the Hot Kid (2005) (18 page)

"Well, I shot Emmett Long--"

"That's the one, some years ago. I remember reading you knew him from before."

"When I was fifteen, still living at home. I stopped at the drugstore to get an ice cream cone and Emmett Long came in for a pack of cigarets."

"You knew him by sight?"

"I recognized him from wanted dodgers. He's there and a tribal cop I knew happened to walk in, a Creek named Junior Harjo and Emmett shot him twice, for no reason." Carl paused and said, "Before Junior came in I was eating the ice cream cone . . . Emmett asked me was it peach. He wanted a taste, so I handed him the cone and he held it ou
t
in front of him as it was starting to drip. He took a bite . . . I looked at him, there was ice cream on his mustache."

McShann started to grin. "That stuck in your head, didn't it? Stole your ice cream cone and the next time you saw him you shot him dead."

"He was a wanted felon," Carl said, "The reason I tracked him down."

"I understand," McShann said, "but it's a better story you popped him for taking your ice cream cone." He looked straight at Carl Webster and said, "You sure you didn't?"

McShann told how he never took lessons but started playing in church, then with the Gray Brothers, played in Tulsa with them, in Nebraska, in Iowa, came to Kansas City and started playing for a dollar and a quarter a night; then after hours would drop around to other clubs. He said Julia Lee was the best piano player around for making money 'cause she knew the tunes everybody liked and asked you to play. So he learned these tunes--never mind if you liked them or not, you had to make money to live--and pretty soon he was working in the better clubs making two dollars and fifty cents for the evening and another five or six bucks from the kitty they put in front of the stand. They each had a couple of drinks while they were talking about music and clubs. Carl saying, "It sounds like you've played in all the clubs around town."

McShann said, "Most of 'em. I get old I'll play whorehouse piano."

Carl said, "I'm thinking this girl I'm looking for, she could be attracted to the excitement--I mean the clubs, not the whorehouses-GCo
a
nd could be working in one of the joints. You happen to know of a redhead with pure white skin named Louly?"

Carl heard the name out loud as he said it and knew he had it wrong. But McShann was already telling him, "No, but I know a redhead with pure white skin name of Kitty." The name she wrote on the note Carl had in his pocket. She'd say to the gentlemen at the table, "Well, hi," sounding pleased to see them, "I'm Kitty. What can I serve you fellas?" Every once in a while she'd forget and say, "Well, hi, I'm Louly," and they wouldn't know the difference, more interested in seeing what they could see through her peach teddy. Just once a gentleman said, "I thought your name was Kitty," and she had to make up a story: how she was trying out her middle name, Kitty, 'cause she liked it better but wasn't used to it yet. After that happened, she'd remind herself who she was before going to the table.

It was the reporter from the Kansas City Star--the one who came to her home in Sallisaw before she went to Tulsa for the True Detective interview and then wasted her time waiting for Carl Webster to take her dancing--that reporter who told her if she ever went to Kansas City, get a job at Fred Harvey's in the Union Station. He said those girls made good tips for not having to take their clothes off. He said if she got a job at a club she might have to work bare naked. Louly said, "Oh . . . ?" The reporter said his favorite was Teddy's, once a millionaire's home at Eighteenth and Central. He said, "But don't go near the place if you're Baptist."

When she applied for a job, Johnny the manager said, "You're a cutie, but our customers come first. They want to mess around with you, while they're in the club, like have a feel? You let 'em. Outside the club, they want to take you to a hotel when you're through work? That's up to you."

Young rich guys who'd come in late, horny and half smashed an
d
want to get to it, were kind of a problem. They'd grab her in a back hall, a private room, even in Johnny's office, work a knee between her thighs and breathe hard trying to get her to leave with them.

"Parker, please, I don't work I'll get fired."

"Arthur, I'm so tired I could sleep standing up."

"Chip, I hate to say it, but I fell off the roof today."

She kept them coming back. They all had money, a couple were good-looking enough to be in the movies, and every one of them was married.

"Chandler, what will your wife say, you come home with my scent all over you?" It wasn't easy but worth it. These guys knew how to tip. Kitty's real problem was with Teddy Ritz.

She had scrimped to hold on to the $500 check the Oklahoma Bankers Association gave her for shooting Joe Young. Most of the $100 check from True Detective went for gas coming here and renting an apartment on West Thirty-first near the Lutheran Hospital. She had gone to the club to apply for a job and spoke to the manager. Johnny looked her over and said she'd hear pretty quick. The next day Teddy Ritz himself stopped by with a dark-haired young guy, really handsome but dark, and with little cut scars on his face like you see on fighters. She had just moved in and was unpacking, a suitcase and a few boxes. Teddy prowled around opening doors, chewing his gum. He came out of the bathroom saying, "I like to know how hygenic my girls are," and to the young guy, "You ever sleep in a Murphy bed?" The young guy said, "What's that?" with some kind of accent. When Teddy was finished looking around, sat down and said to Kitty, "Okay, what do you do?"

"I kept books at a department store."

"You're lying. Doesn't matter--I wouldn't have a good-looking redhead working a comptometer. You strip?"

"I wouldn't know how." The young good-looking guy with all that curly dark hair said with his accent, "You don't know how to take your clothes off?"

She saw Teddy Ritz give the young guy a serious look, cold, and the young guy shrugged.

Teddy was sitting on a chair half-turned from the junk desk that came with the furnished apartment. He brought his arm back to lay it on the desk, not looking, and pushed her rental agreement and check from the Bankers Association off the desk. Teddy looked down at the floor, then bent down and picked up the envelope the check was in, leaving the rental agreement.

He said, "What's this?"

"A reward they gave me?"

"For what?"

Teddy looked like the kind would get a kick out of her answer, so she told him. "Shooting a bank robber."

He stared at her for a few minutes.

"You're telling me you're in a bank while the guy's robbing it?" He saw her shaking her head, but knew everything and said, "What were you doing with a gun, in a bank?" Now he seemed confused, frowning.

"You were with the guy you shot?"

Louly said, "You want to hear what happened?"

She began telling him how this convict Joe Young stole her stepfather's car and was holding her against her will in a tourist cabin when the police came looking for him and she was trapped in the cabin with a wanted man. Got that far and saw Teddy wasn't listening. He had the check out of the envelope and was glancing at the letter from the Bankers Association, thanking her for her courageous act. Teddy looked up.

"What were you going to do with this?"

"I thought I'd put it in the bank."

"Sweetheart, banks are shaky. Let me take care of it for you. Some guy'll come along and sell you something."

Louly made a face and said, "Gee, I don't know," like she had anything to say about it. Teddy slipped the check inside his Chesterfield saying, "Don't tell me you don't trust your own boss."

She had a feeling the young guy, if he had been a fighter, might say something in a kidding way--if it would work with his accent--She's a big girl, can take care of her own money. But he didn't. He shrugged. This evening, Kitty was serving sidecars to three young hotshots at a table in the bar, bringing them each two cocktails at a time so they wouldn't die of thirst between drinks, Kitty with a smile frozen to her face.

She was waiting for Teddy. When he came in she'd make herself walk up to him and ask for her $500, because her mom had to have an operation and they didn't have the money, account of their cotton crop had failed this past summer, as so many did, dried to kernels and blew away. She had to see that her mom had her operation. And Teddy'll say, You're lying.

She looked toward the foyer--her story ready, though not anxious to try it on this gangster--and there was Carl Webster. It was, it was Carl in his raincoat hanging open and his hat that had to sit just right, Carl holding a worn leather grip and standing with a piano player she recognized, both of them looking her way and grinning. Now the piano player was taking the grip from Carl and heading for the coat check and Carl was coming this way and Kitty felt her frozen smile thaw and heard her own voice in her mind say, My God, look at him. She wanted to run into his arms and tell him she was sorr
y
for taking a powder on him, leaving Tulsa the way she did, and thought of that blues song the colored girl sang about going back to Tulsa. He was coming through the bar with only kind of a smile but his eyes not leaving hers. One of the hotshots was saying, "Kitty Cat, pay attention. What do I have here?" Another one said, "What's wrong with her?" The first one said, "Take this, Kitty Cat, and fill it with nuts and bring us more sidecars, if you're not busy."

She felt Carl's arms come around her and she slid her bare arms inside his open raincoat, getting in there tight against him and feeling his gun between them, his suitcoat open, too. They were eye to eye grinning and now they were kissing and he was good, Kitty loving his smell of bay rum and whiskey but hearing a hotshot trying to ruin it, the hotshot saying, "Kitty Cat, the hell you doing with this bird?"

They stopped kissing but kept their hands on each other. Carl said
,
"That's what they call you, Kitty Cat?"

"These fellas are the only ones."

Carl was looking at them past her red hair straightened with an iron and brushed as hard as she could stroke it. Carl said to them, "Fellas, don't call her Kitty Cat no more. She doesn't like it."

She said close to him, "It's all right, they're just drunk."

"You want to be called Kitty Cat? Like you're their pet?"

She hadn't thought of it like that, but said, "Well, I'd rather not,"
k
nowing she didn't have to work here or be Kitty, or have to work anywhere or have to stay in Kansas City; knowing it because he had come to get her and she wasn't alone now.

The hotshots lounging at the table were after Carl now in their lazy way, wanting to know who the hell he was and what he thought he was doing, saying things like, "Who the fug you think you are?"

Carl moved Louly aside, took the dish one of them was holding and handed it to her. "They want some nuts." She looked confused holding the dish. Carl said, "Why don't you get 'em some?" She started toward the bar as he turned to the table.

Carl said, "I'm sorry if I disturbed you," and leaned over to get closer to them, placing his hands flat on the table, his raincoat and suitcoat hanging open. "But don't call her Kitty Cat again, okay?"

Carl's tone quiet. "You do, I'll throw you girls out on the street." There was a silence as he kept looking at their upturned faces, young guys about Carl's age, giving them time to see his holstered revolver and make a judgment about him and say something to him if they had the nerve. Their time ran out and he turned to Kitty bringing the dish of peanuts.

She said, "I bet I just lost my job."

"What do you need it for?" Carl said, scooping up a handful of nuts.

"You got me."

They went to the servants' quarters in back to what looked like a dressing room for showgirls: a mess of makeup at a row of vanities, clothes thrown on chairs, dozens of pairs of teddies hanging from an overhead pipe, a pile of torn ones in a trash basket and on the floor around it. Carl noticed the bathroom door closed while Louly put on her street clothes, Louly telling him she couldn't wait to get out of here.

"They're so confident the way they treat you. Especially the real rich ones, copping a feel whenever they want." But Teddy had her reward money, damn it, and she didn't want to leave without it.

"What's he doing with it?"

"I don't have any idea."

"We'll go see him and get it." Carl walked toward the dozens of teddies hanging across the room wall to wall.

"I've got a story I made up," Louly said. "I tell him my mom needs money for an operation."

"It's yours--why you have to make up a story?"

"You don't know him."

Carl parted the wall of teddies to look at the rest of the room. "I read up on him in Marshals Service reports on Kansas City. Teddy supervises Jackson County precinct captains." Carl stepped through the underwear toward a window that looked out on part of the backyard, a garden illuminated by a spotlight mounted on the house. "Teddy's got four hundred men under him, some of 'em ex-convicts. His bodyguard did time in Oklahoma. Luigi Tessa."

He walked back to the curtain of teddies and parted them as Louly said, "Luigi? That's his name?"