ancient, almost omnipresent. My guess is, he'd have been beaten too.'
'That boy?the older brother. He left home at sixteen, went and joined the Marines, and never went home again. What would he feel?'
'Mr. Henderson, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I have no X-ray vision. This is all speculation.'
'No sir. But ain't nobody know this business like you.'
'Well, I'd say, this older brother would feel grief and rage and deep survivor's guilt. You'd expect him to be emotionally crippled in some respect. You'd expect him to have an unhealthy view of the universe?he'd believe that at any moment the world was about to shatter and some huge malevolent force would break in and whip him savagely. That would be difficult to live with. He could easily become a monster.'
'Could he become a hero? An insane hero who took amazing risks?'
'Well, I hadn't thought of that. But I can see how the war would be the perfect vessel for his rage; it would give him complete freedom. And when he was in battle, he wouldn't be haunted by his past. So other men would be frightened, but he'd be so preoccupied, he'd actually feel very good because his memories were effectively blocked for once. Was he in the war?'
'He won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima.'
'Very impressive. What happened to the fadier?'
'He was a law officer who got himself killed. I guess he was a little too used to whacking people in the head, and he whacked one boy who had a gun.'
'Sometimes there is justice.'
'I never thought I'd say it about a dead police officer, but, yes, sometimes there is justice.'
Chapter 33
'It's there.'
'How do you know?'
'I went, I saw.'
'How do you know?'
'If you look at it from the outside, you'll see that there's four windows across the back. But if you go where they have the slots and the gambling stuff, you can only see three windows. There's a kind of dead space to the rear. It has to be there.'
'You're sure?'
Frenchy, back a day early, sat alone with Earl and D. A., just returned from Hot Springs. It was early on a sunny afternoon; outside it was Texas, and nothing but. The temperature was hotter than hell, the atmosphere drier than a desert, and all the wood seemed about to crack from sheer cussedness. The wailing wind picked up a screen of yellow dust and threw it along in front of it. But the three men, sweaty but still in suits and ties, sat in the Assembly Room and talked it all out.
'Yeah, that's it. Plus, if you go out and follow the phone wires, you'll see that there's an unusual number of poles outside in the alley. Where there should be just one pole, there's two, for all the lines. I know. I checked. It's there. It's at the Ohio Club. It makes sense. It's downtown, he can walk to work, he can keep an eye on it, it's close to everything, it's so heavily used that no one would think you could hide a phone room in it. We never would have found it.'
'You found it,' Earl said.
'Well, I found it, yeah. But I'm a genius. I have a very sly mind. Everybody says so.'
The boy smiled unsurely as if he wasn't quite sure that this was going as expected. D. A. Parker and Earl looked at him with hard, level eyes.
'Maybe he's right,' said D. A. 'We should check it out.'
'It's the Ohio Club. The Central Book, I'm telling you. Not in the casino but on the same second floor, in the back. It's obvious. I found it.'
He smiled in the way a man who thinks he's really winning some points smiles.
'We'll go up there tomorrow and check it out,' D. A. said.
'Yeah,' said Earl.
'We can close this thing down early next week,' said Frenchy. 'We take that place out, Owney's licked. You said so yourself. That's the key. What can he do? He has no other place set up and all the horse books die. They die in a matter of days. So what's he do, spend his money to keep the town operating? Or bail out? We all know he'll bail. He's got to.'
He summed it up admirably.
'There's a problem,' said Earl.
'What's that, Earl?' asked D. A. 'If he's got it, he's right. And Owney won't be detonating no bombs in Niggertown because once it gets out the phone room's closed down, all his boughten judges and cops are going away from him 'cause they know he won't git enough money to pay them off.'
'No, that's not the problem.' He looked hard at Frenchy. 'Now, you got anything to add?'
'What do you mean?'
'You sniffed this out on your own? All by your lonesome?'
'Yes sir.'
Earl looked hard again at the boy.
'You lying to me? Short, are you lying?You could get us all messed up if you're lying.'
'Hey,' said Frenchy fearlessly, 'I know that. No, I'm not lying.'
'Earl, what?'
'Goddamn you. Short!' Earl bellowed.
Frenchy recoiled, stung.
'Earl, what?'
'There ain't no windows at all atop the Ohio Club. And there ain't no extra phone poles out back.'
'Ah, well?'
'Earl, how do you know?'
'I know. I know, goddammit! I notice stuff like that, and by God, I know that!'
'Ahh, well, maybe, uh?' Frenchy bumbled.
'Short, I'm going to ask you one more goddamn time. Where'd you find this shit out? Where? Are you just making it up?'
'Ah. Well, actually, uh?'
For the first time in his life, Frenchy Short wasn't sure what to say. He had a gift for improvisation under stress, that he knew; it had saved him getting cooked a number of times, though alas, a few times it hadn't. But he was also utterly confused, because this great treasure was the home run that would make him a hero, he was sure, and erase completely the ambiguity of the killing of the two mobsters and the awkwardness of the accidental slaying of the two Negro women. It meant he was the star, the best boy, the success.
'Short, you better tell us,' said D. A.
'It just makes sense.'
'Actually, it don't make no sense at all.'
'ShortI Goddammit, you tell me!' Earl shouted.
'Okay, okay. What difference does it make?'
'It makes a difference, Short,' said D. A.
'I broke in.'
'You broke in? To the Ohio Club?'
'No. The phone company.'
Frenchy explained his thinking, his night mission, his burglary, his discovery.
'Jesus Christ,' said D. A. 'Do you know what could have happened to us if you got nabbed by the cops?'
'I wasn't going to get nabbed. It's Hot Springs, Arkansas, for God's sakes, not the U. S. Mint.'
'Shit,' said D. A.
