Infamous (32 page)

The boy began to pick the guitar and sing about a cloudless morning on a mountaintop, watching the smokestack below on that old Southern railroad, and the way he twanged his voice and made the words sound pretty, Harvey could close his eyes and think he was listening to a white man.
“That ole 97, the fastest train / Ever ran the Southern line.”

“What else you know?”

“ ‘Birmingham Jail’?” the boy said.

Manion uncorked the bottle and took a sip of some bonded Tennessee whiskey and passed it on to Harvey. Pretty soon, a trusty pushing a broom was watching the men through the bars, and he smiled a big negro grin before breaking out into a jig and dancing around. Manion cracked open the door and let him in, and, man, that started it, the trusty walloping around on his brogans, slapping his knees and twirling, the negro guitarist wiping his brow and accepting a tin cup of whiskey from Manion, who was real careful not to let a negro drink from the bottle.

“You Mr. Bailey, ain’t you?” asked the guitar picker.

“I am.”

“I read about you in the paper,” he said. “They say you the best bank robber that ever was.”

“If I was that good,” Harvey said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

They finished off the bottle, and Manion tossed the trusty keys to his desk and told him to fetch up another bottle, and the boy returned a short time later. The guitar picker, who called himself R.L., launched into “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine” with a grin and a wink, singing that if he could only erase the lines from his face and bring back the gold in his hair.

“Goddamn, you make me feel old,” Harvey said. “Sing something else.”

“Been working on a little tune,” R.L. said, tuning his guitar a bit, “About a ‘Kind Hearted Woman.’ ”

“Damn, you can play, boy,” Harvey said.

“Didn’t come cheap.”

“How you figure?”

“I sold my soul to play.”

Harvey turned up the bottle and looked to Manion, yapping it up and slapping his knee, resting his hands on his fattened belly with his tin star pinned upside down on his old chest. Harvey nodded, “Every man’s got his price.”

The negro was halfway into the song, the trusty using his broom as a dancing partner, when Harvey heard the heavy boots on the jail floor moving closer. Manion was up, slapping his thighs and keeping time, the bottle hanging loose in his hands, and didn’t turn till he heard the metallic squeak of the cell door flying open.

In the doorframe stood Gus T. Jones and another old man, carrying a six-shooter.

Jones looked at the scene, his mouth downturned like it was the sorriest goddamn thing he’d ever witnessed. He shook his head with pity for all the weakness in the world, removed his hat, and said, “I sure hope we’re not interrupting anything.”

KATHRYN WOKE UP WITH A SPLITTING HEAD AND A DRY MOUTH and only vague memories of a county-line roadhouse where she and Louise had danced on the bar, with George working out a sloppy slugfest with two country goons. She remembered there had been a lot of laughter and fun and a queen’s share of gin, but after that most of the details were fuzzy. She thought she recalled losing Ching-A-Wee when taking him out for a squirt at the hotel, but she felt the dog breathing between her legs and knew all was well, and she kicked off the covers and stumbled to the bathroom, making a cup of her hand and lifting water to her mouth.

Her skin felt like paper, and then she looked in the mirror and saw her face was paper.

Sometime in the night she’d pulled on one of those Part-T masks that came free with one of those Hollywood magazines, and right now she was staring cold-eyed into the face of Jean Harlow. She peered out the bathroom, and there sleeping in the big, rough-and-tumble bed were George Raft and Joan Crawford.

Crawford had a big hairy leg and a bare chest. Raft was wearing a pink slip.

She drank the water, the slivers of morning piercing her eyes as she tore the elastic from her head, remembering patches of how it had all been such a hoot. The three movie stars out in Des Moines, the big bankroll in Joan Crawford’s thick fingers, laughing and drinking and all being fine till one of the country boys asked Miss Crawford if she’d like to suck his pecker.

George didn’t hesitate with the knuckle sandwich.

Prison makes a man a little edgy, Kathryn guessed.

She scooped up Ching-A-Wee and rustled at Louise’s shoulder until the eyes opened in Raft’s mug and she heard, “Hey, what gives?,” Louise tearing the mask from part of her face and then flipping over to face the wall. More gin and champagne bottles, the trays of food on the carpet this time, steak bones gnawed clean, and little piles of doo-doo by the front door.

George had thrown his dress pants over a lamp, his two-tone shoes kicked off by the bathroom.

Kathryn slinked into her feathered robe and feathered slippers and carried Chingy over to the elevator, where the nicest old man asked her, “What floor?,” and she said, “The lobby,” and then the old man asked her if she’d like to get dressed first. And Kathryn said she paid enough money to dress any way she pleased, and, if that didn’t please the staff, then so be it.

She bummed a smoke from the doorman and let Chingy take a squirt and sniff a bit. The doorman, growing nervous with the wind fluttering up her silk robe and Kathryn not bothering a bit to pull it down, offered to bring the dog back to the suite.

Kathryn shrugged, the morning sun a real son of a bitch, and elevatored up to the top floor. All along the hallway morning papers had been laid out, all clean and neat. Kathryn scooped up the first one she saw, tripping along to the presidential suite and scratching her behind a bit, yawning and stretching, the fat paper hanging loose in the palm of her hand, above the fold declaring U.S. WARSHIPS TO PROTECT CUBANS, and then flipping on over to see KIDNAPPERS’ NEST RAIDED.

And there she stopped and stood, mouth open, not even awake yet, to see a picture of her mother with Boss Shannon and dumb old Potatoes, who was fool enough to look right into the lens and smile. A smaller headline read, “Desperado ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly and Wife Still at Large.”

“Goddamn,” she said. “Goddamn.”

She threw open the door to the suite, flung open the curtains, nobody stirring in the big bed until she swatted George—still looking like a fool as Joan Crawford—who shot off his ass and reached for the gun, aiming at Kathryn’s heart.

“Cool it, Joan,” Kathryn said, throwing the paper in his lap. “The G’s got ’em. They raided the farm four days ago. They’re onto us.”

Louise stirred in the bed, complaining and tossing in the tangled sheets until she fell with a loud thud to the floor.

“Get dressed,” Kathryn said. “Both of you.”

“What gives?” Louise asked.

“We’re headed back to Texas to rescue my family,” Kathryn said, reaching for the pistol in George’s loose hand and then prying the mask from his face until the elastic broke from his thick neck.

“What’s that gonna do, Kit?” he asked, looking a lot uglier than Joan Crawford. “It’s too late.”

“The hell it is,” she said. “You brought my kin into this and now you’re gonna get ’em out.”

“Me and what army?”

“I don’t care how you do it,” she said. “Take your pecker out of your hand and make some calls to all those hoods that you brag about knowing. Call in some favors, make some bribes. I don’t give a good goddamn. Just get my momma.”

“Quit your crying,” George said.

“I’m not crying,” Kathryn said, knowing she’d started.

A toilet flushed, and Louise came startled from the bathroom, carrying her hatbox, already dressed with her hat all crooked. “I think I’m gonna be sick,” she said.

Kathryn bit into her knuckles, still holding the gun. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch. How’d they know?”

George didn’t say a word, keeping a fat finger running over the words in the news story and then turning the page.

“I said how’d they know?” she said.

George didn’t say anything for a few moments and then closed the newspaper in his lap. He looked up at Kathryn with the most confused of expressions as he asked, “Who in the hell is ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly?”

24

T
hat was a hell of a thrilling conversation,” Doc White said. “You expected him to sing?” Jones asked.

“Well,” White said, turning to Jones on the steps of the Dallas County Jail, “if I were in that predicament, facing that long of a stretch, I’d be open to some straight talk.”

“But you’re not in that predicament.” Gus Jones affixed his Stetson on his head and squinted into the afternoon sun. A long shadow fell from the jail and sliced down the marble steps. “If it were you, you’d react a certain way. J. Harvey Bailey is a different breed.”

“Sounds like you admire him.”

“I wouldn’t call it admiration, Doc. It’s
understanding
the animal.”

“Shit, Buster. I never knew you were so goddamn wise.”

“You sure are funny today, Doc. You could be Will Rogers.”

A government sedan rolled up to the curb below. The wind shooting down the long avenues and through the cracks of concrete and the glass buildings was as hot and dry as the desert. He recalled visiting Dallas twenty years back, and there wasn’t a building more than a few stories tall. Now the whole center of town reached to the damn clouds, keeping all the familiar hotels and shops in shadow.

“I just think Harv is pulling our leg,” White said. “Said he was only at the Shannons’ place to grab some shut-eye. Who’s gonna believe that?”

“He confessed he’d just robbed two banks. The man was tired. He has a bum leg.”

“You believe him?”

“Now, why in the world would a man confess to robbing two banks if he hadn’t?”

“To loosen the noose from the Urschel job.”

“Maybe.”

“When I got up, you ask him about Kansas City?”

“Shit, I forgot.”

“Aw, hell, Buster. You’re just trying to be contrary. In the old days, we’d just tie Bailey to a mesquite tree and set his feet on fire till he told us what we wanted to know.”

“If Bailey was a weak-minded fool, I’d contemplate that. You think I forgot about those that got killed? But he’s not gonna give himself up, or Miller. You could toss a rope around his neck and he’d stick to the same story.”

The two men crawled into the black sedan and it pulled away, Joe Lackey turning from the front passenger seat and resting his head on his forearm. “Nothing?”

“Nope,” White said. “Buster’s gone soft on us.”

“He confessed to working two jobs with Clark and Underhill.”

“He say where in the hell’s Verne Miller?” Lackey asked. He wiped a drop of sweat off his big nose with a forefinger, his face swarthy and wet under his gray felt hat.

“Said he hadn’t seen Verne since he escaped from Lansing. Said they played a round of golf.”

“Bullshit,” Lackey said. “Two men saw Miller dart out of that cornfield. You ask him about Union Station?”

“Said he read about it in the papers.”

“Bullshit.”

“Well, of course it’s all bullshit,” Jones said. “You know, I’m getting tired of being second-guessed. I get enough of that from Mary Ann. What’d you get from the Shannons?”

“Good ole Ma sez Kathryn Kelly is a fine Christian woman who has a mental deficiency for bad men.”

“And Pa?” Jones asked.

“Nothing new,” Lackey said. “Same as before. Said Kelly threatened to kill him and his family if they didn’t help.”

“Kelly wasn’t there when he picked up the gun,” Jones said.

“Yeah,” Lackey said, nodding. “He didn’t have much of an answer for that. And says he never saw Verne Miller. Every time I mentioned Miller, I thought the old guy would piss himself.”

The drive took them out of the downtown, past an old warehouse reading PERKINS DRY GOODS COMPANY, and onto the highway headed northwest to Love Field, where they’d arranged for an airplane back to Oklahoma City. They passed roadside courts, filling stations, and new Wild West highway attractions, Passion plays, and Alamo reenactments, the whole town of Dallas spilling out onto what used to be a dirt trail and now had been paved, leading to damn-near everywhere. One of the motor courts had been built in the style of an old Spanish mission, complete with tile and stucco, and it advertised authentic rooms for two dollars a night. Down Highway 77, a roadside diner advertised A MEAL LIKE MOM’S for only two bits.

“You can find everything you want out here,” Jones said. “Everything a man needs.”

Western-wear shops. Steak houses. A billboard facing the road into town read JOBLESS MEN KEEP GOING. WE CAN’T TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN. Another billboard promised that tuberculosis was PREVENTABLE AND TREATABLE

The driver pulled off the main highway and past a gate opening onto the tarmac. They followed a side road to a large, open hangar where a single-engine silver airplane was being fussed over by several mechanics. Special Agent Bruce Colvin waited inside along with the young sharpshooter from his office, Bryce. Bryce held two rifles, one in each hand. Colvin’s hair was neatly greased, and he held a perfectly steamed hat in his long fingers.