Grumley, who under normal circumstances they would have avoided like a disease. After all, the Grumleys were a disease.
Owney offered them a drink, a cigar, and an earnest demeanor.
'Owney,' said Leo O'Donovan, His Honor, a watery-eyed old hack who liked to parade around the town in his cabriolet behind horses named Bourbon and Water, 'I'll come to the point. People are unsettled with this kind of violence. Suddenly, the town is turning into Chicago in the '20s.'
'I'm working like hell to locate these characters! What do you think I been doing, Leo, sitting on my hands? You think it's fuckin' good for me when two boys get clipped on my own fuckin' territory? Next thing, we won't be getting the Xavier Cugats and the Perry Comos and the Dinah Shores down here, and then we're screwed.'
'Jeez, Owney,' said Leo, dumbfounded. 'I thought you were British.'
Under the intense pressure of his situation, he had slipped and let his New York persona show in front of people not in the inner circle.
'Well,' he said, somewhat archly, 'when one finds oneself in a gangster movie, one must act the gangster, no? No, Garry?'
F. Garry Hurst said, 'Absolutely, old toff. Mr. Maddox sometimes pretends to be an East Side gangster for the amusement of his staff.'
Pap chimed in with, 'He's a proper English gent, the finest in these here parts, Mr. Mayor.'
The mayor looked at Pap as if he'd just been addressed by a large hunk of dogshit, sniffed and turned back to Owney.
'You have to do something, Owney. The town is coming to a stop.'
'Oh, I hardly think that's quite the case, Leo. The girls are still doing their mattress-backed duties, the alcohol is still flowing, the horse wire still thrums with electric information, the fools still bet the horses, the wheel and the dice, Xavier continues to wow them, and Dinah is scheduled for next week. I've just replaced my old Watlings here at the Southern with brand-new Mills Black Cherries, the very latest thing. Fresh from the factory in Chicago, seventy-five of them, the most beautiful machine you've ever seen. I've got the best room in the country. So you see, we really haven't been affected a bit. We've lost two houses out of eighty-five, and less than $100,000, plus around sixty-five slots. It's nothing. It's a trice, a trifle, a gossamer butterfly wing.'
The two officials were hardly consoled.
'Owney,' said Judge LeGrand, 'the mayor is onto something. Like FDR said, the main thing we have to fear is fear its own black-assed self. If people lose their confidence in the town, Hot Springs goes away. It disappears. It turns into Malvern or Russellville or some other bleak little nowhere burg. Like many cities of fabled corruption, it is sustained merely by the illusion of vice and pleasure, which is to say, the illusion of security that such human weaknesses ain't only tolerated, they are encouraged. If that image is damaged, it all goes away.'
The judge spoke a harsh truth.
Publicly Owney could only say, 'I swear to you both, we will work on this issue.'
Privately a million thoughts poured through his head.
'What I'm saying,' the judge continued, 'is that this problem had better be dealt with quickly. I think for our business interests, what we need is a show of force, a stand, a victory.'
'Judge, old man, your sagacity is unmatched. And I say in a response hardly as eloquent but equally as heartfelt: I will take care of this. As I said, we are working on it. For your part, I expect the following: business as usual. The same payments in the same pickups. You enforce discipline with yours so I do not have to enforce it with mine. That is clear?'
'It is,' said Leo. 'We'll do our part.'
'We are all taking the right steps,' said Owney, to signify that the meeting was over.
The two men left.
'Any bright guys got any bright ideas?' he asked. 'Or do I have to fire you mutts and bring in some heavy fuckin' hitters from Cleveland or Detroit or KC?'
'Now, sir,' said Pap, 'ain't no damned call to be talking to a Grumley like that. You know us Grumleys go to the goddamn wall fer you every damn time you need us, Mr. Maddox. That's God's honest truth.'
He hitched up his pants, stiff with indignity, and launched a gob of something blackish toward the spittoon, which it rattled perfecdy.
'Telephones,' said Hem.
'What?' said Owney.
'Goddamn telephones. If'n them boys is hiding in secret, and if we follow Mr. Becker but don't never see him leavin' town, and he's there every goddamned time, he's got to be reaching them boys by telephone. You know the boss of the phone company. So whyn't we tap into his lines, and listen to his calls. That way we get to know where they gonna be striking next. And we'd dadgum be waiting for 'em. Radio intelligence, like. We done it to the Krauts in Italy, toward the end of the war. Intercepted their messages, sure as shit.'
'You know, Owney, that's very good,' said F. Garry. 'That's quite good, actually. I'm sure Mel Parsons could provide technical guidance. After all, he's an investor too, isn't he?'
'Yes, he is. Goddamn, that is good. Pap, you raised a fuckin' genius.'
'I knowed about what happened in Italy in '45,' said Flem proudly. 'That's whar they court-martialed me.'
'They court-martialed you?'
'Yes sir. The second time. Now, the third time they…'
It was D. A.'s idea but it was Earl who figured out how to make it work.
He called Carlo Henderson the next morning.
'Henderson,' he said, 'how'd you like to go on a little trip?'
'Uh. Well, sir?'
'No big deal. Just a little lookie-see party.'
'Sure.'
'You got a straw hat?'
'Here?'
'Yeah?'
'No sir.'
'How 'bout some overalls, a denim shirt, some clodhopper boots?'
'Mr. Earl, I'm from Tulsa, not the sticks. I went to college. I'm not a farmer.'
'Well, son, that's fine, because guess what's in this bag?'
He handed over a paper sack, much crumpled, weighing in at around five pounds.
'Uh.. overalls, a denim shirt, some clodhopper boots and a straw hat?'
'exactly. Now I want you all dressed up like Clyde the Farmer. I'm going to have one of these federal dam workers drive you downtown. Here's what I want. You just mosey around the block City Hall is on, where Mr. Becker's office is. And the blocks a couple each way.'
'Yes?'
'Here's what you're looking for. A phone company truck and man. Parked somewhere in that vicinity, working probably on a pole, but maybe under the street or at some kind of junction box. Now the thing is, you can't let him see you watching him. But if you see him, you watch him close, see, because I think you'll see he ain't really working. He's actually playing at work. But he's got earphones and a rig set up to the pole knobs or some such, don't know what it'd be. But he's really listening. He'd be all dialed into calls coming out of Mr. Becker's office.'
'But we don't get calls from Mr. Becker's office.'
They got pouches delivered by a fake postman, with the information for that night's raid encoded, a system put together by D. A. with the express intention to avoid a wiretap.
'That's right. We don't. You know it and I know it. Mr. Becker knows it and we both know D. A. Parker knows it, because he thought it up. But they don't know it. We could let him tap his butt off, but Mr. D. A. came up with an idea to turn their little game against them. This one could turn into some real damn fun and I don't know about you, Henderson, but goddammit, I could use me some fun.'
