Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Well sir, we done our best. I am truly ashamed it wasn’t good enough. But we got up there fast, we nabbed that bird McGaffery on the steps, there was a goddamned pissing drunk in the men’s room, and we run him downstairs too, and we checked all the closets.”

  “So Garnet Grumley could not have been up there?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Carlo. “But if I missed him, then I missed him.”

  “He was not up there,” said Frenchy. “Mr. Earl, we went all through that place. I even beat the lock off the closet door in the ladies’.”

  “See,” said Earl, “I do not particularly care for having to shoot a boy dead, who was after all only doing his job and as it turned out had forgotten to load his shotgun. Either of you killed anyone?”

  Both men shook their head no.

  “I swear to you, Mr. Earl, that fellow did not come from up there,” said Frenchy. “He must have snuck in from the outside. Or maybe he came up from the cellar.”

  “Wasn’t no cellar,” said Carlo. “And we’d have seen him in the alley if he’d been lurking up there. Mr. Swagger, I do believe it was my fault and I am very sorry it happened. It wasn’t Frenchy’s. I was number one on our fire team, so the job was mine, and I muffed it. If you give me a next time, I will sure try hard to do a better job.”

  “Jesus, Henderson,” said Frenchy. “He wasn’t up there. It’s not your fault, it’s not my fault. It just goddamned happened is all and everybody is lucky it was him that got killed, and not one of us.”

  Earl pushed something across the table at them.

  It was the Hot Springs New Era, the city’s afternoon paper.

  FARMBOY SLAIN IN COP “RAID”

  Locals decry “Nazi” tactics

  “He was a good boy,” Mom says.

  “Christ,” said Frenchy.

  Carlo read:

  Raiders from the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office shot and killed a local man while invading a local nightclub.

  The incident occurred at the Horseshoe Club, on Ouachita Avenue in West Hot Springs, late last night.

  Dead was Garnet Grumley, 22, of Hot Springs, shot by a raider as he wandered in from the upstairs bathroom.

  “Garnet was a good boy,” said his mother, Viola Grumley, of eastern Garland County. “He did all his chores and milked his special cow, Billie. I wonder what he was doing in that downtown club. But I wonder why they had to shoot such a harmless, God-fearing boy.”

  Fred C. Becker, Garland County Prosecuting Attorney, refused to talk to New Era reporters.

  In a news release his office provided, he claimed that officers shot in self-defense while on a raid aimed at local gamblers.

  See New Era Editorial, Page 7.

  “Boy, I’ll bet that one’s rich.”

  “Oh, it is,” said Earl.

  The two young men flipped pages.

  New Jayhawkers?

  In the era preceding the Civil War it was common for night riders to terrorize Arkansans in the name of a just cause, which was more a license to hate. Town burnings, robberies, lynchings and other malicious acts were the order of the day. History remembers these brigands as Jayhawkers and under that same name it consigns them to evil.

  Well, a new plague of Jayhawkers is upon us. Unlike their predecessors they don’t ride horses and carry shotguns; no, they ride in modern automobiles and carry machine guns.

  And, like their brethren from a century ago, they hide behind a supposedly “just” cause, the elimination of gambling influence and corruption from our beautiful little city. But, as before, this is a clear case of the cure being worse—far worse—than the disease.

  “Ouch,” said Carlo.

  “Newspaper morons,” said Frenchy.

  “Well, they do leave out the fact that the late Garnet spent fourteen months in the state penitentiary for assault and that he had a juvenile record that goes back to before the war,” said Earl. “And D.A. says that Viola is no more his mama than you are, Short. He’s an orphan Grumley, raised at the toe of a boot in the mountains, and pretty much your legger attack dog, and little else. So if a man had to die, better it was him than you or me.”

  “Yes sir,” said Carlo.

  “Okay, let me tell you two birds something. You are the youngest, but that don’t bother me. You are probably also the smartest I got. I don’t hold that smart boys ain’t no good in combat, as some old sergeants do. But I do know your smart boy is easily distracted, and naturally doubtful, and has a kind of sense of superiority to all and sundry. So let me tell you, that if you want to stay in this outfit, you put all that aside. You put those smart-boy brains on the shelves and you commit to doing what you’re told and doing it well and thoroughly. Elsewise, you’re on your way back to where you come from, and you can tell your buddies there you were a bust as a raider.”

  “Yes sir,” said Carlo.

  “Now rack up some sleep. We’re going again tonight.”

  17

  The Derby was filled that night. At one of the booths, the young, leonine Burt Lancaster held court like a gangster king, surrounded by cronies and babes, his teeth so white they filled the air with radiance.

  In another, the young genius Orson Welles sat with his beautiful wife, eating immense amounts of food, an actual second dinner, and downing three bottles of champagne. Rita Hayworth just watched him sullenly as he uttered the words that were to become his signature: “More mashed potatoes, please.”

  Mickey was there, of course, though without his wife. He was with a chorine who had even larger breasts than his wife. He was smoking Luckies and drinking White Russians and looking for producers to shmooze, because he could feel himself, in his dreams at least, slipping ever so slightly.

  Bogie was there, with a little nobody named Bill something or other, a Mississippi-born screenwriter who was lost in the rewrites of Ray Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Bogie called him “Kid,” got him good and drunk, and kept trying to get him to understand that it really didn’t matter if anybody figured out who did it.

  And Virginia was there, with her swain Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and Ben’s best Hollywood friend, Georgie Raft.

  “Will you look at that,” said Ben. “Errol Flynn. Man, he don’t look good.”

  “He’s all washed up, I hear,” said Georgie, drunkenly. “Warner’s may drop him. Look at him.”

  Errol Flynn was even drunker than Georgie Raft and his once beautiful face had begun to show ruination. It was a mask of beauty turning inexorably into a burlap sack hung on a fencepost.

  “Yeah, well, they didn’t pick your contract up either, Georgie,” said Virginia.

  “I bought my way out of my contract,” said Georgie. “I gave Jack a check for $10,000 and walked out of his office a free man.”

  “I heard he would have paid you the ten long to take a hike,” said Virginia.

  “Can it, Virginia,” said Ben.

  Raft stared moodily into his drink. For a tough guy, he had an amazingly delicate little face, a nose as perfectly upturned as any pixie’s.

  “It ain’t been easy on him,” consoled his best friend from the old neighborhood, where they’d specialized in heisting apple carts.

  “Why don’t you beat up a casting director, Ben? That is, if you could find one you could take. Maybe you could make Georgie big again.”

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with this bitch,” Ben explained to Georgie. “Ever since we got back from the South, she’s been acting funny toward me.”

  He looked at her. But goddamn, she was still the female animal in all her surly glory, tonight with a huge wave of auburn cream for hair, meaty big-gal shoulders and breasts scrunched together to form a black slot in the ample flesh into which a man could tumble and lose his soul forever.

  “Yeah,” she said, “maybe it has something to do with all the times you fly out to the fucking desert and watch Del Webb pour Mr. Lansky’s money into a big hole in the ground.”

&n
bsp; Another row was starting.

  “Kids, kids, kids,” consoled Georgie. “Let’s enjoy ourselves. We have a great table at the Brown Derby in a room filled with movie stars. People would kill to get what we have. Let’s enjoy. Garçon, another Scotch, please.”

  The three friends each retreated briefly to his or her libation, tried to settle down and collect themselves, then returned to conviviality.

  “Virginia, it’s a big thing I got going. You’ll see. The big guys all believe in it. It’ll be bigger than Hot Springs.”

  “Hot Springs is supposed to be in Hot Springs, not in a desert. Owney Maddox is supposed to run Hot Springs. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, Ben. You ought to know that.”

  Ben allowed himself a snicker.

  “You think Owney’s so high and mighty? You think nobody would stand against Owney? Well, let me tell you something, Owney’s got some troubles you wouldn’t want.”

  “Owney’s okay,” said Georgie. “He knew some people and helped me get started out here.”

  “Owney’s finished,” said Ben. “He just don’t know it yet.”

  “Owney’s a creep but he can take care of himself,” Virginia argued, then took another sip of her third screwdriver. She could outdrink any man in Hollywood except for Flynn. “He pretends to be a British snob but he’s an East Side gutter rat, just like you two pretty boys.”

  “Virginia, Owney’s got troubles and the big guys know it. I heard about it all the way out here. He’s got some crusader raiding his joints and he doesn’t know how to get the guy. His grab on that town is shaky and once it slips, you just watch everybody walk away from him. It happened to him in New York, it’ll happen to him in Hot Springs. He lost the Cotton Club, he’ll lose the Southern. You just watch. He’ll end up dead or with nothing, which is the same thing.”

  “And would you be the guy to take it from him?”

  “I don’t want nothing in Hot Springs. But I don’t want Hot Springs being Our Town either. We need a new town, and I mean to build one in the desert. You just watch me, goddammit.”

  “Ben, the only thing you’ve built so far is a hole in the ground for somebody else’s money.”

  “Virginia, you are so rude.”

  “Don’t you love me for it, sugar?”

  “No, I love you for them tits, that ass, and the thing you do with your mouth. You must be the only white girl in the world who does that thing.”

  “You’d be surprised, honey.”

  “Hello, darling. Your bosom is magnificent.”

  This was from Errol Flynn, an old pal of Virginia’s from some weekend or other. Flynn leaned into their booth, his famous handsome face radiating a leer so intense it could melt a vault door.

  “Hit the road, you limey puke,” said Ben.

  “Hi, Georgie,” said Errol, ignoring Ben. “Tough luck about Warner’s. They’ll drop me next.”

  “I got some deals working. I’ll be okay. Errol, how’re you doing?”

  “Well, there’s always vodka.”

  “Errol,” said Virginia, “just don’t doodle any more fifteen-year-olds. Jerry Geisler might not get you out of it next time.”

  “In like Flynn, old girl. Oh, Benjamin, didn’t see you there, old fellow. Still looking for buried treasure? There’s a very good map to it in Captain Blood.”

  “You Aussie bastard.”

  The reference was to one of Ben’s more regrettable adventures. With a former lover who billed herself a countess by way of some forgotten marriage to an actual Italian count, he had rented a yacht and gone to an island off the coast in search of pirates’ treasure. It had been quite the joke in Los Angeles in the social season of 1941.

  “Don’t pick on Ben,” said Virginia. “He has big plans. He does know where the treasure is buried and it is in a desert, only it ain’t on an island.”

  “Virginia, you bitch.”

  “Tut tut, old man,” said Errol, moving on to another table.

  “You shoulda smashed him,” said Georgie. “He can be an asshole. You understand, I can’t take him on because he still has Jack Warner’s ear, and he might talk against me. I might get another shot at Warner’s, so I don’t want to do nothing now.”

  “You’re dreaming,” said Virginia. “You couldn’t smack him because you’re afraid of him. He’s pretty tough, they say. And genius here couldn’t smack him because he can’t smack anybody without puking all over his clothes.”

  “Virginia, leave it alone.”

  “Did he tell you that story, Georgie? He tries to strong-arm this cowboy in Hot Springs and the guy hits him so hard he can’t sit up straight for a week and a half. And I had to listen to him all that time, whinin’ like a baby.”

  “I’ll fix that guy.”

  “Yeah, you’ll fix him. You and some army. Ben, why don’t we go back right now? Fix him this week. Get it out of the way?”

  Ben’s eyes clouded and his face tightened.

  “I got business to take care of first.”

  “He’s spooked by this guy. So he’ll hire goons to clip him, because he don’t have the guts to do it man on man.”

  “I will fix that guy,” Bugsy swore. “I will fix him after I fix Owney and after I fix Hot Springs. Forget Hot Springs. Its time is over. The future is in the desert, goddammit, and I will lead the way.”

  18

  The Belmont lay close to the Oaklawn Racetrack, just south of Hot Springs. If the Horseshoe was your run-of-the-mill joint, with a hundred duplicates on almost any street in town, the Belmont was a step up the food chain. It offered the fancier gamblers a sense of class without quite demanding of them the tuxedoed glamour—with its Xavier Cugats and its Perry Comos—that a place like the Southern Club might. The entertainment tended to be regional, usually a piano combo that played light jazz. It sold cocktails at the bar, not shots, not champagne. Its machines were the sleeker Pace Chrome Comet, which looked as if it could get up and fly, the hottest thing from the year 1939, as its reels spun bells and apples and bananas and oranges this way and that. These machines weren’t as tight as the older models, which meant that once or twice a night a line of bells would pop up and a pilgrim would be rewarded with a silver cascade of nickels. The house payoff was a modest 39 percent.

  It stood in the same hollow as the now-deserted racetrack, under a low piney ridge, and it had been done up in the style of the antebellum South, to resemble a wooden plantation house with fake columns and white trim that a Scarlett O’Hara might have designed. A valet crew parked cars; the overhanging elms gave it hushed and muted elegance.

  Rather than enter the gates and move into the parking lot, in plain sight of the valets, D.A. elected to infiltrate from the empty racetrack. The three cars discharged their men on the far side, and there the raiders loaded magazines, checked weapons, put on vests and went over their plans for the last time. Becker was already there, this time with two men on his staff and a clerk-driver.

  D.A., Earl and Becker hunched undercover in a racetrack portico, examining a diagram of the Belmont with a flashlight.

  “Since this is a bigger, more complicated structure,” said D.A., “I’d rather have muscle up front. I’d send ten men through the front door and side door—a six-man team and a four-man team—and I’d bolt that kitchen door and leave two men out back to cover it. That way, you got all your force up front and you get it into play.”

  “I don’t want any shooting,” said Becker suddenly. “I don’t want anyone else getting hurt.”

  There was a quiet moment.

  Then D.A. said, “Well, sir, then I guess we better gather the boys up and take ’em home. I ain’t sending men into a dangerous situation with the idea they can’t defend themselves.”

  “No, no,” said Becker. “They can defend themselves. I just want ’em to think before they shoot.”

  “If they think before they shoot,” said Earl, “they may die before they shoot.”

  “We train ’em to shoot instinctively. They’ve been
trained hard. There won’t be no mistakes.”

  “Like the Horseshoe?” Becker said.

  “That weren’t no mistake, sir,” said the old man. “That was a completely justified legal shooting during the commission of a bonded officer’s official duty, and we ought to thank the man who done it, for it probably saved some lives.”

  Becker seemed to vacillate, almost biting his lower lip like a child.

  “It just played bad in the papers, that’s what I mean. I have more photogs from Little Rock here,” he finally said. “We need the Little Rock papers behind us. They’ll get the state behind us. The Hot Springs papers don’t matter. But you can’t screw up in front of Little Rock reporters. Okay?”

  Both officers nodded, and Earl was thinking: This bird wants everything. He wants us to raid without killing and he doesn’t want the action to get out of control. He’s worried more about the press than the young men who are going in tonight. You can’t control this work like that.

  “We’ll brief the boys,” said D.A.

  “Excellent. I’ll meet up with the photographers.” Becker looked at his watch: it was 9:35 P.M.

  “Ten P.M., as usual?”

  “We can’t set up that fast,” said D.A. “Make it 10:30.”

  “I told the photographers to meet me across the street at 9:45. Dammit, they’ll get bored.”

  “Ten-fifteen then, if we hurry.”

  “That’s good,” said Becker. He walked back to his car and his clerk drove him away.

  “He’s shaky,” said Earl. “I don’t like that.”

  “I don’t like it neither.”