Jack had noticed the second dude standing by the La Salle—a young guy, Teddy’s driver or bodyguard—and could see that Teddy was somebody who didn’t care for smart talk from a girl. Teddy Ritz stopped chewing his gum and stared at Heidi through his rimless glasses. He said, “Sweetheart, I’m vice president of the Democratic Club and head of all the precinct captains in Jackson County. In other words, my position is right under the Boss.” He said again, “Welcome to Kansas City.”
This time Heidi kept quiet and let Jack say, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ritz,” shaking the man’s hand and telling him they were both Democrats from Tulsa, just nosing around, seeing what Kansas City was like.
Teddy asked if they had their utilities hooked up or any problems with the rental. Jack said everything was fine except they were still waiting for a phone. Teddy said, “Let me take care of that for you.” He said, “And I’ll get you registered to vote you let me have your names.” He wrote them down in a black leather book, glancing up at Jack as he heard the name Belmont.
Heidi, by the window, had noticed the young dude outside. She asked Teddy, “Would your friend like to come in where it’s warm? I can make you gentlemen a cup of French-drip coffee.”
“Lou’s use to waiting for me,” Teddy said. “It’s what he does.”
“I see a resemblance,” Heidi said. “I thought he might be your son.”
Teddy stared at her again. “You think I look like a wop? He’s my bodyguard, Lou Tessa.”
Jack smiled at him. “You know she wasn’t trying to be offensive in any way.”
“I was kidding,” Teddy said, and left.
“He’ll be back,” Jack said, watching the La Salle drive off, “as soon as he looks me up.”
“He tells you who he is,” Heidi said, “I thought you were gonna kiss his butt.”
“We’re driving here, I told you about Tom Pendergast? You don’t listen, do you? Boss Tom, he runs the machine that runs Kansas City. I told you the town’s wide open? Twenty-four hours a day you can do anything you want? Drink, gamble, spend all day in a whorehouse? There’s a hundred and fifty of ’em in this town. Pendergast gets a cut from the rackets, his ‘lug’ they call it, and uses it to pay off the cops. He owns the police and gets the judges and politicians he wants on the bench and into office.”
“How’s he do that?”
“Teddy says he’ll get us a phone? Like that, does favors for people. By tomorrow we’ll have a phone and I’ll vote for anybody they want. Doesn’t matter if it’s a close race, they have thousands of names to use as voters, a lot of ghosts who’d died and gone to hell.”
“Have you ever voted?”
“Not yet.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“Honey, I did time. Convicts like to talk, show off they know things and I listened. You’re on the dodge and need a place to hide out, you come to Kansas City. Why do you think it’s called ‘The Playground of Criminals’? You’re safe as long as you vote the right ticket and you don’t kidnap some judge’s wife. You get the nod from the Pendergast machine you’re free to have a good time. You’re downtown, you feel like having a drink but don’t know where the nearest speak is? You ask a cop.”
“Come on—really?”
“Honey, there’s no limit to this town. Why do you think all the conventioneers, the Shriners, come here and go crazy? Why do you think we’re here?”
Heidi took her time now. “They allow you to rob banks?”
“That’s something we’ll have to find out pretty soon,” Jack said. “We’re getting low.”
“What’ll you do, ask permission? Teddy, can I knock over one of your banks?”
“We pick one out of town. Pull it off—how do they know it’s us?”
The bell rang. Heidi looked out the window going to the door and saw the La Salle at the curb. It was the bodyguard at the door. He winked at her, said, “How you today?” with an accent and walked past her to the kitchen.
“Can I help you?”
“Jack is here?”
“Not right now.”
He walked past her in his black overcoat, a stick pin in his tie, going the other way now, down the hall to look in the bedrooms, the bath and the screened porch and came back saying, “You right. I don’t see him.” He stepped to the door, still open, and waved for his boss to come in. Now he turned to her with pleasure in his eyes. “I’m Lou Tessa,” the accent there. He was shaved and smelled good, but would show a beard no matter how many times he shaved and she wondered if you could feel it.
He said, “You get your phone?”
“The next day.”
“What if I give you a call?”
She liked dark guys and raised the back of her hand to brush her fingers along his jaw. His skin felt smooth.
“When?”
He said, “Sometime,” and stepped aside for Teddy Ritz, telling him, “They got the phone.”
Heidi said, “Jack sure appreciates your help. He said we’d be waiting forever without it.”
Teddy glanced at Lou Tessa and the bodyguard walked out closing the door.
“His old man’s Oris Belmont,” Teddy said, “and Jack can’t get service when he wants it?”
“He’s sort of bashful,” Heidi said. “But the big problem, he and his daddy don’t get along too well.”
Teddy said, “On account of Bashful Jack robbing banks or selling whiskey?”
Heidi laughed out loud. “Well, you sure learned about us in a hurry.”
“About Jack. Nobody knows of any Heidi Belmont. You two aren’t married, are you?”
“We talk about it once in a while. No, I’m still Heidi Winston.”
“You have any kind of talent? You strip?”
She could tell him she was an experienced madam, as young as she was, but held off about that or screwing commercially, believing, from the way his eyes kept falling into the scoop neck of her peasant blouse, she could do a lot better than minding whores.
“I can work as a hostess in some high-class joint,” Heidi said, “keep the gentlemen coming back.”
“Yeah? How you do that?”
“I know how to treat a gentleman.”
“Show ’em your goodies?”
“In a tasteful way. I bend over the table, he’s hoping my titties fall in his crawfish bisque.”
Teddy was breathing Juicy Fruit on her, smiling now.
“I see that could happen.”
“I’m looking for a high-class place that suits my personality, not one that caters to a bunch of louts. You happen to know of any?”
“I sure do, sweetheart. I know one’s just the ticket.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“Teddy’s,” Teddy said. “Eighteenth and Central.”
A few days later in the afternoon, Jack and Heidi were driving through town in the True Detective writer’s Ford Roadster on their way to North Kansas City, a different town but right across the Missouri River. Jack wanted to show her a bank he had in mind. They’d been driving Tony’s Ford since stealing it in their escape from the road house.
Heidi was now working at Teddy’s from 10 p.m. to the next morning as a cocktail waitress. They had a host instead of a hostess, an Italian named Johnny, a nice guy; he’d step out the back to smoke reefer and let you have a puff. Heidi had said to Jack after her first night, “You know what we wear?”
“Some kind of revealing costume?”
“I’ll give you a hint. What’s the name of the club?”
“You wear a teddy?”
“That’s all, rose or peach.”
“Yeah? Where do you keep your tips?”
“In my garter. They give me silver—it doesn’t happen much—I hold it in my hand, give the big spender a look and drop the change on the table. This place, they know how to tip. There’s a group of rich old geezers, six of them, they come in wearing their tuxes after some kind of affair or the symphony? Their limos drop them off, take the wives home
and come back to wait. They have Cuban cigars and cognac, always in one of the private rooms.”
“That’s all they want?”
“It’s how they want it,” Heidi said. “Johnny calls me into the private room, easy chairs around a cocktail table. He tells them, ‘Gentlemen, we have a special treat for you tonight, Heidi. She’s come all the way from Switzerland to wait on you.’ He’s already told me their favorite thing is to be served by a bare-naked girl wearing just black silk stockings and high heels.”
“Yeah…?”
“I curtsey.”
“Yeah…?”
“I unsnap the crotch, fling the teddy aside, then go around pouring cognac and lighting cigars.”
“They cop feels?”
“They talk business and tell jokes.”
“While they’re staring at your cooze.”
“I’m telling you, these old guys are honest-to-God gentlemen. I’m serving them, they hunch over for a light, my puss is practically in their face, but they’re casual about it. Once in a while I got a pat on the fanny. That’s all. They have a couple of snifters, smoke their cigars and go home. But, each one gave me a peck on the cheek and at least a five-buck tip.”
“You made thirty dollars?”
“Forty, the time I did it. They said they want me whenever they come in.”
Jack said, “I have to get a look at this Teddy’s.”
“It’s a mansion,” Heidi said, “he bought off an estate. It’s huge, all dark-wood paneling, bar, dining rooms on the first floor, private rooms upstairs, a ballroom on the third floor—”
“What kind of music?”
“A white band nobody listens to. They finish and the younger crowd runs upstairs to hear the colored guys who come in to jam. That’s what they call it. Guys with names like Count, Big Daddy, Speedy…Hot Lips—”
Jack said, “I don’t know about that nigger music.”
“They start on a tune like ‘Lady Be Good’ and each one comes in on a sax or trumpet playing jazz, but whatever they feel like, making it up, and they still all end up together on the tune. Without any music in front of them.”
“That’s what I don’t understand,” Jack said.
“You’re not suppose to understand it,” Heidi said, “you feel it and tap your foot and move your body. There’s a colored girl name Julia Lee? She sings a song, ‘Won’t you come over to my house, nobody’s home but me,’ and you know from how she sings it what she wants. There’s another one sings ‘T-Town Blues.’ She’s going back to Tulsa, to Greenwood where she used to live.”
“Niggerville,” Jack said. “We burnt Greenwood down must’ve been ten years ago. They sort of built it up again.”
“It’s real bluesy,” Heidi said. “And there’s a girl from Oklahoma working at Teddy’s started the same time I did. Cute little redhead from Sallisaw. You ever been there?”
Jack said no, but believed Pretty Boy Floyd use to live there, or near it.
Crossing the bridge to North Kansas City Jack said, “I’ve read everything written about Pretty Boy and haven’t learned one new trick about robbing banks. Or from working with Emmett Long that time. I told you coming here there’s only one way to do it. Walk in, show ’em your gun and ask for the money.”
They were coming along Armour Avenue now in the heart of downtown. Jack said, “There it is, the National Bank and Trust, next to the Kroger grocery store.” He had to turn the corner at Swift Avenue to find a place to park.
“Last week,” Jack said, “they sent a girl works at the bank, Dortha Jolly, to the post office—see the flag, right over there? They sent Dortha to pick up a registered package with fourteen thousand dollars in it. You either go to the Federal Reserve to pick up money you need or they mail it to your post office. If they used an armored truck the bank has to pay for it. So these cheap fuggers sent Dortha, a stenographer, to pick up the package with a city marshal as her armed guard. They come from the post office, turn the corner and now they’re approaching the bank. They see a shotgun sticking out of a car window parked in front of Kroger’s and Dortha is told to drop the package. She drops it and runs into the grocery store. The city marshal goes for his gun and is shot a couple of times but makes it, he isn’t killed. A constable across the street sees what’s going on and opens fire. There’s a gun battle that shoots up some of the stores along Armour Avenue, one of them a beauty parlor, and the bandit car drives off heading north. Three police cars get after it, but have to stop at a filling station to have roofing nails, ones the bandits threw in the road, pulled out of their tires. Does that sound like the Keystone Cops or what?”
“They get away?”
“So far.”
“When was this?”
“I told you, last week. It’s the third time the bank’s been robbed, Dortha was there for two of them.”
“You don’t think after being robbed three times,” Heidi said, “they haven’t learned something and be ready now?”
“If they’re too cheap to hire an armored truck,” Jack said, “they’re not gonna spend money on a bank guard. Even if they do, it’ll be some hayseed they pay no more’n a buck and a half a day.” Jack brought a.38 revolver from his coat pocket, handed it to Heidi and told her to put it in her purse.
Heidi said, “You want to rob the bank right now?”
Jack said, “It’s as good a time as any.”
He had told her during the 360-mile trip from the roadhouse, they’d have to rob a bank if they planned to stay in Kansas City awhile. Heidi asked him, didn’t he know he might have to leave in a hurry? Didn’t he have cash ready, just in case? Jack said sure, he did, there was a thousand bucks in the Packard, hid in where the spare tires were. He said any time he planned something ahead, like kidnapping his dad’s girlfriend? It never worked out. He said but he was lucky, so don’t worry about it.
Now, sitting in that same Ford Roadster on Swift Avenue in North Kansas City talking about robbing a bank, Heidi said, “Do we have to?”
Jack said, “I’ve told you why.”
“But I’m making money now.”
“Enough to get by on isn’t what I call making money.”
“I never robbed a bank before.”
“But you shot a man and laid him across the railroad tracks, didn’t you?”
“That was different, they came to kill me and Norm.”
“Different,” Jack said, “’cause it took way more nerve. Honey, there’s nothing to robbing a bank. Come on, let’s go do ’er.”
They walked around the corner, came to the bank and entered to leave a dismal sky, rain threatening, for bright chandeliers shining down on marble: four cashier windows but only one occupied by a teller, a blonde girl; a bank official at his desk toward the rear, behind the low fence, busy with papers; and a guard on the floor, a skinny old coot in a gray uniform too big for him. Jack had called that one. The guard stood with his hands behind his back, the grip of a pistol showing in the holster on his hip.
Jack, an unlit cigaret in his mouth, his hands in the pocket of his coat, was ready for him. He walked up to the guard and asked if he had a light. The old guy patted his pockets and shook his head. Jack was still ready. He said, “I only have one hand that’s any good,” and brought his left hand out of his coat pocket with a book of matches. He said, “Would you mind lighting me up?” The guard took the book of matches and Jack looked around at Heidi.
“Why don’t you make the withdrawal?”
Heidi walked over to the blonde girl, who smiled at her and said, “Can I help you?”
Heidi set her purse on the counter in front of the window and saw the blonde girl look past her and then stare in that direction. Heidi wanted to look around but was afraid of what she might see. She brought the .38 out of her purse and pointed it at the blonde girl still looking past her and said, “You gonna wait on me or not?”
The blonde girl, seeing the gun pointing at her, said, “Oh my God—”
Heidi told her to take the
cash out of the drawer and put it in the purse. Watching her do it, Heidi said, “Are you Dortha Jolly?”
The blonde girl paused, holding bills in her hands. “Somebody from school called and she went home. I think one of her kids took sick. You know Dortha?”
Heidi said no, shaking her head, and said, “Don’t stop what you’re doing.” When she did stop Heidi said, “Is that all you have?” The blonde girl said yes, it was, and Heidi told her to move to the next window and empty the drawer there. Now she looked around to see the bank guard lying on the floor on his stomach, his head raised to watch Jack coming this way, to the window where the blonde girl was now, Jack saying to Heidi, “How we doing?”
She said, “Okay, I guess,” handing him the purse. He was holding an old .44 Colt she thought of as a horse pistol he must’ve taken off the guard. He set both the pistol and the purse on the counter and said to the blonde girl, “Are you by any chance Dortha Jolly?”
“No, I’m not,” the blonde girl said. “She sure is popular since she got her name in the paper.”
“Well, you’re doing fine,” Jack said. “Keep up the good work,” and shoved the purse toward her.
Heidi was looking at the bank official at his desk, the man staring right at them now. She said, “Jack—” and he turned from the counter and started toward the bank official, drawing his .38 from his coat.
“You press an alarm button?”
He stopped within ten feet of the man shaking his head, swearing now, he never touched it.
All Heidi wanted to do was run. She grabbed the purse from the blonde girl stuffing bills in it and started for the door yelling, “Jack, he did, I saw his hand go under the desk.” Heidi scared to death while Jack stood there pointing his .38 at the official swearing honest to God he never touched the button.
Jack said, “You sure about that?”
Taking his time now to show off. It drove Heidi crazy and she said to him again, “Jack, I’m leaving,” and watched him turn and come toward her in kind of a slow strut, pausing to say something to the old coot still on the floor, and finally, finally, they were out of the bank.