Infamous

2

Kathryn had met George Kelly in a Fort Worth speak just before he got nabbed selling some moonshine on a Cherokee reservation just outside Tulsa. She’d been with Little Steve Anderson back then, and George had been with the kind of girl that George tended to be with before he traded up. He’d looked at her and lit a cigarette, a fat ruby ring on his finger, and winked, saying, “Where have you been all my life?” And he said it right there, right in front of Little Steve and the woman he was with, and Kathryn felt like she couldn’t breathe. He was big and dark and looked rich. Very rich. And that night she’d snuck away from that sad-sack husband of hers and wrapped her long fine legs around big George in the back of his 1928 Buick, him taking it to her so hard that it about wore out the shocks on that poor machine.

As she’d slipped back into her unmentionables and scooted her silk dress past her knees, she lit a smoke. George had smiled at her and she smiled back, saying: “Just what in the world are we going to do about this?”

“That’s the most romantic story I’ve ever heard,” said the girl, a friend of Kathryn’s who worked the coat check at the Blackstone Hotel. “That’s something out of Daring Confessions, or Good Housekeeping if you kept out the sex part.”

The two sat at a corner table at a beer joint in downtown Fort Worth, the old basement of a hardware store that still smelled of fresh-cut wood and penny nails. The bar was mahogany and the floors black-and-white honeycomb tile. The place was class in spades. Waiters wore white, and the band, Cecil Gill and the Yodeling Cowboys, dressed in satin garb with clean ten-gallon hats.

“I loved him more when I saw how he handled himself,” she said. “You know, when he worked a job.”

Two more women joined them from the bar. A negro in a white jacket brought them all shots of whiskey and frosty Shiner Bocks in thick glass mugs. The booze not as much fun since drinking was getting to be legit.

“And when he got out of the Big House,” Kathryn said, “I was right there waiting for him. We drove straight through to Saint Paul and got married on the spot.”

“I like your ring,” said the girl.

Kathryn looked at her finger as if eyeing a speck of dust. “I’m getting a new one soon.”

“Do tell,” said the hatcheck girl.

“It’s big.”

“How big?”

“So big that I’m through with Texas.”

“A bank?”

“There’s no money in banks anymore,” Kathryn said. “This Depression ruined that. You can’t find a decent jug these days.”

The three girls leaned forward. They were pretty, all of them wearing stylish new hats cocked just so and expensive little silk scarves. Kathryn pulled out a cigarette, always a Lucky, from a silver case, and two of the girls greeted her with a match.

She smiled self-consciously and took the one nearest to her.

“Where’s George?” asked one of the girls.

“Working.”

“Did you bring ’em?” asked another.

Kathryn smiled and reached into her little purse, pulling out three spent brass bullet casings. She slapped them on the table and said, “You can probably still feel the heat in ’em. He shot up a barn this morning. You know, to practice.”

“Is it true he can write his name in bullets?” asked the hatcheck girl, maybe getting a little too breathless about George.

“Sister, ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly can write his name in blood.”

KATHRYN GOT BACK TO MULKEY STREET A FEW HOURS LATER SO plastered with whiskey and gin she nearly took out a fire hydrant turning in to the bungalow’s driveway. The bungalow had belonged to her second husband, Charlie Thorne, and she was glad he’d left her something before shooting himself in the head with a.38, leaving a typed sob-sister note blaming his problems on her. Can’t live with her, can’t live with out her, the note read.

The kitchen light was on.

She closed the door behind her and leaned against the window glass to steady her feet.

George R. Kelly, aka George Barnes, aka R. G. Shannon, aka “Machine Gun” Kelly, looked up from an iron frying pan where he was flipping pancakes. He wore nothing but boxer shorts and blue socks. A cigarette hung loose out of his mouth.

“Where the hell you been?”

“Working.”

“Working?”

The boxer shorts were white and decorated with red hearts. His blue socks were held up with garters.

“People are talking about you,” she said. “How do you think that gets done?”

“You’re drunk.”

“So are you,” she said, eyeing the empty bottle of Old Log Cabin bourbon on the table.

“Aw, hell,” George said. “Is that the way it’s gonna go?”

“Why are you cooking so much?”

“We got company.”

“It’s two in the morning.”

“I just got a call,” George said. “Verne and Harvey are in town. Don’t that beat all?”

“What?” Kathryn asked. “Are you screwy?”

“They needed a place to sleep.”

“What the hell are they doing in Texas? They hate Texas.”

“Hand me some bacon out of the icebox.”

Kathryn plopped down at the little kitchen table and massaged her temples. She breathed, just trying to wrap her drunk mind around what George had done.

“Don’t get sore,” he said. “Make coffee.”

“You make coffee, you rotten son of a bitch.”

“Hey.”

“Don’t you know that we got work to do? Have you even read any of those articles I cut out? Do you know how broke we are? GMAC calls every damn day about the Cadillac.”

“I got that covered.”

“What? You and Albert are going to go knock over a gas station for ten bucks? This is real money.”

“I guess.”

“You guess?” Kathryn stood, walked up to her large husband, and rapped on his forehead with her knuckles. “This isn’t some bank job in Tupelo. This is the score. And just as we’re getting ready, you want Harvey Bailey and that sadistic son of a bitch Verne Miller cutting in. You know they’ll want in.”

“Maybe we should cut ’ em in. They ’re good, Kit. They’re real good. I’ve worked with them, not you. It’s my ass.”

“And you want to cut the money another two ways?”

“Goddamnit.”

“Listen to what I’m saying.”

“That’s not it. Aw, hell. You made me burn the gosh-dang pancakes.”

She took a breath, damn glad she was drunk right now. She half walked, half stumbled back to the bedroom, where she pulled her new dress up over her head, down to her pink slip, and looked at herself in the long oval mirror. She was still good-looking at thirty, still had the curves but not too fat, and the dark hair and eyes she got on account of her Cherokee grandmother. Nice cheekbones. Like the makeup ladies told her at Neiman Marcus, good bones accounted for it all.

A black curl dropped over her eye as she studied herself, turning left to right, watching her profile and trying to remember that pout she’d caught from Claudette Colbert.

She wiped the dark red lipstick off her mouth with a rag and had just plopped into an unmade bed when George stuck his head in the room. “Honey, you mind making up the bed and sofa for the boys? They’re gonna be real tired.”

She didn’t answer, pretending she was asleep, but after he closed the door Kathryn turned over and clicked on a bedside lamp. From the middle of a thick family Bible, she pulled out a handful of neatly clipped newspaper articles from the Daily Oklahoman. One of them had been read so much it had grown soft and light in her hands, the folds like lines on an old-time treasure map.

The headline read OIL MAN URSCHEL MARRIES SLICK WIDOW.

The union of the two fortunes will make the Urschels the richest household in the state and one of the richest in the nation. Charles Urschel began his career as partner of the noted Tom Slick, King of the Wildcatters, back when Oklahoma…

Kathryn read the story four times, each time with a pleasant smile, feeling much, much better about the world, before clicking off the table lamp and falling asleep.

Sometime about dawn she heard heavy feet and laughter and the clank of bottles and glasses and the smell of more burning bacon.

She lay there staring at the cracked ceiling, thinking of ways to send those two rotten bastards on their way.

THE NEWSBOYS CALLED IT THE “UNION STATION MASSACRE.” By the time Gus T. Jones was pulled from the shot-up machine, five men were dead. Sheriff Reed, the two Kansas City cops, Frank Nash, and the young agent. The boy’s name was Caffrey. Joe Lackey was shot in the arm, and the SAC was shot in the shoulder. Jones was pulled from the car without a scratch, and he walked the breadth of the brick streets, ringed by onlookers and police, and found the whole thing muted and curious, especially the way one of the big cops lay across the other, like twin boys sleeping in a river of blood.

Jones wired Hoover from the station.

Hoover cabled back that he’d send more men.

The afternoon heat was on them, and Jones stayed long after each man was picked up off the uneven streets by a pasty mortician and his wife and driven away on a flatbed truck. Jones had immediately sealed off the station while the cops put out a radio call for the Chevy. He personally interviewed twenty-seven witnesses, most of whom had been eating a morning meal at the Harvey House. A reporter had spoken to the woman at the Travelers Aid Society, and soon the word was that “Pretty Boy” Floyd and his gang were responsible. The hell of it was that Jones didn’t know who’d pulled the trigger or driven the car, or if there’d been two or a half dozen of ’em.

Every story varied. The gunman was short. He was tall. He was dark. He was light. He wore a gray suit. He wore a blue suit. He was handsome. The man was ugly.

When bullets fly, the last thing a person does is study faces.

The hatband on Jones’s Stetson had grown wet.

He walked back into the relative coolness of the station, the place feeling even more like a cathedral. He sat down on a long, lone wooden bench. A wide swath of light fell from the windows, and he tilted his face into the sun, pulling off his glasses and cleaning them with a handkerchief.

It was then he noticed the blood and gray matter across the lapels of his jacket.

Old Sheriff Reed grabbing for that shotgun between his legs, weathered hands slipping while trying to take aim at the gunmen, instead blowing off half of Jelly Nash’s head. Jones knew he’d take that image to the grave and never tell a soul. He figured Lackey would do the same, knowing Reed worked better for the newsboys as a martyr and not an old lawman with shaky hands.

Jones thought back to a box canyon nearly twenty years ago just outside Pilares, where some greenhorn Rangers and a lone Customs agent had followed Mexican bandit Chico Cano as he drove a herd of stolen horses back to Mexico. The canyon had been nothing but a trap, and soon Jones’s friend and the young Rangers had been pinned down by at least thirty bandits, two Rangers escaping and making for a nearby ranch where they got word to Jones. By the time he found the men, they were all dead. Shot a hundred times, faces unrecognizable after being smashed with rocks. The bandits had shot their horses, too, and stolen their saddles and guns. Some political types in Austin blamed the men who escaped for not staying in the canyon and fighting to the death.

Jones would never forget loading up those boys on mule back, the heat more than a hundred, the bloated bodies already busted and the smell so awful that it caused one of the animals to vomit.

It took years. But Jones got the saddles and the guns back.

And Chico Cano’s head, too. A gift from Pancho Villa.

“Sir?”

Jones slipped the glasses back on his face, bringing Union Station back into focus. Another young agent handed him coffee and told him he’d drive whenever he was ready to head to the office. Jones thanked him and drank the coffee by himself in that long wash of light. He cleaned his glasses again and, when no one was looking, wiped the brains and blood from his jacket, tucked the handkerchief into his pocket, closed his eyes, and said a short prayer.

Then he stood, checked his weapon, and walked back to the Western Union office.

The next cable to Hoover read AGENTS CANNOT WORK ARMED WITH PEA-SHOOTERS. PLEASE ADVISE.

THE SONSABITCHES HAD LEFT HER CUTE LITTLE KITCHEN A goddamn mess. Kathryn was no nigger maid-Junie came on Wednesday-and she didn’t have time to be scraping out skillets and pouring suds into her big sink to clean up the piles of dishes laden with pancake syrup and cigarette ash. Coffee mugs that smelled like piney gin and sweet bourbon, open bottles of beer and busted poker chips. Son of a bitch. Kathryn walked over the black-and-white tile maze of the floor in her gingham housecoat, hair pulled into a tight knot behind her head, her arms elbow-deep into the bubbles, a cigarette hanging loose from her mouth.

The radio was tuned to WBAP, Jimmie Rodgers singing “Miss the Mississippi and You.” That yodeler was dead but still singing like the world was nothing but heartache and pain.

She poured in more suds and scrubbed another dish with a brush, rinsing with the clean water, drying with a damp towel, and placing it up on the rack. She grabbed a coffee cup that had been part of a set from her mama, Ora, and she gritted her teeth at the sight of a fat cigar ash in the bottom. George.

The back door to her little bungalow opened, and she smiled up at the face of old Albert Bates, the only friend of George Kelly’s that she could stand. He was nearly as tall as George, soft muscled, with a high forehead and gentle eyes. Bates was a good egg. A professional thief who was as honest as they come.

“Hey, doll,” Kathryn said.

“Jesus H.,” Albert said, kissing her on the cheek and setting a suit jacket across a chair. “I miss the party?”

He rolled up his sleeves and began to clear more dishes, whistling along with old Jimmie the brakeman’s yodels while Kathryn bopped her head in time.

“Harvey Bailey and Verne Miller stopped by last night.”

“They’re gone?” Albert asked, nudging Kathryn over with his butt and taking a spot in the suds, handing her the clean dish to rinse.

“I told George to get ’em gone.”

“Where to?” he asked.

“They showed George a map, easy-pickin’ banks.”

“No banks are easy pickin’ these days. Nothin’ to pick.”

He handed her a couple of her mother’s cups. Chipped china with delicate rose designs.

“I can’t stand either one of those bastards,” Kathryn said, rinsing and then drying. “Verne Miller gives me the creeps. Those eyes. Jesus.”

“Did George…”

“He’s not that stupid, thank God,” Kathryn said. “This is a two-man job.”

“And one woman.”

“And one woman.”

“Doesn’t come much better than Charles F. Urschel,” Albert Bates said. “Hey, can I have a smoke?”

Kathryn dried her hands and reached for her pack of Luckies, sticking one into Albert’s chiseled mug and lighting it with a kitchen match.

“Oil,” Bates said. “Those people shit money. How’d you find ’im?”

“Can you believe it was George’s idea?” she said. “He’s got a finger man in O.K. City who said this fat cat was ripe.”

“Just like we like ’em.”

“Al?”

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“You ever get a pain in your heart just ’cause you feel so damn regular and dull?”

“No one would ever call you dull, Kit.”

Kathryn smiled and pulled out another smoke. “It sure is good to have some sense in the house.”

“Me and George will plan this thing so tight, it’ll be-”

Kathryn mashed her index finger to Albert Bates’s lips and said: “Shush. Don’t be a dope and get all cocky.”