The Hot Kid

by Elmore Leonard

  Jack told Nancy some of what he’d been up to since the last time they had seen each other: mostly about robbing banks, doing time for the storage tank fire and running a roadhouse.

  Nancy ate it up, listened with a look of amazement, and said she’d love to manage a roadhouse sometime. She said working as a Harvey Girl was like she imagined serving in a high-class prison cafeteria, if there was such a thing.

  Jack said, “You couldn’t sell prison food if everybody’s starving to death.”

  “Remember that lacy apron I wore,” Nancy said. “They still wear it. No makeup, no jewelry, no stains allowed on the uniform. No conversing or flirting with patrons. The head waitress was like a prison guard.”

  “Why do you keep thinking of it like prison? I loved that chicken à la king.”

  “No men in dorm rooms, ever.”

  “You wanted to dress up and go out, didn’t you? I remember you and my dad whispering.”

  “You’d leave and I’d hear it from the head waitress. I had to sneak out of the dorm while I was living there.”

  “I remember your uniform, your hair, how you fixed it.”

  “Hairnets were mandatory. But you know what?” Nancy starting to smile. “At times it was a thrill. If you were a Harvey Girl you were somebody. You’d get recognized on the street like a movie star. Little girls would ask for your autograph.”

  She took Jack out to the kitchen and poured him a beer, Jack smelling vegetable soup on simmer. She said, “Do you know what I’ve been doing since I first met Oris? I’ve been waiting. Fourteen years, since I was twenty years old I’ve been waiting. Alone. By myself.”

  “Why’d you stick with him?”

  “I thought he’d leave your mom.”

  “He promise you he would?”

  “He’d say he had to get out of that house in Maple Ridge…with the roller-skating rink on the third floor where Emma would beat her dolls to pieces on the wood floor.”

  “He tell you all that?”

  “He told me everything. I should’ve known he’d never leave her.”

  “My mama’s tough,” Jack said. “I have a feeling if I ever showed up she’d pull a gun out of her sewing basket and drill me.”

  These fourteen years, she told him, she was never so lonely.

  Drinking his beer and smoking a cigaret it was in his mind to tell her he was sorry for different things he had caused to happen, but thought, For what? He stubbed out his cigaret and said to Nancy, at the kitchen table with him, “That’s over, what’re you looking for, some action? Want to pull a job with me?” Seeing a light coming into her eyes. “Can you drive? Can you drive fast? I’ll give you ten—no, I’ll give you twenty percent of the take. What do you say?”

  Now she was looking right at him with that sparkle in her eyes, lighting a cigaret, taking two puffs and stubbing it out.

  She said, “I want to go to bed with you. Right now.”

  “I’m ready,” Jack said. “But tell me if you like the idea of turning gun moll.”

  “What would I wear?”

  “I think something sporty.”

  The next day they laid around, Nancy asking about his home life when he was a kid and Jack barely telling her anything. Then Nancy telling him about being raised on a farm, as boring as all stories about living on farms. It wasn’t until late afternoon Nancy went to the grocery for coffee and a few things and came back with that day’s Tulsa World.

  Jack opened it on the kitchen table, his drink and ashtray moved aside, and saw the story headline in two lines across two columns, marshal shot at, phones would-be killer. There was Carl Webster’s picture in both columns, the one he’s holding his Colt. “And there’s a picture of me in it, smaller than his, with a number under my face. But it’s not too bad for a mug shot. That son of a bitch. He knew it wasn’t me.”

  Nancy had turned from the icebox to watch him as he read the story aloud, saying “That son of a bitch,” a couple times, and then going to the phone carrying the paper coming apart and telling the operator he wanted Tulsa and give her the number.

  So after he talked to Carl he had to settle down again with his drinks and cigarets and tell Nancy what was going on. Tell her about “Massacre at Bald Mountain” and not just about running a roadhouse.

  Nancy standing through the first part holding on to the back of a chair.

  Tell her about shooting the seven spooks in their bedsheets and some of the gunfight inside—no mention of Norm Dilworth—and how he was able to slip away in Tony’s car and end up in Kansas City. No mention of Heidi, either.

  She thought some of it funny, most of it hair-raising and sat down at the table.

  He told her how Carl tricked him into coming back to Tulsa and told how he’d shoot Carl on sight, or almost on sight, so he wouldn’t have to listen to that If-I-have-to-pull-my-weapon shit.

  She said, “That what?”

  He didn’t tell her because he didn’t want to hear it again. They had it in the news story he’d just read. He moved on to meeting the famous lawyer and his escape from McAlester on a streetcar.

  How he stole Tony’s car for the second time, turned it in along the way and left the last one in back of the St. James.

  She made them new drinks and they lit cigarets.

  “On the phone he wanted to know where I was. I said, ‘You can’t even begin to guess.’ He says, ‘Sapulpa?’”

  Nancy said, “Oh, my God. I’m in it now.”

  “All it means,” Jack said, “they’re following the trail of stolen cars. Now they have to check on ones stolen from here, see if it keeps going.”

  She said, “Does he know I live here?”

  “Carl? He might, but I doubt it.”

  Sapulpa Police called the Marshals Service responding to the all-points on Jack Belmont: they had a Ford Coupé stolen in Muskogee that might trace back to the end of the streetcar line. The marshals located the points in between where motorcars were stolen before coming to Anthony Antonelli in Hartshorne, his coupé stolen again by Belmont. There was reason to believe he was still here.

  The next day Carl Webster was showing Belmont’s mug shot around the St. James without any luck. Now he sat in his Pontiac out-side the hotel asking himself if Jack would’ve gone to see his dad’s girlfriend.

  Why? ’Cause he and his dad were so close?

  The minute Jack wasn’t looking, like taking a leak or something, she’d of run out of the house to find a cop.

  In the conversation Carl had going in his head, he said, “You’re sure of that, huh? But what if they were seeing each other—something Jack would think was funny—during these last few years, while his daddy was buying her things, like her ’32 Chevrolet coupé.

  At the roadhouse Norm Dilworth had told him Jack tried to kidnap her one time. It was when he set the storage tank on fire and brought her to Dilworth’s house near Kiefer. But Nancy knew who he was, so the kidnapping wouldn’t of worked.

  There was too much going on at the roadhouse to look into it then. Go back to the time of the storage tank fire, Jack went to prison for it, and Nancy Polis never filed a kidnapping complaint.

  What Carl could do, drop in on her now, say he was investigating the rumor of a kidnapping.

  Finally, huh? It had only been seven years.

  Jack was in the living room, the door open, and saw the Pontiac pull up in front. He called out, “Nancy? Where are you?”

  Her voice, faint, came back, “Upstairs.”

  “Look out a front window.”

  “What is it?”

  “Take a look.”

  He ran up the stairs two at a time, the stairs polished, slippery in his socks without shoes. Nancy was at the window of the bedroom they’d used last night, the bed unmade, a mess, looking at the Pontiac sedan parked on the street and the man in a light gray suit and panama hat starting up the walk. Not having any idea who it was, she said, “He looks like an in-surance salesman. I don’t answer the door, he’ll go away.”
r />   “You have to,” Jack said. “It’s wide open to let some air in the house. And you got that Lanny Ross record on the Vic.”

  “He’s just selling something.”

  “Then you don’t care if I get rid of him.” Jack reached under the pillow he’d used last night and brought out Fausto Bassi’s .45 automatic, telling her, “Honey, that’s the marshal, Carl Webster. Can you beat it, he’s come to see me?”

  Nancy said, “You’re not really going to shoot him,” smiling a little, letting him know he’d had her fooled.

  Jack said, “You have to talk to him while I put on my shoes. It’s bad luck ever since Billy the Kid was in his socks when he was shot dead. It’s a fact. He says, ‘Quien es?’ Wanting to know who’s come to see him in the dark.”

  She sounded more determined than nervous saying, “Jack, you’re not going to shoot him in my house and get me involved.”

  It was good she was thinking instead of becoming hysterical, and what she said made sense, but it didn’t move him. He laid the .45 on the pillow and sat on the side of the bed to put on his shoes. He said, “I thought you wanted to be a gun moll.”

  She didn’t say yes or no. Jack looked around with a shoe in his hand to see her up next to the bed holding Fausto’s .45.

  She said, “I’ll throw this through the window and scream as loud as I can and run downstairs.”

  The doorbell rang.

  There was a silence in the bedroom until Jack said, “The first situation that tightens your butt, you don’t want to be my girlfriend no more? I was with a nervous woman in a bank one time and it’s no fun.”

  The doorbell rang again.

  “It’s a shame, though, ’cause you’re a smart babe. You’re older than I am, but I think we could’ve gone to town together. For a while anyway.” Jack said, “Come on back when you’re through.”

  They took off their clothes in another bedroom to get in a fresh bed.

  “He wanted to know why it says there’s no vacancy when there’s no one here but me. I said I’m getting ready to do housecleaning and I want the house empty.”

  “What’d he ask you, if I’d been here?”

  “I started the conversation. I said is this about Oris Belmont? Acting nervous. He said no, his son, Jack. I started to shake my head to say I never met you in my life and he’s telling about the time you wanted to kidnap me. That’s what it was about. That dumb idea you had, as if I didn’t know who you were. He asked if I’d seen you since then. I said, ‘You think it’s likely?’”

  “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 coupé, 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.

  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 Coupé that had raced away from the 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, to 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?”