She was watching them now, fingering her blonde hair the wind was blowing in her eyes.
As soon as they were inside Nancy said, “Where’s Oris?”
Jack told her he’d be along. Mr. Belmont had waited for the doctor they called to have a look at the tankies that got hurt. He had a feeling Nancy was suspicious now, nervous, looking around the house. There wasn’t much to it, a pump on the sink, an old icebox and stove, a table covered with oilcloth and magazines sitting on it, three straight chairs, a double bed they could see in the back room.
Jack was ten when they moved to Tulsa and his dad would take him out to the lease every once in a while and explain boring things about oil wells, how the first joint of pipe had a bit on it they called a fishtail that bored the hole and those big pumps they called mud hogs would clean it out. They always stopped by the Harvey House in Sapulpa for chicken à la king, Jack’s favorite, and always had the same Harvey Girl in her big white apron, her hair swept up and fixed. Jack would listen to them talk in a low voice like they were passing secret messages to each other. It wasn’t until he saw Nancy Polis at the Mayo Hotel he realized she was the Harvey House waitress. She’d be in her thirties now.
Norm came in, the girl behind him with her empty clothes basket. He said to Jack, “This here’s my wife, Heidi.”
It took Jack by surprise, ’cause up close this girl was a looker, even with her hair mussed, no makeup on, man, a natural beauty about twenty years old. He had to wonder why she’d settled for a hayseed like Norm Dilworth. There was a presence about her, reminding him of rich girls in Tulsa, till she said, “Y’all want some ice tea?” and she was off a farm or an oil patch. Man, but she was a looker.
Nancy Polis, sitting at the table now smoking a cigaret, said, “I want to know where Oris is.”
Jack was still looking at Heidi. “You got anything else?”
“I got a jar,” Norm said.
Jack turned to the table and the magazines sitting there, Good Housekeeping, Turkey World, Ladies’ Home Journal and a new issue of Outdoor Life. He said to Nancy, “Keep your pants on,” picked up the Outdoor Life and started looking through it.
Norm went to the cupboard over the sink and brought out a mason jar, a third of clean whiskey in it. He said to Heidi, “Honey, will you get the glasses?”
She said, “We only got two,” looking at Jack. “Somebody’ll have to tip the jar.”
Jack smiled at her staring at him. He held up the Outdoor Life and said to Norm, “You hunt?”
“Any chance I get.”
“Leave this little girl here by herself?”
He winked at her and she winked back.
“She likes it here,” Norm said, “after where she’s lived.”
Nancy said, “None for me, thanks,” watching Norm pour the liquor into a couple of jelly glasses.
“It ain’t for you, it’s for me and Jack,” Norm said, handing Jack a glass.
Nancy sat sideways to the table, her legs crossed, showing her knees and some thigh in a dark shade of hose. She looked at Jack and held out the cigaret to tap ashes on the linoleum floor.
“Are you old enough?”
“If Prohibition means nobody’s suppose to drink,” Jack said, “then anybody can break the law and drink if they want, can’t they?”
“You work for Oris Belmont directly?”
“I’m his first assistant.”
“What kind of a man is he to work for?”
Jack raised the glass Norm handed him and took a big swallow of the liquor, feeling a nice burn, Nancy staring at him. Jack said, “I won’t say anything nasty about Mr. Belmont. I’ve heard some things but I don’t know if they’re true or not.”
“Like what?”
“He’s hard on certain employees in the office, cute girls they say he’s especially hard…on.” He winked at Nancy. Shit, he couldn’t help it. He heard Norm laugh and looked over at Heidi grinning at him. He could see her nipples poking against the thin cotton dress. She knew it, too, grinning at him like a cat if a cat had tits. He turned to Nancy drawing on her cigaret, her eyes holding on him, but no smile from this one. He took another sip of the whiskey, smooth going down. He was starting to feel good already. She wasn’t going anywhere—he may as well tell her.
“Honey, you’re gonna be staying here a while.”
She held the cigaret with his elbow on the table.
“Nothing happened to Oris?”
“I told you he was hurt to get you out of the house.”
“What’re you, holding me for ransom?”
“We’ll see how much Mr. Belmont likes you.”
“He doesn’t pay, then what, you kill me?”
“He’ll pay.”
“Then you will have to kill me.”
“What for? We’re gone. Nobody knows where we’re at.”
“But I know who you are.”
It stopped him and he said, “I don’t work for Oris Belmont. I only told you that.”
“I know you don’t,” Nancy said, “you’re his rotten kid. As soon as this goober called you Jack I knew it. You’re Jack Belmont. I remember you from eight or nine years ago when I worked at the Harvey House. You’d want to go home and you’d whine and keep tugging at your daddy’s sleeve. You were a brat then, now you’re what, a kidnapper? I heard the blackmail didn’t work.”
Shit. He did think of shooting her. It passed through his mind knowing Norm’d have a gun if he hunted.
Nancy said, “You give me the creeps, you know it? You can ask your dad for money anytime you want and he’ll give it to you. No, you’d rather steal it from him. Lord have mercy, you want to be a real crook, go rob a bank.”
Later on that day Joe Rossi phoned his boss again. He said, “Mr. Belmont, you want to get your boy to straighten himself out? What I’d do is have him arrested for destroying company property.”
Oris Belmont didn’t say a word. He sat looking out the window at the smudge still in the sky.
“You want,” Joe Rossi said, “I’d be glad to call the police on him. Keep you out of it.”
Oris took a few moments before saying, “No, I’ll call them.” It was time he took charge.
3
June 13, 1927, Carlos Huntington Webster, now close to six feet tall, was in Oklahoma City wearing a dark blue suit of clothes, no vest and a panama with the brim curved on his eyes just right, staying at a hotel, riding streetcars every day, and being sworn in as a deputy United States marshal. This was while Charles Lindbergh was being honored in New York City, tons of ticker tape dumped on the Lone Eagle for flying across the Atlantic Ocean by himself.
And Emmett Long, released from McAlester, was back in Checotah with Crystal Davidson, his suit hanging in the closet these six years since the marshals hauled him off in his drawers. The first thing the outlaw did, once he got off Crystal, was make phone calls to get his gang back together.
Carlos was given a leave to go home after his training and spent it with his old dad, telling him things:
What the room was like at the Huckins Hotel.
What he had to eat at the Plaza Grill.
How he saw a band called Walter Page’s Blue Devils that was all colored guys.
How when firing a pistol you put your weight forward, one foot ahead of the other, so if you get hit you can keep firing as you fall.
And one other thing.
Everybody called him Carl instead of Carlos. At first he wouldn’t answer to it and got in arguments, a couple of times almost fistfights.
“You remember Bob McMahon?”
“R. A. ‘Bob’ McMahon,” Virgil said, “the quiet one.”
“My boss when I report to Tulsa. He says, ‘I know you’re named for your granddaddy to honor him, but you’re using it like a chip on your shoulder instead of a name.’”
Virgil was nodding his head. “Ever since that moron Emmett Long called you a greaser. I know what Bob means. Like, ‘I’m Carlos Webster, what’re you gonna do about it?’ Y
ou were little I’d call you Carl sometimes. You liked it okay.”
“Bob McMahon says, ‘What’s wrong with Carl? All it is, it’s a nickname for Carlos.’”
“There you are,” Virgil said. “Try it on.”
“I’ve been wearing it the past month or so. ‘Hi, I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal Carl Webster.’”
“You feel any different?”
“I do, but I can’t explain it.”
A call from McMahon cut short Carl’s leave. The Emmett Long gang was back robbing banks.
What the marshals tried to do over the next six months was anticipate the gang’s moves. They robbed banks in Shawnee, Seminole and Bowlegs on a line south. Maybe Ada would be next. No, it turned out to be Coalgate.
An eyewitness said he was in the barbershop as Emmett Long was getting a shave—except the witness didn’t know who it was till later, after the bank was robbed. “Him and the barber are talking, this one who’s Emmett Long mentions he’s planning on getting married pretty soon. The barber happens to be a minister of the Church of Christ and offers to perform the ceremony. Emmett Long says he might take him up on it and gives the reverend a five-dollar bill for the shave. Then him and his boys robbed the bank.”
Coalgate was on that line south, but then they turned around and headed north again. They took six thousand from the First National in Okmulgee but lost a man. Jim Ray Monks, slow coming out of the bank on his bum legs, was shot down in the street. Before Monks knew he was dying he told them, “Emmett’s sore you never put more’n five hundred on his head. He’s out to show he’s worth a whole lot more.”
The stop after Okmulgee was Sapulpa, the gang appearing to like banks in oil towns: hit three or four in a row and disappear for a time. There were reports of gang members spotted during these periods of lying low, but Emmett Long was never one of them.
“I bet anything,” Carl said, standing before the wall map in Bob McMahon’s office, “he hides out in Checotah, at Crystal Davidson’s house.”
“Where we caught him seven years ago,” McMahon said, nodding. “Crystal was just a girl then, wasn’t she?”
“I heard Emmett was already fooling with her,” Carl said, “while she’s married to Skeet, only Skeet didn’t have the nerve to call him on it.”
“You heard, huh.”
“Sir, I drove down to McAlester on my day off, see what I could find out about Emmett.”
“The convicts talk to you?”
“One did, a Creek use to be in his gang, doing thirty years for killing his wife and the guy she was seeing. The Creek said it wasn’t a marshal shot Skeet Davidson in the gun battle that time, it was Emmett himself. He wanted Skeeter out of the way so he could have Crystal for his own.”
“What made you think of her?”
“Was after that barber in Coalgate said Emmett spoke about getting married. I thought it must be Crystal he’s talking about. I mean if he’s so sweet on her he killed her husband? That’s what tells me he hides out there.”
Bob McMahon said, “Well, we been talking to people, watching every place he’s ever been seen. Look it up, I know Crystal Davidson’s on the list.”
“I did,” Carl said. “She’s been questioned and Checotah police are keeping an eye on her place. But I doubt they do more than drive past, see if Emmett’s drawers are hanging on the line.”
“You’re a marshal six months,” Bob McMahon said, “and you know everything.”
Carl didn’t speak, his boss staring at him.
McMahon saying after a few moments, “I recall the time you shot that cattle thief off his horse.” McMahon saying after another silence but still holding Carl with his stare, “You have some kind of scheme you want to try?”
“I’ve poked around and learned a few things about Crystal Davidson,” Carl said, “where she used to live and all. I believe I can get her to talk to me.”
Bob McMahon said, “How’d you become so sure of yourself?”
The Marshals Service occupied offices on the second floor of the United States Courthouse on South Boulder Avenue in Tulsa. This meeting in Bob McMahon’s office was the first time Jack Belmont’s name came up in conversation: Bob McMahon and Carl Webster deciding it was between the bank robberies in Coalgate and Sapulpa that Jack must’ve got out of prison and joined the Emmett Long gang.
What was different about the Sapulpa bank robbery, Emmett Long walked in and first tried to cash a check made out to him for ten thousand dollars, a NMD Gas & Oil check bearing the signature of Oris Belmont, the company president. Jack Belmont, standing at the teller’s window with Emmett, said, “That’s my daddy signed it. I give you my word the check’s good.” The teller reported that he recognized Jack Belmont from his dad bringing him in since he was a kid, but the signature didn’t look anything like Oris Belmont’s on file. It didn’t matter, by then Emmett and Jack Belmont had their revolvers out, as did another one of the gang later identified as Norm Dilworth, and the tellers cleaned out what was in their drawers, something over twelve thousand dollars.
Bob McMahon asked Carl if he knew about Jack Belmont, how he’d set fire to one of his dad’s storage tanks, Jack and this tankie named Dilworth, a former convict. The dad didn’t hesitate to point Jack out in court. Joe Rossi identified Norm, and the two boys were convicted of malicious destruction of property, each drawing two years hard time.
Carl said he’d read it in the paper and spoke to the Tulsa police about Jack’s previous arrests. “And I saw him at McAlester,” Carl said, “to find out what I could learn about Emmett Long.”
He told how they sat in the captain’s office off the rotunda that must be four stories high, where the east and west cell houses met. “You hear wings beating,” Carl said, “and look up to see a pigeon flying around inside.”
He told how Jack sat across the desk from him in a lazy kind of way like he wasn’t interested, his legs crossed like a girl’s. “He smoked the cigaret I gave him and stared at me, wouldn’t say he even knew Emmett, but this had to be where they first met. Emmett was already out when Jack got his release, right after I spoke to him. So they must’ve already decided to hook up and do some banks. I can hear Jack telling Emmett he had a new way to rob them, hand ’em a check to cash.”
McMahon said, “And I bet Emmett kicked his tail.”
“But tried the check first,” Carl said. “I’m talking to him, Jack sat there with one arm folded across his chest to the other arm tight against his body, holding the cigaret straight up between the tips of his fingers. He’d turn his head to take a drag, his face raised to it like he’s showing me his profile.”
“You mentioned his legs crossed like a girl’s,” McMahon said. “You think he’s a nancy-boy?”
“At first I did. I said, ‘There fellas here gonna have fun with you.’ But he did have girlfriends and was accused of raping one, though he was never brought up. He said he didn’t give the other inmates a second thought. He had his buddy with him, Norm Dilworth doing his second stretch and Norm, Jack said, had showed him how to jail. I’m told this Dilworth is stringy but tough as nails. No,” Carl said, “Jack Belmont was putting on a show, letting me know he was cool as a fifty-pound block of ice. He asked me what I was, even though I’d showed him my star. I said I was a deputy United States marshal. He called me a poor sap and wanted to know if I’d ever shot anybody.”
“You tell him?”
“I said just one. He shrugged like it wasn’t anything special. I told him the next time I saw Emmett Long he’d be my second one.”
Bob McMahon didn’t care for that. He said, “I reminded you once before, my deputies don’t brag or speculate. The hell got into you to say that?”
“The way he looked at me,” Carl said. “The way he smoked the cigaret. Different things about his manner toward me.”
Carl watched Bob McMahon shake his head, McMahon saying, “My deputies do not brag on themselves. Have you got that?”
Carl said he did.
But thinking
that Jack Belmont, with what he was up to now, could be number three.
Marshals dropped Carl off a quarter mile from the house, turned the car around and drove back to Checotah; they’d be at the Shady Grove Café. Carl was wearing work clothes and curl-toed boots, his .38 Colt Special holstered beneath a limp old suitcoat of Virgil’s, a black one, his star in a pocket.
Walking the quarter mile his gaze held on this worn-out homestead, the whole dismal 160 acres looking deserted, the dusty Ford Coupé in the backyard abandoned, its wheels missing. Carl expected Crystal Davidson to be in no better shape than her property, living here like an outcast. The house did take on life as he mounted the porch, the voice of Uncle Dave Macon coming from a radio somewhere inside; and now Crystal Lee Davidson was facing him through the screen, a girl in a silky nightgown that barely came to her knees, barefoot, but with rouge giving her face color, her blonde hair marcelled like a movie star’s…
You dumbbell, of course she hadn’t let herself go, she was waiting for a man to come marry her. Carl smiled, meaning it.
“Miz Davidson? I’m Carl Webster.” He kept looking at her face so she wouldn’t think he was trying to see through her nightgown, which he could, easy. “I believe your mom’s name is Atha Trudell? She worked at the Georgian Hotel in Henryetta doing rooms at one time and belonged to Eastern Star?”
It nudged her enough to say, “Yeah…?”
“So’d my mom, Narcissa Webster?”
Crystal shook her head.
“Your daddy was a coal miner up at Spelter, pit boss on the Little Gem. He lost his life that time she blew in ’16. My dad was down in the hole laying track.” Carl paused. “I was ten years old.”
Crystal said, “I just turned fifteen,” her hand on the screen door to open it, but then hesitated. “Why you looking for me?”