“Come on,” she said. “Let’s finish.”

  “I need a drink.”

  He started slamming cabinets in the kitchen, looking for some more gin but instead finding Tich’s stash of Log Cabin bourbon, bottom-shelf kind of stuff, that George poured over ice. He turned on the radio, saying he was listening for any news on them but only finding some kids’ show again. He drank and brooded there on the sofa until the shadows fell across the floor. Tich was back sometime later, dragging that old foot and bringing them an angel food cake from his church service and a .45 automatic he sold to George for $17.50.

  George grabbed the gun but didn’t eat a bit of the cake, and he and Kathryn both went to bed sometime late that night, not really knowing when, all that time kind of getting mixed together. They slept apart, Kathryn not waking until she heard Tich had returned, and the ugly little man handed her a telegram from Gainesville, Texas. HAD SEVERAL TOUGH BREAKS . . . DEAL FELL THROUGH. TRIED TO GET LATER APPOINTMENT. BEST PROSPECT WAS AFRAID. IMPOSSIBLE. CHANGED HER MIND. DON’T WANT TO BRING HOME A SAD TALE. CAN GO ON IF ADVISABLE. WIRE INSTRUCTIONS HERE.

  “Where’s the bottle?” she asked.

  HARVEY WALKED UP THE DRIVEWAY OF THE LITTLE HOUSE on Rayner early that Tuesday morning after sleeping a night in the car at a tourist camp over the river in West Memphis, Arkansas. With the .45 loose at his side, he checked the back door and found it unlocked. He pressed on, not knowing who all was in the house. The kitchen was bare, a black skillet left cold on the burner, with the grease turning white and hard. He shifted the gun in his hand and moved into the main room, where a bunch of pillows and blankets was left on the couch, full ashtrays and half-finished glasses scattered across the room. He looked for suitcases, satchels, anything where they’d keep his dough if they had it with them at all. But he’d take whatever they had, fight over it if it came to that, and then he’d be on the great, beautiful, open road.

  He heard sounds coming from a back bedroom.

  He crept forward, and through a narrow crack saw the nude back of Kathryn, who was on top of George and riding him. He only saw George’s hairy legs and big feet and was glad he couldn’t see more, finally spotting a fat leather grip at the edge of the bed.

  “Hope I didn’t stop you from the morning routine,” he said, tipping his hat at Kit. She crawled off George and covered herself with the entire sheet, George stumbling to his feet.

  He walked up to Harvey as naked as you please and shook his head.

  “Take it, Harv.”

  “How much is left?” Harvey asked. “I only want what’s mine.”

  “Three grand, give or take a few hundred,” George said. “Rest is hidden.”

  “I’ll be wanting the rest.”

  “How were we to know you pooled your goddamn money with ours at Cann’s place?” he said. “Your own fault.”

  “Good luck, George.”

  “Where’s Miller?”

  “Dead,” Harvey said. “Nitti snatched him.”

  “How’d Nitti know?”

  “Pussy sure can make a man blind,” Harvey said. “You better get your eyes checked, George.”

  “Skip the commentary, you rotten SOB,” Kathryn said. “Get what’s yours and get gone.”

  Harvey tipped his hat, the leather grip feeling heavy and fat in his left hand. He hoisted it onto the table and opened the top, a breeze through a cracked window fluttering the loose bundles of cash. He caught sight of two garbagemen conversing with a fella who’d just parked across the street. The man opened his hood and stood against the fat fender.

  The garbagemen had good haircuts. The man with the busted car shifted his weight, placing a hand on his belt, the son of a bitch carrying a rod. All three men glanced up at the bungalow, trying not to stare, first light still an hour away.

  Harvey didn’t say a word, only snatched up the grip and walked out of the kitchen, hopping a fence to another house and then another, before finding his machine parked out on Speedway, knocking it into first and thinking what a beautiful day it was going to be.

  KATHRYN WOULD LATER HEAR HOW MA COLEMAN HAD REBUKED Lang and Geraline three times before shooing them away and telling them federal agents were everywhere. Lang tried his best to get back to that willow tree he’d been told about, Geraline pleading with the blind old woman to let her inside, saying that Kathryn missed her little Pekingese dog and needed her furs for the winter. But the old woman wildly aimed a little .22 and said they wouldn’t last a mile if they picked up Kathryn’s things. “If they knew what was good for ’em, they’d get back in their car and keep driving till they were out of Texas.” The whole thing didn’t seem to bother Geraline but rattled poor Lang so bad that the little girl had to hold his cigarette while he lit it. She even told Lang he didn’t have the nerves for gangster work.

  He ignored the kid.

  And then fifty miles down the road, she started in on how much she missed her folks and started to primp up to cry.

  “You told Kathryn you wanted to go back to Memphis.”

  “Please,” Geraline said. “I want my momma.”

  And he’d found a station, walking inside with her and purchasing a one-way ticket to Oklahoma City. He handed her a five-dollar bill and wished her good luck.

  He wasn’t gone five minutes before she used the money to wire a message to the Shangri-La Apartments, Oklahoma City. MEET ME AT ROCK ISLAND STATION. 10:15 TONIGHT. GERRY.

  Gerry had a fine time on the late train, finding the Sunday funnies section on a vacant seat. She probably laughed and giggled the whole way, with no more concern about what she’d done than Chingy showed when he killed a songbird.

  The train arrived on time and clattered to a stop at the station. Geraline grabbed her fattened suitcase and politely declined help from a kindly negro porter. She stopped on the platform, the engine still hissing and steaming several cars ahead, and soon spotted old Luther and Flossie Mae, her momma and daddy, waving to her by a large clock atop a metal post.

  Geraline lugged her suitcase, not in any particular hurry, and became annoyed when some old man came in step beside her and asked if she was tired.

  “What’s it to you?” she asked.

  “I’m a friend of your parents’.”

  She noticed he wore a fine pearl gray cowboy hat and polished boots. He was short and sort of fat and wore a pair of gold-rimmed cheaters.

  “Must have been some trip.”

  “Sure thing, pops.”

  Flossie Mae ran to her and tried to hug her. But Geraline just stood there limp while the woman put on some kind of show, kissing and cooing, for the cowboy. “Can we get something to eat?” Gerry asked.

  “Little girl, how’d you like an ice-cream cone?” the cowboy asked. “We have a lot to discuss.”

  Gerry looked to her parents and back to the man. She saw that her daddy had a hell of a shiner.

  “WILL YOU RECONSIDER LETTING ME COME WITH YOU?” CHARLES Urschel asked.

  “We appreciate you arranging a plane.”

  “Kelly won’t go easily.”

  “Don’t expect it.”

  “Will you kill him?”

  “If the situation calls for it.”

  “I’d hate to have another trial,” Urschel said, speaking to Jones in the rear of the government vehicle on the way to the airstrip. “My family has been through enough.”

  Jones said nothing. It was past three in the morning.

  “How many men?”

  “Me and Doc,” Jones said. “We’re meeting four men from the Oklahoma City office, including Special Agent Colvin. Six more in Memphis.”

  “What do you think of Agent Colvin?”

  “You don’t need my opinion, sir,” Jones said. “Think you already got that figured out.”

  “You know Betty broke that young man’s heart when she took up with the club’s new tennis pro?” Urschel asked.

  THEY LANDED IN MEMPHIS AT HALF PAST FIVE THAT MORNING. The police met them at the landing strip, and a briefing was held inside an airplane hangar. The locals had arranged for a garbage truck and some uniforms for Agent Bryce and Joe Lackey. Agent Colvin would drive a car and park across from the house on Rayner, where he’d feign having engine trouble.

  A little after five a.m., Jones got word there was no movement in the house, and they figured Kelly—if inside—was still asleep. Jones pulled a machine gun from the back of a Memphis police car they’d parked six houses down on Speedway. Doc White carried a sawed-off Browning 12-gauge. The six detectives brought pistols, knowing this would all be close work inside that little house. Bryce could watch the front door and windows with a scoped rifle he’d stowed in the front seat of the truck.

  Jones checked his timepiece and nodded to Doc White.

  “IF KELLY IS KILLED,” CHARLIE URSCHEL SAID, “YOU’D BE a hero.”

  “I made my way for twenty years trying to stay out of the papers.”

  “The country needs something like this,” Urschel said. “Strong leaders. People are restless as sheep.”

  “Folks follow money,” Jones said. “Always have. Greed is the root of it all.” Charlie Urschel turned away.

  JONES CROSSED THE SMALL, SLOPED LAWN AND MET DOC WHITE, circling the house from around back. He was slow up the walkway and front steps, recalling the Paradise raid, trying the front door and finding it unlocked, a clear view of a big open room through to the glass cabinets of the kitchen. A small fella lay on the sofa, a half-empty bottle of whiskey in hand, and Jones was careful to open the front door slow and easy, while Doc touched the shotgun to the man’s nose and the man opened his eyes wide, frozen.

  Bottles of bourbon and gin lay all around the house. Ashtrays overflowed. Jones spotted a copy of Master Detective wide open to a story called “My Bloodcurdling Ride With Death.”

  Jones’s boots beat heavy steps on the wooden floor, and he waited any minute to hear gunshots. He walked along the hallway to find a bedroom door wide open and a nude woman, who lay tangled in a pile of white sheets. The first light of the day crossed the room and over the back and shoulder of Kathryn Kelly. A piece of her hair had caught in her mouth during sleep, her mouth slightly parted, eyes closed.

  When he turned, a shadow crossed the wall, and Jones turned and raised his Thompson.

  “THOSE MEN HUMILIATED ME,” URSCHEL SAID.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It hasn’t been settled in my mind.”

  “And won’t for some time.”

  “Did Agent Colvin discuss with you my suspicions?”

  “He did.”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “As us all.”

  “Those people took Mr. Jarrett at gunpoint,” Urschel said. “I don’t want his personal conversations placed on phonographic records.”

  “Mr. Hoover cabled that Mr. Jarrett should be left alone. Is that to your liking, Mr. Urschel?”

  IT WAS KELLY, LOOKING HEAVY AND TIRED, HIS THICK HAIR bleached bright yellow. He stood not five paces away in the bungalow’s hallway, aiming a .45 at Jones’s chest. He wore only a pair of boxer shorts with red hearts.

  “Drop that gun,” Jones said.

  “I’ve been waiting for y’all all night,” Kelly said with a smile, as if he found the whole situation to be funny.

  “Well,” Jones said, “here we are.”

  Kelly stepped forward but did not lower the gun.

  “DO YOU HAVE CHILDREN?” URSCHEL ASKED.

  “No, sir. We wasn’t blessed with them.”

  “When I received that letter from Kelly, I purchased pistols for all my children. I even gave Betty one to carry in her purse.”

  “I never found that letter sincere.”

  “I don’t let my children out of my sight.”

  “I suppose that faith is the toughest part. Being a family man.”

  “I don’t even trust my own safety. A shadow startles me.”

  JONES INCHED HIS FINGER ON THE TRIGGER; JUST A LITTLE pressure would scatter the entire drum of bullets. He wondered if Kelly thought the gun was his own and that Jones had stolen it from him. He thought back on Paradise and then on Kansas City, Sheriff Otto Reed and those two dead city detectives lying like twin boys in the blood along the brick road.

  Kelly just smiled down at Jones. Jones knowing goddamn well that Kelly thought it was kind of humorous being drawn by the much shorter, much older man.

  “Are you the Federal Ace?” George Kelly asked.

  “I’m Gus T. Jones of the Department of Justice. Now, drop your weapon.”

  Kelly smiled some more, Jones hearing a stir in the bedroom and Kathryn calling for her husband to come back to bed. George chuckled. He lowered the .45 and placed it with a light touch on a sewing machine that had been pushed against a wall, covered with discarded rags and a fine dust.

  It would take fifteen minutes before Kathryn agreed to put on some clothes. She emerged from the bathroom wearing a black dress that hugged her fanny and fanned out at her feet like a mermaid. As she was pushed into the Black Mariah with handcuffs on her wrists, Jones heard her say, “Officer, an agent of mine is returning from Texas shortly with all my furs and jewels and my Pekingese dog. Please make sure these are returned to me.”

  George was sullen and silent. Jones only saw him grin once more after the arrest. The desk sergeant asked his name, age, and where he lived. “My name is George Kelly. I’m thirty-seven years of age, and I live everywhere.”

  39

  Harvey Bailey cut through Memphis without trouble, the bluffs falling away behind him, and he drove over the Mississippi River at dawn with a wide smile on his face, that gorgeous light hitting the muddy water and shining like gold across the Arkansas Delta like something out of the Old Testament. He had the window down, the air bright and cool, a full tank of gas, and a full satchel of cash beside him.

  He nearly missed the roadblock.

  Slowing, trying to remain confident. He rolled down the window and smiled.

  Four coppers pulled guns on him. Harvey shook his head, held up his hands, and told them they were welcome to help themselves to what’s in the bag if they’d just let him pass through.

  One of the coppers grabbed the bag and plunked it on top of the Plymouth, tossing out the thick stack of bills, reaching deeper to pull out magazines and a phone book and what looked to be kids’ undershorts and socks.

  “You trying to bribe us with fifty-two dollars and some dirty drawers?” the copper asked. “You got some set of balls, Mr. Bailey. Now, put your goddamn hands up where I can see ’em.”

  KATHRYN KNEW THE SCORE FROM THE MOMENT THAT SNOT-NOSED kid pranced into the courtroom in a hundred-dollar dress and patent leather shoes. She wore a full-grown woman’s slouch hat, and told Flossie Mae—who held her hand down the aisle—to go and sit down and be quiet. Flossie Mae lowered her head and did what she was told. Geraline took the stand with a little jeweled pocketbook that Kathryn knew was just bulging with that money she’d switched. She nudged George in the ribs at the defense table, but he didn’t take any interest, sitting there in a nice suit with a dull smile.

  They tried them together after convicting Bailey and Bates, Ora and Boss. Potatoes and the hot-money Jews from Saint Paul. Kathryn had tried to explain that George would’ve killed her if she’d tried to leave him. But all the saps were turning a deaf ear, the judge and the prosecutor just over the moon with the dumb kid who’d taken the stand, a real flavor of the month, with headlines across the country reading GIRL, 12, NABS “MACHINE GUN” KELLY.

  Kathryn didn’t see how telling the G that they were in Memphis amounted to anything. But the Arnolds sure had put in for the ten grand in reward money, and already there was talk of a Hollywood movie, with the girl from Dora’s Dunkin’ Donuts in the role of Geraline.

  The little girl sure as shit gave Kathryn the high hat when she finished telling her little tale of meeting while her parents were hitching, all the way through to the Fair and then down to Memphis. It was a real sob-sister act, and, as much as Kathryn hated it, she grinned to herself a bit when the rat walked past.

  George never seemed to mind Kathryn telling a story of George being the brains behind it all and how he said he’d kill her and her family if she didn’t go along. He seemed to know this was all part of the game and even patted her goddamn hand when she returned from breaking down on the stand, remembering, of all the horror from their time on the road, what the big gorilla had forced her to do.

  But nothing could save them. Even Chingy would’ve been convicted in that lousy court. She knew it was all a sham when they rode the elevator up for sentencing. She turned to kiss George on the cheek, but that cowboy federal agent Doc White pushed her away. And like he deserved, she slapped that old bastard across his face.

  He grabbed her hand and snatched her up at the elbow.

  In manacles, George turned to try and break his grip. But all that old man did was pistol-whip George till the elevator doors opened, leaving him with a good-size egg and a handkerchief on his split lip as their verdict was read.

  They were sentenced to life.

  When Kathryn was released twenty-five years later, she remarked to a reporter, “I guess the thing that impressed me most on my first trip out was the fast traffic. I was honestly afraid to cross the street.”

  George never did get out.

  September 1934

  The train was a midnight special, taking the highball route from the federal prison in Atlanta, tracks cleared all the way to Leavenworth, and then steaming right for the California coast, where a hundred and three of the very worst in the system would be locked up tight on Alcatraz. Hoover had put Jones in charge of the move, and he hadn’t even been able to tell Mary Ann his assignment, only saying that he’d meet her in San Francisco at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. They’d have cocktails, and she’d try to talk him into retiring like Doc White.

  The train’s windows had been covered with bars and a metal screen, and the doors could only be unlocked from outside, the openings covered in welded lattice, easy to slip the muzzle of a machine gun through and start shooting if there was trouble. By morning, they all felt the heat wave without even a small crack for a crossbreeze. Some of the men went on a hunger strike, most of them unshaven and stinking. Many he knew on sight—Bailey, Bates, Kelly—as he patrolled the aisle with a Thompson in hand. George Kelly nodded to Jones every time he passed, like an old friend, asking him once, when they stopped in a train yard to let the prisoners stretch, smoke, and drink water from tin cups, if it would be okay to write Charles Urschel a letter.