The Kind One

by Tom Epperson

  “Don’t leave yet. Tell me something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Tell me about why they call me Two Gun Danny.”

  Dick sighed. “Ah, Danny…it’s three o’clock in the fucking morning.”

  “Come on, Dick. Please.”

  Dick shook his head but at the same time he lit up a cigarette so I knew he wasn’t going.

  “You, me, and a couple other of the boys—one night we drove down to Long Beach. We took a water taxi out to the Monfalcone. It was one of them gambling boats. It was out past the three-mile limit, so it was all strictly legit.”

  “But what we were gonna do—that wasn’t legit.”

  “That’s right. We was on a heist job. We was gonna heist the dealers and the customers and we heard there was a safe with a hundred fifty G’s in it and we was gonna heist that too. But that wasn’t all.”

  “We were gonna sink it. Sink the Monfalcone.”

  “You wanna tell the fucking story? Yeah, that’s right. We was gonna set it on fire and sink it ’cause Bud had a beef with the owner. And we didn’t care if everybody on it drowned like rats.

  “The main gambling room was the greatest place in the world. It had green carpet and chandeliers, and roulette wheels and dice tables and slot machines, and all the customers was dressed up like a million bucks. And the dames was all gorgeous, all of ’em looked like Ginger Rogers. Dozens and dozens of Ginger Rogers.”

  “Too bad we had to burn it up,” I mumbled. “Too bad we had to sink it.”

  “Yeah, too bad. But orders is orders. So we was taking a little look-see at things when you got recognized by some muscle that worked for the boat and he started to take his piece out. But you slugged him in the jaw and knocked him colder than a mackerel and grabbed his piece and pulled out your own piece and jumped up on a blackjack table and yelled: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this here’s a heist!’”

  I was lying flat on my back, with my eyes closed. The room was spinning around me like a roulette wheel. Dick’s voice seemed to be coming from further and further away.

  “Then all these guys come running in the room, some of ’em had sawed-offs and some of ’em had pistols and you was screaming that they was dirty sons of bitches and blazing away at ’em with a gun in each hand.”

  Two Gun Danny. Then I couldn’t hear Dick anymore. I was in endless night, floating on a raft on an infinite sea. And the water was filled with floundering Ginger Rogerses in golden gowns. And they were in danger of drowning, but I welcomed them on my raft, one and all.

  Chapter 2

  I DROVE THROUGH Hollywood in my yellow ’33 Packard Club sedan on a sunny Monday morning. I passed a church with a sign in front that said: “The eyes of the Lord are everywhere.” I had to slow down when a baseball bounced out on the street in front of me; a kid ran out after it and as he bent down to pick it up he looked up at me and I felt this sort of shiver like I’d lived through this before, except the kid with the tousled hair chasing the brownish battered ball was me, and the guy behind the wheel of the Packard was…who? Then the kid ran off and I felt like me again and drove on.

  I turned down La Vista Lane. It was a little street of modest pale houses and skinny palm trees south of Melrose and east of Vine. I parked in front of the Orange Blossom Bungalow Court. A sprinkler was going and made a rainbow over the sloping lawn. I climbed seven steps to a sidewalk that ran straight back from the street between identical tan tiny stucco houses, four on each side, facing each other across a courtyard. The courtyard had a couple of dwarf orange trees loaded with green half-grown oranges.

  I knocked on the door of the first bungalow on the left. Edna Dean opened the door. She was the Orange Blossom Bungalow Court manager. She had a long face with a sharp chin and she wore glasses with wire frames. She smiled and showed a set of teeth that were way too bright and perfect to be real.

  “Oh hi, Danny. I got the place all ready for you. Let me get the key.”

  A sour smell wafted out the door. I assumed Mr. Dean was in there somewhere. When I was here before, he never said a word, but just sat in a chair with a filthy blanket over his lap. A fly was buzzing around the room, and Mr. Dean followed it with his watery blue eyes. He needed a shave, and he smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in weeks. Mrs. Dean explained that he’d been laid up for the last few years after an accident at a mackerel cannery in San Pedro. He looked baffled as he watched the fly, like he couldn’t figure out how his life had come to such a pass that he didn’t have anything better to do than watch a fly buzzing around.

  Mrs. Dean came back out. She was wearing a drab dress that hung on her like a gunnysack and she had booze on her breath. “Nice day, isn’t it? I hope you like it here. It’s a pretty nice group of people, I guess, but they come and they go. You’ve come. You’ll go. Just don’t have any wild parties or play your radio too loud and we’ll get along just fine.”

  We headed up the sidewalk.

  “Did you hear about Dillinger?” she said. “It was just on the radio. They had him and his gang cornered in Wisconsin, but they all escaped in a blaze of gunfire. They killed one federal agent and an innocent bystander. I’m just scared to death of gangsters. Nobody’s safe these days.”

  A little girl, maybe ten or eleven, was squatting on the sidewalk, drawing hopscotch squares with a piece of chalk.

  “Hi, Sophie,” said Mrs. Dean. “Meet your new neighbor, Mr. Landon. Danny, this is Sophie Gubler.”

  The girl winced. “You said it.”

  “Said what?”

  “My last name. You know I hate it.”

  “Oh Sophie, there’s not a thing wrong with your last name. Gubler’s a perfectly fine name.”

  The girl winced again.

  “What would you like your last name to be?” I asked.

  She liked that question. “Well in school we studied this French queen, she told her people to eat cake so they cut off her head. Her name was Marie Antoinette.”

  “You’d like to be Sophie Antoinette?”

  She shrugged. Her knees were poking up from under her cheap print dress and were scraped up pretty good and blotched red with Mercurochrome. I said: “What happened to your knees?”

  “I was skating down the street and this dope opened his car door right in front of me. What happened to your leg?”

  “My leg?”

  “Yeah. I saw you limping on your leg. You hurt it or something?”

  “Sophie,” frowned Mrs. Dean, “that’s a personal question.”

  “My knees are personal. He asked me about my knees.”

  “I got hit in the head. With a lead pipe. See?”

  I took my hat off and inclined my head. Sophie stood up to get a better look at my dent. “Gosh. And you got hit in the leg too?”

  “Nah. But it mashed my brain, and it made it so’s my left leg and my left arm don’t work so hot anymore. But they’re getting better.”

  Sophie nodded, looking me over, not feeling sorry for me, just interested. But Mrs. Dean looked embarrassed. “Let’s go, Danny,” she said quietly.

  We walked on toward my bungalow, the last one on the right. In front of the third on the right a guy was kneeling and weeding in front of a carefully tended flower bed. He was wearing brown trousers, a loose white shirt, a big sombrero, and gardening gloves. A black and white cat was keeping him company. He gave us a friendly, gap-toothed grin over his shoulder as we walked by.

  “That’s Mr. Dulwich,” said Mrs. Dean as she nodded at him genteelly. “An Englishman. A real gentleman, too. I’ve had nary a lick of trouble from Mr. Dulwich.”

  Mrs. Dean unlocked the door of my bungalow and we went in. She looked around the living room with a pleased expression. “I had a nigger named Matilda spend the whole day cleaning in here. You could eat off the floor if you wanted to. Because nobody cleans like Matilda.” Then she gave me the key. “Well this is yours now. If you need anything you know where to find me. Do you play checkers by any chance?”

  “C
heckers?”

  “My husband loves checkers with a passion. If you ever feel like a game, just come on over. And I’ll pour you a cup of jackass brandy to boot.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Dean. Thanks.”

  She left. The key was cool in my hand. I was all alone in my little bungalow. I thought it not bad for forty bucks a month.

  One reason I took it was, it was furnished, with some battered mismatched odds and ends. I sat down on a tattered black davenport. I took my hat off and placed it down beside me, then sat there with my hands on my knees trying to remember if I knew how to play checkers. Red and black squares. Take your jump. Crown me. Yes. I knew how to play checkers.

  My head hurt. I always kept a little tin of Bayer aspirin in my pocket. I got up and went in the kitchen. No glasses. I’d have to buy some. I’d have to buy a lot of things. I didn’t really own anything, except a toothbrush, a shaving kit, a couple suitcases of clothes. And the car. It used to be Bud’s car. He gave it to me. After I got hit in the head.

  I put two aspirin in my mouth, turned on the tap, put my cupped hand under the water, and washed the aspirin down. Then I went in the bedroom.

  A bare mattress lay on a rickety frame. I needed sheets, and pillows. On the mattress was a tea-colored stain almost exactly the shape of the state of Texas.

  I lay down on the bed, avoiding Texas. The box springs creaked. I put my hands behind my head. I planned to stay here till my headache went away.

  I heard something, and looked toward the window. Sunlight was pouring in. A fly was buzzing and butting its head against the glass. The fly was green, bright as a jewel.

  Chapter 3

  I PULLED INTO the parking lot of the Peacock Club. It was on the north side of the Sunset Strip, just down the street from the Clover Club.

  It was early afternoon, and the club wasn’t open yet. Inside Bud Seitz sat in his usual U-shaped booth, just to the right of the stage.

  Every table had its own little wooden peacock, and the walls and ceiling were covered with painted peacocks, and there were a thousand or a million or who knows how many eyes of the tails of the peacocks looking at you. The club was called Cicero’s before Bud bought it. He changed the name and the look because when he was a kid growing up in New York he went to the Central Park Zoo and fell in love with the peacocks. On opening night he had three dozen live peacocks brought in. They were supposed to just walk around looking proud and pretty but almost immediately it got out of hand. People got drunk and started chasing the peacocks around trying to pull out their tail feathers and the peacocks were screaming and crapping all over everything and then one of them flew up on a table where there were candles burning and its tail caught on fire. The burning peacock flapped around the room and everybody just went nuts, guys in tuxes and girls covered in jewels were yelling fire, fire and running toward the exits, movie stars were cursing and swinging their elbows and knocking people down and the funny thing was, the newspapers the next day didn’t print a thing about it. Sure, they had stories about the gala opening of the Peacock Club and pictures too, but everything went swimmingly and everybody had a grand time according to the reporters who were all on Bud’s payroll.

  One of those reporters, John Hobbs of the Los Angeles Times, was sitting with Bud in his booth. Nucky Williams, Nello Marlini, and Arnold Dublinski were there too. There was so much smoke rising out of the booth it was like it was on fire with Nucky and Nello and Blinky smoking cigarettes, Hobbs a pipe, and Seitz a cigar. I didn’t smoke. It gave me a headache.

  I sat down with them. Eddie, the waiter, brought me a cup of coffee. Everybody was drinking coffee. Bud had a firm rule that nobody could have a drink before sunset. Sitting over at the bar, Tommy and Dick Prettie were also drinking coffee. Tommy in particular was a real booze hound, and I could see him in the mirror staring at all those shiny bottles of liquor behind the bar like sundown couldn’t come fast enough.

  Bud was forty-two but looked older. He had a narrow face with deep grooves in it, slightly buck teeth, bushy eyebrows, and small brown eyes that could scare you to death when they looked at you in a certain way. He was starting to lose his hair. He was maybe five-ten and a hundred sixty pounds.

  He was always dressed to the nines. Today he was wearing a gray suit, a gray shirt, and a white tie, with a white carnation in his buttonhole.

  There was no way you could describe Bud as handsome, but girls were always all over him. Maybe it was just a matter of him having a lot of dough and being a big important guy. Or maybe some girls actually liked him.

  It wasn’t like Bud was getting laid by a different girl every day though. He was very careful about girls, because he was scared of catching something from them. Before he slept with somebody she had to go to his doctor to get a clean bill of health. He had a thing about germs, about cleanliness. He showered three times a day. He didn’t like to shake hands with people. He always had to have a box of Kleenex tissues near him and every five or ten minutes he’d wipe his hands.

  He also had a thing about order. Let’s say that on his desk were a fountain pen, a cigar box, and a letter opener, then they had to be lined up a certain way, and if anybody moved them even half an inch when he wasn’t around he’d blow his top. And he couldn’t stand to have anything pointing at him. Once this little bookie named Louie Vachaboski put his cigarette down in an ashtray with the lit tip pointed right at Bud. Bud picked up the cigarette and dived over the table and grabbed Louie by the throat with one hand and with the other hand mashed out the cigarette in Louie’s left eyeball. Louie cut loose with these high-pitched, girlish screams, which got him nicknamed “Fay Wray” after the screaming blonde in King Kong. When Bud was done with Louie, he had to wash his hands about fifty times to get rid of his germs.

  “She’s a milestone around my neck,” Bud was saying. He was talking about his wife, Bernice. They’d been married ten or twelve years but the last two years they’d been living in separate houses, Bud in Hollywood and Bernice in Beverly Hills.

  “She spends my dough like there ain’t no tomorrow. And she’s always calling me up and pestering me about dumb shit. Like she calls me last week, she likes sunbathing naked by her swimming pool and she says these two kids that live next door are always climbing up in a tree to get a gander at her. She says she opens her eyes up and sees them two kids staring down at her and jacking off and she wants me to take care of ’em. What am I supposed to do, send some of you guys over to bump ’em off? Shit, the truth is I feel sorry for them kids if they’re so desperate they gotta jack off by looking at Bernice’s fat ass.”

  Everybody laughed. John Hobbs puffed on his pipe and said: “She still won’t give you a divorce?”

  “Nah, she’s a Catholic. She thinks the Pope’ll send us both to hell if we get a divorce. And she says she still loves me too much to let me go to hell. I tell her the Pope’s gonna try and send me to hell anyway ’cause I’m a Jew. But she won’t listen to me.”

  “We need to get something on her,” Blinky said. “So she’ll cooperate.”

  “Yeah,” said Bud. “Like she’s fucking a nigger. Something like that.”

  Hobbs wrote something down in a notebook. He was wearing a tweed coat and a red bowtie, and he had a lazy eye that gave him a slightly loony look. He said: “Maybe I can look into it.”

  “It oughta be a famous nigger,” said Nucky. “Not just some regular nigger.”

  “There’s no such thing as a famous nigger,” said Nello.

  “What the fuck’s Jack Johnson then?” said Nucky. “Danny? You ever hear of Jack Johnson?”

  “Sure. He’s a boxer.”

  “See? Even Danny knows who Jack Johnson is.”

  “But he’s all washed up now,” said Nello. “He ain’t had a fight in years.”

  “That don’t matter. He’s still famous.”

  “He used to be famous. He ain’t now.”

  “Why don’t both you guys shut up?” said Bud. “You’re giving me a fucking headache.”
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br />   Stan Tinney brought a girl over to the booth. Stan used to run some big club in New York till Bud had brought him in to manage the Peacock. He was an older guy, with white hair and heavy, black-framed glasses. Stan could hire anybody he wanted as long as it wasn’t a girl. Bud had to approve any girls.

  Stan introduced Armilda Lee Keddy to him. Said she was up for the job as the new cigarette girl.

  “What happened to Betty?” said Bud.

  “She quit, Bud. She took a job over at the Pom Pom Club.”

  “You telling me she’s going to work for those cocksuckers?” Bud looked incredulous. Stan shrugged.

  “I even offered her a raise.”

  “Even offered her a raise,” repeated Bud, shaking his head; then he turned his attention to Armilda Lee. “Where you from?”

  “Ada, Oklahoma.”

  She had brown hair, dimples, and a hayseed accent; her jaws were working hard on a piece of gum.

  “Another dumb hick from Oklahoma,” said Bud pleasantly. “Just what this town needs.”

  Armilda Lee giggled, her dimples deepening.

  “Spit it out.”

  “Huh?”

  “The gum. Get rid of it.”

  Armilda Lee quickly spit the gum out in her hand, then put both hands behind her back.

  “People chewing gum. It makes me sick.”

  She looked scared and said: “I’m sorry, Mr. Seitz.”

  “Lemme see your legs.”

  She hiked up her skirt a foot or two. We all inspected her legs. Armilda Lee Keddy had killer legs.

  “Armilda Lee, if I hire you, do you promise never to go to work at the Pom Pom Club?”

  Armilda Lee’s face lit up. “Oh yes sir, I swear to God, I’d never do nothing like that. And my daddy’s a preacher, so I don’t take swearing to the good Lord lightly.”

  Bud bared his buck teeth in a smile. “Well hallelujah, sister. Welcome to the Peacock.”

  Stan led the ecstatic Armilda Lee away. “I need to talk to Danny,” said Bud. “So everybody kindly clear out.”