“Okay,” I said. “So I’m in. What’s the score?”
He leaned back and smiled, an expression of enormous satisfaction on his face. “The take is going to be two to three million, maybe more.”
“Jesus Christ!” I said, honestly surprised. If he wasn’t just blowing smoke, it was an incredible score, particularly for 1970 when $8,000 would buy a top-of-the-line Cadillac or Lincoln, and a nice three-bedroom brick home could be had for about $15,000. The famous Brinks job itself had been under $3 million, and it had been the most publicized robbery in American history. “What in the name of God is it?” I asked.
“Hog, they’re gonna be writing about this one for years to come. It’s a carnival. A big one. Games, rides, scams, concessions. The works. We’re gonna take down a whole freaking carnival for a year’s receipts.”
Ten
The next day I decided it was time to start packing a sidearm again. Later that afternoon I was glad I had. Besides my .38, which now resided in the Biloxi PD’s evidence vault, I’d brought along a Browning 9mm automatic and a Colt Woodsman .22. The Browning was big enough that it made a noticeable bulge under my coat, but the .22 was almost invisible, a work of art. Many years earlier a criminal gunsmith of my acquaintance had heavily modified it for me. He’d cut the barrel back to two and a half inches, ported its end, and then fitted a special silencer of his own invention over the barrel. Now the piece looked like a heavy target pistol with a four-inch barrel, and while it was not as quiet as a pistol fitted with a conventional silencer it made considerably less noise than an unsilenced weapon. The .22 may not be a quick man-stopper, but in the hands of a good shot it can do a lot of damage. Besides, one in the brain from a small-caliber weapon will kill a man just as dead as a .44 magnum. I checked the magazine to make sure it was loaded with high-velocity Remington hollow points, then slipped it into the waistband of my pants near my right hand.
A little after five that afternoon I’d just stepped from my car in front of the Gold Dust when Jasper Sparks pulled up in his white-on-white Lincoln Continental Mark III. There was a soft hum and the passenger-side window came down, and I leaned down to look in. Jasper was always a sharp dresser. That afternoon he had on a fine pair of dark brown silk slacks, a cream-colored cashmere sweater, and a nylon windbreaker. “I gotta make a little delivery,” he said. “And I need you to come along if you have time.”
“Sure,” I replied and climbed in. I really didn’t want to go, but I saw no way to refuse without arousing his suspicions.
We threaded our way through town, and in a few minutes we were on the bridge going northward across the bay. The speedometer was holding a steady eighty when he pulled a small glass bottle from his pocket. “Hey, Hog,” he said. “Why don’t you grab the wheel so I can take a toot.”
I reached over and steered the car while he quickly pulled a penknife and a small bottle from his shirt pocket. A few seconds later the blade’s tip emerged from the bottle laden with fine white powder that quickly vanished up his nose. A second trip for the other nostril, and the bottle was capped and thrust back into his pocket.
“Coke?” I asked.
“Yeah. I love the damn stuff. Want a snort?”
“Can’t handle it,” I replied with a shake of my head.
All the while the car’s speed never varied. Once his hands were back on the wheel, he reached up under the dash, and suddenly the crackle of a police radio erupted from the car’s stereo system. “Big standoff over on the colored side of town,” he said. “Let’s listen awhile.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Bad shit, man. A domestic disturbance got out of hand, and some spade is barricaded inside his house. I been listening to it for about an hour. From what I gather, this guy came home from work and was trying to have a couple of beers when his old lady started in on him about the garbage or some such shit. I dunno. Maybe he snapped and went upside her head. Anyhow, somebody must have called Biloxi’s finest, and when they arrived, the jig went for his shotgun. Now they’ll kill him, sure as hell. They always do that down here. Just think about it. The poor bastard works hard all day and just wants to come home to a little peace and quiet, and now, between his wife and the law, he’s one doomed nigger.”
He had the volume jacked up high, and somebody keyed a mike just as a rattle of gunfire broke out. A few seconds later we heard someone yell, “Cease fire! Cease fire! Suspect down. Repeat, suspect down and wounded!”
Sparks reached up under the dash and turned off the radio. He looked over at me with eyes that were a little sad despite their coke-born gleam. “I told you so,” he said. “You know, Hog, I’m not much of a racist. Most of these ol’ characters I do business with aren’t but about two steps up from the Ku Klux Klan, but I’m not that way. I’ve always tried to treat spades decent. I realize that if I’d been born black I’d be dead already. Nobody ought to have to take some of the shit those poor bastards have had to put up with, and I wouldn’t have. I know myself well enough to know that.”
He pushed the accelerator down and soon we were blazing northward into the gathering gloom of a Mississippi winter twilight. About twenty-five miles out of town he turned off onto a rutted dirt lane. After about a mile we pulled up in front of a ram-shackle farmhouse, and Jasper pressed the horn button. A light came on above the doorway, and two rough-looking men I placed in their late twenties ambled out onto the sagging porch. Both had droopy mustaches, and both wore their stringy hair long and down over their ears. One had on a T-shirt under a ragged army jacket while the other wore a tattered blue sweater. Neither appeared to have bathed in a month. I didn’t like their looks and I didn’t like being out there in the middle of nowhere with them and Jasper Sparks. He had no reason to suspect anything, but a man like him didn’t need a reason. He could kill because of a stray thought.
“I think these fuckers are okay,” he said before he opened the door. “I’ve done business with them a couple of times, and they know who I am and the kind of people I run with. That should put them on their best behavior, but they’re meth heads, and you know how unpredictable those assholes can be. If they get weird on us, then we just smoke ‘em and go sell our shit someplace else. Okay?”
“Damn right,” I replied.
“You got a piece?” he asked. “If you haven’t there’s one in the glove box.”
“I got one,” I said.
“Good. Don’t fuck around if things get sticky.”
He opened the door and climbed out. I emerged from the other side and we waited while the pair meandered out to the car like they had all the time in the world. Hurrying wasn’t in their genes, and I shuddered to think what might be.
Jasper popped the trunk lid, and then I saw that the trunk of the Mark III was half full of one-pound plastic bags of marijuana. I stood with my hands on my hips, my senses electrical, my right hand practically on the little Colt.
“Seventy-five pounds at a hundred a pound,” Jasper said. “That comes to seventy-five hundred, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” the taller of the pair said. “But I thought you were coming alone.”
“Why’s that, motherfucker?” Sparks asked coldly, looking the big thug straight in the eyes. “Did you have a little something planned for me?”
“Aww, come on, Jasper!” the man whined. “We don’t want no trouble with you. I was just asking, that’s all. I mean, I don’t know this guy.”
“You don’t need to know him. Just give me my money and get this shit out of my car.”
The pair looked at each other for a few seconds in apparent confusion, then the smaller one disappeared off into the darkness. A minute later he came back pushing a battered old wheel-barrow. Soon the trunk was empty, the wheelbarrow was piled full, and the smaller man began rolling it slowly back off into the night, its ancient, rusted wheel screeching in protest. The big guy hauled a roll of cash out of his coat pocket and counted off seventy-five one-hundred-dollar bill
s. A few moments later we were gone in a cloud of dust, and I was breathing a little easier.
Back on the highway Jasper handed me the money, and said, “Get yourself a thousand of that.”
“How come?” I asked with surprise.
“Shit! What do you think? For riding shotgun for me on this deal. I don’t expect nobody to do that for free. Did you see how surprised those fuckers were when they saw you? I think they had notions.”
“A thousand’s too much,” I said. “How about five hundred?”
“If that’s the way you want it, but you’re welcome to a grand.”
I pulled off five bills and handed him back the rest. He stuffed it in his pocket and reached over to shake my hand. “You’re good people, Hog,” he said.
“Thanks, Jasper. But I wish I’d thought to get a lid of that grass. Was it pretty good?”
“What!? Am I to understand that you like a toke now and then?”
“Yeah, and so do a lot of cops.”
He glanced at me and grinned, then said in a high falsetto voice, “Yes sir, Mr. Judge, Your Honor, sir. It was right then when I commenced to suspicion that this seemingly upstanding young lawman was in reality nothing but a vicious dope fiend. ...”
I laughed. His mimicry was really good.
“Anyhow, this shit was only mediocre,” he said. “I’ll bring you some real dynamite stuff here in a couple of days. I’m flying down to Guatemala tomorrow.”
“Really?” I asked. “What for?”
“A two-day gambling junket. The Guatemalan government sponsors them. We fly right out of south Mississippi. Want to come?”
I shook my head. “I’m kinda busy with Nell right now. And besides, my passport’s in Dallas.”
“Fuck, man, I don’t even have a passport.”
“Damn, Jasper!” I said.
“What’s the big deal?”
“It’s foolish to leave the country without a passport. When you do you forfeit your rights to State Department assistance if you get in trouble.”
“If the Guatemalans don’t mind, then I don’t mind.”
I said nothing more. Despite his earlier assurances that he was comfortable with me on the carnival job, I knew the dope sale had been a test. Which was why I’d asked about the marijuana. I didn’t use it regularly, but it added a bit of verisimilitude to my cover story.
We rode on in silence for a few minutes, then Jasper reached in his pocket, and said, “Hey, Hog, take the wheel, will you? Toot time again!”
Eleven
Early the next morning I called Nell. “Would you like to go to Texas with me for a couple of days?” I asked her.
“Only if we can canoodle a lot after we get there,” she said impishly.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
The score was planned for mid-to-late January, almost a month away. Sparks saw the logic of my renting a small apartment in Biloxi for the duration. “Money,” I told him. “I need to start watching my money, and that damn motel is going to get expensive.” And I said that I needed to go back to Dallas to get some household goods and more clothes. But my real reason for the trip was that I wanted to talk to Bob Wallace in person.
Nell and I left the next morning, and I let her drive most of the way. I have no idea what she told Aunt Pitty-Pat, but the old lady raised no objections. She just reminded me to take good care of her niece and then stood on the front veranda waving her tiny lace handkerchief in farewell as we pulled away.
“That was a surprise,” I said.
“You’ve got to understand how she thinks, Manfred. In her world going off for a discreet weekend with some gentleman is a deliciously wicked adventure. However, for a single girl to do it in her own bedroom at home would be trashy.”
“Seriously?” I asked, looking at her in wonder.
She nodded. “Down here a woman can get away with just about anything provided she does it with style.”
We pulled into town in the late afternoon and I found that I regretted being back. Although I’d lived in Dallas for almost twenty years, I’d never really liked the place; it was too uptight to suit my taste. There had once been a different Dallas, though—one that died not long after World War II. It had been wild and freewheeling and even a little exotic, a place where the lingering flavor of the frontier West mixed and mingled with the rising tide of the New South.
Back in the 1920s the black business area south of the Texas Central Railroad tracks known as Deep Ellum had been one of the cradles of the blues, home to such legendary artists as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Willie McTell, and Little Hat Jones. Good music could be heard nightly in a dozen spots, and young Highland Park swells drove down in their fancy roadsters to drink bootleg whiskey and hobnob with whores and gunsels. The stock market crashed, Prohibition ended, and the old bluesmen drifted away. Deep Ellum began to fade, but the Depression brought another kind of life to the town as legions of dispossessed farmers frantically seeking jobs swept in from the dust-blighted countryside to fill shantytowns and tent cities over in West Dallas, on the far side of the Trinity River. It was an era of desperate bandits. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were the most famous, but there were others, including a bloodthirsty young killer named Raymond Hamilton whose single-handed capture by Bill Decker made that young officer’s career. A onetime member of the Barrow gang, Hamilton went to the Texas electric chair in 1935, and Decker went on to be elected sheriff a few years later.
In the late ‘30s a gang war broke out between two local mobsters named Herbert Noble and Benny Binion. It lasted better than a decade and claimed over a dozen lives. At stake were the lucrative Dallas gambling rackets. The conflict ended only after Binion fled to Las Vegas and Noble han been blown to pieces by a bomb planted in his car—a bomb planted, some said, by Binion in revenge for their longtime squabble.
Then things changed. The ‘50s came, and with them came a wave of anticommunist hysteria as politically oriented preachers like Billy James Hargis and Reverend Carl McIntire took to the airwaves to become the darlings of the Dallas right, their venomous rantings quoted by the faithful with the same fervor with which their ancestors had once cited the Four Gospels. John Birch Society recruiters hit town, and within a decade Dallas had the largest Birchite membership in the nation.
The economy was booming and new skyscrapers were rising all over town. In those years Dallas became known as a place of fast money and fierce religion. It was a time of steel and glass and hard-core paranoia. Traitors were everywhere and everyone was suspect. Birch founder Robert Welch proclaimed President Eisenhower a “conscious member of the international communist conspiracy.” Many wealthy Dallasites agreed with him, among them H. L. Hunt, a billionaire bigamist and right-wing crank who professed to have found Jesus in his declining years. To him and many of his associates our own government was little more than the local branch office of the Kremlin’s politbureau. But the nightlife flourished. Such a society always needs outlets for its tensions, and the well-heeled could find relief at a half dozen swank bordellos, including Illa Marlette’s palatial establishment on Turtle Creek, which “catered to all tastes,” as she once told me. The common people had to make do with what they could pick up on the street in Oak Cliff, a workingman’s neighborhood west of the Trinity. All classes mixed and mingled and rubbed elbows in the town’s small burlesque district, which lay in a six-block stretch of Commerce Street stretching westward from the Adolphus Hotel. Rich young bloods who favored a little late-night danger mixed with their forbidden pleasures headed for lower Greenville Avenue where huddled a cluster of nightspots that were known as hangouts for police characters from all over the South. The most notorious of these places was the Fan Tan Club, a scabrous dive run by a pair of aging Dallas hoodlums named Willard Crowe and Newt Throckmorton.
The town changed again in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, and by the time I retired the strip joints and saloons on Commerce Street were about gone. Jack Ruby’s Carousel survived hi
s arrest by only a few weeks, and Abe Weinstein’s oncefamous Colony Club was limping toward oblivion. When the joints went, Dallas’s color went with them, and what was left was just a tinsel city on the Blackland Plains, full of oil money and arrogance, but which couldn’t hide the deep sense of shame and inferiority that had grasped the town since that fateful day back in November of 1963.
When I’d left for Biloxi the week before, my apartment had been in a mess, the sheets unchanged for a week, and I didn’t want to take Nell there. Instead, I splurged and checked into the Adolphus. While Nell was in the shower I made a phone call to a black nightclub called Mingo’s over in Oak Cliff. I had hoped an old friend of mine was in town. I wanted Nell to meet him, and there was always the possibility that he would have some information I could use. His granddaughter told me I could find him at the club that very evening.
We ate at a fancy French restaurant that had just opened on Turtle Creek, and afterward I pointed the deVille toward the old West Dallas Viaduct and on across the Trinity River. Our destination was a run-down building made of white framing and dirty brown brick only a dozen blocks from the rooming house where a strange young man named Oswald once fondled a junk rifle and dreamed strange dreams of making his mark on the world with one desperate act of cathartic violence.
Pulling into the parking lot, I counted only eleven cars parked there that evening, which meant nothing more than a slow night. Many times I’d seen the lot jammed to bulging, and patrons’ vehicles lining the street for a block in either direction. According to the weather reports a blue norther was blowing in off the Panhandle Plains, and a hard freeze was expected. The temperature was falling and the wind was beginning to gust, filling the air with grit and tiny pieces of refuse. Overhead a dying neon sign that spelled out MINGO’S sputtered and buzzed against the icy darkness. Inside, the barroom was toasty warm, with a low ceiling, dark walls, and a small raised stage at the far end opposite the door. Near the stage, surrounded by a half dozen admirers, sat the man I’d come to see.
The Sweet and the Dead Page 7