Under the Skin (6 page)
“Go to hell,” Brando said. He kicked the back of my seat and said,
“Why do you put up with that kinda talk?”
I always got a kick out of how easily LQ could rile Brando with
some crack about Mexicans, or even by calling him Ramon. It was
funny because, despite his Mexican looks, Brando was a naturalborn
American. He couldn’t even speak Spanish except for a few phrases
of profanity, and he spoke those with a gringo accent. At twentyfour he was three years older than me, born and raised on a dairy
farm just east of Austin, where his wetback parents had worked.
They were the only Mexicans on the place, and because they’d
wanted their son to be a good Yankee citizen they named him Raymond and encouraged him to speak English from the time he
learned to talk. They’d made it a point to converse with him only
in English, like everyone else on the farm, even though they themselves could barely get by in it, and so even though he never learned
Spanish, his English had a touch of their accent, which only added
to the impression that he was Mexican.
People usually took me for Mexican too, until they got up close
enough to see my eyes. Then they knew I was even more of a breed
than most Mexicans—most of them being mestizos, of SpanishIndian mix. There were Spaniards with blue eyes, of course, and some
of their kids by Indian women had the same eyes as daddy. But more
often than not, when you saw blue eyes in a brown face they came
from Yankee blood. Unlike Brando, however, I could speak Spanish
pretty well, and my only accent in either language was a touch of border twang.
We turned off Broadway onto 23rd and drove toward the neon
blaze of the Turf Club a few blocks ahead at Market Street. The Club
did good business late into the evening every night of the week, but
tonight being New Year’s it was even busier than usual.
LQ honked his horn at the traffic crawling along ahead of us. He’d
started to worry that he was running late for his date with a redhead
named Zelda. She worked as a hostess at the Hollywood Dinner Club
and he’d already taken her out once but hadn’t been able to score. She
was impressed that he was one of Rose’s Ghosts, but she’d been
around some and she made it clear to LQ she wasn’t any pushover,
that she expected to be wooed. She was pretty enough that LQ
thought she was worth the effort. She came off her shift at ten-thirty
and he was taking her for Chinese at a Maceo place called the Sui Jen
that was on a pier jutting out into the gulf. Then down the street to
the Crystal Palace to ring in the New Year with some dancing and
champagne. Then to her place for a nightcap. He was sure tonight
would be the night.
Brando had a hot date too. He was going to a party with a longlegged thing he’d met at a dance the week before. She’d told him her
name was Brigitte and she was French. He said she spoke with a
slight accent but he suspected she was really just some bullshitting
hustler out of New Orleans. Of course he had been bullshitting her
too, claiming he was a partner in the Big Trinity Oil Company, which
was about to be bought by Texaco.
“With golddiggers,” he said, “the idea you got money works better than Spanish fly.”
“Too bad Mexican flies don’t work as good,” LQ had said. “You always got plenty enough of them on you.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Brando said.
“If I only could,” LQ said with a sigh. “I’d finally be doing it with
the best there is and somebody I truly love.”
He stopped the car in front of the Club and Brando and I got out.
I carried Ragsdale’s valise and one of the briefcases, in which I was
carrying my revolver and the .380 I took from Ragsdale. LQ waved
so long and drove off.
Brando punched me on the arm and asked if I was sure I didn’t
want to go to the party with him. “Frenchy can prob’ly get a friend.”
“Thanks, anyway,” I said. “I’ll find my own fun.”
back where he’d left his car.
T
he Turf Club was a three-story building where the Maceos kept
their headquarters. Everybody just called it the Club. On the
ground floor was a restaurant called the Turf Grill, and as restaurants
go it was fairly flashy and the food was always good. On this night
the place was packed and there was a line of diners out on the sidewalk, waiting to be seated. A hostess named Sally gave me a wink
when I went in, and some of the harried waitresses smiled at me in
recognition as I made my way across the room to a doorway leading
to the real attraction on the lower floor—a large betting room where
you could lay money on any horse race at any track in the country.
The day’s major races were broadcast over the parlor’s wall speakers
and the hollering in there could get pretty intense when a race was in
progress.
Anybody could get into the betting room, but the upper floors
were exclusive. The elevator and the narrow stairway were in a hallway at the rear of the room. The stairway doors on every floor locked
automatically from the inside, and there was always a palooka posted
at the elevator to make sure nobody but special customers or friends
of the Maceos got on it. Rose and Sam had their offices on the second
floor, which also contained a billiards room and the Studio Lounge—
a small restaurant with a dance floor and a long bar and a backroom
gambling hall for big-money card and dice action. The third floor
was a health club equipped with a boxing ring and all kinds of exercise equipment.
The only raids the local cops ever pulled were of course just for
show. They always let the Maceos know they were coming and they
never hit anything but the ground-floor betting parlor. Whatever
equipment they confiscated they returned on the Q.T. a few days
later. Every now and then, however, the Texas Rangers would come
calling. That’s when the elevator man would push a hidden button to
buzz a warning to the upper floors. The band in the Studio Lounge
would strike up a blaring rendition of “The Eyes of Texas,” which
everybody knew was the signal of a Ranger raid. The staff in the gambling room would fly into action, covering the gaming tables with
expensive tablecloths and setting them with dinnerware and platters
of food. The back bars would swivel around to hide the booze racks
and display nothing but seltzer bottles and tea sets and urns of fresh
coffee. The elevator was also equipped with a secret switch that
turned it into the slowest mechanical conveyance in Texas. By the
time the Rangers arrived at the second floor the only booze they’d
find was what the customers had brought in—which was legal to
do—and there wouldn’t be so much as a poker chip in sight.
At this hour the day’s races were long over, and the betting parlor
was pretty quiet. A few guys sat around with bottles of beer, gabbing
and telling each other how close they’d come to winning big today in
the first or the fifth or the last race at such and such a track.
Guarding the elevator tonight was an ex-pug named Otis Wilcox
who’d once lasted six rounds with Tunney before the Gentleman Marine coldcocked him. Otis said he couldn’t remember his own name
for an hour after he came to. He worked as both a Turf Club guard
and a trainer in the gym. He gave boxing lessons to health club members and still liked to spar, but he wasn’t one to pull all his punches,
so regular partners were hard for him to come by. I was his favorite
sparring buddy because I could take it. Besides, I was a fast learner
and had gotten good enough to make it interesting for him. The
lumps I took were worth it to me for the chance to box against somebody who knew what he was doing. We rarely got a chance to work
out with each other, though, because of our different schedules, and
we hadn’t been in the ring together in a month. We’d gone three
rounds the last time, and we got pretty serious in the third. With
about a half minute left in the round he’d got careless and I nearly
knocked him down with a right. For the rest of the round he went at
me with everything he had. By the time the bell rang, my headgear
was in a lopsided twist and my ribs felt like he’d used a ball bat on
them. But Otis took a lot of kidding from some of the boys about the
right hook I’d hung on him, and I knew he couldn’t wait for our next
session so he could get back at me.
As I walked up to the elevator he feinted a left at my ribs and
popped a lazy right into the valise I threw up to block the punch.
“Christ, kid, you getting too quick. You’ll knock me on my ass
next time.”
“Count on it.”
“Name the day,” he said.
“Been out of town a lot. I’ll let you know.”
“Do that, kid.”
The old guy working the elevator nodded hello and took me up.
The Studio Lounge was loud and smoky and dimly lit, jammed
with revelers, the band hammering out “Let’s Fall in Love,” the
dance floor swirling with couples. The Maceo offices were in a hallway on the other side of the room and I made my way through the
crowd between the dance floor and the bar. A lot of the customers
knew who I was, and they pulled each other out of my way. No
telling what kind of stories they’d heard about me except that all of
them were scary and probably half of them bullshit, but that was all
right with me. The more such stories got around, the easier it sometimes made my job.
As I entered the hallway, a door at the far end opened and Big
Sam came out, adjusting a gardenia in his lapel. A blond cigarette
girl I’d never seen before was with him, holding to her tray and
straightening her pillbox hat over her slightly disheveled hair. She
had the right body for the little shorts and low-cut vest of her
uniform.
She’d missed a button on the side of her shorts and Sam pointed it
out to her. Then he saw me and said, “Hey now... Jimmy the Kid!”
He’d started calling me that from the time we’d first been introduced and he heard how Rose and I had met in San Antonio. “You
should’ve
seen
this guy in action, Sammy,” Rose told him. “Like
fucken Billy the Kid or somebody.”
“Only this one’s
Jimmy
the Kid,” Sam said with a big grin—and
that was his name for me from then on, though he usually just called
me Kid. Then Rose took up the name, and Brando and LQ sometimes
used it, sometimes Goldman the bookkeeper. But nobody else. Even
people who knew me well enough to say hello—and there weren’t
many—rarely called me by any name at all, but when they did, it was
just Jimmy.
Sam gave the girl a smack on the ass and she hurried past me with
a fetching blush. She gave off a sweet warm smell with a tinge of sex
in it. I watched her disappear into the crowd, then arched my brow
at Sam.
He laughed and said, “Just getting a happy start on the new
year, Kid.”
Sam and Rose were both married, but you never saw their wives
and children, and the brothers rarely spoke of them. Their business
lives and their home lives were completely separate worlds—except
that their families and luxurious homes were protected around the
clock by a crew of Ghosts and special police patrols.
Sam put a hand on my shoulder and stood with his back to the
lounge so no one who looked down the hall could see his face.
“So?” he said, his aspect serious. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
His face brightened again and he patted me on the arm. “You always do good work, Kid.”
He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder into the lounge behind him and said, “Listen, do yourself a favor and take a spin with
that doxy was just here. New girl. Suzie Somebody, from . . . I don’t
know, Hick City, Nebraska. She’s a regular carnival ride, I swear.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.
Sam liked to hire small-town girls who’d been brought up so
straitlaced they couldn’t wait to run off on their own. Girls who’d
been hit over the head with religion all their life, who’d been told
over and over that if they let a boy so much as touch their tit they
were no better than whores. But the girls would see broads like Harlow and Crawford having all that slutty fun in the movies, and some
of them wanted to have that kind of fun too, wanted it
bad
. When
they finally couldn’t take any more preaching, they’d run off to some
big city and dive into sin headfirst.
“It’s like they wish Mommy and Daddy could get a load of them
with a mouth full of cock,” Sam once told me. “Like they’d love nothing better than to give everybody back home a heart attack.” I’d
heard a few Galveston madams say pretty much the same thing about
a lot of the girls who worked for them.
Sam was husky and handsome and always impeccably groomed,
every curly hair in place even now, just minutes after a roll in the
hay. His teeth were as bright as a movie star’s. Hell, he could’ve
been a movie star if he’d wanted. I’d never seen him in need of a
shave or a haircut, and he always smelled of just the right touch of
cologne. Nobody could make a suit look better. His usual good
spirits were so contagious you couldn’t help getting caught up in
them.
I accepted the Chesterfield he offered, then the flame of his gold
lighter, and then he lit his own.
He told me Rose was up in the gym, and as he walked me back to
the elevator he said, “Hey, you hear about the suicidal twin who
killed his brother by mistake?”
I smiled politely.
R
ose was punching the heavy bag when I pushed through the
frosted-glass door to the gym. You could tell on sight he was
Sam’s brother. The same curly hair and beaked nose, the same dimpled and slightly double chin. At forty-nine, Rose was seven years
older than Sam and he looked it, at least in the face. He almost always
had blue half-moons under his eyes and his hair was already half gray.
He was a little shorter than Sam and not as husky, but in truth he was
in pretty good shape and he tried to stay that way with workouts in
the gym. Sam was naturally strong and built like a halfback, but his
only exercise was in humping the chippies.
A hulking, bushy-bearded health club worker named Watkins was
bracing the bag with his shoulder as Rose threw hooks and crosses,
bobbing and shuffling, showing good footwork, glaring at the bag
like it was a flesh-and-blood opponent. He popped a few sharp jabs,
cut loose with a roundhouse right, ducked and hopped back like he
was dodging a counterpunch. Sweat ran off his face, and his sweater
was dark around the neck and armpits. He saw me watching from the
door and beckoned me over. Then pivoted and drove a right-hand lead
into the bag like he’d caught his opponent off guard. He followed up
with a pounding combination of steady lefts and rights before finally
stepping back and dropping his arms, blowing hard breaths.
“Good work, chief,” Watkins said. He exchanged nods with me
and headed for the elevator.
Rose stripped off the bag gloves and tossed them on the table,
then wiped his face and neck with a towel. He draped the towel
around his neck and stepped over to the open locker where his white
suit was hanging and reached into a coat pocket and fished out a pack