The Hot Kid

by Elmore Leonard

  “Where am I gonna see him before you do? I hope to God he doesn’t come, ’cause you’ll shoot him down like a dog.”

  Carl was shaking his head telling her, “Uh-unh, we shoot when there’s no other way to stop the fugitive.”

  “That’s your excuse,” Venicia said, “why you became a marshal and get to carry a gun. You like to shoot people. I think you get a kick out of it.”

  He didn’t tell Tony what Venicia said—it wasn’t a detail of shooting the machine-gun killer.

  Carl kept it to himself, because that whole time they were tracking Peyton Bragg, it was in his mind that when they caught up with him and there was a gunfight, he’d have a chance of making Peyton No. 4.

  He did, he saw Peyton as a number.

  But was that bad, wanting to put a desperado out of business? It was what marshals did and he was proud to be one—even though his old dad thought he was crazy trading high risk for low pay. The only thing he’d ever felt after was relief that it was over and he was still alive. That time in Turley he was shaking after. The woman hostage fainted she was so scared and he thought he had shot her.

  First relief, then later on he’d feel proud of what he did, the way pilots in the war, Eddie Rickenbacker, had German crosses painted on the side of his Spad, under the cockpit, proud of his kills. Rickenbacker had twenty-six. That German, though, the Red Baron, was the ace of aces with over eighty kills. They went up and looked for enemy planes to shoot down. Marshals went out to take wanted felons dead or alive. What was the difference?

  He had made balsa models of the war planes when he was a kid. The German Fokker with three wings he painted a bright red.

  Carl said when they heard the gunfire Venicia was lighting a cigaret. He jumped up but remembered the match burning her fingers—if Tony wanted details—and saw her drop it on the table. He told how the shooting was coming from the front and by the time he got to the porch the Essex was driving away from the house, the key in the car or else Peyton had it. Carl said he ran to the Pontiac and reached in to get the Winchester, the deputies and Wesley Sellers around front now firing at the Essex running away from them. Carl said he saw the red taillights come up big in the scope sight, aimed a little bit above the left one, the deputies yelling at him to shoot, and fired, levered the rifle to fire again, but the Essex had veered off the road, crop furrows slowing the car down till it rolled to a stop.

  “The round caught Peyton in the back of the head,” Carl said.

  Tony, writing in his notebook, said, “Number four for you, uh?”

  Carl didn’t respond to that. He said, “A deputy paced off the distance to where the car went off the road and said it was four hundred yards, give or take.”

  “Did you consider it a lucky shot?”

  “I hit what I aimed at.”

  “But at that distance—”

  “It was more like three hundred yards.”

  “You see Venicia Munson again?”

  “When I went back for my car.”

  “Was she crying?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “She say anything to you?”

  “Asked could she have her rifle back.”

  “You give it to her?”

  Carl shook his head. “It was evidence.”

  Tony went to the bedroom door to check on Louly again. She told him she’d be out in two minutes. Coming back to the sofa Tony looked at his watch.

  “She’s been in there almost two hours. What do you think she’s doing?”

  “Looking at herself in the mirror,” Carl said. “It’s what girls do.”

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” Tony said, “about the gun-fight at the roadhouse.” He sat down again and flipped back a few pages in his notebook. “Everything happened so fast.”

  “You want to know,” Carl said, “who shot the Wycliff boy, me or that one-eyed bouncer. I’ll tell you, I think by the time Boo got around to shooting him rigor had already set in.”

  Tony grinned. “I know, I saw you shoot him first, and I’ll swear to it in court. What I’m not sure of, you told Nestor if you had to draw your gun—you know, you’d shoot to kill.”

  “What bothers you?” Carl said. “You think I had my gun in my hand?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  “Why’s it matter to you?”

  “I’m writing the story, I want to be able to describe what happened.”

  “If I had it in my hand—when did I pull it?”

  “I’m not positive you were holding the gun.”

  “But if I was,” Carl said, “if I already had my Colt out, would I have been lying to Nestor about pulling it?”

  Tony was shaking his head. “It’s got nothing to do with telling the truth or not. They bust in with the car, you know any second they’re gonna start shooting.”

  “But was I lying to him?”

  “No—as I said, it wasn’t about lying or telling the truth. I guess it’s what you say in that kind of situation.”

  “You were up on the stairs, had a good view. Tell me what you saw happen.”

  “Nestor raised his guns and you shot him.”

  “What’s wrong with leaving it at that? Just telling what you saw?”

  Carl left a few minutes later saying he was going to stop by the Belmont estate, see if he could have a word with the dad, Oris. “But listen, you want to ask the little girl about Charley Floyd, go ahead. I’ll be anxious to hear what she says.”

  12

  If your boy robbed banks, broke the law selling alcohol and shot different ones with every intention of killing them, would you protect him? Hide him? Carl believed most parents would lean toward making excuses for their boy and try to help him, but wasn’t sure about the Belmonts, especially Jack’s mother.

  Carl called Oris Belmont’s office to make an appointment to see him, but was told he was in Houston, Texas, this week. Carl had already checked on Mr. Belmont’s personal life and wondered if he might be at the Mayo Hotel with his girlfriend. Carl decided no, not all week, a man who’d been a wildcatter and now ran a number of businesses. Or he could be home for some reason.

  That’s where Carl went, to their mansion among all the mansions in Maple Ridge, that rich area south of downtown Tulsa. He parked his Pontiac on the street and went up to the door. The six giant columns holding up the portico, as big as they were, didn’t impress Carl; there were twenty-two columns across the front of the federal courthouse he entered almost every day of his life. He was about to ring the bell, but then decided to have a look around first, in the open about it, here in pursuit of a fleeing felon—Eddie Rickenbacker looking for Fokkers to shoot down, though he’d rather have the score of the German ace, Manfred von Richthofen, who’d press the buttons to fire his machine guns and another Spad would go down smoking, or a Sopwith Camel, the German the same age as Carl when the Canadian got lucky and shot him down. Walking past the side of the house he thought about the model planes he’d made and painted and was allowed to hang from the ceiling of the living room because Virgil liked to look at them.

  He came to the back of the property and saw the swimming pool covered for the winter. He turned to the house—there was Mrs. Belmont on the patio standing with her back to him at a window, washing it with a sponge, a dish towel over her shoulder. The husband worth twenty million dollars and the wife did the windows?

  She turned and Carl saw he startled her. He used a quiet tone of voice stepping up on the patio, touching his hat brim and telling who he was and showing his star. She didn’t say a word. He asked if Mr. Belmont was home and it got her to shake her head. He said, “I’d like to talk to you if it’s all right and you have the time.” He paused and said, “About your son,” just as a colored woman in a white uniform with a heavy coat sweater over it came along a walk between the patio and the swimming pool—pushing Emma in a wheelchair, strapped in, the girl’s head hanging in the collar of a fur coat. Carl knew about Emma, how she’d gone in the p
ool without her water wings and almost drowned, her brain shut off for fifteen minutes before she was revived. The colored woman called to Mrs. Belmont:

  “You washing windows again? Where you want me to put her?”

  “Right there,” Doris Belmont said and turned to Carl. “I’ll talk to you.” She hesitated and said, “Let’s go inside.”

  Doris took him through the house to the front hall and up a staircase that had to be six feet wide to a semicircular sitting room that appeared lived-in and Carl believed was her dayroom where she spent her time by herself with this heavy, upholstered furniture; a decanter of sherry sat on a silver tray with stem glasses, the tray on a round table in the middle of the room. The windows looked out the back to the swimming pool and the lone figure, this woman’s daughter head-down in the fur coat in late-afternoon sunlight.

  Carl tried the edge of a deep chair and then sat back as Doris Belmont sank into the middle of the davenport and wiggled her fanny into the cushion.

  She said, “You think Jack’s here, hiding out?”

  “It depends how you feel about him?”

  “You see that girl out there? She can’t walk or speak ’cause he let her drown, watched her drown, and we went and brought her back.”

  “You saw him do it?”

  “I know he did it—God have mercy.”

  Carl looked out at the girl, Emma, about twenty now, her face hidden in the fur coat. He turned back to Doris.

  Waiting for him, Doris saying, “I’ll tell you something,” then paused and sounded like she’d changed her mind saying, “I’m tired. I am so tired. You know why? There isn’t nothing to do. I have two maids and the woman who takes care of Emma. This is her time off now, having a smoke with her coffee. You happen to have any cigarets?”

  Carl got out his Luckies. He went over to her and struck a match to light hers and then his own, Doris saying, “Pour us a glass of sherry while you’re standing there. Else I’ll get you whiskey if you rather.”

  Carl said no, sherry was fine, saying, “We have some at Christmastime.” If Virgil remembered to tell his Texas oil buddies to bring a couple of bottles. He said to Doris Belmont, “You were gonna tell me something, and then realized how tired you are. Though you look like you’re in good health.”

  For a stick of a woman with pale, sunken cheeks.

  “But you don’t have anything to do,” Carl said, “except wash windows?”

  “I was cleaning off something a bird left.”

  “Instead of getting one of the maids? I guess you’ve worked all your life, haven’t you? I imagine you were raised on a farm?”

  “We moved in this house,” Doris said, “I got turned upside down. I mean it. Nothing a-tall’s the same as any place I have lived. I’d go back to Eaton, Indiana, tomorrow and all that ever amounted to was hard times.”

  “What’s Mr. Belmont say about it?”

  “About what? My not liking it here?”

  “Or having Jack on your mind—what he did.”

  “What the boy’s done all his life, whatever he wants. You know why he tried to kill Emma? ’Cause Oris named his first gushers for the child, Emma Number One and Emma Number Two, and never named a well for Jack.” Doris took a sip of sherry and puffed on her cigaret. She said, “You know what I do mostly? Make sure that decanter always looks about half full. It’s cooking sherry, but serves my need.”

  Carl said, “You must talk to Mr. Belmont.”

  “You mean about Jack? Whatever I say Oris agrees in a soft voice patting my hand, then thinks of something to tell me, like he says they’re talking about changing the name of the bank. Oris has a guilty conscience, but I’m not sure if it’s for sending Jack to prison or ’cause he’s still seeing this old girlfriend of his. One time Oris showed hisself, he said, ‘Jack’s so bad you want to hit him, only now it’s too late, and when I should’ve been hitting him I was looking for oil.’”

  Carl, trying to think of something to keep her busy, said, “You cook?”

  “We have one I’m finally getting use to, a colored man from New Iberia, Lou’siana. Oris brought him from down there he was looking at oil property. We have all these people, the maids, the cook, the one takes care of Emma, all living here in this house. My mother comes to visit…” Doris shook her head, tired.

  “You say Mr. Belmont agrees with you,” Carl said.

  “On account of his guilty conscience. I say, ‘If Jack should come home, you won’t let him in, will you? Or let him talk to you?’”

  “What’s Mr. Belmont say?”

  “Says a course not.”

  “Jack hasn’t been here?”

  Doris said, “You know what I have under this cushion? A thirty-two caliber pistol.” She wiggled her fanny to show Carl where it was. “He comes up those stairs and walks in here to kiss me on the cheek? I’m gonna shoot him and watch him bleed on the carpet.”

  “You tell Mr. Belmont that?”

  “I told him he tries to stop me I’ll shoot him, too.”

  In five days Louly had seen Carl Webster twice, both times when he came home to freshen up and change his clothes. They hadn’t even spent the night together yet.

  “Oh, you’re gonna take me dancing? See the sights of Tulsa?” Using her best sarcastic tone of voice. “You know who’s appearing at Cain’s Ballroom all this week? The Light Crust Doughboys featuring Bob Wills. The ad in the paper calls them the hottest hillbilly swing band you’d ever want to hear. Every night the ballroom’s crowded with two-steppers.”

  Carl told her from the bathroom, “Honey, I’m on the hottest investigation of my career, working surveillance, watching for a certain fugitive.”

  “You told me you were taking time off.”

  “I been called in special on this one.”

  The second time he came home she said, “All I do is talk to you through the bathroom door. What’re you doing’s so special?”

  Carl said he couldn’t tell her.

  “Well, all I been doing every night is listening to Amos ’n’ Andy, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Ed Wynn, or Walter Winchell talking to Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, and you don’t tell me nothing.”

  She gave him that the second time he was home and Carl said, “Okay, we’re closing in on your boyfriend, Charley Floyd.”

  The words stunned Louly.

  “He’s here?”

  “Living on East Young Street with Ruby and the boy, according to the police informant, one of the neighbors. And a guy with them the police think is George Birdwell, Choc’s partner.”

  “All the time since they left Fort Smith,” Louly said, “he’s been in Tulsa?”

  “The past month. The informant says Ruby shops at the grocery store on credit, tells them she’ll settle when her husband gets paid at work. Meaning, when he robs a bank.”

  Louly said, “What is wrong with me? This is the third time I’m only a few miles from Charley Floyd and I don’t know it.”

  “You’ve been lucky,” Carl said.

  “Where’s East Young?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  “You’re gonna get him tonight?”

  “Dawn, the dawn patrol swoops in.”

  “You’re not taking part?”

  “I get to watch.”

  “So you won’t have a chance to shoot him?”

  Carl paused. “Why’d you say that?”

  Louly said, “I don’t know,” in her own head. “What about Ruby and the boy?”

  “They’ll be allowed to walk out.”

  “I can’t even drive past the house?”

  “They won’t let you on the street. You’ll have to wait and read about it in the paper.”

  The headline on the front page of the World read: officers foiled by “pretty boy” in gas-bomb raid.

  The story said that when the police tossed the tear gas bomb through the front window, Floyd and Birdwell went out the back and drove away.

  There was more to the story, ho
w the police moved into the dark house and rooted around once they found it empty. There was an editorial saying the police had blundered. Another one quoted the secretary of the Oklahoma Bankers Association saying, “Floyd must be killed before he is captured.”

  Louly Brown, who had gone as far as the sixth grade, said, “Why capture him if he’s already dead?” It surprised her that she noticed this, written by the secretary of the Bankers Association, instead of feeling heartbroken about Choc. Maybe because she was tired of thinking of him as a good guy once you got to know him. Tired of sticking up for him. She listened to Amos ’n’ Andy and went to bed and lay there in the dark thinking of what she’d say in the note, if she felt the same in the morning.

  She did. She wrote the note on Mayo Hotel stationery she’d brought with her and left it on the kitchen table with the newspaper. The note said:

  Dear Carl,

  I have given up on the two men I thought I admired most in the world—you and Charley Floyd. I can’t wait any longer to go dancing with you and see the sights as you are always busy. The same is true of Charley Floyd. (Boy is he busy!) I have stopped letting people believe I am his girlfriend. There is no way to keep up with you two boys. I am going to Kansas City since you have not even called since Choc got away. Am leaving this morning. I will stop at a gas station and get a map.

  Love & kisses,

  Louly

  P.S. I am thinking of changing my name to Kitty and starting a new life.

  13

  A few days after Jack Belmont and Heidi rented a furnished bungalow on Edgevale—Modern, 6 rooms with sleeping porch—an Italian-looking guy in his fifties wearing glasses, a fitted Chesterfield coat and snappy gray fedora, rang the bell and identified himself saying, “Good afternoon, I’m Teddy Ritz, welcome to Kansas City. Where might you folks be from?”

  Heidi thought it was funny a guy his age calling himself Teddy and chewing gum. She said, “We might be from the North Pole, Teddy. What business is it of yours?”