Ace Atkins - Infamous

“Can we send a man from the Birmingham office?”

Colvin nodded.

“Who the hell was this woman with her?” Jones asked. “I wonder if she has kin anywhere else? Doc, you take Bryce and go down to the train station. We got ’em flushed, and now-”

“Now what?” Lackey asked.

Jones walked across the suite to a large wooden dresser and stared into a large oval mirror. Across the mirror someone had written the words GO TO HELL G-MAN JONES.

In the reflection, he watched Lackey, Colvin, and White flank him, reading the words scrawled in red lipstick. Lackey popped his gum. “What the hell’s a ‘G-man’?”

CHARLIE URSCHEL ASKED BETTY TO TAKE THE WHEEL OF THE Packard and just drive, him sitting in silence, as she wheeled around the manicured streets and wide avenues of the Heritage Hills neighborhood, until he made up his mind and told her to go ahead and turn onto North Broadway heading south, and then to cut over and down on Robinson toward the downtown and the Colcord Building, where the Slick Company had their offices. They found an open space not far from the botanical gardens on Sheridan, and from that spot he could see the Colcord entrance and the parking garage across the street, where the son of a bitch would emerge well before five o’clock in that garish Buick sedan, painted canary yellow, with wire-spoked wheels.

“You want me to wait?” Betty asked.

“I’m waiting, too.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“Mr. Jarrett.”

“Does Mr. Jarrett need a ride?”

“Of sorts.”

“Can I have fifty dollars?”

“What are you going to do with fifty dollars?”

“Buy a dress.”

“You have two closets full of the best dresses.”

“I need a new one. They’re having a sale on summer dresses at Katz’s. Lord, it’s hot. What’s for supper?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope Louise makes chicken. I love chicken.”

“Betty, we need to talk.”

“I knew it. I knew it.”

“No one else will listen,” Charlie said. “Your mother thinks I should see a doctor for my nerves.”

“I don’t think you’re nuts, Uncle Charlie.”

“Then you know why you just can’t trust a man of little acquaintance.”

“Uncle Charlie, I’m sixteen years old. I know about men.”

“No, you don’t. You can never know what’s in a man’s heart. He’ll deceive you. He’ll look right into your eyes and smile while he cuts you. We can’t let him win.”

“Uncle Charles.”

Charlie reached into the pockets of his suit and found them empty. He patted his pants and looked in the glove box. Betty sighed and reached into her little pocketbook and gave him her matches. He had a dead cigar in his mouth and got it going. In the side mirror of their machine-a Packard sedan of this year’s make-he stared into his bloodshot eyes and uncombed hair and then back at the glass doors to the office, knowing the bastard would be coming out soon, and that’s when he’d grab him, catching him off guard, and walk with him on his evening stroll back to his home, back to the house he shared with his family, and sit down with him, look him dead in the eye, and tell him he knew. Charlie looked at the little mirror and wiped his cheek, as if he’d felt the wetness of a rotten kiss.

“Not all men are bad.” Betty fanned herself with a loose hand, wiping the perspiration from her lip. “You haven’t even given him a chance. All the boys I know are just that: boys. I’m so very sick of boys, Uncle Charlie.”

“The nature of man is deceit.”

She turned to him, slinking back into the driver’s seat and staring at his face for a long while. She shook her head and told him that his heart had grown hard and that he had no right to stop her from her private matters. But he heard only a bit of it, seeing Jarrett appear from a side entrance and stroll down Robinson, walking across the street. Charlie felt his heart hammering in his chest, his mouth dry, and felt the slickness of his hand on the door handle.

But he did not move. His muscles had frozen.

“Deceit,” Charlie said, smoking on the cigar, getting the burn to go real quick, and stopping for a moment to pick tobacco from his tongue. “You cannot come into a man’s house, eat his food, drink his liquor, and then stab him in the back.”

Betty grew quiet and they sat in the Packard for a long while, Charlie watching the streets and spotting men he knew-friends from the club, salesmen who dropped by his office peddling useless wares, Masons with their secret handshakes and antique codes-walk along the familiar route. Shadows slanted, long and soft, with a hazy summer weight.

He smoked down the cigar until he felt it burning into his flesh, feeling the ropes and chains, tasting that goddamn rusted water in his mouth.

“He did no such thing,” Betty said. “He was a gentleman. He does not touch liquor.”

The garish Buick rolled out of the garage and headed down Sheridan, out of sight for a moment, and Charlie reached over and mashed the starter and told Betty to just drive.

“He is a liar,” Charlie said, muttering to himself. “A goddamn thief of my time.”

Jarrett turned south on Gaylord, and Charlie motioned for them to follow. Jarrett doubled back on Reno, well out of the way for a man who should be returning to his family north of town, and then drove flat-out fast, heading east for miles.

The Buick dipped south on Pennsylvania into the Stockyards, and with the windows down in the summer heat you could get a good whiff of the stale hay and fetid cow shit, and Charlie figured Jarrett was about to have what they called “a meet” with some square-jawed hoodlum to divvy up money made as cowards with guns. They would play cards and drink homemade liquor and laugh about all the suckers in the world.

They could not win.

The Buick rolled on, and Betty mashed the brakes hard as a long trailer filled with cattle blocked the road, away from the holding pens, where you could hear the confused animals trying to communicate, shuffling and bumping into one another, their dumb heads sticking out of broken slats in the fence.

Charlie hit the dash and cursed, and then noticed Betty staring and apologized for his indecency.

“Drive me home.”

The Packard idled.

“Betty?”

He turned to see his niece with her head in her hands, her delicate sunburned shoulders shaking. He put his hand on her small arm.

“What?”

She didn’t answer, just tapped her patent leather shoe from the brake and gently touched the accelerator.

“I won’t hurt him,” Charlie said. “But he must know I’m not a fool. Don’t ever let a man treat you as a fool.”

“Bruce is a fine man. He’s such a fine man.”

She drove slowly for several blocks, under the shadow of a train trestle, until Exchange Street ended, and they were surrounded by a loop of railroad tracks, a turnaround for cattle cars. Charlie just stared, facing the dead end, tossing his spent cigar into some high weeds littered with the broken glass and burned oil drums of derelicts and bums, the losers of this world.

“Which one is Bruce?”

“I APPRECIATE YOU TAKING ME OUT OF THE CELL, MR. MANION.”

“Figured you’d like a change of view, Mr. Bailey.”

“Appreciate the coffee, too.”

“I do brew a fine pot,” Deputy Manion said. “Helps keep a man regular. Although I like to put away a bowl of cornflakes if I know I’m gonna drain a whole pot.”

They sat across from each other on either side of Manion’s old, battered wooden desk. Manion leaned back in a creaky old chair, scuffed-up old boots crossed at the ankle while he smoked a thin cigarette and slurped his coffee. Behind him, Harvey saw one of those old pendulum wall clocks, swinging back and forth, marking the hour past ten at night. A trusty was mopping down the long hallways and into Harvey’s old cell, the sheriff having decided to move Harvey up to the death cell on the tenth floor. The penthouse suite for the worst criminals, awaiting a hangman’s noose and trying to evade a lynching.