Two Trains Running

by Andrew Vachss

  “Got to take him with us now,” Rufus said. “We used our own sirens to get them all to run, but the real cops’ll be here any minute now. You!” he snapped at Buddha. “Come on!”

  * * *

  1959 October 07 Wednesday 22:18

  * * *

  “I think I see a way to do it,” Dett said. “If everything you’ve got here”—pointing to stacks of paper and the maps taped to the wall—“is accurate.”

  “I’d bet my life on it,” Beaumont vowed.

  “That’s up to you,” Dett said.

  * * *

  1959 October 07 Wednesday 22:41

  * * *

  “You see it?” Ace demanded, for the fifth time. “You see me drop that nigger like a sack of cement?”

  “We got to get rid of that pistol,” Hog said, urgently.

  “Fuck that! This baby is what’s going to make the Hawks—”

  “Are you nuts? Once the cops dig that slug out of Preacher in the morgue, all they have to do is match it up with your gun, and you’ll end up getting the chair.”

  “Why should they even—?”

  “Oh, man,” Hog said, despairingly. “I know you’re all jazzed from what happened, okay? But you’re not thinking, Ace. You asking people if they saw it. Well, they did see it, man. Everybody out there saw it.”

  “None of our guys would ever—”

  “The niggers, man. You think they’re not going to squeal?”

  “Never did before, when we—”

  “We never killed one before. This time, the cops are really going to look, man. That pistol has to go. Tonight.”

  “Damn, Hog.”

  “Hey, man, when the Klan hears what you did tonight, they’ll give you another one. Maybe more than one . . .”

  * * *

  1959 October 07 Wednesday 22:43

  * * *

  “White boys got to burn for this,” a coal-colored youth with a red bandanna around his neck said. “Gunned down Preacher like he was a dog. He never had a chance.”

  “Firesticks!” another youth said. “I got a cousin, works on a construction site all the way up in Gary. We get a couple of sticks of dynamite, go down to their clubhouse, blow those cocksucking Hawks all to hell. Bang!”

  “Shut up, all of you,” a squat, coffee-colored young man said. He swayed on wide-planted feet, blood still running from a gash next to his right eye. “This ain’t what Preacher would want us to do. We got to be cold, not crazy. Cops gonna be all over this place. Everybody that needs patching up, get out. All the weapons got to go, too. Have the debs take them away. Now! When the rollers show up, we all want to be—”

  “Dancer’s telling it like it should be told.” The voice penetrated the darkened room.

  “Buddha!” A joyous yell. “Thought you got it, too.”

  “White boys can’t kill no man like me,” Buddha said, grinning.

  “Is Preacher gonna make it?” one of the youths called out.

  “Make it? Shit, motherfuckers, he gonna do a whole lot better than that. Everybody split now, like Dancer say. We meet back here, tomorrow night.”

  “You in charge now?” another youth asked, not a trace of challenge in his voice, only awestruck respect for the man who had stayed behind while all the others had run.

  “Preacher in charge, fool!” Buddha said, laughing infectiously. “We all meet, tomorrow night, right here. And you gonna see for yourselves.”

  * * *

  1959 October 07 Wednesday 22:50

  * * *

  “I have to look it over by myself,” Dett said. “How far a drive is it?”

  “To the estate?” Beaumont asked. “Probably take you only about—”

  “Not there. To the daughter’s house.”

  “The daughter? Why her? I thought it would be his son. He’s the one named for him. Not Ernest Junior; Ernest the Fourth. Like he was a goddamned king. And I guess he will be, someday.”

  “You said the daughter had a baby.”

  “So? That kid’s not going to be named for Ernest Hoffman. What makes you think—?”

  “Hoffman himself’s seventy-seven years old, right?” Dett said, pawing through some of the papers in front of him. “Had his own son, this Ernest the Fourth, when he was a young man, so that one’s in his middle fifties already. And he’s been married three times, no kids. What does that tell you?”

  “He’s had some bad luck picking women,” Beaumont said, ticking off the possibilities on his fingers. “He can’t make babies himself. Or he’s a fag, and the women are just cover.”

  “If you’ve been looking as hard as you say you have, for as long as you have, you must have narrowed it down past that.”

  “If he’s a fag, he’s the best faker I ever heard of,” Beaumont said, chuckling. “Ernest the Fourth has been in half the whorehouses in the state. And he’s had a woman on the side every time he’s been married, too. In fact, the one he’s married to now, she used to be the lady-in-waiting.”

  “And if he wasn’t shooting blanks, he would have gotten one of them pregnant by now,” Dett said. “ ‘Specially when he knows any kid of his would inherit a fortune.”

  “Right,” Beaumont agreed. “Got to be something wrong with his equipment.”

  “There’s a lot more wrong with him than that,” Cynthia said, disgustedly. “No man ever had more opportunities in life than Ernest Hoffman’s son. And he’s squandered them all. He’s just a wastrel and a failure. If I was his father . . . Oh!”

  “Sure,” Dett said. “The line is going to die out, without anyone to take over. The daughter, Dianne, she’s out of Hoffman’s second wife, after his first one died. Twenty years younger than the son, and still pretty old to be having a baby.”

  “You think she was pressured into it?” Cynthia asked.

  “It adds up,” Dett said, moving his hands in a wide-sweeping gesture, as if to include all the material Beaumont had gathered. “Hoffman knows his own son isn’t going to take over for him. But his grandson . . . I don’t care what the name on the birth certificate says, that’s the real Ernest the Fourth.”

  * * *

  1959 October 07 Wednesday 22:59

  * * *

  Sherman Layne entered the precinct house at the beginning of his shift. He strolled through the squad room, back to the area reserved for the detectives. “I heard there was a rumble earlier, Chet,” he said to a jowly, white-haired cop in a houndstooth sport coat, making the statement into a question.

  “There was something,” the plainclothesman answered. “Call comes into the precinct, says they’re having World War III out there. Heavy gunfire. Everybody saddles up and rides, but, time the first cars are on the scene, it’s back to being a vacant lot.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” the big detective said, slowly. “There’s always some of them left, either from wanting to be the last ones to run, or not being able to run at all.”

  “They got tricked,” the jowly cop said, making a jeering sound with his rubbery lips. “Looks like someone in the neighborhood had their own police siren. Some of our guys heard it in front of them, as they were heading to the scene.”

  “That was pretty damn slick, whoever thought of it,” Sherman said, furrowing his brow in concentration. “Those kids hear a siren, they’re going to bolt. They wouldn’t stop to figure out where it was coming from.”

  “Yeah. But you know that area. Nobody knows nothing. One old lady, lives a few blocks from the lot—on Halstead, where it went down—she said the sirens were coming from a couple of different cars.”

  “Cars?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “But not squad cars?”

  “Nope. Just regular cars. Driving around, blasting sirens.”

  “That’s a new one on me. Never heard of anything like that before.”

  “Me, neither. But it wasn’t her imagination, Sherman. ’Cause the gang boys heard them, too. That’s what made them cut and run.”

  “I t
hink I’ll go out there myself,” Sherman Layne said. “Take a look around while it’s still dark.”

  * * *

  1959 October 07 Wednesday 23:04

  * * *

  “Did you see it?”

  “Not up close,” Lacy said into the phone. “But we were there. Saw one of them go down. We split soon as we heard the sirens.”

  “Tomorrow morning, come over to Benny’s place. We’ll shoot a game of pool.”

  “What time?”

  “I’ll be there sometime between ten and eleven,” Harley Grant said.

  * * *

  1959 October 07 Wednesday 23:08

  * * *

  “Dianne lives right here,” Beaumont said, pointing to a large map. “Not in Locke City proper, but just outside. They have a place on Carver Lake.”

  “Summer place, you mean?”

  “No, it’s year-round. Her husband, he works for . . . well, he works for Hoffman, I guess. He’s the manager of a half-dozen different businesses in town: couple of bars, Trianon Lanes—that’s the bowling alley that’s not ours—the movie house—the Rialto, not the drive-in—things like that.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work.”

  “It isn’t any work,” Cynthia said, making a snorting sound. “Every one of those places has a full-time manager. All the husband—Parsons is his name, Mark Parsons—has to do is make his rounds and collect money. He’s like a little kid with an allowance.”

  “Is he paying anyone off?” Dett asked.

  “With Ernest Hoffman for a father-in-law? You’ve got to be joking,” Beaumont said. “Those businesses, they’re all legit. And nobody’d be crazy enough to try and shake him down for protection.”

  “All he’s good for is driving around in that fancy sports car of his,” Cynthia said, dismissively. “And making babies. That he knows how to do.”

  “They only have the one kid, right?”

  “They do,” Cynthia said, her mouth twisting in disapproval. “But before that child was born, two of his girlfriends visited Dr. Turlow.”

  “He does abortions,” Beaumont explained.

  “If you know all that . . .”

  “It’s not a lever,” Beaumont said. “The son-in-law is . . . well, he’s a son-in-law. That’s what he is; that’s what he does. He’s not running for office.”

  “What if he thought his wife was going to find out?”

  “Even if that was worth something, it’s not what we need,” Beaumont said. “All the son-in-law could do is pay some money to hush it up. Probably already did. But he can’t make anything happen, not the way we need it to.

  “Hell, his wife probably already knows. And you can bet Hoffman himself does. If Hoffman wanted him to stop running around, he’d take care of it himself. There’s nothing there for us.”

  “But if someone had the baby . . .”

  “A kidnap?” Beaumont said. “You have to be insane.”

  “Who kidnaps kids?” Dett replied, calmly.

  “I don’t know. Psychos, I guess. It’s, I don’t know . . .”

  “Dirty,” Cynthia finished for him, her mouth twisted in disgust.

  “Rich people’s kids get kidnapped all the time,” Dett said, calmly. “Bobby Greenglass, Peter Weinberger . . .”

  “Those kids got killed,” Beaumont said.

  “You’re going to do a snatch, you might as well,” Dett said, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s the death penalty no matter what. They’re going to execute that guy out in California . . . Chessman, and he didn’t kill anyone. Ever since Lindbergh . . .”

  “I don’t see where you’re going with this,” Beaumont said, feeling Cynthia’s anger fill his own chest. “We can’t snatch Ernest Hoffman’s grandson. Even if he’d play ball—and we don’t know that he would—he’d know it was us. That’s not strategy. That’s suicide.”

  “Have to be pretty stupid to try and pull a stunt like that, wouldn’t you?” Dett said, as if struggling to understand a complex proposition. “Extortion’s for money, not for politics. I mean, what kind of a man thinks he can kidnap a kid to make the kid’s grandfather do him a bunch of favors?”

  “An idiot,” Beaumont said, his voice as iron as his eyes.

  “Exactly,” Dett said, very quietly. “A real animal. The kind you can’t talk to. You know anyone like that around here?”

  * * *

  1959 October 07 Wednesday 23:59

  * * *

  “Tussy! Call for you.”

  “Thanks, Booker.”

  “You know Armand don’t like it when—”

  “Armand won’t mind,” she said, innocent-eyed.

  Tussy went through the swinging doors, picked up the phone, said, “Walker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to come over after I—?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’m a long way out of town. But I thought maybe you’d like to go for a drive with me tomorrow.”

  “A drive?”

  “Yes. A long drive. I thought we could maybe find a nice place, have a picnic all to ourselves.”

  “Oh, I’d love that. I’ll pack a—”

  “No, I didn’t mean for you to have to do anything. We can pick up some—”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” Tussy said. “Just tell me what time you’re picking me up. I can be ready anytime after nine.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 04:14

  * * *

  “He’s going to go for it,” Lymon said, shielding the telephone receiver in one cupped hand.

  “You’re sure?” Shalare said.

  “He told me so. Late last night. A few hours ago.”

  “Just you?” Shalare asked, glancing over at Brian O’Sullivan.

  “No. He called a meeting. Faron was there, too. And Sammy. And—”

  “Okay.”

  “But he’s going to wait for—”

  “I know,” Shalare said, and cut the connection. He turned to face his friend. “The curtain’s coming up, Brian. Now it’s time for the Italian to show everyone how good he can play his role.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 09:29

  * * *

  “Where are we going?” Tussy asked, brightly.

  “I hear there’s a lake not so far from here . . . ?”

  “You mean Carver Lake? Did you want to go out on it?”

  “Go out on it?”

  “In a boat, silly. You can rent them there.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of doing that.”

  “Oh, good!”

  “You don’t like the water?”

  “I don’t mind it myself,” Tussy said. “But we’d never get Fireball into a boat.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 10:13

  * * *

  “Those pills really did the job,” Preacher said. “I slept like I was dead.”

  “Don’t get used to them,” Darryl told him, not unkindly. “Use them on pain, real pain, and they work just fine. Use them for anything else, you end up a junkie.”

  “I won’t need any more of them,” Preacher said, resolutely.

  “Just make sure nobody punches you there,” Darryl said, touching the young man lightly. “Or even gives you a hug. Cracked ribs, they heal by themselves, so long as you keep them taped. But you can’t be jumping around, not even with a woman, understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just rest,” Darryl said. “We get you back home after it gets dark tonight. But, first, Brother Omar wants to talk to you.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 10:15

  * * *

  “What did you see?” Harley asked Lacy.

  Lacy leaned over the pool table, sighted down his cue. “There was a little light, from the street, but when they closed on each other, it was like they all stepped in a puddle of ink. You couldn’t tell black from white. But one of the Hawks had a pistol, all right, a real one. We heard the shots.”

  “Anybody
get hit?”

  “Oh yeah. We saw him fall. Then everyone started running.”

  Harley picked up the orange five-ball and the black eight-ball, one in each hand. He placed them together on the green felt so that they were angled toward the corner pocket, then tapped them down with the cue ball. “Sometimes,” he said, “a combination shot, it’s the easiest one of all. It looks hard, but when everything’s lined up right, all you have to do is hit it, hit it anyplace, and it goes. You know what they call it, when the balls are lined up like that?”

  “Dead,” Lacy said. “They call it dead.”

  “That’s right,” Harley said. Without taking aim, he casually slammed the cue ball into the five—the eight drove straight into the corner pocket. “Just that easy.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 10:41

  * * *

  “I know you’re not responsible for my recent losses,” Dioguardi said. “So I wanted to tell you this personally. I’m pulling up stakes.”

  “What does that mean?” Beaumont said, into the phone.

  “What’s it sound like? I thought you were expecting this call.”

  “It sounds pretty complicated,” Beaumont said. “And it sounds like business, too. Not the kind of business we discuss on the phone.”

  “So come on over, and I’ll tell you to your—”

  “It’s not exactly that easy for me to get around,” Beaumont said, stiffly. “You don’t have any problem coming out here one more time, do you? I mean, since we’re going to be partners and all.”