

“You think Harry Sawyer’s back up there?” Verne Miller asked as he walked close, toting a shovel.

“Where else would he go?” Harvey asked, rolling the sleeves of his white shirt to the elbow and lighting another cigarette. “We’ll head to the Green Lantern first thing. I sure wouldn’t mind one of his pork chop sandwiches.”

“And maybe Nina’s?”

“How can a man go to Saint Paul and not stop by and say hello to the girls?”

“Right here?”

“Right here,” Harvey said. “Hand it to me.”

Harvey Bailey felt the hot wind push a cloud over the sun, sliding a cool shadow over his face. He slid the tip of the shovel to the known spot and began to dig.

“How much is buried?” Miller asked.

“Just enough.”

JONES THUMBED SOME TOBACCO INTO HIS PIPE AND EYED Mr. Charles Urschel. Urschel’s face was gaunt and hollow, the flesh around his eyes reddened and blistered. He had changed into fresh clothes that morning-lightweight navy trousers and a white short-sleeved linen shirt. Jones could tell he’d showered and shaved, had his breakfast and coffee. But despite the morning routine, Urschel hadn’t stopped tapping his foot and checking his timepiece since he’d sat down.

Jones struck a match and got the bowl going, the cavernous study empty besides Jones and SAC Colvin. The young boy displaying his talents as notetaker, keeping quiet and letting Jones take the lead, the interview continuing from where they stopped late last night, when Berenice Urschel begged Jones to let her husband get some rest. Jones had complied, but then had shown up at six that morning, and had waited damn-near two hours until Urschel said he was ready.

“I hope this won’t take long.”

“Could take a while, sir.”

“I haven’t set foot at my company.”

“You’ll have some time this afternoon.”

“But I didn’t see anything,” Urschel said. “Everything I could know I told you last night. I even told you about the well and how bad that water tasted. You seemed to take great interest in the mineral quality of it last night. Perhaps that will lead to something.”

“Yes, sir,” Jones said, walking and smoking and moving about in the room, lined from bottom to top with leather-bound volumes of old stories and old tales of murder and adventure, and very serious men taking things very seriously. “Tell me about the boy.”

“He was a boy.”

“You said he went by ‘Potatoes.’ ”

“I doubt that was his real name. Probably something those crooks made up.”

“You never know,” Jones said. “I knew a boy in El Paso that everyone called ‘Turd Head.’ ”

“Well, I doubt the moniker.”

“But he watched you most?”

“He did.”

“And read to you?”

“He did. Yes.”

“What sorts of material?”

“Magazines.”

“What sort?”

Urschel was quiet for a moment and then said, “Ladies’ Home Journal. McCall’s. Frivolous things in which I had no interest.”

“Wasn’t your kind of reading?”

“It passed the time,” Urschel said. “The boy also had some kind of brochure on the World’s Fair and read from that quite often. In fact, I would say he was obsessed with it. Liked to read a portion about native dancers who dance in the nude.”

“Did he offer anything personal from the Fair?”

“Just that he planned on going.”

“Isn’t everybody?”

The more he smoked, the more Jones paced. A flurry of questions came to mind as he paced, smoke breaking and scattering with his steps.

“What about the old man?” Jones said. “You conversed with him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“About?”

“Nothing of consequence. We had some bad weather the night before they released me. There was wind and rain, and I asked them if they had tornadoes.”

“What did they say?”

“Said they had a lot more tornadoes down in Oklahoma and Texas.”

“That was a plant,” Jones said with certainty. He strolled behind Urschel’s desk and pulled back a thin layer of drapes, seeing the newsmen gather around E. E. Kirkpatrick, who read a statement from the family that he’d typed out over breakfast. The statement basically read that Mr. Urschel didn’t recall a goddamn thing about his kidnappers, which was a view that old Charlie kept on sharing with Jones.

“Could you even sneak a peak? Of something? Anything?”

“A few days after they took me, I got the bandages loose. I was able to peer around a bit. They kept me in a shack, like I said. The outhouse was nearby.”

“Hold on,” Jones said. He sat at Urschel’s desk and pulled a small notebook from his satchel. “How many rooms in this shack?”

“Three?”

“Which way did the boards run in the house?”

“The boards?”

“Floorboards.”

“Judging on the heat from the sun,” Urschel said. “East and west.”

Jones nodded. “What about the outhouse? Which direction?”

“West,” Urschel said. “I’m sure of it. But, sir, I really don’t see the point in…”

Jones kept the pipe in his teeth and held up his left hand as he sketched a bit, adding the three rooms to a modest shack, an outhouse, the road Urschel had mentioned last night. That old well where they drew the mineral water. “Did you see animals?”

“Heard them,” Urschel said. “Pigs, chickens. The old man and the boy spoke of a prize white-faced bull, and I saw the animal’s face when I ran. It was about all I saw when I was running.”

“Sun blind?” Jones asked.

Urschel nodded. “I think I lost control of my mind a bit, too.”

“Happens with heat.”

“The boy spoke of a woman of loose character who lived nearby,” Urschel said. “He joked about it often.”

“What did he say?”

“Only that there was a teenage whore in the vicinity. I guess she only charged a quarter for intercourse.”

Jones nodded. He sketched some more, adding arrows and asking a bit more about where Urschel had heard the farm animals. The man had forgotten about an old cornfield and something he’d heard about a melon patch with fruit just turning ripe. Jones asked about the direction cars arrived from and how they departed, and then he came all the way back around and asked more about the storm and how long it lasted and what he did during the rains.

“I know the rain started before five-thirty.”

“And how’s that?”

“Well, at five-thirty is when the airplane would pass.”

“The airplane.”

“Yes, sir,” Urschel said. “I really must be going, Mr. Jones. Might we-”

“Tell me more about the aircraft.”

“An airplane would pass every day at nine in the morning and again about five-thirty,” he said. “I’d ask the boy for the time several minutes after the plane sounded so he wouldn’t get suspicious. But I didn’t think much of it. Planes fly all over this nation these days.”

“What about the rain?”

Urschel looked at him and crossed his legs. His face looked drawn, his dark eyes hollow and void.

“Did that second plane fly the day of the storms?”

Urschel looked up at the ceiling and rubbed his jaw. He thought for a moment and then shook his head. “No, sir. I didn’t hear that plane.”

Jones nodded.

“Is that of importance?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Jones said, puffing on the pipe. “It most surely is.”