True Crime (29 page)

She patted my cheek, sipped her glass. “You could get lucky, too, friend. Lulu’s a hell of a girl. What’s your name again?”

“Jimmy.”

“Nice name. Nice guy. Maybe Lulu’s the one who might strike it lucky. Who knows?”

Soon I’d moved myself into the little bedroom—all I had was one small overnight bag with a change of underwear and socks, and some toilet articles (the toilet was out back, incidentally—like the Auburn, a two-seater); but I decided it best to sleep in my pants and my undershirt on top of the covers. There was an open window by a small desk on which some Big Little Books were confined by horsehead bookends twice their size. On one wall were some shelves with a baseball glove or two and some toy guns and such. Despite the trappings being male, I couldn’t help but feel this child’s room was appropriate for the slip of a thing next to me, the farmer’s daughter who slept so deeply beside me.

I lay on my back, staring at the slanted ceiling, its starry sky visible above me; light from outside—not just the moon, but that well-lit farmyard—made that possible. The girl beside me seemed bathed in blue ivory.

I thought about waiting till everyone was asleep and spiriting her out to the Auburn. But how could I do that and get past this fellow Chase, in the barn? And surely somebody in the house kept a sort of guard; I hadn’t heard the details, but that seemed a safe assumption to make. And how was I to take this girl with me, without her making a fuss? Her emotions were on edge already, let alone a stranger grab her and try making off with her.

My thoughts careened from dead Dr. Moran to the pending kidnapping that I hoped to avoid being drawn into—though I knew I already was. Maybe if it had been a bank they were planning to rob, I could’ve let it pass. But kidnapping? No. Like every other red-blooded bozo in this country, the Lindbergh tragedy had got to me, and made the idea of kidnapping seem something abhorrent. It had me thinking in terms of children, too, which was ridiculous, because the Karpis-Barker specialty was a rich banker or brewer. Still, stealing money was one thing—stealing a person was quite another….

I should have been frightened, and I suppose I was, but too much was going on, too much was whirling through my brain, for me to feel the full impact of what I was caught up in.

More than anything, I missed Sally. Missed her and her silk sheets—how I wished this dinky kids’ bedroom was her white bedroom at the Drake—and I regretted our parting angry.

Angry. That was something else working at me: anger. Anger and my old friend frustration were knocking around with everything else in my head, vying for attention. I’d been suckered, I’d been used—Frank Nitti had made me pay for my trip to Outlaw Land with the Moran setup. And what could I do about it? Being angry with Nitti was like getting pissed off at God. You could do it, but it wouldn’t get you anywhere. Except hell maybe.

My fault—my own damn fault for dealing with Nitti, and expecting a fair shake. From his point of view this no doubt
was
a fair shake: tit for tat. He’d done a lot for me—he gave me a name and cover and backed it up, and now here I was, the girl I’d come to find lying right beside me.

I just had no idea how to get her the hell out of here.

That was the thought Louise—Lulu, if you will—interrupted when she woke up and saw me and screamed.

I placed a hand over her mouth as gently as I could; she continued to scream into it, but I’d stifled her enough for her to be able to hear me.

“Please,” I said. “Please don’t. I’m just here to keep you company.”

Her wide, wide-set brown eyes seemed to consider that, and beneath my palm she stopped screaming.

I took it away. That had been one hell of a piercing cry she’d let out, worthy of Fay Wray, but I didn’t hear footsteps rushing up the steps or down the hall—no one was hollering out, wondering what was wrong. Maybe women screaming in the night was standard stuff around these parts.

She looked at me, mouth open, lips trembling, eyes still wide, nostrils flared, like the distressed damsel on a pulp-magazine cover.

“Who—who are you?” she finally managed.

“You met me before,” I said. “Jimmy Lawrence. I drove Ma here from Chicago.”

The eyes narrowed a bit. “Oh.”

“They didn’t have a bed for me, and your friend Paula asked me to sleep in here, so somebody’d be with you through the night.”

The door cracked open and Paula, cigarette dangling from her red lips, said, “That’s right, sugar. Didn’t want you to be alone in your hour of need.”

Somebody’d heard the scream, after all.

I said to Louise, “I’ll leave if you like.”

She looked toward Paula. “Can’t
you
stay with me? You’re my
friend.
”

“I’m your pal,” Paula said. “But I’m Freddie’s girl, and he wants the pleasure of my company, tonight. You understand, sugar. You going to be all right?”

I got off the bed, stood. “I’ll leave.”

Louise looked at me; she was a small thing, but she had eyes you could dive into and swim around in for a lifetime or two.

Paula said, “Why don’t you let him keep you company? You don’t want to be alone tonight.”

Louise thought about that for a moment, shook her head no, meaning she didn’t want to be alone, and Paula smiled and said, “That’s a good girl,” and shut the door on us.

I stood there looking down at the girl, in the blue-ivory semi-light. She looked up at me. She looked pretty pitiful.

I said, “Is it all right if I lay back down, there?”

She swallowed. Nodded. Then quickly added, “But keep your pants on.”

I smiled at her. “I don’t do anything in a hurry.”

Despite herself, despite her situation, she found a tiny smile for me. Said, “Well, keep ’em on, anyway.”

“I can pull these beds apart a ways, if you like.”

“No. No, that’s okay.”

I lay back down.

She turned her back to me.

A few minutes ticked by, and then I heard her sobbing. I thought about touching her shoulder, but let it go.

Then she turned to me and, a hanky clenched in her fist, face slick with tears, said, “This is all wet.” She meant the hanky. “You wouldn’t happen to…?”

“Sure,” I said, and dug out a handkerchief for her.

She patted her face dry; no new tears seemed on the way, at least not immediately. She said, “I must look a mess.”

“You look fine. But you got a right to feel that way.”

She shook her head despairingly. “He was alive one minute, and the next…” Her chin crinkled in anger; she looked like a little girl about to throw a tantrum. “I’d like to kill that damn doctor!”

“It’s been taken care of.”

That shocked her. The angry look turned blank and she said, rather hollowly, “They…killed him?”

I nodded.

“Good,” she said. But I didn’t quite buy it.

“You don’t have to pretend for me,” I said.

“What?”

“That you like it. The cheap way life and death is traded in around here.”

She swallowed again. “I didn’t really mean I wanted Doc Moran dead. He’s a…he was a lush and always crowing about himself. But…”

“But he didn’t deserve to die for it. That what you’re saying?”

She shrugged a little; leaned on her elbow and looked at me. Those eyes. Those goddamn eyes.

“He didn’t mean to kill Candy,” she said. “I hate him for not being a better doctor. But I’m not glad they killed him.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Just don’t expect me to cry for him,” she said, with an edge of bitterness. “I don’t have any tears left for that damn old drunk.”

I nodded.

“You’re nice to stay in here with me, Mr. Lawrence.”

“Call me Jimmy. Should I call you Lulu?”

“If you like…Jimmy.”

“What’s Lulu short for?”

“Louise. Nobody around here calls me that.”

“Would it be okay if I call you that?”

That surprised her; but she nodded, three little nods.

“Why don’t you get some sleep, Louise.”

“All right,” she said.

She turned on her stomach, facing away from me.

I lay looking up at the stars in the ceiling-paper sky.

After a while she said, “Jimmy?”

“Yes, Louise?”

“Would you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Slide over onto my bed, with me.”

“Well…”

“Not for that. I need…held. You won’t try anything. You don’t have that sort of face. I can trust you. Can’t I?”

“You can trust me, Louise.” Taking into consideration I was pretending to be somebody I wasn’t, I figured she could do worse than trust me, among this company.

“I’m going to turn on my side,” she said.

She did.

“Now could you cuddle up to me? Maybe slip your arm around my waist?”

I did.

“That’s…that’s how Candy and me slept. Like spoons.”

“I got a girl back in Chicago,” I said. “We sleep like this sometimes.”

“It’s nice, isn’t it? Kinda…comforting.”

“It is nice.”

I was right up against her; she was soft and smelled like perfume. Dime-store perfume maybe, but I liked it anyway. I felt a stirring in me and had to pull back away from her rounded little rump; but she pushed back against me and said, ingenuously, “Candy was so sweet.”

Soon she began sobbing quietly; into my hanky. My erection receded. I kept my arm around her waist and hugged her to me.

“What am I going to do without him? What am going to do?”

I stroked her head, said, “There, there.”

And pretty soon she fell asleep.

So did I, and then I heard an unearthly sound, a screech out of a nightmare, and bolted upright in bed.

“What the hell was that?” I said.

Louise was sitting over at the child’s desk, combing her bobbed blond hair out with a brush; she was wearing that same pink dress I’d seen her in yesterday—like me, she’d slept in her clothes. She smiled over at me. She had no makeup on and looked about thirteen years old. The kind of thirteen-year-old that makes boys reconsider how they feel about girls, however.

She made a crinkly smile. “A rooster, silly. Haven’t you ever been on a farm before?”

I rubbed my face with a hand; I needed a shave. Sun was beginning to find its way in the open window next to her, but it still seemed pretty dark out to me.

“No,” I said. “This is a first for me.”

Still brushing her hair, she said, “I was raised on a farm. My daddy’s a farmer.”

“Do you miss your daddy?”

She looked sad, kept brushing. “Sometimes. I don’t imagine he misses me, though.”

“Why’s that?”

“He thinks I’m a bad girl. A sinner.”

“He’s a religious man, your daddy?”

“Too religious. He used to beat me with a belt because I wasn’t devout enough.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “At least when he beat me I knew he cared.”

“Pardon?”

She put the brush down and came and sat on the side of the bed next to me. “Sometimes that’s how people show you they care about you.”

“Hitting you?”

She nodded. “I don’t say it’s the best way. I wouldn’t ever hit anybody myself. And Candy—he hardly ever hit me. I guess that’s why I loved him so much.”

She seemed better this morning, seemed already to have accepted the finality of Candy’s death. Maybe in this fast crowd she ran with, fast death was commonplace. I asked her.

“You ever see anybody die before?” I said.

“Sure. Two times.”

“Guys working with Candy, you mean?”

She nodded. “They got shot on jobs.”

“I see.”

“And Candy killed some people. I never went on any jobs with him, so I never saw it. And I don’t like to think of it. But it’s true.”

“What kind of people?”

“Did he kill? A bank guard and a sheriff’s deputy. It bothered Candy.”

“It did?”

“Yes—he was afraid of the electric chair.”

I said nothing.

“He doesn’t have to be afraid anymore,” she said, and then tears gushed forth, and she was burying her face in my chest.

I held her for a while; by the time she came up for air, the sun was pouring through the windows like fresh buttermilk.

I wiped her tears with the bedspread. She smiled at me bravely. I got lost in her eyes, brown, brown eyes.

She said, “You didn’t take advantage of me last night.”

I swallowed.

“Most men would’ve.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You could’ve. I was helpless.”

“You look like you’ve got some spunk left. You let out a pretty good scream when you saw me, for example.”

She shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. You could’ve taken me. A man can have a woman if he wants her.”

“You mean he can rape her.”

She nodded.

“Where I come from,” I said, “that’s not an acceptable way of getting to know a girl.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Back East.”

“Is that why you’re such a gentleman?”

I smiled. “That’s another first for me—being called a gentleman.”

“I think that’s what I’ll call you. Gentleman Jim. A real gentleman in a lousy world.”

“Let’s just leave it at ‘Jimmy.’”

“No—I like ‘Gentleman Jim’ better.” She beamed at me; she was trying a little too hard to be cheerful, but I was glad she was making the effort.

“Whatever you say,” I said.

She grabbed me by the hand and yanked me off the bed.

“Come on, Gentleman Jim…this old farm girl’s going to show you around a farm. You got some learning to do.”

I told her I had to go the bathroom, but she said that would be no problem.

I could stop at the outhouse on our way.

When we cut across the backyard, a dozen chickens were dancing around, scrounging for food. One with yellow legs and another with bluish-green legs were dancing in place, pecking at something that looked like an old beat-up leather glove.

Louise caught my curious expression and said, “That’s a rat skin. That’s about all the cat leaves behind, when she’s done with it.”

“Hens aren’t real particular about their breakfast, are they?”

Deadpan, she said, “Those aren’t hens. Not yet. They don’t start laying eggs till they’re seven months.”

She led me by the hand beyond the barn and silo, down a dew-wet path, at the end of which half a dozen cows, black, brown, stood gazing at us with bored expressions. Then we cut over by a shocked field, each shock looking like a small rustic wigwam.

“Velvet barley,” Louise explained. She pulled a stalk out of one of the shocks, crushed the head against her palm, lifted her palm to her lips and blew away the chaff. She held out her palm for me to see the seeds there. “You like beer?”

“Sure.”

“That’s the malting barley.” She dropped the seeds to the earth and moved on. “Mr. Gillis has fifteen acres of barley. They plant this stuff quick, soon as the ground’s fit.”

“How many acres does Gillis have here?”

“Eighty.”

“Is that big?”

“Not really. Not small, though.”

Birds were singing. I wasn’t used to seeing this much sky; in Chicago, in the Loop, you have to raise your head to see any sky. And the last bird I heard sing in the city was Anna Sage’s parakeet.

I asked, “Can he make a living at it?”

“He could if the prices were right. The livestock’ll get that barley. He can’t afford to sell it for what it’s going.”

“You ought to be able to make a living with land like this. Crops like these.”

She shrugged, walking ahead of me now. Not holding my hand—leading the way.

“Mr. Gillis does all right with his sideline,” she said.

“You mean taking in house guests.”

She nodded.

“You ever stay here before?” I asked her.

She nodded again. “A few times.”

We were at the edge of the barley field, now. Some stones were scattered about, some of them nearly boulders, big cold seeds not worth planting. She pointed.

“That grass is Mr. Gillis’ hay. He’s got about six acres in grass. For the cows and horses.”

We walked along, skirting a patch given to more stones and nettles. “Always a patch or two a farmer can’t tame,” she explained. “There’s the corn.”

I walked behind her, like an Indian, down green rows of corn only a few feet high. Silo corn, she said; planted late to keep it green. It would go eight feet. Up ahead, she said, was some corn Gillis had planted around the end of May.

I followed her down these rows, too, but they were damn near as tall as I was. The air here smelled sweet; up ahead Louise was breathing it in, smiling. At home.

We passed a field of yellow sweet clover, on our way to a field of (she said) alfalfa. She picked off a few tiny purple flowers, saying, “Relish for the cows.” Gillis only had a couple acres of alfalfa, not enough by her way of thinking. We walked past another field (oats, she said) cut and shocked, which she dismissed as pig feed.

“Because of the price?” I asked.

“The price,” she nodded. “My daddy got two dollars for an eighty-pound tin of milk, few years back. Now it’s less than a dollar.”

“That’s rough.”

“It’s the banks. That’s why I don’t think it’s so bad, what Candy and the others do.”

“Rob banks, you mean.”

She glanced at me, brown eyes wide. “Sure. All the banks ever do is foreclose on farmers.”

We were to a big white-flowered field, riffling in the slight morning breeze. Buckwheat, she said.

“Just an acre,” she went on. “Used for chicken and hog feed. You know what he could get selling it? Penny a pound.” She shook her head. “Farmer’s life.”

“But you miss it, don’t you?”

She was looking at the ground, watching her feet as she walked. “Maybe. A little.”

I followed her down into a hollow and we sat under some trees. Another bird was singing. I asked her what kind it was.

“Robin,” she said. “He doesn’t know from the Depression.”

“Why don’t you go back home, Louise?”

“Home?”

“The farm.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why?”

She was sitting with her knees bunched up, clutching her legs with clasped arms; she had nice legs, by the way. White. Smooth.

“I was married. Still am, really.”

“I see.”

“He was bad to me. Worse than my daddy, even. He was a lot like my daddy, really. Maybe that’s why I took up with him.”

That seemed a pretty fair insight for a girl who was part farm girl, part moll. Louise was somebody who had the promise of being her own person, if she could just break away from the sordid world Candy Walker had introduced her to.

“Couldn’t you go back to your daddy?” I asked.

“Would he take me back?”

A rhetorical question, but I thought about answering it, anyway.

Before I could, she answered it herself: “He wouldn’t want me back. I’m a sinner. A fallen woman. And as for Seth, he’d probably shoot me. He said as much.”

“He did?”

She hugged her legs, as if chilled. And it wasn’t chilly.

“He said if I ever took up with another man, he’d see me dead.”

I thought about telling her what her father had told me—that her husband Seth had already taken up with another woman (or two), and could care less about getting her back, at this point; it had been a year, after all.

“And even if Seth
wasn’t
a problem, I don’t know if I’d want to go back to my daddy even if he’d have me. Go back to some stupid little farm after the life I’ve seen?”

I didn’t point out that we seemed to be on a stupid little farm at the moment, and that the life she’d seen with Candy Walker was a squalid nightmare.

But I did say, “Maybe you should start over. Just go to a big city and find a job.”

She released her legs and stretched them out in front of her; the pink dress was up around her knees. Nice calves, as we say down on the farm.

She said, “I did have some typing in school. I had almost two years of high school, you know.”

“You speak well. Express yourself well.”

She liked hearing that; she gave me a broad, toothy smile that was as refreshing as that sweet smell back in the corn rows. She said, “I read a lot, you know. I like the movies, too. I always thought I’d be…you’ll laugh.”

“No I won’t.”

“An actress. There, I said it, go ahead, laugh. Every dumb little farm girl wants to run off to the big city and be a star.”

“Sometimes it works out,” I said, thinking of Sally.

“Well, at least I ran off. I don’t suppose my life is so different from being in show business.”

“You’re sure on the road a lot.”

“But even a typist. A secretary. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? That’d be a step up, and in a big city. I can’t stay on with the Barkers and all. With Candy gone, I just don’t see why I’d stay.”

I touched her shoulder. “Why not go home, at least give your father a chance? Then you can go to the big city, if you like. I got friends in Chicago, for instance. Maybe I could help out.”

She touched my face with a hand that smelled nicely of grain; the hand she’d cracked the barley stalk with. She said, “You really are sweet, my Gentleman Jim.”

She really did read, didn’t she? The romance magazines, that is.

She was saying, “How can anybody be so good and honest as you?”

Since I was a liar trying to manipulate her into doing my client’s bidding, I couldn’t wholeheartedly agree with her.

So I just said, “I’m not, really. I just think a girl as pretty as you doesn’t need a life as shabby as this.”

I thought she might take offense, but she didn’t.

She raised her skirt. Lifted it slowly, up over her thighs. Up to a yellow fringe between her legs. No underthings.

She wasn’t bashful, this girl.

“I know Candy is fresh in his grave,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter. He’s gone, and you’re here—and I want you. I need you. You could make me feel better.”

This would go over real big with my client.

I said, “I don’t think I should, Louise.”

She reached behind her and was unbuttoning the dress; then she was easing it down to her waist and her breasts were round and her nipples were pink and I unbuttoned my trousers.

I was getting a Sheik out of my billfold when she said, “No. You don’t need that.”

“You want me to…?”

“Pull out when it’s time? No. Don’t worry. I can’t have kids.”

A more sensitive man might’ve had his ardor dampened by that remark; but I was still caught up in the sweet smell of corn and the fringe between her legs and pink nipples and I had her on the grass, under the trees, her bottom small and firm and yet soft in my hands, as I slid in and out of her, went round and round in her, as she moved beneath me with a yearning that went beyond the moment, and she moaned and groaned and cried out when she came, and so did I. Then she was sitting up and in my arms, a bundle of flesh and undone clothes and sobbing.

Pretty soon I put my pants on.

That’s when I noticed, not far from where we’d just got to know each other, biblically speaking, a patch of ground without any grass.

The grave where Candy Walker and Doc Moran lay entwined, much as Louise and I had been.

A wave of nausea hit me, as strong as the smell of ammonia. But there was nothing in my stomach, so nothing came up.

But Louise, standing now, hands behind her, buttoning, said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“We better get back for breakfast.”

“Okay.”

“Hmmm,” she said. Noting the patch of grassless ground. “Wonder what’s planted there.”

Nothing that’ll grow, I thought.

“Let’s get back,” I said.

Breakfast was under way, when we did, and Paula—having the alcoholic’s standard plate of hardly any food (but no glass of whiskey yet)—smiled wickedly at Louise, recognizing what I can best if rudely describe as the freshly fucked look on Louise’s face, and Louise blushed, and I frowned at Paula, but nobody else noticed anything. We sat and ate. Ma wasn’t cooking, this time, but Mrs. Gillis did a pretty fair job of it herself. Scrambled eggs and bacon and fried potatoes with gravy and glasses of milk all around.

Ma seemed a little blue about it, actually—especially since her boys Fred and Doc were bent over their plates, inhaling the stuff.

Karpis was sitting next to me, his girl Dolores next to him. “You can freshen up in our room,” he said. “Right across from yours.”

“Thanks.”

“Towels and a mirror and a basin. You’ll have to come downstairs and get some fresh water, though. If you want to shave, anyway.”

“Yeah, I guess I do look a little scruffy.”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “We don’t stand on ceremony, here.”

Nelson was eating a plate of food that would’ve fed a man twice his size; sitting right across from me, next to his cute little brunette wife, he said, “I hear you’re coming in with us. Taking Candy’s place.”

At the phrase “taking Candy’s place,” Paula laughed, and a few heads turned toward her with expressions that said they didn’t get it. But the moment quickly passed, thank God.

“Yeah,” I said. “And I’m pleased to be in such high-flying company.”

Nelson smiled; his mustache looked both wispy and fake, like he was a kid who pasted on each strand with glue, one at a time. “Good to have you aboard. Sorry about the ridin’ I give you yesterday. Chicago says you’re aces, so there’ll be no more complaints from me.”

“Thanks, Nelson.”

“You can call me B.G.”

For Big George.

“Sure, B.G.,” I said.

I was shaving in Karpis and Dolores’ room when Karpis came in, his creepy smile on display.

“You forgot these,” he said.

He was holding out my glasses. I had set them on a dresser last night before I went to bed, and had, frankly, forgot to put the damn things on this morning.

“Thanks,” I said, gliding the razor across my throat.

“I notice they’re window glass,” he said.

I wondered if I had the nerve to use a razor to kill a man.

“So are mine,” he said, tapping the side of his wire-frames.

“No kidding,” I said. Shaving.

“Got to change our looks as best we can, in this business. I try to wear ’em all the time. You get used to ’em after a while.”

I smiled at him in the mirror. “I still forget sometimes. The plastic surgery’s a help, but glasses add to the basic change of appearance. Don’t you agree?”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Karpis said. He put the glasses down next to me. “Now, we’ll be leaving today, throughout the morning and early afternoon. In several cars, at staggered times.”

I nodded. “Not a good idea to travel in a caravan.”

“Nothing that attracts attention is a good idea.”

This might work out. If I could just get Louise in the Auburn—the two-seater Auburn—I could drive away with her, and break off from this fun group before they were any the wiser.

I said, “I, uh…I’m getting attached to Louise.”

Karpis flashed his sick grin again. “You’re a fast worker.”

“She’s a nice kid.”

“And lonely. You must peddle a pretty slick line to the ladies, Lawrence.”

“I get by. You mind if she rides with me?”

“Not at all. I’ll give you directions to the tourist court, before you leave.”

“I’ll take the Auburn, if that’s okay.”

“Sure. Why not.”

Karpis nodded and went out.

I dried my face off, left the big bowl of soapy dirty water on the bureau and went across the hall to the farm boys’ bedroom. Louise wasn’t in there.

I found her in the room next door. A yellow-papered room with a big double bed with a bright yellow spread. She was packing.

She looked over her shoulder at me. “This was our room. Candy’s and mine.” She gave her attention back to packing.

“You okay, Louise?”

“I’m fine.” But she didn’t sound fine.

I went over to her, touched her shoulder. “What is it?”