Under the Skin (4 page)

back fast from his surprise—and he’d figured who was running the
show and was talking to me. Rose said they called him Willie Rags.
“Just let me say something, okay?” he said. I stood there and
stared at him.

“Look, I know who sent you boys. Just tell me what them wops
want. You aint wop, are you? Look Mex to me—no offense, hell, I
like
Mexes. Anyway, what they want? Money? Want to know whose slots
I’m pushing? Well, all right, all right, we can discuss all that. We can
straighten everything out, guys like us, right?”

He’d probably fast-talked his way out of plenty of jams before.
Rose had spoken to him on the telephone once. “Talks like a guy on
the radio,” he said.

“Listen, I know you guys aren’t gonna
shoot
me,” he said. “Not
here
.
Hotel fulla people. Shit, it’s Houston but it aint Dodge City. They
probably told you get the money I made off those slots, right? Plus a
little interest on top? Probably said knock me around some, teach me
a lesson. Okay, all right, won’t be the first ass-kicking I ever took.
But look, the money on the table’s all I got on me. You want more
than that you gotta wait till morning. I’m meeting a guy in the
morning with lots more cash. But you don’t want me all beat up
when I meet him, right? Might make him suspicious, know what I
mean? Would
you
hand over a bunch of money to a guy all beat to
shit? What you oughta do, you oughta hold off on the ass-whipping
till
after
I get the dough from this guy. That’s good business sense,
and you boys are businessmen, I can tell. So let’s talk a little business
while we wait for the man with the money, what do you say?”

I stared at him with an expression like I might be thinking it over.
“Listen,” he said, “tell me what kinda deal you got with the
Maceos. Maybe I can cut you something better, you know what I
mean? I mean, no harm in talking, is there?” He pronounced their
name MAY-cee-o, the same way the Maceos themselves said it, like
Texans, which is what they considered themselves to be.

I looked at LQ. He pursed his lips and shrugged like What the hell.
Ragsdale caught LQ’s expression and took encouragement from it.
He patted the sofa and said to me, “Come on, pal, sit down. No harm
done. Let’s talk business.”

I lowered the gun, and he chuckled and patted the sofa again. I uncocked the .44 and slipped it into my waistband under my coat as I
started to step past him to the other side of the sofa. Then brought
the ice pick out of my inside coat pocket and drove it into his heart.

If you can get them off guard like that you can do it quick and
neat and fairly quiet. They give a little grunt and that’s it. I yanked
the pick out and he started to fall forward but I caught him and positioned him so he’d stay seated. A red spot the size of a quarter was
all the blood there was. His head was slumped to one side and his eyes
were open. He looked like he’d just been asked a stumper of a question. I closed his eyes and wiped the pick on his undershirt and put
it back in my coat.

The other two still had their faces to the wall and looked like they
were trying not to even breathe.
“Tell those Dallas assholes we know it’s their machines Willie
Rags was pushing,” I said. “Tell them Rosario Maceo says don’t cross
the line again.”
I picked up the valise and we hustled out of the room and over
to the elevator. Brando patted the girl on the ass and said, “Let’s go,
honey.”
She blushed and worked the levers and down we went. She looked
a little disappointed we hadn’t brought anyone out in handcuffs.

Ragsdale must’ve thought he was being smart just because he
stayed away from any joint that already had our machines in it.
Maybe he thought the Maceo brothers wouldn’t care that he was
working in Galveston County so long as he dealt only with joints free
of Maceo machines. Maybe he was so dumb he thought they wouldn’t
even hear about it. But Sam Maceo had friends everywhere and they
had eyes and ears all over. They reported everything they heard that
might mean some outsider was working this side of the county line.
Sam would then pass the information to Rose and Rose would decide
what to do about it.

What set Rose off about Ragsdale and the Dallas outfit wasn’t just
the money they were siphoning out of a few mainland joints. What
galled him was their lack of respect. He couldn’t blame outsiders for
wanting to get in on Galveston’s easy money, but he did blame them
if they tried to get in on it without Maceo permission. Sometimes
Rose would let an outside bunch work its game on the county mainland—never on the island—but only for a percentage of the gross. If
the outside outfit thought the Maceo cut was too high, Rose would
shrug and wish them luck and that was the end of the discussion.
Only fools tried to work their game in Galveston County without
Rose’s blessing. Those who did try it could count on Rose taking
swift measures to set things straight.

I was one of the measures he could take.
So were about two dozen other guys, the bunch of us known as
“Rose’s Ghosts.” We saw to it that Maceo territory was defended and
Maceo will was done. We were a fairly open secret—even the chief of
police and the county sheriff knew about us—but you’d never see a
word about us in the papers except as “person or persons unknown.”
Besides discouraging outside outfits from crossing the Galveston line,
we protected the Maceo interests in neighboring counties. We col

lected the Maceos’ money—the daily take from Maceo clubs, the cuts
from places renting Maceo equipment, the loan payments from businesses staked with Maceo cash. We kept the grifters out of the Maceo
casinos. Hell, we kept them off the island altogether. We came down
hard on drunkrollers and room thieves, even harder on strongarms
and stickup men. Although few of the good citizens ever said it out
loud, most of them knew that the real law enforcement in Galveston
wasn’t the cops—it was us.

It was in the Maceo brothers’ interest to keep their gambling
rooms honest and make sure the hotels and the city streets were safe.
The “Free State of Galveston,” as everybody called it, was the most
wide-open place in Texas, probably in the country, and what kept the
highrollers and big spenders coming was the knowledge they
wouldn’t be cheated at the tables or robbed on the streets. Like the
cathouse district that had been doing business on the island ever since
the Civil War, the Maceos ensured the town a steady prosperity—
even now, while the rest of the country was getting hammered by the
Depression. It was a benefit not lost on the islanders, who knew a
good thing when they had it.

Rose was a master of backroom business with the local politicians
and the cops. One recent morning when I’d gone to Rose’s office to
deliver some cash I’d collected in Texas City, the secretary hustled me
right in, even though Rose had the county sheriff in there with him.

I handed Rose the bag and he peeked in it and took out a half-inch
pack of hundreds and dropped it on the desk in front of the sheriff.
“There you go, Frankie,” he said. “A little contribution for the
Lawmen’s Association.”
I’d seen the sheriff coming and going from Rose’s office many a
time and we had sometimes exchanged nods. But I doubted he’d ever
accepted money from Rose in front of anybody, and he looked uneasy
about it.
As the sheriff put the money in his coat, Rose pointed at me and

said, “You know Jimmy here, don’t you, Frank? Let me tell you, they
don’t come any better than this kid. A real whiz at taking care of
business, you know what I mean? And he got a sharp eye. Don’t miss
a thing. He sees something and
click,
it’s like his mind takes a picture
of it.”

The sheriff gave me a careful once-over and we exchanged one of
our nods. We all sat there without saying anything for a long moment
before the sheriff made a show of checking his watch and saying oh
Christ he was late for an appointment. He said so long to Rose and
let himself out. When the door shut behind him Rose and I turned
to each other and laughed.

The look the sheriff gave me had been both wary and somewhat
impressed. Like everybody else, he knew Rose wasn’t one for openly
praising anybody, not like Sam, who was always telling guys how
swell they were, no matter if they were a crooked local judge or a visiting shoe salesman from Tulsa, some regular highroller from Houston or a whorehouse bouncer who came in once a week to drop ten
bucks at the blackjack tables. It wasn’t any wonder Sam handled the
public-relations end of things. Most city officials from the mayor on
down were personally acquainted with both brothers, but it was Big
Sam, as everybody called him, who dealt with them in public. He was
the happy glad-hander, the drinking buddy with a thousand jokes—
or, when it was called for, the gracious host of impeccable manners.
He was the one to hand over the big contributions to the latest charity drives and to help local politicians cut the big ribbons with the
outsized scissors, to bring in big-time celebrity entertainers to perform for free at civic events, to serve as the sponsoring host at sporting competitions and bathing beauty contests. He paid for smart
orphan kids to go to college and made large weekly contributions to
all the local churches. Sam used charm and generosity to promote the
Maceo interests, and Rose used the Ghosts to protect them. They
were a perfect team. And I knew that under his goodbuddy exterior

Sam was no less serious than his big brother. Rose called the shots,
but he always consulted with Sam first, always sought his advice.
They were damn close brothers and partners to the bone.

Some of the Ghosts had been with the Maceos since back in the
bootleg days. I’d been with them not quite two years—but I’d been
Rose’s main Ghost from the time I joined him. Whenever he had to
go out of town on business, I went with him, and if it was just the
two of us, I did the driving. The other Ghosts got their orders
through various captains but I took mine directly from Rose and I answered to nobody but him. And after he’d agreed to let me have them
as my regular partners, Brando and LQ answered only to me.

This had been a busy week. Just a few days before Rose sent us on
the Ragsdale business, Brando and I had tracked down a pair of strongarms who’d been working the island for about two weeks. They’d
been stalking big winners out of the Hollywood Dinner Club—the
Maceos’ biggest and fanciest place. They’d follow them back to their
hotel and jump them in the parking lot, in one case even busting into
the guy’s room. A Ghost captain had put some boys on the problem
but they hadn’t been able to get a lead on the thugs, and Rose was
fuming. By the time he put me on it, six customers had been robbed
and two of them beat up. I collected Brando and we started hunting.

Two days later we found them on the mainland, in the Green
Dolfin Motor Court just east of Hitchcock. They had a suitcase with
twelve grand and were ready to cut for New Orleans. If they had settled for the eight thousand they got off the first few muggings, they
would’ve made away clean, but they got greedy—just one more job,
then just one more. It’s how it was with smalltimers. No discipline.
No sense of professionalism. An hour after we caught up to them they
were on a freight train bound for Kansas City. We’d had to load them
aboard the boxcar because their hands and knees didn’t work anymore
after Brando used a claw hammer on them.