“Applesauce,” Charley said. “It was only two, and Charley Floyd was several hundred miles away at the time.”
“That ain’t what the radio said. How’d you get to be such an expert?” the driver asked, turning to look at him.
“I’m J. Edgar Hoover,” Charley said. “My G-men are hot on his tracks, but he didn’t pull the Mexico, Missouri, job.”
“Can’t we just buy a car?” Beulah asked. “I don’t want to ride all the way to Mexico in this smelly old taxi.”
“That stogie’s so big it’s liable to last all the way to Mexico,” Charley said. “He ain’t named his price yet, though—Mexico might be beyond my means.”
“We got to go get Rose first,” Beulah reminded him.
When they got to Rose’s place, Adam Richetti was in bed with her, a fact that didn’t sit well with Beulah. Rose answered the door in her gown; they could hear Richetti snoring before they even got in the room. Charley had sent him to Rose’s to hide out, but he hadn’t anticipated any romantic developments. He didn’t care himself, but Beulah was clearly annoyed.
“Who told you to sleep with that little jerk?” she asked her sister. “What was wrong with the couch?”
Rose didn’t answer. The truth was, since leaving Bradley, she had been sleeping with more and more men—it covered the hurt for a little while, at least. She didn’t talk about it with Beulah. Beulah had hated being on the farm and didn’t understand how much Rose loved Bradley, or how much it hurt her to leave him. Richetti was just a fellow she could hold onto at night; it didn’t mean any more than that.
Richetti sat up in bed, a smirk on his face.
“What’s for breakfast?” he asked.
Beulah could barely keep herself from cracking him.
“A knuckle sandwich,” she told him. “It’s what you’ll get, too, if you don’t treat my sister nice.”
When Adam Richetti learned that he, too, was implicated in the Kansas City Massacre—the paper had named him as one of Charley’s gunmen—he stopped smirking, and went pale.
“We need to scram,” he said. “It wasn’t my idea to come to K.C., anyway.”
“If you’ve had an idea since we met, other than to plug somebody, I don’t recollect what it might have been,” Charley said. “Maybe you ought to rest your brain for a few years—let me do the thinking.”
“What’s your idea?” Richetti asked.
“My idea is that we split up,” Charley said. “You take the girls and head north. Try Cleveland, or maybe Buffalo.”
“But what about you? Where’ll you be?” Beulah asked.
“Memphis—I’ll be down the river, eating hot biscuits and redeye gravy,” Charley said. “If I don’t like the feel of Memphis, I might try Atlanta. They won’t be expectin’ me to go south.”
“Why can’t I come with you?” Beulah asked. “You just got here.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I’d known somebody was gonna mow down Jelly Nash and blame it on me,” Charley informed her. “You go with Eddie and Rose—I need to move quick and sly, and I can’t be dragging you and your department store around. They’ll be looking for me on the highways—I’m gonna ride the rails until I get someplace safe.”
It was a lie—he had no intention of going to either Memphis or Atlanta. But he saw no reason to put Richetti or the Baird girls in possession of any information that might get him or them in trouble, in case they got nabbed. And, in his view, it was more than likely they would get nabbed.
Beulah had a fit, and then cried. Then she had another fit, and cried some more. She punched Charley twice in the arm, she was so disappointed that he wouldn’t take her with him. But Charley held his temper, took the taxi down to a used car lot on West Kansas Street, and came back with a four-hundred-dollar flivver.
“You’ll have to wrap up good, it don’t have a heater,” he told the gloomy threesome. “It gets chilly up toward Cleveland.”
Beulah kissed him seven or eight times, as passionately as possible, trying to get him to change his mind and take her with him. But Charley was firm.
“I can’t, honey,” he said. “It’s drafty in them boxcars. Delicate as you are, you’d catch pneumonia, and I’d have to leave you in a hospital in some town where you don’t know a soul.”
“But when will you come, Charley?” Beulah asked. “How will you know where to find us?”
“Send Bob Birdwell a letter, once you get settled,” Charley said. “George is dead—I doubt they’ll be watchin’ Bob’s mail.”
Beulah’s eyes were wet when the threesome drove away. She hated leaving Charley after such a brief visit. Also, she didn’t like it that Rose had a boyfriend available for the trip, and she didn’t. Her fellow would be down in Memphis or somewhere. It didn’t seem fair. Charley hadn’t even been in Kansas City long enough to take her shopping. Beulah knew that was mostly Mr. Hoover’s fault, but it still didn’t seem fair.
That night, in Belleville, Illinois, Adam Richetti suggested that it would be more economical if they all three slept in the same bed. The only hotel in town charged two bucks apiece for rooms, and Adam balked.
“It’s high,” he said, after inspecting the room, “but the bed’s big enough for three.”
“That’s what you think, buster,” Beulah informed him. “The biggest bed in the world wouldn’t be big enough for you and me to sleep in.”
“I was just thinkin’ of the money,” Richetti claimed, making a futile attempt to appear innocent of anything more than concern about their finances.
“Like fun you were, you heel,” Beulah replied.
She threw him a pillow, and Adam Richetti slept on the floor.
2
As soon as Richetti and the Baird sisters drove off, Charley made a phone call to Lulu Ash. When she answered, her voice had a rasp to it that Charley had never heard before.
“Have you got the croup?” he asked.
“Come in the back door,” Lulu said. “Half the bulls in town have been here looking for you already.”
When Charley saw her, he was shocked. Her face looked like her name—it was the color of ash. Her hand shook when she unlatched the back screen, and her eyes were blurry and unfocused. She had the look of a dying woman. Just seeing her made Charley weak in the knees, for despite all, Charley looked to Lulu as a last resort. She knew a lot more than he did about getting around the law. Her greed in the bedroom was just sauce; it was her brain he had come to rely on, as he had relied on no one else—not even George Birdwell.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s hit you?”
“Cancer,” Lulu said. “It’s in my jaw and the roof of my mouth.”
“Can’t they operate?” Charley asked. Again, he thought about Red, and wondered if she had passed away.
“I won’t let ’em,”Lulu said. “I ain’t gonna have no docs cutting on me.”
Her voice had an awful rasp. It reminded him of a blacksmith’s rasp scraping a horse’s hoof. Charley didn’t know what to say. The boarding house had an empty feel. He opened a few cupboards but saw nothing to eat, though there was a coffeepot on the stove.
“What do the boarders do, starve?” Charley asked. “I don’t see any grub in the kitchen.”
“I got rid of the boarders,” Lulu said.
“Why?” Charley asked.
“Got tired of listening to a roomful of men belch,” Lulu said. “I’m tired of cooking and tired of eating.”
“But you got to eat,” Charley reminded her. “It’s eat or die, Lulu, you know that.”
Lulu Ash gave him a flat look. Since the first morning in the hallway of her boarding house in St. Louis, when she had walked up and unbuttoned his trousers, Charley half expected her to unbutton his trousers every time they met. Not only did he half expect it, he half wanted it—maybe a little more than half.
But this time, Lulu made no move toward his pants.
“I eat enough,” Lulu said. “It ain’t tasty, I’m taking too much dope to taste much. But
I ain’t likely to starve. My own ma lived on coffee for the last ten years of her life. I can, too, if I have to.”
Charley felt awkward. He had rushed to Lulu, as he had several times before, seeking her advice and her help. Now he was in the worst situation of his life, with the local police and the Bureau of Investigation looking to haul him in and hang him for a crime he didn’t commit. But here was Lulu Ash, in a worse situation still: cancer of the jaw. He might, with luck, elude the G-men and the state police; but Lulu’s cancer was inside her. How could she escape?
Lulu came a little closer to him, with a little smile on her lips, and punched him lightly in the stomach.
“Don’t give me no advice, Charley,” she said. “You ain’t half smart enough to advise me. And don’t be giving me no sympathy, either. I’m sick, but I’ll still outlive you, unless you’re mighty lucky.”
“Then you give me some advice, if that’s how you feel,” Charley said. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with what happened to Jelly Nash, but how am I gonna make Hoover and the other laws believe that?”
“You ain’t—you’ll swing if they catch you,” Lulu said. “They’ve got enough against you to hang you two or three times over, even without Jelly.”
“Did you know Jelly?” Charley asked. It wasn’t so much that he was curious about Jelly Nash as that he was curious about Lulu’s own past.
“I hated his slimy guts,” Lulu informed him. “Nothing’s lower than a snitch. I would have gone to the station and killed him myself if I’da had any idea they were bringing him to town. I’ve always suspected he was the mug who had my boys shot.”
Wally and William Ash had been found dead about six months earlier, in a car parked at the edge of a cornfield, outside Kansas City. Both had been shot in the back of the head with a small-caliber revolver.
“Folks thought I done that, too, out of jealousy,” Charley said.
“My boys wasn’t no ladies’ men,” Lulu said. “If they’d found you dead, I would have suspected Wally, though. He hated you ever since you took Beulah away.”
“I didn’t take her away,” Charley said. “She just sort of followed me off.”
Lulu gave him a hard look. “If we get to talkin’ about that situation, I’ll end up slapping you,” she said. “If she followed you off, it was because you laid down plenty of scent.”
“I need to get out of here, but I ain’t got a vehicle,” Charley reminded her. “You think I’d be safe to hop a train?”
“There’s no safety left for you, hon,” Lulu said, softening a little.
She said it quietly, but the words still made the hair stand up on the back of Charley’s neck. She made it sound so final, as if he already had an execution date.
“What should I do, then?” Charley asked. “You think I should just give up, and fight in the court?”
Lulu snorted. “Are you drunk?” she asked.
“I drank some last night, but I ain’t drunk now,” Charley told her.
Lulu suddenly cracked—a flood of tears poured out of her, and she stumbled into Charley’s arms. She had been living alone with the knowledge that she was dying for too long. Now Charley was in mortal peril, too. The depth of her love for him had always been hard to live with, but the thought that they were both going to die—probably not even while they were together—upset her so much that she couldn’t hold back her feelings.
“I wish they would just leave us alone,” Lulu said. “I never went out of my way to hurt a soul. Why can’t they just leave a person alone?”
Charley was no doctor. He knew he couldn’t help Lulu, and he was bothered by the feeling that the three goons who had showed up that morning at Beulah’s would have wiggled loose by now and could be arriving at Lulu’s anytime. Only this time, they’d come with reinforcements, and he wouldn’t be able to hide under a long tablecloth. He had a sense that he needed to move, and move soon—maybe as soon as Lulu Ash stopped crying.
“Why’d you ask me if I was drunk?” he asked.
“Because you asked about the courts,” Lulu said, attempting to regain control of herself. “The courts ain’t for people like us—we’re bottom feeders. Hoover would never let you set foot in a court-house—you’d be too apt to fool the jury. He’d set up a prison break a few days before the trial, and you’d fall for it. Then forty or fifty G-men would shoot you down, just like they slaughtered Bonnie and Clyde.”
Charley turned white at the comparison. Pictures of the bullet-riddled car Bonnie and Clyde had been riding in at the time of their ambush were in all the newspapers. Just looking at the car and imagining the bullets and the blood was enough to make him queasy. It was worse than what happened in Boley—many times worse.
“If that happens, they’ll have to ambush me, too,” Charley said. “Have you got a car?”
“That car you brought down from Ohio’s still in the garage, four blocks from here,” Lulu said. “I expect the battery’s down, but it’s your car.”
“No sir, that’s a death car,” Charley said. “Billy Miller had just stepped out of that car when they killed him. Beulah got shot in the head, too—it’s a miracle she lived.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Lulu said, “It’s the only automobile available. The police kept Wally’s car—for evidence, they said.”
“I won’t ride in no death car—not me,” Charley said. “I still remember how Billy looked, lying in the street in a puddle of blood.”
“He’s luckier than I’ll be,” Lulu said. “He died quick. About all that helps me now is the dope. I wish I smoked. I don’t care to eat, or screw—there’s no pleasure left.”
Charley was beginning to wish he had hopped a train instead of coming to Lulu’s. He had put on his last fresh shirt; now it was covered with Lulu’s tears. He suddenly had a terrible longing to be home, to be with Ruby, to hear Dempsey laugh helplessly as he did when he was really amused. When he walked up to Lulu’s back door, he had been thinking about her unbuttoning his pants; at least it would have taken his mind off his fear for a few minutes. But Lulu was grey as a plank with the paint worn off—she was past that, as she had plainly said. It made him want to be home, whatever the risk. It seemed to him that a night with Ruby and Dempsey would be worth hanging for. If, as Lulu said, there was no safety anyway, why not have one more night with his family?
When Charley told Lulu he thought he had better go, she broke down again, and clutched at him.
“Stay the night, Charley,” she said. “You don’t have to do nothin’. Just stay the night.”
Lulu slept in his arms, but Charley lay awake all night. The next morning, as he was slipping out, she gave him two hundred dollars, and managed a little smile.
“It ain’t often a whore pays a stiff for not screwin’ her, is it?” she remarked.
Charley started to say that she had it all wrong, that she wasn’t a whore, that the money was a loan. But when he opened his mouth, he choked up and couldn’t say a word.
He blinked at Lulu, and left.
3
“I’m surprised you wasted good money on that trash,” the Director said, from behind Agent Purvis’s chair.
Agent Purvis jumped about a foot—no mean feat, considering that he was sitting down. He could easily imagine many catastrophes—being shot by a madman, for example—but one catastrophe that had never seemed likely to occur was that the Director would pop into his office while he was wasting time reading Police Gazette. The Director never popped into any office. He was rarely seen, even in the halls. If there was one rule that seemed to hold true in the Bureau, it was that you went to see the Director: the Director didn’t come to see you.
But now, he had come to see Agent Purvis. He was chomping on his Cuban stogie, and glaring at the issue of Police Gazette.
“But boss—you’re on the cover,” Agent Purvis hastily pointed out, in his defense.
“Didn’t like the story,” Hoover informed him.
“Well, but the picture’s nice,�
�� Purvis said. He hoped not to have to admit to the Director that he had not yet read the story on Hoover and the Public Enemies list.
“A picture of me won’t get us a penny more out of Congress,” Hoover told him. “The Public Enemies list will, if the public can only be made to see what a menace these criminals are to society.
“You don’t understand how these things work, Purvis,” he added. “And you never will, if you waste your time reading trash.”
He snatched the magazine out of Purvis’s hands, and threw it in the wastebasket.
“We need to get Dillinger,” he said. “That’s priority number one. And we need to get Pretty Boy Floyd. I’m moving him up to Number Two.”
Agent Purvis was a little surprised. Pretty Boy Floyd was currently Number Eight, nearly at the bottom of the list. That didn’t seem unfair, in Agent Purvis’s view. After all, Floyd was just a hick bank robber. He had killed one lawman and a bounty hunter, and had caused the insurance rates on bank money in Oklahoma to go sky-high. Floyd needed to be taken off the streets; probably, he even needed to be hung. But, as menaces go, he wasn’t in the same league as a mean weasel like Dillinger, or crazy old Ma Barker and her boys, or the vicious and sadistic Baby Face Nelson.
“Charley Floyd? Number Two?” Purvis asked, in surprise. “What’s he done to pull rank on the six above him?”
“The Kansas City Massacre, that’s what!” Hoover snapped, chomping his cigar. “There are four dead agents, and one dead informant. Would you agree that’s enough?”
Agent Purvis knew he had to be careful in his remarks, or he would end up in more hot water than he was already. None of the young G-men at the Bureau thought Charley Floyd had anything to do with the K.C. Massacre. Floyd was a bank robber. Gunning people down on railway station platforms didn’t even come close to any job the Oklahoma outlaw had ever pulled before. The Director had announced immediately that Floyd had done it, but the Director was always quick to name a perpetrator when some big crime was committed. He wanted the public to think the Bureau knew everything. But the young G-men knew better. So far, they didn’t have a clue about the Kansas City Massacre—it had been a clean job. Going public with a name before the blood was even dry on the street was just the Director’s way. When the real culprits were identified and captured, their names would get front-page play. Probably, by then, the public would have forgotten that Charley Floyd had even been accused.
Pretty Boy Floyd Page 34
