Hot Springs (15 page)

“Sir. Mr. Grumley is here.”

“Flem?”

“No sir. The other Grumley. The one they call Pap. He’s out of his sickbed.”

This alerted Owney that indeed something was up.

He walked into the foyer of his apartment, to find the ghost-white old Pap Grumley supported by two lesser cousins or sons or something.

“What is it, Pap?” asked Owney.

“A Grumley done been kilt,” said the old legger, a flinty bastard who’d fought the law for close to six decades and was said to carry over a dozen bullets in his hide.

“Who? Revenuers?”

“It’s worse, Mr. Maddox.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your place done been raided.”

Owney could make no sense of this. One or two of his places were raided a year, but by appointment only. It usually took a meeting at least a week in advance to set up a raid. The police had to be told which casino or whorehouse to raid and when to do it, the municipal judge had to know not to get that drunk that night so he could parole the arrestees without undue delay, the casino had to be warned so that nobody would be surprised and nothing stupid would happen, the Little Rock newspapers had to be alerted so they could send photographers, and the mayor had to be informed so that he could be properly dressed for those photographs. Usually, it occurred when some politician in Little Rock made a speech in the state-house about vice.

“I don’t—”

“They come in hard and fast, with lots of guns and wearing them bulletproof vests. And one of ‘em shot a Grumley. It was Jed’s boy, Garnet, the slow-wit. He died on the spot. We got him over at the morgue and we was—”

“Who raided?”

“They said they was working for the prosecuting attorney.”

“Becker?”

“Yes sir. That Becker, he was there. There’s about ten, twelve of ‘em, with lots of guns. They come in hard and fast and one of ‘em shot Garnet dead when Garnet pulled his shotgun. Mr. Maddox, you got to let us know when there’s going to be a raid. What am I supposed to say to Jed and Amy?”

“Where did this happen?”

“At the Horseshoe. Just a hour ago. Then they chopped up all the tables and the wheels with axes and machine-gunned the slots.” “What?”

“Yes sir. They turned them machine guns loose on over thirty slots. Shot the hell out of ‘em too, they did. Coins all over the goddamned place. Nickels by the bucketful.” “They were working for Becker?” “Yes sir. He was there, like I say. But the boss was some big tough-looking stranger. He was a piece of work. He shot Garnet. They say nobody never saw no man’s hands move faster. He drew and shot that poor boy dead in about a half a second. Nailed him plug in the tick-tocker. Garnet was gone to the next world before he even begun to topple.”

The cowboy! The cowboy was back!

By the time he got there, reporters and photographers were already on the scene. They flooded over to Owney, who was always known for his colorful ways with the language, those little Britishisms that sold papers. There were even some boys from Little Rock in attendance.

But Owney was in no mood for quips. He waved them away, then called a Grumley over.

“Get the film. We don’t want to let this out until we know what’s happening. And send ‘em home. And tell ‘em not to write stories until we get it figured out.”

“Well, sir,” said the Grumley, “there’s already a press release out.”

He handed it over to Owney.

HOT SPRINGS, August 3, 1946, it was datelined.

Officers from the Garland County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office today raided and closed a gambling casino in West Hot Springs, destroying 35 slot machines and much illegal gaming equipment.

The raid, at the Horseshoe, 2345 Ouachita also confiscated nearly $32,000 in illegal gambling revenues.

“This marks the first of our initiatives to rid Hot Springs of illegal gambling,” said Prosecuting Attorney Fred C. Becker, who led the raid.

“We mean to put the gangsters and the card sharks on notice,” said Mr. Becker. “There’s no longer a free lunch in Hot Springs. The laws will be enforced and they will be enforced until gambling and its vices have been driven out of our city.”

Operating on a tip that illegal activities were under way …

Owney scoffed as he discarded the sheet: maybe the thirty-foot-high neon sign on the roof of the Horseshoe that said 30 SLOTS—INSTANT PAYOUT! was the tip-off.

“Who the fuck does he think he is?” Owney asked the Grumley, who had no answer.

“Where’s my lawyer?” asked Owney and in short order F. Garry Hurst was produced.

“Is this legal?” Owney demanded. “I mean how can they just fuckin’ blow down the doors and start blasting?”

“Well, Owney, it appears that it is. Becker is operating on a very tiny technicality. Because Hot Springs Mountain is a government reserve, any illegal activities within the county that are subject to affecting it can be construed to come under injunction. So any federal judge can issue warrants, and they don’t necessarily have to be served by federal officers. He can deputize local authorities. Becker’s got a federal judge in Malvern in his pocket. There’s your problem right there.”

“Damn!” said Owney. He knew right away that clipping a federal judge would not be a good idea, just as clipping a prosecuting attorney wouldn’t, either. “Can you reach him?”

“He’s eighty-two years old and nearly blind. I don’t think money, whores or dope would do the trick. Maybe if you snuck up behind him and said boo.”

“Shit,” said Owney.

“It’s a pretty smart con,” said Hurst. “I don’t see how you can bring legal action against the federal government, and through that technicality Becker is essentially operating as a federal law enforcement officer. He’s got the protection of the United States government, even if the United States government has no idea who he is.”

“Okay, find out all you can. I have to know what the hell is going on. And I have to know soon.”

Owney headed inside, where Jack McGaffery, the Horseshoe’s manager, waited for him.

“Mr. Maddox, we never had a chance. They was just on us too fast. Poor Garnet, that boy never hurt a fly, and they blowed him out of his socks like a Jap in a hole.”

But Owney was less interested in the fate of Garnet than he was in the fate of the Horseshoe. What he saw was an admirably efficient job of ruination accomplished quickly. The roulette wheels and the craps tables could be replaced quickly enough, although a roulette wheel was a delicate instrument and had to be adjusted precisely. But the slots were the worst part.

Usually, the slots were simply hauled away to a police warehouse, stored a few weeks, then quietly reinstalled. Some of them had dozens of TO BE DESTROYED BY HSPD stickers on their backsides.

But this time, someone had walked along the line of machines and fired three or four tommy gun bullets into each. The heavy .45s had penetrated into the spinning guts of the mechanical bandits and blown them to oblivion. The Watlings looked like dead soldiers in a morgue, their glossy fronts cracked or shattered, their adornments of glass spider-webbed, their stout chests punctured, their freight of coins spewed across the floor. Reels full of lemons and cherries and bananas lay helter-skelter on the floor, along with springs and gears and levers. They were old Wading Rol-a-tops from before the war, though well maintained, gleaming and well bugged and tighter than a spinster’s snatch, ever profitable. The Rol-a-tops, though, were the proletarians of the gambling universe. More obscenely, a Pace’s Race, the most profitable of the devices, was included in the carnage. It was a brilliantly engineered mock track where tiny silhouettes of horses, encased in mahogany under glass, ran in slots against each other, and by the genius mechanics of the thing, the constantly changing odds whirled around a tote board, the odds themselves playing the horses. Its glass shattered, its elegant wood casing broken, its tin horses bent and mangled, the thing lay on its side, all magic having been beaten out of it.

Owney shook his head sadly.

“We kept people out,” said Jack. “All the coins are still there. Them boys didn’t get no coins, that’s for sure.”

“But they got $35,000?”

“Sir, more like $43,800 and odd dollars.”

“Shit,” said Owney. “And all the records.”

“Yes sir. But wasn’t airy much in them sheets.”

Of course not. Owney wasn’t foolish enough to keep sensitive documents in casinos.

“But sir,” said Jack. “Here’s something I don’t understand.”

He pointed at the walls. Every ten or twelve feet, someone had whacked a hole with an ax. Owney followed the gouges, which circled the main room of the casino, continued up the stairs to Jack’s looted office, and followed a track into both the gals’ and the men’s rest rooms.

Looking at the destruction in the women’s room, he said finally, “Who did this?”

“Well, it was an old guy. There was an old guy who came in after all the ruckus was done. He had a hatchet and he went around chopping holes in the wall while the younger boys chewed up the tables and gunned the slots.”

“What’d he look like?”

“like I say, Mr. Maddox, old man. Face like a bag of primes. Big old man. Sad-like. He looked like he seen his kids drownded in a flood. Didn’t say much. But he was some sort of boss. Meanwhile, the tough guy supervised the cracking of the tables, and outside, Becker and his clerk handed out them news releases, answered some questions, posed for pictures. Then they all up and went. Nobody made no arrests.”

“Hmmmm,” said Owney. He had been caught flat-footed, and someone smart somewhere was behind it. That old man chopping at the walls. He was clearly someone who knew what he was doing. He had a sense of the one place Owney was vulnerable. You could raid on places in Hot Springs for years, and as soon as you closed one joint down, another would spring up, sustained by the river of money that was track betting. But the old man was looking for the wiring that would indicate the secret presence of the Central Book, where the phones poured their torrents of racing data, and Owney knew if he found it, he could dry Owney out in a fortnight.

Goddamn the wire! He was trying to get out of that business but he was still tied to it, it was still his lifeline, and he was still vulnerable to its predation.

One thing was for sure: next time he’d be ready.

“Jack, get Pap in here.”

When the old man came, Owney went to the point.

“I want ‘em all armed now. Nothing goes easy anymore. They’ll never have it as soft as they had it tonight. If they want a war, we’ll give ‘em a goddamned war. They got guns? We’ll get bigger guns. Tell the Grumleys, they will get back for what was done to them tonight.”

“Wooo-oooooooo-doggies!” yelped the haggard old sinner, and danced a mad little jig there in the ruined casino.

By three separate cars, the raid team arrived at the courtyard of the Best Tourist Court at around 9:30 P. M. The neon of the Best was spectacular: it washed the night in the fires of cold gas, in odd colors like magenta and fuchsia and rose around each cabin. It looked like a frozen explosion.

In this strange illumination, the men loaded magazines quietly, slipped into their bulletproof vests, checked the safeties, locked back actuators, tried to stay loose and cool and not get too excited. But it was hard.

Across the street they could see the looming shape of the old ice house, and next to it, the Horseshoe itself, somewhat rickety and wooden like most of the casinos built in the 1920s, with its blazing neon sign thirty feet high atop the roof: 30 SLOTS—INSTANT PAYOUT! and the double green neon horseshoes at each end of the sign.

“Hard to miss,” said D. A.

“It’s not like a secret or nothing,” said one of the boys, possibly Eff—for Jefferson—up from the Georgia Highway Patrol. A designated tommy gunner, he was loading .45s into a stick magazine.

Earl was alive in ways he hadn’t been alive for a year. He felt his eyeballs extra-sharp, he tasted the flavor of the air, his nerve endings were radar stations reading every rogue movement in the night sky. He walked around, checking, examining, giving this boy or that the odd nod or pat of encouragement.

Becker pulled in, with a clerk. He seemed especially nervous. He walked among the men smiling dryly, but he kept running his tongue over his gray lips. All he could think to say was “Very good, very good, very good.”

Finally he approached the two leaders.

“I like it. They look sharp,” he said.

“It ought to go okay,” said the old man.

“You, Earl, you agree?”

“Mr. Parker’s got it laid out real nice, sir,” said Earl.

“Okay. When it’s clear, you send a boy out. At that moment I’ll call HSPD and announce a raid in progress and request backup. Then I’ll call the newspaper boys. I did alert the Little Rock boys to have a photog in the area. But that’s okay, that’s secure. Got it?”

“Yes sir,” said D. A., but suddenly Earl didn’t like it. Okay, Owney owned the local rags, but how safe were these Little Rock people? He pulled D. A. aside.

“I’m going to go in early,” he said.

D. A. looked at him.

“You’ll be right in the line of fire for twelve nervous kids.”

“Yeah, but in case somebody in there gets a little crazed or has been tipped off, I might be able to cock him good and save a life or two. This’ll probably be the only raid we can get away with that.”

“I don’t like it, Earl,” D. A. said. “It’s not how we planned it. It could confuse them.”

“I’ll be all right,” said Earl. “It could save some lives.”

“It could cost some lives too,” said D. A.

“Look at it this way,” said Earl. “We’ll never get a chance to pull this trick off again. They’ll be waiting for it in all the other places. We might as well do it while we can.”

D. A. looked at him sharply, seemed about to say something, but then reconsidered; it was true he did not want a killing on the first raid, for he believed that would turn the whole enterprise inevitably toward ruination.

“Wear your vest,” he cautioned, but even as he said it, he knew it was impossible: the vests were large and bulky and looked like umpire’s chestpads, and everybody hated them. If Earl walked in with a vest on, it would be a dead giveaway.