True Crime (31 page)

“Let’s walk,” Floyd said.

Hands in our pockets, we strolled aimlessly around back, through the trees, down to the riverbank. Trees on both sides of the river reflected off it; the sun looked at itself on the peaceful shimmer of the water.

We sat on the sloping ground, looking down at the river; there wasn’t any beach to speak of, right here. Floyd plucked a weed and chewed on the end of it.

“Ever think about getting out of it?” Floyd asked.

“Out of what?”

He smiled; cheeks seemed about to burst, and they were a burning red. “This life of crime, friend. This ol’ life of crime.” He looked out toward the trees across the river. “Wouldn’t you like to cross over there, and just be done with it?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“You probably better off with those Chicago Boys.” He said “Boys” like “bow-ahs.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’s business men.”

“Well, aren’t you?”

He grunted a laugh. “We’s small fry. Kind gets gobbled up by the bigger fish.”

I knew what he meant. There would always be room for the Capones and the Nittis; like Karpis said, the Syndicate was in “public-service-type business.” The outlaws were a dying breed. And some of them seemed to know it.

“Take this ‘Pretty Boy’ shit. And ‘Baby Face.’ Those ain’t names nobody who knows us calls us. That’s newspaper shit. Only I don’t think it starts with the newspapers.”

“You don’t?”

“I think it’s Cummings and Hoover trying to make saps out of us.”

Cummings was the U.S. attorney general, the man who was spearheading FDR’s war on crime.

“Why?” I said.

“Why? They make us sound like mad dogs so they look like big heroes when they catch us.”

“They haven’t caught you yet.”

He shook his head. “Matter of time. Matter of time.”

“My experience with the feds is they’re pretty goddamn lame.”

Floyd nodded, chewing on the weed. “But they’s so many of ’em.”

“Yeah. And they got guns now. They can cross state lines, and they got guns now.”

“I got so little to show.”

“Huh?”

“I been at this since I was in my twenties. Just a kid. And I got so little stored away. This life is expensive, you know.”

“They say you gave a lot of your money away.”

He smiled, almost shyly this time. “I did some of that. I ain’t no Robin Hood, like some’d have you think. Took care of my friends, in the hills, is all. And they took care of me. And mine.”

He sat and stared at the river.

Then he said, “I got a boy, nine. Just a tad older than that boy of Ben’s. And I got a pretty wife.” He chewed the end of the weed; then turned eagerly and said, “Want to see?”

“Sure.”

Grinning, he dug his wallet out of his back pocket. He showed me a snapshot of his wife—a lovely dark-haired woman in a white dress and hat; standing near her, putting a supportive arm around her, was a beaming kid in a white shirt and slacks.

“Good-looking kid,” I said. “Honey of a wife, too.”

He smiled, looking at the picture; after a while the smile faded, but he kept looking.

Then he put it away in the wallet; stuffed the wallet in his pocket.

I said, “They were dressed nice—look healthy, well-fed.”

Floyd nodded. “I been providin’ for ’em. But in the long run, what? This life can’t last. I’m gettin’ too old for it. And the times is passin’ me by. It’s time to get across the river.”

I didn’t follow him. I said so.

He smiled. “Sometimes you got to do something that common sense says not.”

“Like what?”

“Like a impossible job. Like a score so big, you can make a new life.”

My mouth felt dry.

I said, “Is that the kind of job going down tomorrow?”

He nodded—just the trace of a smile on the cupid lips.

I said, “All
I
know is it’s a kidnapping.”

“Did you know it’s a big shot? A national figger, like the damn papers put it?”

I felt something cold at the base of my spine.

“No,” I said.

“Well, it is, Jim.” He rose.

He began to walk up the slope.

I followed.

“Who?” I asked.

“How much did they say you’d be getting?”

“My cut? Something like five gees.”

“It’ll be more. I promise you that.”

We were through the trees, now.

“Who, Chock?”

“I don’t want to tell you, unless I know you’re in. In all the way. In for sure.”

“I’m in. Who?”

“One of them that’s out to end us.”

“Who.”

“Not ‘who.’ Hoover. John Edgar Hoover. Attorney general’s right-hand man. Better hurry, Jim—it’s gettin’ time for Ma’s barbecue….”

Shortly after Floyd and I came back around the front of the tourist camp, a Ford sedan pulled in, driven by Doc Barker. Karpis rode in front with him, and Dolores and Louise were in back. The guy in the Panama hat, Ben, fetched their cabin keys. Louise saw me through her window, beamed and climbed out of the sedan and all but ran to my side. I’d known her less than twenty-four hours and there she was, clinging to my arm like life was a sinking ship and I was a piece of floating wood.

I walked her down to the room, carrying her bag.

“Twin beds,” she said. “Too bad.”

“Louise,” I said. “I’m not so sure what happened this morning is something we ought to repeat….”

She pretended to be hurt by that; the wide-set brown eyes looked comically woeful. God, she looked cute—the bobbed blond hair, the rosy cheeks, pouty lips, slight but rounded figure well displayed in a form-fitting pink-and-white-print cotton dress with a shoelace bow at the neck. She sat on the edge of one of the beds and hiked her skirt up to where the milk of her thighs said hello above her rolled stocking tops.

“You’re too
much
of a gentleman sometimes, Jimmy—don’t you think?”

Then there I was with my pants down around my legs and her skirt up and I never said I was perfect, did I?

She went into the bathroom for a while, came out looking fresh and sparkly, and we lay together, clothes more or less buttoned up and back in place, and she had a smoke. I hadn’t seen her smoke before.

“You want a drag?” she asked, offering the ciggie.

“No thanks. Never picked up the habit.”

“My daddy’d whip me sure, if he saw these lips touching tobacco. Candy got me started.”

She spoke Candy’s name with a sense of history; he’d retreated into the past. Dead a day.

It wasn’t that she was cold, or heartless; she was a warm little thing, in about every way you could imagine. She’d just learned the facts of life on the outlaw road.

She said, “Should be suppertime soon, shouldn’t it?”

“Real soon. Ma’s cooking out back.”

“She’s a good cook.” Puffed the cig. “This is a nice room.”

“No outhouse tonight.”

“Yeah, and a bath and everything. That’s ugly wallpaper, though. Is that purple or brown or what? It makes the room seem small—why would they pick something so dark?”

“To keep us from noticing the cockroaches.”

“Oh,” she said, nodding. She didn’t seem to be inhaling her smoke.

Bedsprings making their unmistakable music came through the thin wall.

She giggled. “Somebody else is being naughty.”

“Who’s next door?”

“I think it’s the Nelsons.”

“Well, then they’re not being naughty. They’re married, so it’s okay with God and everybody.”

She nodded; she had a disconcerting way of taking my wisecracks at face value.

From next door, a woman’s voice said, “Less…less…oh, less!”

I said, “Doesn’t she mean ‘more’?”

“She’s saying Les—the name, Les. Short for Lester? That’s Nelson’s real name. Lester Gillis.”

That was news to me.

“Louise, honey. Can I be serious for a second?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“You said this morning you couldn’t have kids. You’re a young woman. Are you sure about that? Have you checked with a doctor, or…?”

She tried to be nonchalant, puffed her cigarette. She definitely wasn’t inhaling. She said, “A doctor made me this way. Candy knocked me up one time, and the doc that took care of it didn’t do me right.”

Next door, Baby Face Nelson’s wife was moaning.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She shrugged facially. “A real doctor looked at me later. He told me I couldn’t have kids. It’s okay. I don’t think I want kids anyways. They’re just a bother.”

The bedsprings sang next door; Nelson’s wife said, “Les! Les!”

I hugged the girl to me. “Don’t you worry about anything,” I said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

She looked at me; the big brown eyes were wet. “Really?”

“I promise.”

She hugged me. Hard. Desperately hard.

Silence next door.

A few minutes later somebody knocked and hollered, “Soup’s on!”

Nelson.

“Time to chow down, lovebirds! Ha ha ha.”

Behind the central cabin, in which Ben and the little woman and their two kids lived, was a little brick patio, surrounded by a stone wall about waist-high. A slatted brown-stained picnic table, large enough for a dozen or so people, was in the middle. At the left was one of those white swings that looked like an inverted wooden V with the top squared off, in which two people could sit facing each other. At the moment Baby Face and his wife Helen were doing that very thing. To the right was a brick barbecue oven, the lower part as tall as a man and wide as his reach, with two openings, wood burning in the bottom, smaller one, and iron grids in the larger arched opening above that, at which point it narrowed into a chimney. Ma, wearing her calico apron over one of her familiar floral tents, was poking at various halfed chickens spread out on the lower of two grills, basting them occasionally from a bowl of thin red sauce; a pot of baked beans was biding its time on the upper grid.

The picnic table began to fill up, and soon the whole gang—if you’ll pardon the expression—was having at the platters of barbecue chicken and the several bowls of coleslaw and the pot of baked beans; beers, Cokes, glasses of milk were scattered about, as were plenty of paper napkins. Baby Face Nelson and Helen, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker brothers and Fred’s girl Paula, Old Creepy Karpis and Dolores, chowing down like this was a family picnic. Speaking of family, Ben, the little woman and their two kids were down at one end of the table. The little woman had, in fact, made the slaw, which was very good, and had got the fire going earlier in the afternoon that had made the chicken possible. But that was the extent of her being sociable, and she wasn’t eating much, just picking at her paper plate.

Her kids would look down the table toward Nelson, who would wink at them, and the kids would grin at him, and each other. I’d seen this at the farm, too—Nelson got along famously with Verle and Mildred’s two boys, as well—and wondered if somehow I was seeing the real George Nelson. Or anyway, Lester Gillis.

His wife Helen picked up on the byplay between him and the kids, and said to him, “I miss our two.”

Nelson looked momentarily sad—the only time I ever saw sadness touch his face—and said, “We got to find a way to get to Mom’s and see ’em. We just got to.”

Louise whispered to me, “That’s sweet,” without sarcasm. I don’t think she and sarcasm were acquainted, actually.

Next to Nelson was a dark-haired, dark-eyed man, eating quietly, holding the messy chicken in his hands almost daintly, like the dead barbecued bird was a teacup. He was handsome, a lady-killer type, but on the cadaverous side, with a little Ronald Colman mustache, and even sitting down you could see he was tall, much taller than Nelson. This was John Paul Chase, Nelson’s dog-loyal sidekick, who’d been posted in the barn back at the Gillises’. I hadn’t seen him arrive, so he’d apparently come later in a car of his own.

He said, “Pass the salt, please.”

It was the only thing I ever heard him say.

Nelson would speak to him occasionally, and Chase would just nod. Nelson called him J.P. Using initials for nicknames was a trend Nelson was trying to set in these circles, with no apparent success.

There was no talk of crime at the table. The subjects at hand were baseball (did the St. Louis Cardinals, a.k.a. the “Gashouse Gang,” have the pennant sewn up or not?) and boxing (would Ross take McLarnin in their rematch next month?) and how good Ma’s cooking was (better ’n Betty Crocker’s).

Doc Barker, who’d taken little part in the small talk, did at one point say, “Where’s your friend Sullivan?”

Floyd, hands red with barbecue sauce, glanced above the half-eaten half a chicken he was eating (his second) and said, “He don’t feel so good. We tied one on last night.”

Fred Barker paused mid-chicken to grin, gold teeth flashing. “Hung over, huh?”

Floyd smiled; he had sauce all over his lips and teeth. “
Way
over.”

Doc said, “Is he going to be up for it?”

“Sure,” Floyd said, matter-of-factly.

“I never worked with the guy.”

“I have,” Floyd said. Friendly but with a hard edge.

“I never even heard of him.”

Floyd put the chicken down. “I don’t work with just anybody, Doc.”

“I never said you did, Chock.”

Nelson, working on a bite of baked beans, said, “Yeah, why isn’t your pal Richetti in on this one? I thought
he
was your right-hand man.”

“He’s on the mend. Caught a bullet while back.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Nelson said. “Suppose he’s holed up in the Cookson Hills, huh?”

Floyd shook his head no. “We been havin’ to avoid the hills. Ever since the feds and the state militia did that sweep through there February last, we been stayin’ out.”

Karpis, who was sharing half a chicken with Dolores, said, “I heard they only nailed a dozen or so crooks, all of ’em small-timers, with that search party.” Small laugh. “A thousand men combing the hills for small change.”

Floyd nodded. “Still, with the governor willin’ to turn up the heat that high, we been keeping out of there. We been holing up ’round Toledo way.”

Doc said, “Licavoli mob’s helping you out, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Floyd said. “For a price.”

Doc sighed, nodded. “Yeah. This ol’ life ain’t cheap, is it?”

“Life’s cheap enough,” Floyd said. “It’s livin’ that gets expensive.”

Louise, who was an even daintier eater than John Paul Chase (she was the only one at the table cutting the meat off the chicken with her knife and fork, instead of just using her hands—her daddy must’ve beat some manners in her), had finished her meal and was starting to complain of getting eaten up by mosquitoes. The sun was going down and the bugs were coming out.

Floyd stood. “You nice gals can clear the table, if you would, and get in away from the skeeters. Us men got work to do.”

Karpis wiped his face and hands with a napkin and stood as well. “Yes we do. Let’s go down to my cabin.”

The men went down to his cabin.