I told Mrs. Bianco I’d be in the gym if Rose wanted me, then went up to the third floor.
T he health club was always open to members—weekends and holidays included—and there were already a dozen guys there, the usual bunch who always showed up early. Club rats, Watkins the trainer called them. As the morning wore on, still more members would come in for their regular workouts or just to sweat last night’s booze out of their system.
The large room echoed with the huffing and grunting of hard effort, with the slapping of jump ropes and the clanking of barbells, punches smacking the heavy bags. The daily reek of sweat and liniment was already starting to build.
It had been a good while since my schedule let me have a morning workout, and Otis was glad to see me come in during his shift. I figured he’d want to go a few rounds and I was ready to oblige him. But he was booked solid with his club rat boxing lessons for the next two days.
“I got a ten o’clock open on Saturday,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ll be out of town.”
I said I had to hang around town all week, so Saturday was fine.
“I’m locking us in at ten,” he said, writing “lesson to hotshot” in ink on his big desktop calendar.
I took the pen from his hand and drew a line through the word “to” in his notation and wrote “from” above it.
“Cocky sumbuck,” he said. “We’ll see. Three three-minute, no headgear, Watkins refs?”
“You’re on,” I said.
I went to my locker and got into my shorts and T-shirt and ring shoes. I’d never been in a gym before I got to Galveston, never fought with gloves or according to any rules. I’d known how to fight—not box, fight—since I was a boy. Nobody had taught me how, I just knew. And I learned early that a real fight had no rules. And nobody stopped it. A real fight wasn’t over until one of the fighters couldn’t fight anymore, and even then it sometimes wasn’t over. Boxing wasn’t real fighting, it was an exercise of skill and endurance, a test of your self-control. It required you to hold to the rules no matter if you were losing, no matter how hurt or angry you might be, no matter how sure you were you could kill the other guy if you just said to hell with the rules. Fighting in the ring exercised your discipline. It’s what I liked about it.
I did a few sets of sit-ups on the slantboard, then skipped rope for a while, breathing deep and easy. After that I put on the bag gloves and pounded the heavy bag till my T-shirt was pasted to me. Then I moved over to the speed bag.
I started slowly, building a smooth rhythm of alternating lefts and rights. Little by little I increased the tempo until I had the bag ricocheting in a steady racketing blur that sounded like a train highballing by. I was aware of the attention I’d attracted, the guys gathered behind me. Even Otis couldn’t work the light bag better than I could. I kept at it until my arms felt packed with burning concrete, then gave the bag a hard overhand that shook the boards and I stepped away and gestured to the others that the bag was all theirs.
A few of the guys applauded and somebody let out a whistle.
Otis had interrupted his boxing lesson to lean on the ropes and watch me work the speed bag. I grinned at him and stripped off the gloves, then mopped my face with a towel. He smiled and shook his head and then went back to showing some husky guy in the ring how to slip a punch.
After I showered and dressed I checked in at Rose’s office again. Mrs. Bianco said he’d been dealing chiefly with phone business all morning. He’d received a few visitors, none of them strangers to her. He’d given her no messages for me. I told her I’d be out for a while and come back later.
I took a trolley over to the Strand, downtown’s main street. The clouds had broken and scattered and the sun was high and warm and had done away with last night’s threat of a cold spell.
Unlike the stores, most of the cafés were open for business. I went into De Jean’s and had a T-bone and a bottle of beer. I finished up with coffee and a cigarette as I watched the sparse pedestrian traffic pass by the sidewalk window.
It was strange to be so idle. My days usually consisted of going here and there to take care of this or that. The other Ghosts tended to the routine jobs around the island, including the daily cash pickups, but the Maceos had dealings all over this region of Texas, and sometimes Rose would hand me a list of jobs that took me out of town for days or even a couple of weeks at a time. I frequently went up to Houston, sometimes out to San Antone, now and then down to Corpus. More often than not I took LQ or Brando with me, usually both.
Among my assignments were visits to guys who’d been slow to make loan repayments or turn over the daily slot cuts. They usually got their accounts up to date real quick after I gave them a warning. Everybody knew one warning was all Rose ever gave, and few of them were late with the money again. Now and then somebody would require a second visit but nobody ever needed a third.
The ones who’d been doctoring their books were another matter. They never failed to correct themselves, either, but their transgression was more serious than a late payment, and it had to be punished, even as a first offense. A broken hand would usually do, but sometimes a foot was also called for, maybe an arm or a leg, sometimes something worse. It depended on how long they’d been at it and how much they’d skimmed.
Then there were the robbers. The island clubs never got robbed—they were much too well protected—but now and then some little joint on the mainland or in a neighboring county would get hit, some club or café or filling station with Maceo machines in it, and although the stickups were rarely for more than peanuts, they included Maceo peanuts. Only the dumbest stickup guys would ever hit a place without first making sure it had no Maceo connection. Next to an outsider who tried to cut in on Galveston, nobody got Rose as hot under the collar as a robber. Any business that had even one Maceo machine in it was guaranteed protection, and Rose took his guarantees seriously.
Most of the stickup men were such dopes they didn’t even leave the local area after pulling their heist. They’d hole up with a relative or a friend or a sweetheart. But the Maceos had a standing reward offer for information about robberies—the reward sometimes more than what was taken in a holdup—and the information always came, as often as not from the people the robbers were hiding with. It never took me long to track them down, and when I did, there was nothing to discuss. If they had the money with them, fine, and if they didn’t, the hell with it. Not only was the money rarely very much, its recovery wasn’t the point, not to Rose. As he once put it, “What I want is those bastards removed from the living”—which made me chuckle and say he sometimes had a touch of the poet in him. Which made him give me a look and say he sometimes thought I was fucking touched. In any case, once the thieves were removed from the living, he made sure the news got around.
Few robbers ever skipped the state, but if we got a sure tip on one that did, we went after him—no matter how little he’d made off with, no matter how far he’d gone. But reliable information about a guy who lammed the state was hard to come by, and even when Rose thought the tip was solid he was reluctant to send more than one man on the job. He believed one man had a better chance of getting around unnoticed in unfamiliar territory and a better chance of getting back out if the job went bad. I agreed. The only two times he sent me out of Texas I went alone.
I ran down the first guy in a rooming house in a rundown section of St. Joseph, Missouri, exactly where the rat had said he’d be. I slipped in after midnight. The stairs creaked but if any of the other tenants woke up they stayed put and minded their own business, lucky for them. The guy’s doorlock was even easier to jimmy than the one in the kitchen. He didn’t wake up till I cut his throat. I’d killed with a knife before but never cut a throat—although I’d come close one time, when I was still a kid—but I’d seen Brando do it and knew they didn’t make much noise that way, just a kind of gargle like water going down a partly clogged drain. I thought I’d be able to avoid the mess better than Brando had, but I wasn’t. I
had to trade my bloody shirt for a clean one of the guy’s, and I went out with my ruined coat rolled under my arm. He’d made off with about five hundred dollars but I found less than fifty in the place.
After that job I started using an ice pick for the close work. You had to be more exact with a pick but it was a hell of a lot neater.
In the other case, the robber hit a Texas City club for three grand and then went to hide at his brother’s house on the Pearl River, a few miles south of Jackson, Mississippi. The place was so isolated I didn’t have to be very clever about it. I waited till dark and then left the car in among the pines and walked back up the road to the house. I found his car parked around in back where it couldn’t be seen from the road. I peeked in all the windows and saw that there was nobody in the place except him and a girl. He was in his undershorts, the girl in T-shirt and panties. I couldn’t spot a gun anywhere.
I kicked open the door to the kitchen where they were having supper and shot him through his open mouth before he could even stand up. The back of his head splattered the wall behind him and he drained off his chair.
The girl shrieked and jumped away from the table and then clapped her hands over her mouth like she wasn’t all that new to situations suddenly gone bad and knew that rule number one was shut up. But her eyes were huge with fear. She was a slim bob-haired blonde with freckles and nice legs. She looked about seventeen. One of her cheeks had a pale purple bruise.
“Where’s the guns?” I said.
“He aint got but the one.” She nodded at the kitchen counter behind me. I picked it up—a snubnose five-shot .38—and dropped it in my coat pocket. Then I stepped out the kitchen door to see if any lights had come on anywhere, some nearby cabin, some neighbor in the woods who maybe heard the .44’s blast, but there was nothing. I went back in and shut the door.
“The money?” I said. And was pleasantly surprised when she led me into the bedroom—being careful to keep from stepping in any of the blood spreading from the guy’s head—and pulled a valise out of the closet. She put it on the bed and opened it to show the cash.
“I knew it had to be somebody’s,” she said. “I knew he didn’t win it in no card game.” Her accent was swamp rat to the bone.
I riffled through the money. It looked to be almost all there.
“I don’t know how much all he spent of it,” she said. “I got about four dollars in my shirt yonder. You want I should get it?”
“Never mind,” I said.
“You gonna hurt me?” She looked all set for a bad answer.
“You help him steal it?”
“No sir, I never did any such.”
“Then I’ve got no reason to hurt you.”
“Truth to tell, I didn’t never expect to see him again. Then he shows up in Port Allen a coupla weeks ago and says he’s hit the jackpot and to come on if I was coming. Momma said he was no-count and I was a harebrained fool to go with him and she was right both times.”
“You the one to rat on him?”
She shook her head. “Probably his brother Carl. He was all the time beating on Carl and finally run him off from his own house—can you imagine? I wouldn’t blame Carl a bit if he told on him.”
She glanced toward the kitchen and her mouth tightened. “I told him he hit me again I’d stick him with a butcher knife. I meant it too. Momma always said they got to sleep sometime.”
I knew her story without having to hear it. I knew a dozen just like it: sweet girl takes up with some mean bastard who mistreats her till she goes sour and sometimes gets pretty mean herself. Some of them might deserve a slap now and then—some of them needed it—but none of them deserved to be made mean. This one was headed that way but might still take a lucky turn.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Sally. It’s Sally May Ritter.”
“Can you drive that car out there, Sally?”
“Yessir. I kinda can.”
I took about three hundred from the valise and gave it to her. I told her to go to the second nearest depot, not the nearest one. “Park a few blocks away and then walk to the station. Get yourself a ticket to anywhere else.”
She stared at the money and then at me.
“And try to be more careful about the company you keep,” I said.
She said she aimed to be. Then said, “Where you from, anyway?”
“Someplace else. Now get a move on.”
She was packing a bag fast as I went out the door.
When we didn’t know where a robber had lammed, Rose would put out the word on him. If the bastard ever showed his face in Texas again, we’d hear about it.
Next thing the guy knew, there I’d be.
There were times, of course, when everything was running smoothly, when nothing was out of order and Brando and LQ and I didn’t have much to do but exercise in the gym or play cards or go to the police range and take a little target practice. Times when the only duty to come our way was to drive Rose to Houston or Corpus Christi to tend to some matter in person like he sometimes had to do.
But such times were pretty rare and never lasted more than a few days—praise Jesus, as LQ was prone to say in moments of gratitude.
A fter lunch I wandered along the Strand for a while, then went into a movie house showing A Night at the Opera. The Marx Brothers could always get a laugh out of me.
When I got back to the Club, Mrs. Bianco said to go on into the office. Rose was on the phone and Big Sam was in an easy chair, puffing a cigar and sipping a glass of wine. Sam gestured for me to sit in the chair beside his. I took a Chesterfield from the case on the desk. Rose did too and I leaned over and lit it for him. I sat down and Sam punched me lightly on the arm and said, “Jimmy the Kid.”
“Right,” Rose said into the phone. “Louisiana Street. They’re expecting you this afternoon. Just fill in the forms and get the signatures. I told them if they signed today the machines would be there tomorrow afternoon.”
He listened for a moment. “Yeah…Yeah…Right. Railyard warehouse got plenty in stock. Soon as they sign, let the warehouse know and they’ll get the shipment out to Houston…Okay. Yeah.”
He hung up and scribbled something on a sheet of paper, then leaned back and looked at me and Sam and gave a tired sigh that struck me as a touch theatrical.
“I swear to Christ, there’s times I wish I was still a barber,” he said. “A barber can whistle while he works, know what I mean? Can sing while he does his job. Shoot the shit with the customers. Talk about sports, pussy, stuff in the papers. This…” He gestured vaguely at the big desk in front of him. “Nothing but fucken deals all day. Phone calls. Arrangements. Nothing but business.”
Sam looked at me and winked. It wasn’t the first time we’d heard this complaint from Rose—but it was sentimental bullshit. He wouldn’t last two days back in a barber shop before he’d be scheming at how to outfox the big-time crooks at their own games, both the legal and the illegal ones, just like he and Sam had been doing all these years.
He saw how Big Sam and I were smiling. “Go to hell, both you.”
He poured me a glass of wine and refilled his own. Then held his glass across the desk and said, “Salute,” and Sam and I clinked ours against it.
He wanted to know if I’d picked up on anything today that might connect to the Dallas guys. I said I hadn’t.
“I keep telling you,” Sam said to him, “you’re worrying for nothing. I was on the phone with our ears in Dallas ten minutes ago. None of them have heard anything.”
“Everybody knows we got ears all over,” Rose said. “If they’re planning a move they’re keeping a tight lid on it.”
“They got no reason to make a move on us,” Sam said. “Ragsdale lost their machines to us, we didn’t steal them. They made a bet on Willie Rags and they lost.”
“Could be they’re sore losers,” Rose said. “Could be they don’t give a rat’s ass it’s Ragsdale’s fault.”
“What can they do, come get the m
achines back?” Sam said. “As soon as they tried it we’d hear about it and be there before they got the first slot loaded on the truck. They can’t do anything except forget the slots or buy them back. You got them over a barrel, Rosie.”
Rose arched his brow at me in question.
“I’m with Sam,” I said.
He nodded but didn’t look convinced. “Well…keep a close tab with the ears,” he said to Sam.
“And you,” he said to me, “just keep close.”
L ucio Ramirez is about to close his bakery for the day when the little bell jingles over the door and two men enter. One of them flips the sign hanging inside the glass door to the side that says CERRADO and then turns the doorlock.
Angel Lozano and Gustavo Mendez are large men in finely tailored suits and snapbrim fedoras. They could pass for brothers, their chief distinction in their mustaches—Angel’s thick and droopy, Gustavo’s thin and straight—and in Angel’s left eye, which is held in a permanent half-squint by a pinched white scar at its outer corner.
Apodaca is a small pueblo and these men in smart city clothes are obvious outsiders. Even as Ramirez asks how he may serve them, his apprehension is stark on his face.
Angel asks if he is related to Maria Ramirez, who until recently was in the employ of La Hacienda de Las Cadenas.
The baker can see that the man already knows the true answer—and sees as well that he is not a man to lie to—and so he admits that Maria is his daughter and asks what they wish with her.
At that moment his rotund wife emerges from a curtained doorway to the living quarters in the rear part of the bakery and stops short at the sight of the strangers.
Ramirez tells her who they are and she turns back toward the curtain but Gustavo catches her by the arm and yanks her to him and claps a hand over her mouth. Ramirez starts toward them but Angel grabs him by the hair and rams his forehead against the wall and lets the baker fall to the floor unconscious, his forehead webbed with blood.
Under the Skin Page 11