Suspects

by David Thomson

  “What’s it to you, pisspot?” she gave back, not promising a love match, but William could smell out a tender heart, and he bought her a buffalo dinner straightaway. When he learned she was a shootist, he asked for a demonstration: Lucy was part of the Wild West Show before she’d finished buffalo farting. But it was hard for her because Annie Oakley—old souse—was the shooting star, except that she was often too drunk to hit a wall. Lucy was employed to do the real shooting that Oakley had once been capable of. A wagon would come into the arena with Annie up front blasting away on nothing, and Lucy under the canvas plonking the targets. It did not foster friendly feelings between the girls.

  Lucy and Jarrett were married in 1898, and a son was born the next year—Cody, after their buckskin boss—in Casper, Wyoming, as the show toured. For the first five years of the child’s life, they stayed with the show, roaming the West. But in 1904, they built a homestead in the part of South Dakota near Custer. It was a wild place, with Indians around, and Ma kept the child in one arm and a gun in the other.

  Away from the show, William Jarrett was hardly able to chop a cord of wood, much less skin bears or make decent whiskey. So Ma took to doing a little holdup work in small banks in Nebraska. She would sometimes take Cody along, originally for luck, but once he cottoned on, he was cover for her. Ma had taught Cody to shoot as soon as she’d given him a pipe.

  Ma never was sure about the death of her husband, on a camping trip with Cody. But there were things between men you shouldn’t inquire into. William had been a worrier, and he was holding her and Cody back. They could get a gang together now. The automobile had put a fresh face on the holdup business, and while Ma had had to go into spectacles, so that her shooting slowed a touch, she was a merciless driver, so long as you had a strong car.

  All through the 1920s, the Jarrett gang kept active. There was the bank in Chillicothe, Missouri (1922), the railroad holdup outside North Platte, Nebraska (1925), and the Wells Fargo job in Topeka, Kansas (1927). It happened that I was riding on the train they stopped near North Platte. I was fourteen then, and I had been visiting my grandmother. The train stopped and I could hear a lot of laughter and whooping down the line. I was able to watch out of the window, and I have never forgotten the jaunty wave Ma gave me as she strode around in boots and a cotton dress. She went on, then stopped, came back and handed me a chocolate bar out of her pocket. “There, son.” She smiled. Her hand was small and bony; her nails were cracked. The back of her hand was dotted with freckles and she wore a thin gold wedding ring. There was a six-gun in the other hand; it seemed as big as a man’s finger in a baby’s fist. I kept that chocolate bar for years, till it was hard and black. It was the best story I ever had for my children—that and the one about Johann Tickle. I think Harry threw the chocolate bar in the fire.

  Then, in 1928, outside Aberdeen, South Dakota, the gang was trapped in a motor court and Cody set off so as to let Ma get away. Cody was taken and, with a lot of bribing of witnesses and barefaced lies, they were able to get him fifteen years in the state penitentiary.

  He was out in ten, but it was a bad time for the family and Ma was never quite the same again without her boy. She was reduced to typing envelopes and baking pies while he was away. What’s more, Cody’s headaches got a lot worse in prison. That was one of the reasons he was released in 1939, because the doctors suspected he had a brain tumor or something and didn’t have a long way to go anyway.

  Ma and Cody decided to head further west, and so they moved on into Idaho and Oregon, but it was cold and high there, and somehow Ma had gotten superstitious about living at altitude. She was sure it hurt Cody’s head. They did a few jobs, but they lived simply and many a night in front of the fire they’d read Charles Dickens to each other. Actually, that was the period when Ma really mastered reading—and shot an owl to celebrate!

  It was in 1942 Cody met the other woman—Verna, yellow-haired tramp. She was from Chico and said they’d love it in the south where it was warm. She got her hooks into Cody—always parading in her underwear and pouting at him—and they got married, damn it! Then in no time Ed Somers was coming by, an “old, old friend” of hers, full of ideas for a new gang. Ma could see Verna had the hots for Ed—greaseball hunk, he was—and she could tell that Cody didn’t always catch on. He needed looking after still.

  So, anyway, in 1945, the new Jarrett gang held up a train in the Sierras. Then all hell broke loose. Cops were out after them, and Cody said he’d had enough. He turned himself in on a smaller job (three-year sentence, he thought) just to get the heat off. But they gave him another fifteen in Folsom, so he knew he had to crash out. Ma looked after the so-called “gang”: most of the time it was telling Ed and Verna to stop using themselves as mirrors. She went to see Cody in prison, and she’d heard that there’d been an attempt on his life there. Hell! If you had to be in prison, you expected security. So she told Cody she’d settle Ed—it had to have been his idea. But Ma was sixty-eight, and Ed worked out with weights. It was a real fight, but in the end Verna put a bullet in the back of her head to shut her up.

  CODY JARRETT

  James Cagney in White Heat, 1949,

  directed by Raoul Walsh

  The headaches had begun as his trick, like a fingertip of grease put on a fastball so that it fell off the table as it neared the plate—a certain additive, a definite effect, illegal but winning. Whenever Cody Jarrett wanted his mother, and didn’t want his father around in their precious air, he would curl up, with his hands between his legs, shudder and whisper, “Head hurts.” Whatever she was doing, Ma would order his father away, she’d pull the drapes together so that the house became darker and more auspicious, and she’d come to his side, smelling of flour, tobacco and gunpowder.

  “Head hurts, Ma,” he’d say.

  “I know it,” she told him.

  “You’re with me.”

  “It’ll pass, by and by.”

  As he lay there, letting her gnarled hand stroke the back of his neck, he was dizzy at the lack of pain and his own guile. But as the years went by, and he acted his heart out to hold on to Ma, he noticed that the strain of his belief in the play had begun to make his head throb. Then, once, in amazement, he realized that he was having a headache, unbidden, not ordered. It had stolen up on him, a pain imprisoned in his brow, so that he didn’t dare move or open his eyes. “Ma!” he cried in a voice of such fear and agony that it startled the seventeen-year-old Cody and made him afraid of the force in himself. Ma came, and his father came too, two faces looking down into the cradle of migraine.

  His father said that Cody was moping in the house. They should go off into the hills, get some fresh air and exercise. “That wood stove,” his father explained, “makes the air go stale, and you spend all your time indoors reading comic books.” So father and son packed a tent and put on boots. Ma watched them depart, and she told William to come back and get a gun in case of mountain lions. He took the pistol and a box of bullets and put them in the backpack. Cody stood watching, his shoulders hunched, a tense look on his face.

  They didn’t converse in the hills. His father cooked a meal the first night while Cody gathered wood. He watched his father at work and pretended to be a hostile tracking the white man. He thought how easily he could pick off his father.

  “Hey, dreamer!” yelled William Jarrett. “What’d I ask?”

  “All right, Pa.” Ma would be baking now with a pot of milk and moonshine warming on the stove.

  Three days later, Cody came back down the same path toward the house. He was carrying the pack and the same anxious expression.

  “Howdy,” said Ma, and then an hour later, “Pa coming?”

  “No Ma, he’s not.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Got hisself killed.”

  “How’d he do that?”

  “Fell right off a cliff. Body landed in rushing rapids. Swept away.”

  “Damn it!” said Ma.

  “I know,” said her son
in a heartfelt way.

  It passed off.

  But Cody had the headaches now like the color of his hair. It went from brown to gray but the headaches didn’t grow older or weaker. Ma saw she should never let him off on his own.

  It was while he was in prison the first time that Cody got teased by other men about Ma. These guys were always talking about the sex thing and they had pictures of cuties in bathing suits. When he came out of prison, Cody had worked it out that he ought to get himself that kind of woman so he’d be less odd. Verna looked exactly like the pictures, so Cody said he’d marry her. She laughed at him, but then he slugged her good and she got that wicked-bitch afraid look in her eyes. Ma couldn’t understand about Verna. She said the girl wasn’t good for him. But that wasn’t the point. Just keep her around for appearance.

  The new Jarrett gang did a lovely train as it came out of a tunnel in the mountains. But one of the gang used his name, Cody, and the driver heard. So Cody gave him one in the gut and the guy tipped over on a lever, and the engine gave off white steam right in the face of one of the gang. He was a goner—blind and helpless.

  Back in the cabin, Cody got his worst headache yet; maybe it was Verna’s powder-puff scent. Ma took him into another room. “Don’t let them see you,” she said as he curled in her lap. “Might give ’em ideas.” Then she passed him a drink: “Top o’ the world, son.” That was saying it.

  So Cody took a rap on a small job and in the prison he meets this Vic Pardoe, and they get along. One day at lunch someone whispers in his ear that Ma is dead. The head starts to burst. Cody Jarrett gets up ranting and roaring, Cody can see him, and he staggers along the top of the tables before four guards restrain him and carry him out. That guy’s nuts, thinks Cody.

  The doc is for putting Cody in an insane asylum. But he gets a gun and breaks out with Vic. Goes straight for the old house; it’s night when he gets there. Cody gets to Verna; she’s so scared she’s wetting herself. But all she can do is set up Ed, and Cody plugs him at the top of the stairs so he goes tumbling down. What are stairs for?

  Then the gang plans a new job, just to prove Cody’s his old self. Night before it, Cody meets Vic outside the house and they have a regular talk. Vic wants to get into L.A. to see his wife. “You’re lonesome, like me,” says Cody. “All I ever had was Ma. I was just talking with her. Always trying to put me on top, she was… . Maybe I am nuts.”

  But “Vic” was a cop, it turned out. Liar. Traitor. Knife in the back. Couldn’t trust anyone. Cody ended up on top of the gas tank and one of the shots set it off, a column of fire and heat with Cody laughing in it. His headache had finally exploded the world.

  BRIGID O’SHAUGHNESSY

  Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, 1941,

  directed by John Huston

  Everything visible was real: the long legs, her high breasts, the swimming-pool-blue eyes, and the waves of what we call red hair. But redness in hair covers a range of hues all unlike the smart red in a box of paints—there’s rust, whiskey, dried blood, paprika and ginger, iron-strong earth, a claret where it meets the glass, one of the russets you find in a Cox’s Orange Pippin (an English variety of apple), copperiness, a thin bitter red that could be sour or poisonous, a noble faded red like the red of Raphael. The red of red hair goes on forever, and you’ve never quite pinned it down. I always wanted a red-haired child, but Mary Frances and I were brown and brown, so it might have been strange and worrying.

  Brigid O’Shaughnessy had the unequivocal body of a fine creature. But she was a frightful liar. If you asked her the time, and she looked at her little watch, with a face the size of a dime, instead of telling you it was 8:56 (and you had a train at nine), she’d say, “Oh, it’s early yet, just after a quarter to” or, “Heavens, it’s nearly ten past. You’ll have to stay the night.” She had a set of names for herself in the way con men keep a wallet full of cards—she could be Arlene Wonderly, or Stella Leblanc, Hope Middlewhich, Hermione Heigho, Winifred Wadman, Gwendolen Torrance—I don’t know what!

  She was born in Annamoe, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, the child of a professor of literature at Harvard who was teaching that year at Trinity College, Dublin, and was having a weekend walking in Wicklow with his wife when—the rain falling—she said, “Horace, I would like us to hurry.”

  “How so, my love?” he enquired.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  “You didn’t tell me,” he complained.

  Enough of that. There are childhoods so flat you can put a reader to sleep with a faithful account. If I was to tell you how thoroughly and religiously Brigid was brought up, you’d only say, “Well, how is it she turned out an incorrigible liar?”

  Cut to when she’s eighteen, with a shock of pimento hair only fierce brushing could tame. Straightaway, she carved up men with her falsehoods. She had a beguiling trick of dropping her eyes, lowering her voice and drawing muskily close to a man—all in the spirit of intimate confession—to say, “Dear heart, I have to say something… .”

  The he in question was like a cork in a vortex. He listened and was moved a mile by her sad tale. Then time passed and he cottoned on that this revelation had been mist. He mentioned it, “I say, my dear…” And wham, her eyes were pools of remorse, the blush was raspberry and she came closer still, so that if he’d looked he might have seen the rising of her nipples beneath her blouse. “That was a fib, dearest, a half-truth really. I want now to tell you the hard facts …” And so on, a little closer, a little more hushed and momentous, a better show every time.

  To cut it all short, we come to 1930 and there she is—red head at morning, sailor’s warning—in hot pursuit of the Maltese Falcon, a statuette stuffed with gemstones and a history harder to believe than it is to tell, and anyway who’s seen the bird in the last century?

  But we all need something to be looking for, and the falcon made a pretty trail by way of Constantinople to Hong Kong and San Francisco. It picked up colorful characters as it traveled: Casper Gutman, Floyd Thursby and Joel Cairo for starters, with Pacific voyages on boats called La Paloma—everything a romancer could wish for.

  But then in San Francisco, looking for help, she’d gone to Spade & Archer, and in that alley off Bush Street, above the Stockton Tunnel, as Miles Archer came closer to swallow the next sotto voce untruth, she had put a bullet inside him. And later, Spade had worked it out, despite her holding her trembly body against his with that threat of ultimate coming clean in her eye. Imagine a milk-white body with that Titian hair, imagine that, Sam, you were saying to him without opening your mouth except to breathe and let him see the cooked lobster of your tongue.

  It could have gone on forever, this farrago of lies and a falcon too heavy to fly. Yet Spade called it quits. Not that he wasn’t impressed by the lies or the liar. But he came up with a stuffy quote about what’s expected of a detective, how if your partner’s bumped off and you know who did it why it’s “bad business” to let the killer go. And, anyway, he knew enough to know he shouldn’t trust her. He had seven or eight reasons for turning her in and, against them, only the vision of that hair on top of that pale body. So he turned her in, the sap. You know a man like that’s a depressive and that one day he’s going to come to a full stop, the end of his alley, and never say or write another civil word.

  Spade didn’t know if they’d hang her or give her life. He never bothered to find out. He was the sort who had read about Lot’s wife. Well, they made it life, and who can say it wasn’t because, there in the court, she gave the judge the impression of edging closer and looking up at him with the unadorned, woeful truth? “Your Honor …” did she begin?

  She went to prison, and no one ever knew how, but after two years there, they suddenly realized she was nine months pregnant. She was delivered of a boy baby, named Sergius, but she agreed he should go to an orphanage and not know the glum truth about his real mother—unless she ever found herself in a position to reveal it. He did well, too, in the air force and Hollywood. But that
’s too much to get into here.

  CASPER GUTMAN

  Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, 1941,

  directed by John Huston

  THE BABY EATS HERE! said the sign, in bold red with the exclamation mark like a flame. The sign was attached to a playpen in the window of the best bakery in Mitcham. Mr. and Mrs. Gutman did cakes, pies and puddings, as well as a range of loaves. And they took no less care with those offerings than they did with their rotund infant, Casper, who sat, large, pink and glowing, in the playpen as an advertisement. He had been born in 1879, a thirteen-pound baby. The exertions of the delivery were such that his mother had to be kept on a diet of lard cakes for a year.

  Casper’s parents were German, and they had come to London fifteen years before his birth. I don’t know why. I can’t know everything. Look into your own family trees and try to account for all those jagged changes in direction.

  As a boy, Casper kneaded the dough. He could crawl into the oven itself to retrieve loaves. He was the delivery boy, and he was always on show at fetes and fairs with a sampling of the family eats. Still, it was his large, contented presence that spoke loudest. To look at Casper was to wonder whether one didn’t have room left for just one more turnover, or another slice of crusty farmhouse.

  He was spared most of the burden of formal education. Eating or urging others to do so took up much of his time. Yet, by the age of eighteen and at 270 pounds he had amassed a body of diverse knowledge. Without any central preoccupation, he had an archipelago of hobbies and subjects. They included card games, the Great Western Railway, Levantine history, the comic novel, horse racing, the grammar of Latin languages, food (of course), mental arithmetic, the Hanseatic League, bizarre murders, shaggy-dog stories, the life of Sterne, cricketing statistics, papal anecdotes, fire irons, Chinese tortures, the campaigns of Wallenstein, miniature gardens of the Japanese type, the history of puppets, culinary aphrodisiacs and those vagaries of fact that are often lumped together under the title “Believe It or Not”.