I went down the hall and saw “llamo el clobb—10:06 pm” scrawled on the slate next to the phone. I picked up the earpiece and dialed Rose’s number and he answered on the first ring.
“Youngblood,” I said.
“Where the fuck you been?”
I started to tell him but he said, “Never mind—just get your ass down here.”
“What is it?”
“Micks. Now get over here.” He hung up.
I figured I’d better be prepared for anything, so I went up to my room and packed a small valise. I put the .380 in the bag and took off my coat and put on the shoulder holster and slipped the Mexican .44 in it and put my coat back on. Then I went back downstairs and put the valise on the table by the phone and went into the kitchen. The game had just broken up and some of them were laughing and counting their money and some were bitching about their rotten luck, and then they all shut up and looked at me.
I told Avila that Daniela was expecting me to take her to breakfast in the morning but something had come up and I might not be able to meet her as I’d said. I said to tell her I didn’t know how long I would be away, maybe only until later tomorrow, maybe a few days, but in any case I would call on her as soon as I returned.
“Sí, claro, le daré el mensaje,” Avila said, nodding rapidly.
“Okay then,” I said.
T hey’d hit the team that made the nightly cash collection from the joints along the north end of the county—including all the places where Ragsdale had put in the Dallas slots. The two Ghosts had come out of a little club in Dickinson with the next-to-last pickup of the night and had just got in their car in the parking lot when a black Hudson sedan pulled up beside them and the men at the passenger-side windows opened fire with .45 automatics. The Ghost behind the wheel took hits in the head and died in a blink but our other guy—a fellow named Dooley—managed to tumble out the right-side door and run off with the attackers chasing him on foot and still shooting at him and he made it into the woods behind the club and hid in the darkness. He stayed crouched in the bushes and tried not to even breathe. He wouldn’t know it until after he was taken to the hospital but he’d been hit three times. He heard the shooters walking along the edge of the woods and cursing. He heard one of them say “Pete’s gonna shit.” Then he heard them walking away on the parking lot gravel and then somebody yelled something and there were a few more pistol shots and a moment later the Hudson went tearing out of the parking lot.
The last few patrons who’d been in the club would tell the police they heard the shooting and came out and saw two men walking back toward a pair of cars parked side by side. One of the men fired shots over their heads and the patrons all ran back inside and the shooter fired several rounds through the glass front window and they all hit the floor. The owner of the joint had crawled over to the telephone and called the police. What the owner didn’t tell the cops was that he also made a call to the Turf Club. After a while one of the patrons had peeked outside and saw that one of the cars was gone but the other car was still there—and then saw another man come staggering from behind the club and into the lot and fall down, but everybody in the club was too scared to go out and help him. Then the cops showed up.
The witnesses had all been smart enough not to spill too much to the police. They all said they’d never seen either of the two victims before. None of them had been sure of the make of car the shooters were in or if there had been another man in the car. Dooley the wounded Ghost feigned unconsciousness to avoid being questioned. Then one of Rose’s lawyers showed up ahead of the ambulance and had a private moment with Dooley before the ambulance guys took him away. He got the story from Dooley and told him what to tell the cops when they questioned him in the hospital. The lawyer then had a talk with the sergeant in charge of the investigation. Then he and the sergeant went to the station and chatted with the captain. When the official report was released it detailed a homicide by unknown assailants during the commission of an armed robbery and said the perpetrators stole nothing more than the wallet of the murder victim. The report made no mention of the Maceo name or that the guys in the Hudson had made off with more than two grand of collection cash.
“I figure they been checking us out the last few days,” Rose said. “They knew the places where Willie Rags put in those slots and they cased the route. They picked the Dickinson club for the hit because it’s on an open stretch of road, not much else around there, not many witnesses passing by. It makes for an easy getaway.”
It was nearly eleven-thirty and we were sitting in the office, me and him and Sam. I asked Rose what made him so sure it was the Dallas micks.
“Who else?” Rose said. “They hit the collection on the slots those Dallas fucks think belong to them. It aint coincidence.”
“What if the robbers were just anybody and didn’t know what route they were hitting?” I said. “And if it was Dallas, what would be their point? They couldn’t expect the take to cover the worth of the machines they lost.”
“Their point,” Rose said, “is to try to fuck with our business, to scare the piss out of our customers, make us think it can happen again, make us wonder when and where, maybe get us to reconsider their offer to negotiate. That’s their fucking point. Or maybe they just wanted to do something to feel better about losing their goddamn machines. That would sure as shit be my point.”
He blew out a hard breath and ran a hand through his hair. He was smoking mad. Outsiders had not only robbed his men, they had done it on his own turf.
“We’re not just guessing it was them,” Sam said. He slid a photograph across the desk to me. I turned it around and regarded the picture of a beefy, well-dressed blond guy sitting in a circular booth and showing his big white teeth at the camera, a goodlooking woman on either side of him. He was close to handsome even with a small scar over one eye and a nose that had been broken sometime. His eyes were so lightcolored they seemed to have no irises at all.
“That’s Healy,” Sam said. “Peter Healy. Pete Healy. As in ‘Pete’s gonna shit.’”
I looked up from the picture and Rose was showing that smile of his that had nothing in it that smiles are supposed to have.
“I don’t move on just a guess, Kid,” he said. “You oughta know that by now. And I aint been sitting on my hands these last few days. While they been checking us out I been checking them out. This Healy’s got a rep. He’s a comer, a hardass. Got his start on the loading docks in New Orleans but the word is he killed a guy and took off to Fort Worth. Got in with the Carlson bunch. Then he moved over to the Burke outfit in Dallas. Went on his own over a year ago and took a gorilla named Parker with him. Parker used to do muscle and clip-work for Burke. Six-four, two-seventy they say, scares everybody shitless. Healy was already getting a piece of most of the slots in both Tarrant and Dallas County. Now he owns all the machines up there.”
“The Fort Worth and Dallas outfits are afraid he’s getting too ambitious,” Sam said. “Afraid he might start moving in on their gambling clubs, maybe the cathouses.”
“Those Dallas guys are pussies in cowboy hats,” Rose said. “Too scared to put the fucker in his place—six feet under.”
“Healy keeps beating them to the punch,” Sam said. “He popped Lou Morgan, Carlson’s main muscle—and I mean he did it. Went up to Morgan in some little sandwich joint and boom-boom, two times in the head and walked out cool as could be. Broad daylight, a dozen people in there, and nobody saw a thing. The Parker guy’s a piece of work too. He took down two of Burke’s biggest palookas in an alley fight. Bit one’s nose and ear off. Broke the other one’s back.”
“It’s getting close to a fucken war up there,” Rose said. “A month ago one of Healy’s biggest joints burned down. Next day three of Burke’s best boys vanish. A week later one of them pops up in White Rock Lake. They drag the lake and bring up a car with the other two guys in it. All three had a bullet behind the ear. Persons unknown, the cops said, but the outfits know who it was.”
“With so much going on up there,” I said, “why would Healy start trouble with us by moving his machines down here?”
“That was Ragsdale’s doing,” Sam said. “Willie Rags contracted the slots from Healy and told him he was going to put them in Houston, Beaumont, Port Arthur, all over the oil patch. But then he got ambitious. Thought he’d impress Healy by getting some of them into Galveston County.”
“So Healy’s big mistake was dealing with Ragsdale,” I said.
“No, that was only his first mistake,” Rose said. “His second mistake was thinking the slots still belonged to him. Then he hit my guys…that was his big fucken mistake.”
“I guess I’m off to Dallas,” I said.
“I want it done yesterday,” Rose said. He took two envelopes out of his top drawer and tossed them to me. One contained expense money, the other a city map of Dallas with exact directions to Healy’s office and to his home, and map markings showing the locations of several of his favorite restaurants and bars.
“Parker too,” Rose said.
“We talked to the Fort Worth and Dallas outfits an hour ago,” Sam said. “We’ll be settling our thing with Healy but we’ll be doing them a hell of a favor too—Healy out of their hair and their hands clean, nothing to hide from the cops. But they want Parker out too, and to show their appreciation they ponied up a big advance on a contract to buy all their machines from us from now on.”
“The least they can do,” I said.
“You and your partners will get a bonus on this one,” Sam said with a grin. “The least we can do.”
I stared at Rose. He almost smiled—then looked at his watch.
I got going.
T he phone rang and rang before somebody finally picked up. A woman. “Jesus…what?” she said.
“Sheila?” I said.
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then, in barely above a whisper: “Who’s this?” One of those who never knew when one beau might call while she was with another.
“Let me talk to LQ,” I said.
“Huh? Say, who is this?” I could tell by her voice she was half in the bag. “You know what time it is? Do I know you?”
“Just put him on the phone, will you, sugar? It’s real important.”
The softer tone and the “sugar” did the trick. “Well…he’s sleeping pretty hard right now.”
“He’s passed out, you mean?”
“I don’t know if I’d say that. Just he’s sleeping pretty hard and it’d take a while to wake him, I think. Say, now, don’t I know you…?”
“How about Brando?”
“Who?”
“Ray.”
“Oh…Just a minute, I’ll go look.”
The phone clunked down and then I heard her voice at a distance but couldn’t make out what she was saying. After a minute somebody picked up the phone and coughed and said, “Yeah?” Brando.
“It’s me. Tell me how to get there. We got work.”
He gave me directions to Sheila’s house and then said, “Where we headed?”
I gave him a rundown on what happened to our men in Dickinson and what the job was. “I’m on the way to the ferry right now,” I said. “See you in about three hours. Be sure the Dodge is gassed.”
“It’s gassed already. Listen, me and LQ aint got but pistols. If we gonna need—”
“I already saw Richardson and got two Remington pumps with buckshot loads,” I said. Richardson was a graybeard who ran a hardware store in town but his real business was guns. He could get you any kind you wanted in almost any quantity. He even made after-hours deals at his home—his attic was an arsenal. He did a lucrative trade with Maceo men.
“Pumps,” Brando said. “Outstanding.”
“Be ready, both of you.”
T he Dodge was parked at the curb in front of the house. I pulled up behind it and snapped off the radio in the middle of “Limehouse Blues.” It was close to four o’clock. The moon had set behind the pines but there were only a few thin clouds and the stars were thick and bright. There was an old Ford coupe in the driveway. The living room window showed light behind the curtain. I gunned the engine a couple of times and somebody pulled the curtain aside just enough to peek out and then let it fall back. Then the house went dark and the front door opened and LQ and Brando came out with their bags. The women stepped out with them and there was a lot of hugging and kissing and patting of asses while I locked up the Terraplane.
I put my valise in the trunk of the Dodge and got in the backseat. LQ and Brando came over and put their Gladstones in the truck too. There was a smaller bag with the pickup money and LQ jammed it under the front seat.
“You drive,” he told Brando, and settled himself by the shotgun window. Brando went around and got behind the wheel and cranked up the motor.
“Too bad that Terraplane seats only two inside,” Brando said. “I’d like to drive that honey to Dallas.”
“We took that honey to Dallas I’d be driving and you’d be the one riding in the rumble seat,” LQ said.
“Drive this,” Brando said, jacking his fist. He got us rolling. The radio started blaring “Stardust” and he turned the volume down.
“Goddamn day would have to have a lot more than twenty-four hours in it for you to’ve picked a lousier time to roust us,” LQ said without looking back at me. I could tell by his voice he was still partly drunk.
“Twenty-seven o’clock,” Brando said, and chuckled. “Thirty-three o’clock.”
“It didn’t take you three hours to pack a bag,” I said. “While you’ve been sleeping it off some more I’ve been driving, so don’t cry on my shoulder.”
I took off my coat and balled it into a pillow and stretched out on the seat with my back toward them and closed my eyes.
“He don’t sound real eager to hear about our good time, does he?” Brando said.
T he weather stayed pleasant with only a hint of chill. The day broke cloudless and the air smelled sweet and dry. They hadn’t had a good look at my face till the morning light, and they naturally made a bunch of jokes about it—LQ saying it looked like I’d picked a fight with the wrong little girl—before I told them about the sparring match with Otis.
“Hellfire,” LQ said, “I never did understand why you done all that boxing anyhow. Playfighting by a bunch of rules. That don’t help a man a damn bit when he gets in a for-real fight. How you done him is proof of that.”
“What I don’t get,” Brando said, “is why you waited till you got knocked on your ass so many times before you busted him up. First time he floored me would’ve been the last.”
We stopped at a roadside café and took a booth in the back corner and all of us ordered coffee and cornbread, eggs and pork chops and grits. The waitress was a trim pretty thing in a tight skirt and we all gave her the once-over and she smiled at our attention.
She’d just walked off to the kitchen window with our orders when Brando said, “Oh man, I can’t keep it to myself no more—you gotta hear this,” and started telling me all about his fun with Cora Jane, the friend that Sheila had gotten for him. Cora Jane had done this to him, he said, she had done that, she had done everything. She had even shown him a couple of tricks he hadn’t heard of.
He didn’t shut up about Cora Jane till the waitress showed up with our breakfast plates. She fetched the coffeepot and refilled our cups and gave us all another pretty smile and said to just whistle if there was anything else we’d like.
LQ watched her sweetlooking ass walk away and whispered, “I got half a mind to tell her what I’d like…”
“You got half a mind, period,” Brando said, then got back to the subject of Cora Jane. There was no denying he’d had himself a time.
“That Cora Jane sounds like a ball of fire,” LQ said. He said Sheila was fun in bed but she liked her booze a little too much. After she’d been drinking a while he got the feeling she didn’t really know who she was fucking or really care.
“Hell man,�
�� Brando said, “what difference does it make what’s going on in her head as long as you get to put it to her?”
“Makes a difference,” LQ said.
“You’re never satisfied, that’s your trouble. You expect too goddamn much.”
“What the hell you know about it?” LQ said. “You’d hump a rock-pile if you thought a snake was in it.”
“Snake this.”
W e got back on the road but took our time. We didn’t want to get to Dallas till just about dark. Brando drove while LQ and I sat in the back and went over the maps and the directions to Healy’s office and to his home. The routes had been clearly marked on the map in green ink. Because his house was a couple of miles south of downtown and not too far off the highway, we decided we’d check it first, even though it wasn’t likely he’d be there at such an early hour. His office was in a downtown building a few blocks west of the city park and close to the railtracks. If we didn’t find him there, either, we’d start checking his favorite hangouts.
We stopped at a roadside lunch wagon and bought hamburgers with all the trimmings and bottles of ice-cold Coke and ate the lunch at a picnic table in the shade of a tree. When we got going again, LQ was at the wheel while I went over the maps with Brando.
“What if he aint anywhere we look?” Brando said. “Could be we’ll check someplace and he aint there and then we head for another place and he’s headed for the place we just checked.”
“We’re not leaving Dallas till we put him down,” I said. “If we don’t find him tonight we’ll hunt for him again in the morning. If we spot him in daylight we’ll tail him till it’s dark, then pick our best chance to do it. No daylight hit if we can help it. Too chancy.”
“We could end up hunting him for days,” Brando said. “What if we find him and he’s got ten guys with him?”
“Damn poor odds, all right,” LQ said. “To be fair we’d have to let him send for more guys.”
His big grin filled the rearview and I gave him one back.
“Ha ha,” Brando said. “I’m serious, man. What if we find Healy but the Parker guy’s not with him? Or what if we find Parker first? As soon as we do one of them, the other’s bound to hear about it and get set for us—or make himself too scarce to find.”
Under the Skin Page 23
