Infamous

32

So we’re on?” Harvey said.

“We’re on,” Alvin Karpis said.

“Been a hell of a trip to Chi with the roadblocks, train stations covered and all,” Harvey said. “We’ve been driving for the last two days without sleep, switching off at the wheel, keeping to the cat roads. I can’t stand my own smell.”

“How you doin’ back there, Verne?” Karpis asked, looking in the rearview mirror of his Chrysler Imperial convertible, spit-shined, with white leather interior. Miller grunted and blew some smoke up toward the front of the car.

“It’s worth your time, Harv,” Karpis said.

“Sawyer said it’s the biggest job he’d ever heard of.”

“It’s worth your time,” Karpis said, driving the streets of downtown Chicago, racing the El train above them, in and out of shadows, looking sharp in a white suit and straw boater, flushed with sun, health, and money. He shifted down onto Wabash and then took a hard turn onto Roosevelt, heading west over a rusted bridge and the river.

“Are we playing a game, Kreeps?” Harvey asked. “We’re pretty beat.”

“Read about Dallas,” Karpis said, smiling over at Harvey in the passenger seat. “Ten floors. How’d you pull that off?”

“I greased the wheels of justice.”

“Listen, a couple fellas from the Syndicate came to see me this week,” Karpis said. “First thing I thought was, Oh, shit, they know about the job and want a piece.”

“Who?”

“ ‘Three-Fingered’ Willie and Klondike O’Donnell. Some other fella named Deandre. They wanted to know if we’d thrown in with the Touhy brothers. You ain’t in with the Touhys, are you, Verne?”

Miller didn’t say anything.

“That’s what I told ’em,” Karpis said, heading in a straight shot through the West Side, passing the brownstones and corner markets, kids playing under the shade of oaks. “So this guy Deandre says to me to enjoy Chicago, but don’t get caught in this personal shit storm between the Touhys and the Syndicate. They’re no fans of you, Miller. Said Kansas City was a top-shelf clusterfuck. I hate to say it, but they got it in for you pretty bad, Verne. They’d love to ace you off God’s green earth. Killin’ those cops in Kansas City was bad business. I’d lay pretty low, if I was you.”

“So, what’s the job, Kreeps?” Harvey said.

“Federal Reserve,” Karpis said.

“Right downtown.”

“Right downtown,” Karpis said.

“You’re nuts,” Harvey said. “No offense and all.”

“I got an ace up my sleeve,” Karpis said. “You know how much money we’re talking?”

Karpis told them. Harvey smiled.

Karpis drove them over to this place in Cicero, Joe’s Square Deal Garage, where he parked in a side alley, dripping with rainwater, with ferns and weeds growing from the red brick walls. Inside, they found a little fella welding in blue coveralls with the name JOE stitched on the pocket. When he saw the men, he killed the torch and flipped back his shield and smiled. He’d been adding thick steel plates onto a brand-new Hudson. Karpis circled the car, knocked on the glass with a fist, and popped the trunk, studying what looked like a little oil canister connected to an assortment of tubes and wires.

Miller looked over to Harvey. Harvey shrugged.

“Armor-plated. Bulletproof glass. With a flip of a switch, we get a smoke screen that’ll cover a city block.”

“Trick car,” Miller said. “Great, if we make it out alive.”

“Why do you think I called you boys?”

Miller looked to Harvey. Harvey looked back and shrugged again.

“You two can stay here,” Karpis said. “Joe’s got a couple cots for you and a shower to clean up. I’ll see what I can do about clothes. Harvey, you look like you belong in a breadline.”

Harvey still wore Manion’s clothes, and the smell of the dead fat man was still on him. He thanked Karpis and went to the bathroom with a bar of soap and a straight razor, cleaning himself up the best he could and sliding into mechanic’s coveralls and some boots without laces.

“You bring ’em?” Karpis asked when he joined the boys back at the trick Hudson.

“Yeah, yeah.” Harvey found his golf bag in the trunk of the Plymouth and returned with two Thompsons and extra drums. Harvey admired the cleaning he’d done on the stock and barrel of one of them the other night and passed it over to Karpis.

“Nice,” Karpis said.

“Borrowed one of ’ em from Kelly.”

Joe the mechanic walked over, cleaning grease off his hands with a red rag soaked in gasoline. “George Kelly?” he asked. “ ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly?”

Harvey looked at the little guy, not liking that he was an eavesdropper or that he was talking about George Kelly like he was big shit. Karpis smiled, having been with Harvey that night in Minneapolis when George and Kathryn robbed him of ten g’s. “What’d he say, Joe?” Karpis asked with a smile.

“He had me put this little Cadillac in storage last month and bought a nice little Chevrolet off me,” Joe said. “Now he sez he’s gotten himself a Ford and wants to trade out again. Never thought I’d see him so soon-not in Chicago, with the heat all on him. Figured he’d be in South America by now, but he called and sez he’ll be here tomorrow. He thrown in with you fellas?”

A CORN FARMER GEORGE HAD KNOWN FROM HIS BOOTLEGGING days let them sleep a night in his barn not far out of Joplin off 66, the golden road they’d taken since Oklahoma, and would continue to weave off and on till they got to Chicago. Kathryn had run the Ford up into the big barn and killed the headlights, the farmer coming out to hand them some horse blankets and pillows, wandering to a big pile of hay and using his pitchfork to scare off a hog hidden inside. The hog squealed and trotted away, Kathryn saying she’d just as soon sleep in the backseat. The barn smelled of leather tack and pig shit.

“Y’all need some grub?” the farmer asked.

George told the man they’d eaten a hundred miles ago. Geraline still slept in the front seat, snoring, not stirring since the state line.

“Got another couple stayin’ the night, too,” the farmer said. “Don’t let ’em spook you. They’s set up in the loft.”

Kathryn grabbed the horse blanket, smelled cat urine, and tossed it back to George. George wandered around the big, open barn, holding the lantern and talking to a horse in its stall. “Hello, there.”

“Get some sleep,” Kathryn said.

“My, my,” George said, finding an empty stall, shining his light on a large stack of wooden crates halfway covered with a torn-up quilt.

“Quit talking to that horse and get some sleep.”

“God bless ’im.”

“What?”

“Likker,” George said. “Cases of the stuff.”

“That’s not yours,” Kathryn said, wandering out of the backseat of the car and trying to lead George back to the hay. But George had already opened a wooden crate and unscrewed the top of a jelly jar. He took a big sip. “Smooth as gasoline.”

He held the jar under Kathryn’s nose, and the fumes about knocked her out.

“That’ll make you go blind.”

“Mother’s milk.”

“It’s your turn to drive,” Kathryn said. “Don’t you think you’ll sleep it off in the backseat.”

“How ’bout a throw, baby?”

“How ’bout you throw yourself.”

“Come on, you can be the farmer’s daughter.”

“You’ll wake the kid.”

“The kid’s asleep,” George said. “Let’s roll in the hay.”

“Good night, George.”

Kathryn turned to the Ford but instead faced a thin, worn couple, standing in the door of the barn. The woman held a lantern, and the man shifted in a nervous fashion beside her. George held up the jelly jar and asked if they’d like a drink. Both of them had the hard, bony features of dirt farmers, wearing worn-out clothes and scrapes across their faces. The man had ears as big as Clark Gable’s and hair that looked like it had been combed with chicken grease. The woman had mousy brown hair and pale skin, and perhaps would’ve been pretty if life hadn’t been so damn rough. She tramped on through the pig shit and hay in an old-timey black dress and a modern beret. Her shoes were black laced boots like Kathryn had seen on Ora in old photographs.

The man stepped up to George and offered his hand. “You’re George Kelly.”

George opened his mouth, stumbling for a bit before saying, “Name’s Johnson. Travelin’ with my family.”

The rangy man laughed and took a hit of George’s liquor. “I’m Clyde Barrow. But you can call me Smith.”

George nodded.

“This is Mrs. Smith.”

The woman nodded at George. She had the plug of an old cigar in the side of her mouth and an old revolver hanging from a rope around her waist. She snuggled up into the arm of the lanky man as the man passed the jelly jar back to George. “Where y’all headed?”

George studied the man’s face. “You Buck Barrow’s brother?”

“I am.”

“We’re headed north,” George said.

“We’re headed south.”

“Sorry to hear about your brother,” George said.

The couple climbed up the barn ladder into the loft, and soon the lantern went out. George finished off half the jar of hooch and made some noise, turning over and over in the hay, until he said, “Gosh dang it,” and got in the backseat with her, smelling of barn animals and hay. Kathryn let him get close, figuring they could get clean in the morning, too tired to fight him, and she adjusted, nuzzling up into his chest. From high in the loft, Kathryn heard a rapid knock-knock-knocking, and the sharp, harsh cry of a woman deep in the throes.

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.”