by Don Swaim
I had dibs on them. My prey.
Karpis had just been named Public Enemy Number One.
I intended to redeem myself.
Parking the DeSoto at the edge of Love Field, I watched Hughes and Diana swoop in on Howard’s new open-cockpit H-X Racer, beautiful, metallic, sleek. Diana, sexy in flight suit and goggles, bussed me, but when I reached to shake Howard’s hand he shrank away.
“Always consider hygiene, Tokol. Never touch another’s hands—unless they belong to Katharine Hepburn. Even then… Bathe four times a day, always with oodles of lather. And use separate bars of soap.”
He was phobic about germs, so I wondered how he ever managed sex. But he had good teeth.
“How was your flight?” I asked.
“Four-hours, eleven minutes, seventeen seconds. But I’ll do better. I’m designing a new baby to fly around the world in record time. Wiley Post, may he rest in peace, set the record two years ago: seven days, eighteen hours, forty-nine minutes in a Lockheed Vega. I intend to do it in less than five days—now that my competition’s been eliminated.”
The one-eyed Post and his passenger Will Rogers had just been killed in a crash in Alaska.
“When are you heading back to Hollywood, Howard.”
“As soon as I fix some glitches on my H-X Racer. Besides, if I stay away too long Kate Hepburn may two-time me with Spencer Tracy.”
“Between aviation and Hepburn, you must have your very sanitary hands full.”
“I’m filming Heaven’s Devils, sequel to Hell’s Angels. I sank just under four million into Angels and doubled my investment. So I’m putting five million into Devils and bringing back Jean Harlow to star.”
“I guess a four million ain’t what it used to be.”
“Tokol, I always said I’d be the planet’s greatest golfer, the top Hollywood film producer, most daring pilot, and the world’s richest man. My score’s already three out of four.”
“Then we need to celebrate by eating barbecue in Dallas. Will you join Diana and me?”
“Okay, but I’m eating only fudge, milk, and water until I get back to my personal chef in California. He’s the only one who knows how to cook to my exact specifications. For example, vegetables pared into perfect half-inch squares with each corner precisely cut to a forty-five-degree angle. Nobody else does it right.”
After dinner, Diana, Howard, and I repaired to the Magnolia Hotel, former headquarters of Magnolia Petroleum, in downtown Dallas. On the roof, revolving in neon, was Pegasus, the flying red horse. Our rooms, known as the Petroleum Suite, were decorated with images of oil drills, derricks and pumpjacks, all appearing phallic and masculine.
It was obvious Diana had a crush on Howard. She was a libertine who never hid her amorous impulses, which I neither encouraged nor discouraged.
Engrossed, I watched as she and the aviator barnstormed on the bed, accomplishing loop-the-loops, barrel rolls, spins, dives, and a few aeronautical maneuvers I never thought possible.
Then Diana, touching a rivulet of sweat on her brow, said, “Come join us, Tokol.”
Following that spiritual night, which left our sheets damp and wrinkled, Howard checked out of the Magnolia while I groggily reached Leon Linquist from the house phone.
“I’m being watched, Tokol. I feel it. But I have to get groceries. We’re almost out of milk, and we used up all the butter.”
“Tighten your belts, Leon. Diana and I will be in Minneapolis within three days.”
The state highway was clear as we drove north into the Texas Panhandle, although many of the side roads were nearly impassable, encrusted by drifting sand. Sparse traffic, save for an occasional stripped-down car or beaten-up truck. No greenery, no grass. Even the weeds looked defeated, and the few scraggly trees were leafless. Farms were abandoned, their buildings drab, paint literally sand-blasted off.
The heat was unrelenting.
Once oil-prosperous, the distressed town of Pampa wasn’t far from the Oklahoma border. As we pulled into the grungy jerkwater, we were caught in a sudden black blizzard, and I was afraid the billowing dust, which reduced visibility to a few yards, would stall the DeSoto’s engine.
“What did you get us into?” I asked Diana.
“Stay cool, Tokee, darling. Just a little dust. Someday the world will thank us for our itty-bitty odyssey. Pull over here.”
“A church?”
A sign read FOURSQUARE BAPTIST CALVARY APOSTOLIC CHURCH, and next to it a hand-lettered poster advertising a social with music by the Corn Cob Trio. Obviously, this was one of the few progressive churches in a part of the nation where joy was grudgingly rationed out.
We parked, watching the storm swirl wraith-like around us. Then the wind died and our range of vision improved, but I could feel my teeth crunching on the grains of dust.
“Cover your mouth with your hankie, Tokee, darling, and let’s go in.”
Three dudes, decked out in showy cowboy suits complete with chaps and Stetsons, were making noises with fiddle, banjo, and guitar. They sawed and plunked as the dancers, wearing their go-to-meeting duds, hoedowned with an allemande left, circle right, promenade all, roll away with a half sashay, and a do-si-do. I felt a little out of place in my corduroy knickers and boots from Fifth Avenue’s Best and Company—although, wisely, I left my pith helmet in the car.
“Cole Porter it ain’t,” I groused to Diana about the music.
“Shush, Tokee. Keep your eye on the guitar player, the one with the cigarette dangling from his lips.”
He was a lanky, thin-faced young man with a full head of curly hair. When the Corn Cob Trio took a break, Diana corralled him.
“Mr. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, I presume?” she said.
“They just calls me Woody, ma’am.”
“I’m Miss Dryad from New York and this is my associate, Mr. Tokoloshe.”
“Do tell,” Woody said, eyeing our Eastern threads.
“Mr.… Ah, Woody, you probably recall a certain Mr. John Lomax?”
“Yep, older fella. Came to Pampa with his kid Alan luggin’ one of them big electric phonograph recording machines, which musta weighed three-hundred pounds. Claimed he was collectin’ music for history. Mr. Lomax had me sing ’bout every damned song I ever knowed, ’cept them I wrote myself. He only wanted the old ones. But y’know, when you think about it, all our songs is just little notes in one great, big song.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about, Woody. Are you familiar with the name William S. Paley?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Mr. Paley’s head of the famous Columbia Broadcasting System, and he wants to sign you to a contract to perform on his network in New York. He just acquired Bing Crosby, Kate Smith, and the Atwater-Kent Orchestra conducted by Josef Pasternack. Mr. Paley heard your Lomax recordings and was impressed.”
“Damn, if that ain’t somethin’. You mean this here Mr. Paley actually wants me, a fella born in Okemah, Oklahoma, to go all the ways to New York with my git-tar just to sing?”
“Exactly, Woody. You might even live in one of those tall buildings overlooking Central Park.”
“And I can sing whatever I cotton to, not just them old square-dance numbers?”
“Mr. Paley wants to hear ‘The Bear Went Over the Mountain,’ ‘Froggy Went A’courtin’,’ and ‘Go Tell Aunt Rhody,’ the sorts of folksongs he heard at the Philmont Country Club while growing up on Chadwick Street in Philadelphia. And he’d like you to dress in bib overalls and red flannel shirts, so you look authentic. You’ll be a sensation.”
“Heck, ma’am, I don’t even wear no bib overalls here in dusty Pampa.”
“But you’re turned out like a cowboy.”
“That’s ’cause I’m helpin’ my two fellow Corn Cobbers, my brother-in-law Matt Jennings and Cluster Baker. Y’see, Miss Dryad, the words is what’s important. I gets my ideas out of the Amarillo newspaper, writes down a few lines, then I sing high when everybody else sings low, sing fast when they sings slo
w, and so I gets myself a new tune.”
“Shouldn’t you sing what people want?”
“Shucks, I’m out to sing ditties provin’ it’s the people’s world, and that the world’s knocked ’em all to heck, which ain’t right.”
“Woody, I don’t think there’s a lot of money in the kind of songs you want to sing, protest songs.”
“My songs won’t get no hugs or kisses from the capitalists. I aim to sing about po-lice and vigilantes, who’s carryin’ a gun and where the peace is, what it’s like to fight the law, people who’s been dislocated, the refugees tryin’ to get to California, about the poll tax and Jim Crow, the sharecroppers and the coal miners, the union men who heads is busted, the banks and the scabs, the peaches and prunes and pickers, and maybe a little fun song along the way like, ‘Jaggy, jaggy, bum, bum / And a hey piggy, run.’”
Diana sighed. “Dear, dear Woody, I suspect you’ll never land a gig at El Morocco or the Onyx Club.”
“Never heard of them places, Miss Dryad. Besides, anyone who uses more than three chords on a git-tar is just showin’ off. I’m plannin’ to hitch to California, so you tell your Mr. Paley, thanks but no thanks. If I ever get heard on the radio it’ll be on my own terms.”
Impulsively, Diana took Woody’s hand and kissed him on his whiskery cheek.
“I gotta be driftin’ along, Miss Dryad.” He tipped his Stetson. “Been good to know you.”
Diana and I dined at the town’s best and only eatery where the chili was crunchy with grit, and bedded for the night in a grubby boarding house on sheets with the texture of the beach at Galveston. The Panhandle was bone dry—not only because of the drought—so Diana and I finished off the flask I kept in the Airstream’s glove compartment. Prohibition still reigned in the Bible Belt.
In the morning we set off for Minnesota.
Conditions worsened as we headed north through Oklahoma, the sun’s rays barely penetrating the stifling air, resulting in an unremitting grayness. We drove through ghost towns and empty farms, sagging fences nearly buried under banks of thistles and tumbleweed, fields overrun by grasshoppers and jackrabbits. Then the air began to crackle with static electricity and distant flashes of lightning, and suddenly it poured big pellets of muddy water that pelted the windshield. It was over almost as soon as it began. Too little, too late, too dirty.
As we drove into Kansas City, where we planned to spend the night, we heard on station WDAF that, in a driving rain, a four-year-old chestnut named Omaha won the Belmont Stakes by a length and a half. The third horse to win the legendary Triple Crown.
“I won twenty grand on Omaha,” I boasted to Diana.
“Did you, Tokee? I won forty.”
The rolling prairie gradually became green and lush as we entered Minnesota, and along the clear streams and rivers were fertile groves of ash, maple, and oak. The farms were tidy and prosperous, and even the cows appeared contented—as though a dust bowl in the heartland never existed.
In Minneapolis, we checked into a suite at the Leamington Hotel on Third Avenue, where I bought a copy of the Star and saw a blazing headline followed by a Baton Rouge dateline.
HUEY LONG ASSASSINATED
Intending to intimidate state lawmakers, the Kingfish had gone to the capitol where, in the lobby, Carl Weiss shot him in the gut with a 32-caliber Browning. Huey’s cossacks opened fire on Weiss and kept firing even as he lay dead on the marble floor, awash with blood. The doc ended up with more than sixty bullet holes in his body. So many slugs flew it was likely Huey’s own guards cut the Kingfish down in the crossfire.
Weiss was a rank amateur after all. If you wanted something done right you had to do it yourself.
Someone, probably one of Huey’s skull-crushers, made off with Weiss’s Browning, the gun so important to military history.
Leon Linquist, a bitter adversary of both Herbert Hoover and FDR, was an unrepentant Marxist, passionate opponent of American entry into the Great War, and fervent defender of Sacco and Vanzetti. In his Prairie Patriot, he inveighed against municipal corruption as well as hanky-panky in his own Farmer-Labor Party. What’s worse, he also attacked the racketeers known as the Syndicate. Little wonder he piled up enemies.
When Diana and I pulled up at Leon’s home on Second Avenue South in Minneapolis, I wasn’t surprised to see a bunch of cops and several prowl cars, dome lights flashing.
I said. “We may be too late.”
But then I spotted Leon angrily exchanging words with the cops. As I left my car he saw me and broke away.
“They almost got me, Tokol. As I was getting out of my Ford V-8 in the alley behind the house, a black sedan roared around the corner and someone inside opened fire with a tommy gun. I saw them coming and ducked under my car just in time, but the car’s shot to hell.”
“I told you to stay inside.”
“I had to shop for necessities.”
“Any idea who they were?”
“Yeah, it was Cherry Lips Zwillman himself firing the trench sweeper. I’d know his ugly puss anywhere. Naturally, Police Chief Big Tuna Carney says that’s bull, that the shooters were racketeers up from Chicago, and I was a case of mistaken identity. He claims Cherry Lips has an iron-clad alibi: he was getting a haircut at his favorite hangout, Toblinsky’s Barbershop. Everyone in the Twin Cities knows Cherry Lips has Big Tuna in his pocket, and that they both take orders from Governor Alvin B. Karlson. However, now I’ve got the goods on ’em, definitive proof. It’ll be in my paper tomorrow—if I live that long.”
“I think I’ll pay a call on Mr. Hyman Cherry Lips Zwillman.”
“He’s got an office on Hennepin Avenue where he runs his jukebox and gumball businesses, but you’re more likely to find him at Toblinsky’s on Nicollet Avenue. Isador Toblinsky is better known as Alibi Guy because he’s not only Cherry Lips’s cover-up man but his chief enforcer. Alibi Guy insists he was trimming Cherry Lips’s sideburns at the very moment I was nearly liquidated.”
“I’ll locate the newly-trimmed Cherry Lips and ask him politely to lay off and let you do your work.”
“Being polite’s been tried.”
“I’m in need of a nice shave in any event. Know any good barbers?”
The next day, I parked on Nicollet and walked into the shop. No customers, save for two goons wearing double-breasteds and hideous ties. Perched on a soapbox was a cherubic, gap-toothed shoeshine boy. All were being entertained by a shawl-draped, heavy-coated old woman playing traditional Yiddish airs on a concertina. I knew the music from my days running guns in the Holy Land, and thought I’d puke if I heard “Hava Nagila” one more time.
The barber approached me, an open straight razor in his hand.
“Help you?”
“Are you Mr. Alibi Guy Toblinsky?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m an old pal of Arthur Barker just passing through. Doc told me anytime I needed a close shave I should see Alibi Guy.”
“Pal of Doc’s, huh? Say, too bad about his ma, gettin’ all shot up like that. Where’s he been hidin’ anyway?”
“If I told you it might get out to the wrong parties—if you get the idea.”
“Take the chair, mister.”
Just then Cherry Lips Zwillman walked into the shop. I recognized him from the mug shots Leon showed me. Fat face, receding hairline, flashy three-piece suit. More than a passing resemblance to my favorite romantic screen star: Edward G. Robinson.
“Say, who let her in?” Cherry Lips said, pointing at the old biddy squeezing the concertina. “Get her and that squawk box the hell out.”
Alibi Guy said, “Ah, let her stay, Cherry Lips. Reminds me of my grandma. She docked at Ellis Island as an infant and spoke Yiddish and only Yiddish the rest of her life. And she lived to be a hundred.”
“Okay, but if she plays ‘Hava Nagila’ shoot her.”
A mobster after my own heart.
When Cherry Lips noticed me reclining in the barber chair, my face lathered, and the b
oy shining my brogans, he said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Name’s, ah, Smith. Out of Detroit.”
Alibi Guy said, “He’s a pal of Doc Barker.”
“Doc, huh? Never did like Barker. Takes too many chances.”
I said, “But you gotta cut him a little slack on account of his ma being gunned down. And his brother.”
“Yeah, sad day for everyone. Ma was a great woman. She kicked ass.”
Cherry Lips went to a pay phone on the wall, dropped in a nickel, and started a conversation I couldn’t quite overhear, except, occasionally, the name of Leon Linquist. Then he flopped into a chair, and began working on the crossword puzzle in the Star.
I couldn’t resist.
“Hey, Cherry Lips,” I said from my reclining position. “Couldn’t help hearing you refer to Leon Linquist on the phone.”
“What about the prick bastard? And only my pals and my sainted mother call me Cherry Lips.”
“Heard there was just a shooting outside Linquist’s house.”
“Musta been some pros up from Chicago or K.C. So what? Deserves whatever he got.”
“They missed.”
“Bastard’s time will come.”
“What have you got against him anyway?”
“Ain’t none of your business but I’ll tell you. Linquist runs this cheap rag called the Prairie Patriot in which he’s tryin’ to make out that Governor Karlson, Chief Big Tuna Carney, and me is all in the Syndicate, up to our asses in numbers, prostitution, loansharkin’, and bribery. Hell, nobody’s ever proved nothin’.”
“Until tomorrow.”
“Huh?”
“Linquist is publishing a story he thinks will bust your sad ass for good.”
“Say, who the hell are you?” Cherry Lips leaped up, reaching for the gat I knew was in a shoulder holster under his coat. “Get him, boys,” he yelled to the two sitting goons. “He ain’t one of us.”
Suddenly, the old lady began playing “Hava Nagila” at triple speed.
From under the barber’s sheet, where I had surreptitiously positioned my Smith and Wesson, I let go with a shot that winged Cherry Lips in his firing arm. Before I could get off another shot, Alibi Guy spun the barber chair so violently I not only lost my grip on my .38 but now faced the mirror on the wall.
