Eddie wrestled with a young man’s hormones, decided it was too risky with forty cases of whiskey aboard, found a sweet spot in the Lincoln’s seat, and nudged the gas pedal. Twenty car lengths after he passed the Four Deuces’s lot, headlights swerved out onto the road behind him. Eddie added gas—seventy, eighty, ninety. The Lincoln had a hundred and fifty horsepower in an eighty horsepower world. If the headlights didn’t fade or turn, it was hijackers or the law. Benny Binion didn’t run from either, but his drivers ran from both; stand and fight was for the newsreels.
The headlights stayed in his mirror. Eddie’s heart added beats. He nudged the gas. The lights stayed bright. Exhale. Time to earn your money. Eddie’s foot asked for it all. The V-12 shoved him into the upholstery and straightened his arms. He checked the needle—full-out one-twenty—then the mirror. The lights went high beam and charged at his bumper. Whatever it is, it’s fast. Eddie clenched the wheel, hoping to steer darkness that killed people at half this speed. In tandem, he and the other car veered past slower traffic and roadkill. Eddie’s breath came faster. Twenty years in prison. Family loses everything.
The curve at Springtown almost killed him. Twenty miles, then twenty-five . . . another curve, this one with a dead piece of live oak in it. Eddie slid, the tires buckled, he righted and risked the mirror. Please be just a bar asshole playing chicken . . .
And . . . shit: more sets of headlights, flashing lights, too. That’d be the law. More than a hundred miles of Texas left. Make the Red River and be fine. Unless there’s a roadblock. Eddie’s mirrors glared. The Lincoln’s interior flashed blue-red from behind. They’d be shooting soon. Man, this was a hard way for a “brilliant” engineer to make a living. Eddie grimaced. “Brilliant” seemed a bit overstated just now. His lights struck a dented farm truck bent down over its rear axle, the bed loaded with—Four people at the shoulder, two of them making Xs with both hands. A kitchen apron in blue checks, a rail-thin man in a beaten hat . . . then a kid, scruffy and frozen midroad grabbing for a dog—
SHIT—Eddie picked stupid and swerved. He may have missed the kid, but not the bar ditch, and at one twenty, in Benny Binion’s new Lincoln loaded with whiskey, that was the definition of stupid. The big sedan’s headlights corkscrewed into the night. The Lincoln landed hard and began to roll.
CHAPTER 3
March, 1936
The room was dim for heaven, bright for a jail cell, and white. It had nurses and sheets and tubes . . . and handcuffs. Eddie tugged his left hand. Yup, handcuffs. The body parts he could feel announced themselves by shooting various levels of pain. He decided to remain still until the hard-eyed man sitting on his bed quit shaking him and said something.
“Eddie?”
“Ah . . . yeah?”
“You seeing me okay?”
Eddie nodded, seeing at least two.
“Time’s a wastin’.” The man speaking was Floyd Merewether, Benny Binion’s top lieutenant, a 170-pound ex-Gulf-Coast stevedore who legend said John Dillinger chose not to fight with his hands or a gun. Behind Floyd were two policemen with their backs to Eddie’s door, their uniforms covering two sets of broad shoulders.
“There’s an engineerin’ job for you up north with something called the Culpepper Oil Products Company. Long way away and $115 a week. Room’s a dollar a day; same for the food, leaves you $55 clear. A teacher of yours from that college, Harold Culpepper, asked somebody up there at the Petroleum Club. They sent this Culpepper to Benny; man said he’s been hunting you since December last. Benny planned on telling you after Okie City.”
Fifty clear meant the forty a week Eddie was sending to Oklahoma would continue—the bankers could kiss his father’s ass. Eddie’s face wondered how that would fit with the handcuffs connecting him to the bed.
Floyd said, “Talked to the sheriff—my uncle by my dad’s sister. I’d be on the Rock Island for Chicago, ten a.m.” Floyd Merewether did not give idle advice. “You got an hour. Benny says you owe for his Lincoln. Stay out of Texas awhile. Stay in touch, but no telephone. Ever. Don’t know why, Eddie boy, but Benny thinks you got talent.” The lieutenant smiled like he agreed, then unfolded to his feet. Two nickel-plated Smith revolvers were tight between his belt and wool vest. He patted Eddie’s leg and tossed a handcuff key on the bed. “Me? I think Benny always wanted to be a farmer.”
Eddie palmed the key. “Hey, Floyd, the kid with . . . the one in the road. I missed him, right?”
Floyd Merewether’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, you missed him.” He nodded at the uniforms in the hall. “Copper’s car didn’t. Benny’s paying your respects to the family. You be gone on the Rock Island, Eddie. They hang people in this county.”
At the same moment that Eddie stepped off the passenger platform and onto the Rock Island train, Montague County impanelled a jury of temperance-minded citizens who intended to charge Edward Fred Owen with manslaughter and bootlegging. If the temperance-minded prosecutor could elevate the boy’s death to murder—and the prosecutor thought he could—Eddie Owen would hang.
Eddie took a nervous window seat for his two days and nights aboard the rackety rolling stock of the Chicago Rock Island. A Texas Ranger boarded the car and rode from Sanger to Gainesville. God and luck kept the Ranger occupied with the constant conversation of a man and his two daughters, the man wanting to know who was at fault for all this misery. The car grew colder as they rolled into Oklahoma, the dust thicker, the sun a heatless glow. Whistle stops produced a trickle of new passengers. At each stop, armed deputies stood the platforms, hard-looking men, rangy and underpaid, pistols high on their hips and bandannas across their noses and mouths. The Rock Island made Missouri at sunset. Floyd had said, get this far and you’re likely jake.
Leaving Joplin, Eddie quit imagining prison and the gallows, but safety and night produced no sleep, only endless replays of the little boy and his dog. Eddie realized he didn’t know the boy’s name.
A frosty dawn broke across the Midwest. Eddie washed his face in the train’s lavatory, straightened clothes he’d slept in twice, and stepped off the Rock Island 1,200 miles north in Chicago, Illinois, no more comfortable than when he’d boarded. By now there would be wanted posters in Texas. It didn’t matter that he had parents and siblings to support—Eddie Owen was a fugitive, a gangster by proper standards, and, he guessed, deservedly so. His reunion with a college professor who couldn’t find “integrity” with a microscope somehow seemed fitting.
A thunderous, modern metropolis did Eddie a favor; Chicago forced him to deal with Chicago instead of thinking about the dead little boy and his dog. Everything here was moving—trains, people, cars, trucks, wagons—all in different directions. Even at a distance the buildings could block midmorning sun. These were the “skyscrapers” of Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham, in person and three times as tall as any structure Eddie had ever seen. Chicago truly was a “World’s Fair City.” Engineering theory brought to life. Eddie bumped and bustled through jammed boulevards filled to both curbs with cars and trucks and oogle horns and exhaust. He marveled at almost everything, unembarrassed, bumping shoulders with flannelled, rough-shaven men, caps tight to their eyes, their accents fast and Irish. And a lot of them angry. Eddie apologized as often as he said hello.
Separating two of the impossible skyscrapers was a mammoth brick warehouse constructed on an entire city block. Along the east wall, men of every size and shape inched forward in a line that reached the whole block from corner to corner. The men were broad and narrow, stooped and straight, their clothes clean and dirty. Some wore hats like Eddie’s father. All were silent. The effect was ghostly, a combination of overall quiet defeat and the occasional glare of real violence. The crowds walking the sidewalk pushed Eddie forward and paid the line of men no notice. Eddie followed the line around the first corner and down that block, then around a second corner and another city block. The line of men ended around a third corner midblock at a foggy storefront serving soup through one open door. Walter Winchell’s “soup
kitchens” in person.
On almost every Winchell broadcast that Eddie’d heard, Winchell warned President Roosevelt that soup kitchens were not the answer to no work. Americans wanted an honest future, not communism and charity. Eddie wasn’t sure Mr. Winchell had ever been hungry. Opposite the soup kitchen’s serving door, a crowd had gathered and spilled into the street. Vehicles belched exhaust and honked to push the crowd back. The crowd shook their fists at—or maybe with—a man on a soapbox shouting, “Roosevelt’s the devil, boys! He’s to blame! The New Deal is No Deal!”
Eddie kind of liked Roosevelt, the Fireside Chats for sure, and moved on. At the intersection, two lantern-jawed fellows pushed pamphlets at his chest. Swastikas were emblazoned across the headlines:
JEW BANKS & COMMUNIST MASTERS.
IS THAT WHAT AMERICANS WANT?
SAVE AMERICA!
JOIN THE GERMAN-AMERICAN BUND
Two blocks farther down, five men in clean work clothes stood boxes and waved papers, asking everyone who passed or stopped if they valued workers’ rights and democracy. The man on the tallest box shouted: “Do you fear J.P. Morgan and his foreclosure banks? DuPont and his strikebreakers? Rockefeller and the Wall Street speculators who put us in breadlines? Stop the Fascists before they destroy us again! Join the American Communist Party! No more lies!” The Communists’ crowd was growing, spilling deeper into the intersection. Men came from across the street and began to argue and shove, forcing Eddie to dodge horns and bumpers and more shouters until he found the front door of the Carbon and Carbide Building. Eddie the engineer grinned at all forty stories until his neck cramped and the sun blinded him into the lobby.
The ornate elevator was a rocket compared to the two he’d been in, and he said as much to the black operator. The outer office of Culpepper Oil Products Company was no less ornate, staffed with a smiling, stylish receptionist and furnished with ox-blood leather furniture. Behind the receptionist’s red hair and wide shoulders, two windows overlooked endless green water that met the horizon in three directions. Lake Michigan had to be a misnamed ocean.
Eddie turned . . . and froze.
A policeman’s pockmarked face and brushy mustache shadowed in the far corner. The lamps on either side of the man’s wing chair were turned off. Eddie faked a smile. The Montague County police couldn’t get to this office this fast. Could they? The policeman leaned into the sunlight. His uniform was Army Air Corps—not the police—a major, and a hard-looking one. But the mustache? Did the Army Air Corps allow mustaches?
Harold Culpepper rushed into the space between them, his hand extended to Eddie. “Welcome, Eddie. Welcome to the Windeee Citeee.” Culpepper pumped Eddie’s hand and circled an arm around Eddie’s shoulder.
The greeting was too theatrical to be honest, but definitely not how anyone would greet a fugitive if he knew a fugitive was what Eddie was—
“C’mon in, we’re in the swim.”
Eddie shied at the familiarity and the lingo. Forty-three-year-old Harold Culpepper seemed awfully juked-up for an ex–college professor. His expensive tricolor sweater-vest and billowy trousers were what Clark Gable wore in the Hollywood On Parade newsreels. When at OU, “Professor” Culpepper had avoided flash like it was tenure poison. The new Harold Culpepper herded Eddie away from the Army Air Corps major and into a magnificent office. Culpepper made pistol fingers toward Eddie and an empty chair like he and Eddie were jitterbugging.
Eddie sat, tried to sneak-eye back to the major but couldn’t. Harold Culpepper rounded a leather-topped desk to his chair and tossed Eddie today’s Chicago Tribune. “Take a look.” The March 7 headline read: HITLER MARCHES INTO RHINELAND, VERSAILLES TREATY BROKEN. The second sentence explained “the Rhineland” as a slice of Western Germany taken and kept by the victorious Allies after the Great War. The slice of former German territory had been reconstituted as a demilitarized zone, a buffer for France’s protection. Germany’s new Chancellor/Führer Adolf Hitler had charged that France intended to occupy and steal the territory, so, today, Germany had invaded first. The French were furious and massing tanks at their border.
Okay . . . I’m sure that matters to France and Germany. Eddie checked Harold Culpepper, now mesmerized by his own fingernails. Maybe I’m supposed to keep reading. Paragraph two said the Treaty of Versailles also covered armaments outlawed after the Great War, armaments Germany had been mass-producing in open defiance of the USA, England, France, and Russia. The reporter seemed pretty concerned about this now that the Germans had actually marched somewhere.
Eddie was an ominous three lines into a list of those armaments when Harold Culpepper said: “That Hitler and his Nazis are plenty rugged, eh, man, unifying Germany’s territory like that? Fine with me. Somebody’s got to stop the Bolsheviks from overrunning Europe. France and England won’t. Wouldn’t want to be a Jew, though, not in that spat—Hitler and Joe Stalin don’t care for . . .” Culpepper extended his nose with his index finger. “The bankers of Judah.”
Culpepper’s caricature and emphasis on “the bankers of Judah” sounded like an indictment, although Eddie wasn’t clear why. Eddie wondered out loud at the professor’s newly hip diction and political interest, given that the professor’s history had neither.
Harold Culpepper pointed down toward the street instead. “Labor Communists on every other corner. Unionists, the whole lot”—Culpepper made the index finger by his nose into a conductor’s orchestra baton—“singing breadline ballads to you and me and the apple tree.”
Eddie took a wild guess that this was a criticism of the country’s two largest labor federations, the AFL and the CIO, and their reported infiltration by the Communists. “Unionism” was being assailed by the Hearst newspapers and Wall Street bankers as grossly un-American and, in some cases, treason.
Harold Culpepper said, “No AFL or CIO in this shop, not as long as this American has the right to vote.” The juked-up ex-professor beamed and grabbed a golf putter leaning against his desk. “Now to business, Eddie-boy. Your employer, and mine, the Culpepper Oil Products Company, has the refinery modification patent for catalytic cracking. How about that?”
“Ah . . . congratulations?”
“Catalytic Reforming. Alkylation and isomerization. Platinum platforming, the undergrad project I had you working on in ’33 and ’34. That’s the ticket behind the grind.”
What the “ticket” was to, Eddie couldn’t guess. “Behind the grind” implied that Eddie had been late with his participation in the platinum platforming project, when in fact Eddie’s theoretical refinery designs had been on time and all Eddie’s.
Professor Culpepper had taken the credit. The program then received a substantial increase in funding from the US Army Air Corps, giving the university a reason to look past some very troubling allegations regarding their professor’s private life. The program’s expansion benefited so many at the university that Eddie had swallowed hard and remained silent, the smart thing for a scholarship undergrad to do in the Great Depression.
“Ticket to what?” Eddie asked, allowing himself to wonder if the engineering profession he’d worked day and night to join might actually have a spot for him.
“AvGas. Aviation gas, 100-octane, your future. And mine.” Harold Culpepper extended the woven-leather grip of the putter past Eddie’s shoulder toward the major in the outer office. “And his.” The Army Air Corps major and his hip now shared the corner of the receptionist’s desk. The major’s eyes weren’t on her and should’ve been; they were on Eddie. Eddie summed his surroundings: ex–college professor, big-city oil-company office that lacked any other part of an operating oil company, and a high-rank Army Air Corps officer cooling his heels who emanated enough threat to be a coiled diamondback. Eddie turned to Harold Culpepper and went with the obvious question first. “There aren’t any engines that burn 100-octane, as in none.”
“Are now.” Harold Culpepper nodded toward the major. “A company in New Jersey used our designs to commercially refine
100-octane gas last December. Gents from the Army Air Corps like that major out there have been designing and redesigning engines night and day since.”
Eddie glanced at the Chicago Tribune and a picture of Hitler congratulating Mussolini on Italy’s air strikes in Ethiopia, then back to Harold Culpepper, the unmarred soles of Bass Weejun loafers Harold shouldn’t be able to afford now crossed on the desk.
The new 1936-model Culpepper adjusted expensive argyle socks that matched his sweater-vest. “This 100-octane AvGas produces a thirty percent increase in engine power but no increase in engine temperatures. Adds range, just like we suspected, even to existing engines.”
Eddie processed the “we” without changing his expression, then cocked the side of his head at the major beyond the doorway. “And the Army Air Corps will need range?”
“Soon, so they say. Lots of range.” Harold Culpepper made a grin functional drunks reserved for the first drink of the night. “Ever been on an airplane?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
“Ever ridden a camel?”
Eddie added a small, very tentative headshake, thinking steady job and wanted fugitive thoughts. “They have camels in Chicago?”
“You’ll go to Indiana first—run the tests at the refinery there.” Culpepper pointed over his shoulder southeast. “Lots of disbelievers on that payroll. If you can prove Culpepper Oil Products Company has the answer, then you’ve got a job. You’ll be the next T. E. Lawrence.”
Job sounded great. Engineering job so grand it was hard to believe. But T. E. Lawrence was “Lawrence of Arabia.” The Great War, camels from Wadi Rum to Aqaba—
Culpepper widened his eyes and bobbed his head . . . as if being shot at by Turks and Arabs would be the most fun a guy could have.
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