“Lulu? Busted up about it.”
“It’s a tough one.”
“She’s asleep, now. Poor thing.”
“Best thing for her.”
Paula brightened. “You want to do me a favor?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“Go in and look after her for me. Keep her company.”
“She doesn’t even know me…”
Paula swatted the air with her cigarette in hand. “She won’t wake up till September. But if she does, somebody should be with her.”
“I guess I could sit in there awhile.”
“That’s not what I mean. You need a place to sleep, right? Bunk in with her.”
“Don’t be foolish.”
She crooked her finger, like she was summoning a child. I complied. She leaned in with me in the doorway, where I could see Lulu, curled up in a fetal ball, pink dress way up over pretty white legs. She was sleeping deeply on one of two twin beds that were pushed close together. The bedroom was regularly the boys’ room, obviously. There was a balsa wood model plane hanging from the slanted ceiling, which was papered in dark blue with silver stars, a child’s idea of the nighttime sky.
Standing away from the open doorway, now, Paula said, “Freddie’ll be tickled to death to get the bed Lulu and Candy been sleeping in—we ain’t had a double bed in a week. You’d be doing us a favor, and she isn’t going to mind, you in your separate bed and all. She shouldn’t be left alone, you know.”
I thought about that.
Paula put a hand on my shoulder; her breath was whiskey-scented, but she was sexy just the same. She said, “Let me tell you something. My husband Charlie was knocked off on a bank score, a year ago spring. Freddie picked me up on the rebound, within the week. It’s not that I’m such a floozie, understand. It’s just I needed a strong shoulder. And Freddie didn’t come out so bad on the deal, d’you think?” She smiled wryly and gestured to her navy dress with the white polka dots and the curves.
I smiled back at her. “I think he did just fine.”
She patted my cheek, sipped her glass. “You could get lucky, too, friend. Lulu’s a hell of a girl. What’s your name again?”
“Jimmy.”
“Nice name. Nice guy. Maybe Lulu’s the one who might strike it lucky. Who knows?”
Soon I’d moved myself into the little bedroom—all I had was one small overnight bag with a change of underwear and socks, and some toilet articles (the toilet was out back, incidentally—like the Auburn, a two-seater); but I decided it best to sleep in my pants and my undershirt on top of the covers. There was an open window by a small desk on which some Big Little Books were confined by horsehead bookends twice their size. On one wall were some shelves with a baseball glove or two and some toy guns and such. Despite the trappings being male, I couldn’t help but feel this child’s room was appropriate for the slip of a thing next to me, the farmer’s daughter who slept so deeply beside me.
I lay on my back, staring at the slanted ceiling, its starry sky visible above me; light from outside—not just the moon, but that well-lit farmyard—made that possible. The girl beside me seemed bathed in blue ivory.
I thought about waiting till everyone was asleep and spiriting her out to the Auburn. But how could I do that and get past this fellow Chase, in the barn? And surely somebody in the house kept a sort of guard; I hadn’t heard the details, but that seemed a safe assumption to make. And how was I to take this girl with me, without her making a fuss? Her emotions were on edge already, let alone a stranger grab her and try making off with her.
My thoughts careened from dead Dr. Moran to the pending kidnapping that I hoped to avoid being drawn into—though I knew I already was. Maybe if it had been a bank they were planning to rob, I could’ve let it pass. But kidnapping? No. Like every other red-blooded bozo in this country, the Lindbergh tragedy had got to me, and made the idea of kidnapping seem something abhorrent. It had me thinking in terms of children, too, which was ridiculous, because the Karpis-Barker specialty was a rich banker or brewer. Still, stealing money was one thing—stealing a person was quite another….
I should have been frightened, and I suppose I was, but too much was going on, too much was whirling through my brain, for me to feel the full impact of what I was caught up in.
More than anything, I missed Sally. Missed her and her silk sheets—how I wished this dinky kids’ bedroom was her white bedroom at the Drake—and I regretted our parting angry.
Angry. That was something else working at me: anger. Anger and my old friend frustration were knocking around with everything else in my head, vying for attention. I’d been suckered, I’d been used—Frank Nitti had made me pay for my trip to Outlaw Land with the Moran setup. And what could I do about it? Being angry with Nitti was like getting pissed off at God. You could do it, but it wouldn’t get you anywhere. Except hell maybe.
My fault—my own damn fault for dealing with Nitti, and expecting a fair shake. From his point of view this no doubt was a fair shake: tit for tat. He’d done a lot for me—he gave me a name and cover and backed it up, and now here I was, the girl I’d come to find lying right beside me.
I just had no idea how to get her the hell out of here.
That was the thought Louise—Lulu, if you will—interrupted when she woke up and saw me and screamed.
33
I placed a hand over her mouth as gently as I could; she continued to scream into it, but I’d stifled her enough for her to be able to hear me.
“Please,” I said. “Please don’t. I’m just here to keep you company.”
Her wide, wide-set brown eyes seemed to consider that, and beneath my palm she stopped screaming.
I took it away. That had been one hell of a piercing cry she’d let out, worthy of Fay Wray, but I didn’t hear footsteps rushing up the steps or down the hall—no one was hollering out, wondering what was wrong. Maybe women screaming in the night was standard stuff around these parts.
She looked at me, mouth open, lips trembling, eyes still wide, nostrils flared, like the distressed damsel on a pulp-magazine cover.
“Who—who are you?” she finally managed.
“You met me before,” I said. “Jimmy Lawrence. I drove Ma here from Chicago.”
The eyes narrowed a bit. “Oh.”
“They didn’t have a bed for me, and your friend Paula asked me to sleep in here, so somebody’d be with you through the night.”
The door cracked open and Paula, cigarette dangling from her red lips, said, “That’s right, sugar. Didn’t want you to be alone in your hour of need.”
Somebody’d heard the scream, after all.
I said to Louise, “I’ll leave if you like.”
She looked toward Paula. “Can’t you stay with me? You’re my friend.”
“I’m your pal,” Paula said. “But I’m Freddie’s girl, and he wants the pleasure of my company, tonight. You understand, sugar. You going to be all right?”
I got off the bed, stood. “I’ll leave.”
Louise looked at me; she was a small thing, but she had eyes you could dive into and swim around in for a lifetime or two.
Paula said, “Why don’t you let him keep you company? You don’t want to be alone tonight.”
Louise thought about that for a moment, shook her head no, meaning she didn’t want to be alone, and Paula smiled and said, “That’s a good girl,” and shut the door on us.
I stood there looking down at the girl, in the blue-ivory semi-light. She looked up at me. She looked pretty pitiful.
I said, “Is it all right if I lay back down, there?”
She swallowed. Nodded. Then quickly added, “But keep your pants on.”
I smiled at her. “I don’t do anything in a hurry.”
Despite herself, despite her situation, she found a tiny smile for me. Said, “Well, keep ’em on, anyway.”
“I can pull these beds apart a ways, if you like.”
“No. No, that’s okay.”
I lay back down.
She turned her back to me.
A few minutes ticked by, and then I heard her sobbing. I thought about touching her shoulder, but let it go.
Then she turned to me and, a hanky clenched in her fist, face slick with tears, said, “This is all wet.” She meant the hanky. “You wouldn’t happen to…?”
“Sure,” I said, and dug out a handkerchief for her.
She patted her face dry; no new tears seemed on the way, at least not immediately. She said, “I must look a mess.”
“You look fine. But you got a right to feel that way.”
She shook her head despairingly. “He was alive one minute, and the next…” Her chin crinkled in anger; she looked like a little girl about to throw a tantrum. “I’d like to kill that damn doctor!”
“It’s been taken care of.”
That shocked her. The angry look turned blank and she said, rather hollowly, “They…killed him?”
I nodded.
“Good,” she said. But I didn’t quite buy it.
“You don’t have to pretend for me,” I said.
“What?”
“That you like it. The cheap way life and death is traded in around here.”
She swallowed again. “I didn’t really mean I wanted Doc Moran dead. He’s a…he was a lush and always crowing about himself. But…”
“But he didn’t deserve to die for it. That what you’re saying?”
She shrugged a little; leaned on her elbow and looked at me. Those eyes. Those goddamn eyes.
“He didn’t mean to kill Candy,” she said. “I hate him for not being a better doctor. But I’m not glad they killed him.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Just don’t expect me to cry for him,” she said, with an edge of bitterness. “I don’t have any tears left for that damn old drunk.”
I nodded.
“You’re nice to stay in here with me, Mr. Lawrence.”
“Call me Jimmy. Should I call you Lulu?”
“If you like…Jimmy.”
“What’s Lulu short for?”
“Louise. Nobody around here calls me that.”
“Would it be okay if I call you that?”
That surprised her; but she nodded, three little nods.
“Why don’t you get some sleep, Louise.”
“All right,” she said.
She turned on her stomach, facing away from me.
I lay looking up at the stars in the ceiling-paper sky.
After a while she said, “Jimmy?”
“Yes, Louise?”
“Would you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Slide over onto my bed, with me.”
“Well…”
“Not for that. I need…held. You won’t try anything. You don’t have that sort of face. I can trust you. Can’t I?”
“You can trust me, Louise.” Taking into consideration I was pretending to be somebody I wasn’t, I figured she could do worse than trust me, among this company.
“I’m going to turn on my side,” she said.
She did.
“Now could you cuddle up to me? Maybe slip your arm around my waist?”
I did.
“That’s…that’s how Candy and me slept. Like spoons.”
“I got a girl back in Chicago,” I said. “We sleep like this sometimes.”
“It’s nice, isn’t it? Kinda…comforting.”
“It is nice.”
I was right up against her; she was soft and smelled like perfume. Dime-store perfume maybe, but I liked it anyway. I felt a stirring in me and had to pull back away from her rounded little rump; but she pushed back against me and said, ingenuously, “Candy was so sweet.”
Soon she began sobbing quietly; into my hanky. My erection receded. I kept my arm around her waist and hugged her to me.
“What am I going to do without him? What am going to do?”
I stroked her head, said, “There, there.”
And pretty soon she fell asleep.
So did I, and then I heard an unearthly sound, a screech out of a nightmare, and bolted upright in bed.
“What the hell was that?” I said.
Louise was sitting over at the child’s desk, combing her bobbed blond hair out with a brush; she was wearing that same pink dress I’d seen her in yesterday—like me, she’d slept in her clothes. She smiled over at me. She had no makeup on and looked about thirteen years old. The kind of thirteen-year-old that makes boys reconsider how they feel about girls, however.
She made a crinkly smile. “A rooster, silly. Haven’t you ever been on a farm before?”
I rubbed my face with a hand; I needed a shave. Sun was beginning to find its way in the open window next to her, but it still seemed pretty dark out to me.
“No,” I said. “This is a first for me.”
Still brushing her hair, she said, “I was raised on a farm. My daddy’s a farmer.”
“Do you miss your daddy?”
She looked sad, kept brushing. “Sometimes. I don’t imagine he misses me, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“He thinks I’m a bad girl. A sinner.”
“He’s a religious man, your daddy?”
“Too religious. He used to beat me with a belt because I wasn’t devout enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “At least when he beat me I knew he cared.”
“Pardon?”
She put the brush down and came and sat on the side of the bed next to me. “Sometimes that’s how people show you they care about you.”
“Hitting you?”
She nodded. “I don’t say it’s the best way. I wouldn’t ever hit anybody myself. And Candy—he hardly ever hit me. I guess that’s why I loved him so much.”
She seemed better this morning, seemed already to have accepted the finality of Candy’s death. Maybe in this fast crowd she ran with, fast death was commonplace. I asked her.
“You ever see anybody die before?” I said.
“Sure. Two times.”
“Guys working with Candy, you mean?”
She nodded. “They got shot on jobs.”
“I see.”
“And Candy killed some people. I never went on any jobs with him, so I never saw it. And I don’t like to think of it. But it’s true.”
“What kind of people?”
“Did he kill? A bank guard and a sheriff’s deputy. It bothered Candy.”
“It did?”
“Yes—he was afraid of the electric chair.”
I said nothing.
“He doesn’t have to be afraid anymore,” she said, and then tears gushed forth, and she was burying her face in my chest.
I held her for a while; by the time she came up for air, the sun was pouring through the windows like fresh buttermilk.
I wiped her tears with the bedspread. She smiled at me bravely. I got lost in her eyes, brown, brown eyes.
She said, “You didn’t take advantage of me last night.”
I swallowed.
“Most men would’ve.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You could’ve. I was helpless.”
“You look like you’ve got some spunk left. You let out a pretty good scream when you saw me, for example.”
She shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. You could’ve taken me. A man can have a woman if he wants her.”
“You mean he can rape her.”
She nodded.
“Where I come from,” I said, “that’s not an acceptable way of getting to know a girl.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Back East.”
“Is that why you’re such a gentleman?”
I smiled. “That’s another first for me—being called a gentleman.”
“I think that’s what I’ll call you. Gentleman Jim. A real gentleman in a lousy world.”
“Let’s just leave it at ‘Jimmy.’”
> “No—I like ‘Gentleman Jim’ better.” She beamed at me; she was trying a little too hard to be cheerful, but I was glad she was making the effort.
“Whatever you say,” I said.
She grabbed me by the hand and yanked me off the bed.
“Come on, Gentleman Jim…this old farm girl’s going to show you around a farm. You got some learning to do.”
I told her I had to go the bathroom, but she said that would be no problem.
I could stop at the outhouse on our way.
34
When we cut across the backyard, a dozen chickens were dancing around, scrounging for food. One with yellow legs and another with bluish-green legs were dancing in place, pecking at something that looked like an old beat-up leather glove.
Louise caught my curious expression and said, “That’s a rat skin. That’s about all the cat leaves behind, when she’s done with it.”
“Hens aren’t real particular about their breakfast, are they?”
Deadpan, she said, “Those aren’t hens. Not yet. They don’t start laying eggs till they’re seven months.”
She led me by the hand beyond the barn and silo, down a dew-wet path, at the end of which half a dozen cows, black, brown, stood gazing at us with bored expressions. Then we cut over by a shocked field, each shock looking like a small rustic wigwam.
“Velvet barley,” Louise explained. She pulled a stalk out of one of the shocks, crushed the head against her palm, lifted her palm to her lips and blew away the chaff. She held out her palm for me to see the seeds there. “You like beer?”
“Sure.”
“That’s the malting barley.” She dropped the seeds to the earth and moved on. “Mr. Gillis has fifteen acres of barley. They plant this stuff quick, soon as the ground’s fit.”
“How many acres does Gillis have here?”
“Eighty.”
“Is that big?”
“Not really. Not small, though.”
Birds were singing. I wasn’t used to seeing this much sky; in Chicago, in the Loop, you have to raise your head to see any sky. And the last bird I heard sing in the city was Anna Sage’s parakeet.
I asked, “Can he make a living at it?”
“He could if the prices were right. The livestock’ll get that barley. He can’t afford to sell it for what it’s going.”
True Crime Page 28