The fun part.
Chapter 10
Owney never held his meetings at the same place twice. It was a habit from the old days. You didn't want to fall into a pattern, because a pattern would get you killed. If you have a Mad Dog Coll hunting you, you learn the elementary lessons of evasion, and you never forget them.
Thus most of the higher-ranking Grumleys, the bigger casino managers, the head bookmakers, the wire manager, his lawyer, F. Garry Hurst, the men who ran the men who ran the numbers runners, and so forth and so on, were used to being banged all over town when Owney convened them.
They never knew when the call would come and what travel it would demand. So today's mandate was usual in the sense that it was no more unusual than any other mandate. He called the meeting for the bathhouse called the Fordyce, on Central, which had been temporarily closed for the occasion.
They sat naked, swaddled in sheets, under an ornate glass roof. It was somehow like sitting in flowers. It was daytime, as befit business. Sunlight streamed through the window above, incandescent and weirdly lit by the hyacinth-tinted glass. Each had bathed in the 141-degree water until each had felt like a raisin. Then each had been subjected to a needle-pointed shower that ripped open their pores. Now they sat in a steam room, looking like Roman senators in togas, except that the vapors swept this way and that. Outside, Grumleys patrolled to make certain no interlopers or accidental eavesdroppers were in the vicinity. A couple of Grumley gals even moved into the women's bath area, so as to make sure no ladies lurked there.
The meeting was businesslike, though the Owney on display here was not the cosmopolitan Owney the host, anxious to put on a display of savoir faire for an important out-of-towner, complete to a version of a British accent derived more from an actor than from actual memory. In the privacy of his own sanctum, where his power was absolute and his prestige unchallenged, Owney devolved to the tones of the East Side of Manhattan, where he had been nurtured from the age of thirteen through the age of forty-three.
'Nothin',' he said again, chewing on an unlit cigar, another Havana. 'You got fuckm' nothing'
'Not a dang thing,' said Flem Grumley, the senior Grumley since Pap Crumley's clap had kicked in a month ago, declaring that seasoned operative hors de combat. Flem, hardened in the bootlegging wars of the '20s, spoke a brew of Arkansas diction so dense it took years of concentration to master its intricacies. 'We's run the town up, we's run it down. These damned old boys done slipped the noose. Damnedest goddamn-dangdest thang.'
Owney chewed this over a bit, shredding his cigar even further.
'Only,' said Flem, 'only a bit later cousin Slidell, that being Will's boy Slidell, not Jud's nor Bob's, nor?'
'Yeah, yeah,' said Owney, to halt the list of Slidell Grumley fathers.
'Uh, yes sir, that Slidell, he done checked back at the Best out Ouachita. Seems a feller rented two cabins fer a week. Older feller, sad-like. A younger feller jined him, tough-like, so it goes.'
'There were two of them, then?' Owney remarked.
'Wal, sir, maybe. Manager says them boys stopped showing up midweek. Never came back. Will's Slidell got the key, checked out each cabin. Wasn't nary much-like. Extry underwear, toothbrushes and powder, a Little Rock newspaper. No guns or nothing. Them boys travel light, even if they's the ones, even if they's wasn't.'
'I don't fuckm' like this shit one bit' Owney said aloud. 'If they was nobodies, they fucking wouldn't have thought it to be a big deal. They mighta left town, but not before checking out. These guys, they knew I'd be looking for them. That fuckin' cowboy who hit Siegel, he knew me. He looked at me and said'?and here he lapsed into a passably convincing imitation of the rumbly vessel that was Earl's sulfur-scorched voice?''How 'bout it, Mr. Maddox, you or any of your boys want a taste'? He fucking knew me. How's he know me? I don't know him. How the fuck he know me?'
Owney gazed off into the vapors as if fascinated by this new problem. That guy had the best hands he'd ever seen.
'That fucking guy, he could hit. I managed a boxer for a few years. Big lug couldn't hit shit. But I know the fight game, and that boy was a hitter!'
'Could they be New York guys? Or Chicago guys?'
'They could be Chicago guys,' Owney said. 'Bugsy was a New York guy and he sure as shit din't know them. I'd a heard if they was New York. Man, he hit that yid hard!'
'Cops?' someone thought to ask.
'Did you check the cops?' Owney asked Flem Grumley.
'Did, yes sir. Chief says it warn't none of his boys. He ain't hired no new boys. He even called a friend he has in the little Rock FBI and it ain't no federal thing. No revenooers or nothing like that. Believe me, I know revenooers and these damn boys weren't revenooers. No revenooer ever could hit like that.'
'Could they work for the new prosecuting attorney?' somebody asked. 'We don't got any sources into what Becker is ninning.'
Flem had an answer: 'That boy is so scared since Rufus throwed that dead dog on his lawn he ain't been seen in town! He don't hardly even go to his office!'
There was much laughter.
And that was pretty much it: the rest was old business?a new Chinese laundry near Oaklawn was behind in his payments and would have to be instructed to keep up-to-date; the Jax brewery in New Orleans had delivered too much beer but a Grumley had convinced the driver of the truck not to report it; the wheel at the Horseshoe was running wobbly and cutting into the joint odds, though it could be repaired?but thought had to be put into replacing it; the betting season at Hialeah was just getting started and Owney ought to consider putting a new man or two into the Central Book as the wire would run very hot when Hialeah was up and steaming.
But after the meeting was over, the manager of the Golden Sim, a house near the Oaklawn Racetrack, pulled Owney over.
'I heard something, Owney.'
'And what's that, Jock?'
'Ah, maybe it's nothing, but you should know anyhow.'
'So, spill.'
'My brother-in-law runs a craps game in an after-hour joint for Mickey Cohen in L. A. He used to work on that gambling boat they had beyond the twelve-mile-limit.'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah, and times are tough since they closed that ship. But Mickey told my brother-in-law that good things are set up.'
Owney listened intently. Mickey Cohen was Bugsy's right-hand man.
'What's he mean?'
'He says there'd be jobs for all the old guys, the real pro table crews.'
'So? Is Bugsy going to try and get the ship thing going again?'
'No, Owney. It's bigger than that. Evidently, he's bought a big chunk of desert over the Nevada state line. Gambling's legal in Nevada. Nobody goes there, but it's legal.'
'I still don't?'
'He's thinking big. He's going to build a place. A big place. He's got some New York money bankrolling it. It's supposed to be secret. But he's going to build a gambling city in the desert. He's going to build a Hot Springs in the desert. Me, I think it's shit. Who's going to go to a fucking desert to gamble?'
But Owney immediately understood the nature of Bugsy's visit, and saw the threat to his own future. That was Bugsy's game, then. There could only be one Hot Springs. It would be here in Arkansas, where it belonged; or it would be in Nevada, in the fucking desert, where yid punk Bugsy wanted it.
It wouldn't be in two places.
Someone was going to have to die.
