the Hot Kid (2005) (25 page)

"After you went downstairs," Jack said, "I was thinking, this wasn't the place to shoot him, where we'd have to do something with his body--even though it was a perfect setup. Come down the stairs and surprise him . . . No, first you tell him you're busy."

"I did, I said I had to get started cleaning the house."

"See, and then you say wait, you have a surprise for him and I come down. He can't believe it's me. We both draw and I beat him by a hair."

Nancy said, "If he didn't shoot you first."

They finished some serious loving and Nancy got dressed to go to the grocery to pick up something for their noon dinner. Jack told her, don't forget the paper; he'd stay here and rest awhile.

As soon as she was out of the house he was prowling around the master bedroom, where they'd spent the night. He found an old threepiece suit of his dad's in the closet with a few ties and a half-dozen white shirts in a drawer, the suit going back to the 1920s. Next he looked for money and found a little over three hundred dollars in a drawer in her secretary. He put on the suit with one of the shirts and ties and was ready by the time Nancy turned into the driveway in her Chevrolet coupe, leaving the car at the side door to unload groceries into the kitchen.

Jack walked in, Nancy was placing a sack on the table. He saw the Tulsa paper and the car keys sitting there.

She said, "You have your dad's suit on."

"You think he'll mind?"

"I'm surprised it fits you."

"It's big around the waist."

"It looks good though." She took her time now and said, "Are you getting ready to leave?"

"I thought I would."

"I was about to fix us dinner. I have some nice veal chops, tomatoes, corn on the cob . . ."

"I better get going," Jack said. "I thought I'd take your car."

"Oh, you're coming back?"

"I doubt it."

"Then how can you take my car?"

Jack unbuttoned the suitcoat. He said, "You won't need it," pulling Fausto's .45 from his waist and shot Nancy twice looking right at him.

Chapter
21

Carl listened to McMahon tell him the only reason Miss Polis' colored girl Geneva stopped by the house this morning was to pick up her money for the past three days, since she didn't know when she was suppose to come back with this man in the house. She looked at the mug shot, the same one Carl had left the police the day before, and said that's him, the one staying with her. Carl drove to Sapulpa again and went through the house with Geneva and two detectives, Geneva saying they already done the housecleaning in the spring. You didn't do no housecleaning in July. The detectives believed Belmont had left a pair of overalls with property of osp marked inside, but didn't know what he was wearing when he drove off in Nancy's Chevy. The coroner had taken her body to the morgue. Apparent cause of death, pending a postmortem, the gunshot wounds to the chest. Sometime yesterday.

After Carl had spoken to her.

While Jack was still in the house.

But if he was there and wanted to shoot Carl on sight, why didn't he? McMahon brought it up and Carl thought about it driving home, picturing Nancy standing in the living room answering questions. He had paid attention to her tone and the way she spoke to him and had no reason to feel she was nervous or on guard.

While Jack was somewhere in the house.

Carl spoke to her for no more than ten to fifteen minutes, Nancy anxious to get started with her cleaning. Carl not thinking it strange, spring cleaning being done in the summer. The detectives said they had located a sizeable bank account in her name, but were still looking through her correspondence for a next of kin. They said there were letters from Oris Belmont going back at least ten years. It was all they could find out about her. One of the detectives said, "That's the oil man's boy killed her?"

They looked at the two beds Nancy and Jack had used and made comments.

"I'd say they got along pretty well."

"I know what you mean. You count the rubbers he used and threw under the bed? Three of 'em in the main bedroom."

"What you suppose got in his head to shoot her?"

It's what Carl kept wondering on the drive back to Tulsa. Why would he shoot her if they got along?

He wasn't thinking of anyone shooting at him. The bullet came from across the street as he pulled up in front of his apartment house and cut the motor, from no more than thirty feet away. The bullet shattered the driver's-side window, that same highcaliber round that took out the hotel doors and Carl went flat across the seat, got the passenger-side door open and slid out to the sidewalk, more .45 rounds shattering his windows.

There was a pause.

Carl got to his knees and raised his head to window level and more gunfire ripped through the car from the Ford standing on the other side of South Cheyenne, the Ford Coupe that had raced away from th
e
Mayo. Luigi Tessa behind it. It had to be Luigi. Carl stayed low and yelled out, "Lou?" Lou this time, no Luigi. "Lou, hold your fire. Don't shoot and I won't, okay? Look, I'll put my hands on the roof of the car," Carl said, rising to his feet behind the Pontiac. "See? I'm not holding a gun. Keep me covered if you want and come over here. Okay? Listen, I know a guy wants to meet you and write a piece about the Black Hand for True Detective magazine. How's that sound? Make you famous."

Carl said, "I know you feel you have a bone to pick with me. But it was you shot at me, I never shot at you, not once, or ever threatened you with a weapon."

They were on the sidewalk now and it was getting dark, Tessa holding his .45 in Carl's face, neighbors looking out windows at them.

"Or hit you in the gut with a Louisville Slugger. I'm the one's been abused. I don't know what you have to complain about. You think I insulted you? It's how you took what I said. It was nothing but friendly banter. You know what banter is, Lou? Bullshit among friends. Come on, let's go on upstairs and have a drink. I'll call this writer's anxious to meet you. He'll be tickled to death, and you'll be glad to know he's another Eyetalian, Antonio Antonelli," Carl giving the name as much accent as he could. "You two can shoot the shit in your native tongue. He's even from Krebs."

Carl got hold of Tony at the Mayo.

Tony came in the apartment saying, "I had my hat on going out the door. If I hadn't decided to step back inside to answer the phone, I'd of missed one of the great opportunities of my career as a journalist, t
o
interview an assassin of the dreaded Black Hand, and learn some of the history of your secret society and what you've been up to lately."

"In your native tongue," Carl said.

Tony repeated in Italian everything he had said. Then Tessa, Carl believed, said in Italian with a shrug, shaking his head, that assassinating someone was nothing to him, no problem. It sounded a lot more interesting in Italian. Carl took their drink orders, both whiskey and Coke, set out a plate of Velveeta and crackers and left them alone. He stayed in the kitchen with the World, would hear Tony ask a question and then Tessa sounding like he was acting out the answer that went on and on. Carl gave Tony nearly an hour before walking in the front room. He had left his suitcoat on.

"How's it going?"

Tony closed his notebook. "I believe that ought to do the job."

"I bet you got more'n you expected."

Tony raised his eyebrows. "Quite a bit more."

Tessa was looking from one to the other, his .45 on the table next to his chair with his glass and the ashtray holding cigaret butts.

"You have the feeling," Carl said, "holding the interview in Eyetalian is like keeping the whole thing off the record?"

"I was surprised," Tony said, "he told me as much as he did. Most of it was old 1900s Black Hand throat-cutting stuff, but I can use it for background."

"He bring you up-to-date?"

"The businessman doesn't pay the extortion, they don't burn the place down anymore."

"Not since Luig did time for arson. He shoots 'em now," Carl said.

"That's why I'm bringing him up on two counts of first-degree felony homicide in that coal-mining county."

Tessa looking up from his chair, mouth open, confused, like wondering if he was hearing right. "I'm gonna make a phone call," Carl said, "get him transportation to the federal lockup here, so I won't have to take him. What happens to you after that," Carl said to Tessa, "once you get to McAlester, you aren't gonna like at all. I only have one question for you," Carl said.

"You gonna stick your hands out to take the cuffs, or you want to see if you can pick up that gun?"

I've got my ending," Tony said. "Lou Tessa, the Black Hand assassin's moment has come. He knows if he doesn't reach for his gun he's going to prison."

"He's going to the chair," Carl said.

"All the more reason to pick it up. But he knows the marshal standing before him is armed and will draw and shoot to kill if he does."

"I didn't tell him that."

"You didn't have to. But did you know he wouldn't make the move?"

"If he hadn't ever done it by now," Carl said, "I didn't see him reaching for it."

"Well, what he gave me is perfect, lurid as hell. You sure set him up for me."

They were still at Carl's after marshals arrived to haul Tessa off to the lockup in the federal courthouse, Tessa yelling at Carl in Italian-GCo

Tony translating--that he'd tricked him, Carl shaking his head. He said to Tony, after, "It's strange the way these people talk about being tricked and what's fair. Teddy Ritz saying it wouldn't be fair to tell me where this boob was staying in town. I said, 'It wouldn't be fair?' I can shoot at 'em, but not lie to 'em."

He had told Tony about Belmont killing Nancy Polis, because it wa
s
on his mind, and said he had talked to his boss about it from her house, long-distance. Belmont killing her for no reason. Taking her car. Carl said, "Got what he wanted and shot her."

He seemed to have a different attitude about Jack Belmont now, but wouldn't talk about it. Before, Carl took him seriously but still seemed to laugh at him for wanting to be a famous public enemy. Now, Tony had the feeling, Carl had looked at Nancy lying dead in her kitchen, killed for no reason, and stopped laughing at him. Jack had become that public enemy and had to be put away.

"You have an idea where he is?"

"He's around," was all Carl said.

As soon as Tony left he phoned Bob McMahon at his home. He told him the guy with two detainers was in custody.

"Every time you embarrass me," McMahon said, "and I hope embarrass yourself, you come out smelling like a rose."

"It's not the main reason I called," Carl said. "I'm going after Jack Belmont. You put me on something else, I'll quit the marshals."

McMahon said, "Meet me at Nelson's tomorrow morning, seven a
. M
." and hung up the phone.

Why're you becoming emotional on me? I told you you're going after Jack Belmont. We're all going after Jack Belmont. Because he's a fugitive from justice. Not because you were both in that house at the same time, and you feel to blame for not knowing it. Have more egg on your face than on your plate."

They sat at a table in the Buffeteria's clatter of breakfast noise, McMahon hunched over his three two-minute eggs, straightening now to crumble a piece of bacon in his egg soup. Carl hadn't touched his breakfast.

"Am I right? We don't have to get worked up over what he's done. We'll get him because it's what we do." "He didn't have to shoot her," Carl said.

"What you're telling me, you thought you knew him but realize now you don't. Do me a favor and think of yourself when you were still Carlos, at the drugstore the time Emmett Long shot the Creek. You're fifteen, a well-behaved young boy. As a rule you don't speak out to grown-ups unless they want to hear from you. You remember, about that time, the name of the cow thief you ran into?"

"Wally Tarwater."

"You said you admired the way he bunched the cows without wearing himself out."

"I remember he knew how to work stock."

"But you told him you'd shoot him if he tried to ride off with your cows, and you did. Shot him out of the saddle at a good two hundred yards. Remember what you told me? You said you didn't mean to kill him."

"I didn't."

"Just wanted to wing him? I thought you were doing a little strutting there. I thought, Is he that good or wants me to think he is?"

Carl kept quiet. He'd started dabbing his fork at his fried eggs and potatoes.

"I didn't mind your sounding cocky, showing off in a quiet way. You're a fifteen-year-old kid and you handled the situation. I said to myself that day, I want him when he's of age, and I gave you my card. I let you show off now, because you always come out, as I said last night, smelling like a rose. You've been a marshal seven years, a marshal, and you're almost as well known as that FBI showboat Melvin Purvis."

McMahon paused to sip his coffee.

"You might not've heard. Purvis got Dillinger late last night on a tip. The FBI laid for him coming out of the Biograph movie theater in Chicago. Shot him down in the alley that runs next to it."

Carl hadn't seen a paper and wanted to know everything at once. If it was Purvis who shot him. How many times he was hit. Was he dead on the scene. Was Billie Frechette with him. But what he said was
,
"What picture was playing?"

McMahon looked up from his runny eggs.

"Is that Carlos I hear? The kid wanting to know what the last movie was Dillinger saw? I don't know, but it'll be in all the papers."

Walking to the courthouse they talked about Belmont, Carl looking for the reason he killed Nancy Polis. McMahon said, "He couldn't trust her to keep her mouth shut. What other reason is there?"

They talked about where he might be. Carl saying, "He swore he's coming after me and I'm counting on it. But if you put a watch on my building he'll wait it out. I think it'll annoy him and he'll call me about it and complain, trying to be funny. He's a famous criminal but doesn't know how to behave like one." Carl said, "Except when he killed Nancy Polis. What I'm thinking, let him find out I'll be at my dad's place. Maybe Tony, the True Detective writer can get in touch with him and tell him--let it slip. He'll keep calling me at home and I won't be there. He'll call the office, he's told I'm on leave. He won't believe it, but might think I'm at the farm. I know Tony's told him about it, that I like to visit."

"He calls the office," McMahon said, "I'll have Evelyn tell him where you can be reached, like we do it all the time. Carl, let's get 'er done."

It's what every farm girl dreams of," Louly said, "lie around in a de-luxe hotel and get waited on. After two days I'm thinking, Hasn't he shot that guy yet?" Carl had just brought her home from the Mayo.

"I didn't shoot him," Carl said.

"He tried to shoot you, didn't he?"

"He's Boob McNutt, he didn't know what he was doing. But the next time I have to be gone--"