Under the Skin

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.

“Yeah, yeah, okay. How about the nun and the oyster shucker? Sister Mary Antonia goes into this oyster bar, see…”

Rose 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.

“Okay…thanks, Billy,” he said to Watkins. “That’ll do.”

“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