“I only said they knew each other.”
“You mean alleged to have known each other.”
“And maybe,” Tony said, “it gave Carl a motive, made it easier for him to shoot the bank robber.”
“You’re saying he needed a personal reason to gun down a wanted criminal?”
“What I meant, his knowing Junior might’ve enkindled a determination to do it.”
“Did Carl Webster tell you directly that if he pulled his gun he’d shoot to kill?”
“It was something he told Crystal.”
“And you accepted the word of a gun moll?”
Tony started looking for another writing job.
He was born in Krebs in 1903, the heart of Oklahoma coal mine country, the son of a coal miner, the reason he wrote about the hazards of working underground, the high incidence of deaths, the mine operators’ reluctance to accept safety standards. And the editor chopped the drama out of his stories, telling Tony to get rid of “gasping for breath in a grotto of coal.” He wrote about the Black Hand extorting money from Italian businesses, and the editor asked if he knew for a fact the Black Hand was related to the Mafia. He wrote about Italians in general not trusting banks and hiding their savings. “As much as fifty thousand dollars in small amounts buried in the backyards and vegetable gardens of Krebs, McAlester, Wilburton and other communities.” He wrote that John Tua, the most influential Italian in Oklahoma, the padrone of the Antonellis and all the Italians working in the mines, often sat at night in his restaurant with twenty thousand dollars or more in the drawer of his desk, as much as a quarter of a million in his bank.
The editor said, “Where’d you get your figures? Some other Italian tell you?”
“Everyone knows it,” Tony said. “Mr. Tua is a great man, dedicated to the welfare of immigrants. He gives people advice, finds them work, exchanges foreign currency. Why he keeps all that money.”
The editor said, “I don’t care for the one about the Klan, either. Who says they’re out to get you people?”
“They hate Catholics,” Tony said. “They believe we’re no better than Negroes. And almost all Italians are Catholic. Even the fallenaway ones get married in the Church and have their babies baptized.”
Tony wrote a story about the happy Fassino family’s popular macaroni factory. Another one about a social club, the Christopher Columbus Society and its twenty-five-piece band that played at festivals and on the Fourth of July.
The editor said, “I think you’re getting the hang of it. Now write one about the tendency of your people to overindulge in Choctaw beer and homemade wine.”
That did it. Tony Antonelli quit the Okmulgee Daily Times. Within a few months he was living in Tulsa and writing for True Detective Mystery magazine. Finally, where he belonged.
They’d pay him two cents a word to start. He leafed through one of the latest issues to read a story that opened with “Light beams, sweeping the sky like flowing yellow ribbons against a backdrop of black, shone from the walls of the Colorado State Penitentiary one winter night in 1932.”
He couldn’t wait to start writing.
Two cents a word even for an “As Told To” story, a hundred bucks for five thousand words, nineteen and a half to twenty pages, and the opportunity of working up to a nickel a word. He’d found out they counted the pages, not the words. He believed he was meant to write for True Detective, be able to use more dialogue, the way people actually spoke. Here, the girl saying, “‘I thought you were being hurt. Those screams,’ she stammered.” The response, “‘I made them good, eh?’ asked the imperturbable diver.” Tony turned pages in the magazine and stopped at a photograph with the caption, “The laundry of Lee Hoey, wither the diver started on a peaceful errand, became the center of a strange conflict.” The writer making even a caption work.
The editor of the Okmulgee paper, his problem, he wouldn’t know good writing if John Barrymore read it to him.
Tony had written to True Detective’s editorial offices on Broadway in New York City, gave them samples of his original, unedited work and they called him. This editor said he liked the Black Hand piece and might run it if Tony could expand on the Mafia connection, their scheme to preside over all organized crime in America. Tony said he didn’t see why not.
And then suggested, how about a close study of a deputy U.S. marshal, a good-looking young guy who was on his way to becoming the most famous lawman in America. The hot kid of the Marshals Service who said if he had to draw his gun, he would shoot to kill the wanted felon he was apprehending. “And Carl Webster has drawn his Colt .38 four times so far in his career. You can tell he’s sharp just by the way he wears his panama, his suit’s always pressed. You look at him and wonder where he keeps his gun.”
“He’s good-looking, uh?”
“Could be a movie star. You may remember him shooting Emmett Long four years ago? That was only his second. I’m getting details of the times he shot to kill. They were both in the papers. I might mention Carl is something of a ladies’ man. He’s been seen now and then with Emmett Long’s gun moll, Crystal Davidson. He’s younger than Crystal, still only twenty-five or six. His dad was on the Maine when she blew up in Havana harbor, and survived. The dad adds color, a touch of patriotism. What I want to do,” Tony said, “is follow Carl while he tracks wanted criminals and write about what he thinks and feels, tap into his emotions and come up with the story of a True American Lawman: Carl Webster. His picture on the cover.” Tony paused. “Drawing his Colt revolver.”
The editor in his office on Broadway said it didn’t sound too bad, but then wanted to know, “What else you got?”
Tony said, “How about the son of a millionaire who robs banks? Jack Belmont, out to make a name for himself. His dad’s Oris Belmont of NMD Gas & Oil, worth a good twenty million, into refineries, car lots, has a tank farm. He occupies an entire floor of the Exchange National Bank building here in Tulsa.”
He was giving this editor hard facts, confident he could write for True Detective.
“Jack Belmont’s a young dude. Must have a dozen suits and pairs of shoes.”
“How come I’ve never heard of him?”
“You will. Carl Webster’s after him.”
“If his daddy’s rich, why’s the kid rob banks?”
“That’s what the story’s about. Why did his old man cut him off? What was he up to? Outside of blowing up one of his dad’s oil storage tanks. This guy’s gonna pull something big before he’s through.”
“How do you get to him?”
“I told you, I follow Carl Webster.”
There was a pause on the line before the editor in New York said, “You know who’s the big news now, Pretty Boy Floyd.”
Bingo.
Tony said in the same quiet voice he’d been using, “How would you like a profile of his girlfriend, Louly Brown? I understand she’s hot stuff.”
“Yeah? You know her?”
“I’m meeting her at the Mayo Hotel this coming week,” Tony said, “for an interview.”
There was another pause on the line.
“Which one you want to do first?”
“In a way,” Tony said, “they’re all related. When Louly Brown shot one of the guys in Pretty Boy’s gang, guess who was there?” Tony paused a moment before saying, “Carl Webster.”
5
In 1918, when Louly Brown was six years old, her dad, a Tulsa stockyard hand, joined the U.S. Marines and was killed at Bois de Belleau during the Great War. Her mom, Sylvia, sniffling as she held the letter from his lieutenant, told Louly it was a woods over in France.
In 1920 Sylvia married a hardshell Baptist by the name of Ed Hagenlocker and they went to live on his cotton farm near Sallisaw, below Tulsa on the south edge of the Cookson Hills. By the time Louly was twelve, Sylvia had two sons by Mr. Hagenlocker and the man had Louly out in the fields picking cotton. He was the only person in the world who called her by her Christian name, Louise. She hated picking cotton but
Sylvia wouldn’t say anything to Mr. Hagenlocker. Louly always thought of him that way, as Mr. Hagenlocker, and her mom as Sylvia, someone she never felt close to again. Mr. Hagenlocker believed that when you were old enough to do a day’s work, you worked. It meant Louly was finished with school by the sixth grade.
In 1924, the summer Louly was twelve, they attended her cousin Ruby’s wedding in Sallisaw. Ruby was seventeen, the boy she married, Charley Floyd, twenty. Ruby was dark but pretty, showing some Cherokee blood on her mama’s side. Ruby had nothing to say to Louly at the wedding, but Charley called her kiddo and would lay his hand on her head and muss her bobbed hair that was reddish from her mom. He told her she had the biggest brown eyes he had ever seen on a little girl.
Just the next year she began reading about Charles Arthur Floyd in the paper: how he and two others went up to St. Louis and robbed the Kroger Food payroll office of $11,500. They were caught in Sallisaw driving around in a brand-new Studebaker they’d bought in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The Kroger Food paymaster identified Charley saying, “That’s him, the pretty boy with apple cheeks.” Gradually the newspapers began referring to Charley Floyd as “Pretty Boy.”
Louly remembered him from the wedding as cute, but kind of scary the way he grinned at you—not being sure what he was thinking. She bet he hated being called Pretty Boy. Looking at his picture she cut out of the paper Louly felt herself getting a crush on this famous outlaw.
In 1929, while he was still at Jeff City, the Missouri State Penitentiary, Ruby divorced him for neglect and married a man from Kansas. Louly thought it was terrible, Ruby betraying Charley like that.
“Ruby don’t see him ever again going straight,” Sylvia said. “She needs a husband the same as I did to ease the burdens of life, have a father for her little boy Dempsey.” Named for the world’s heavyweight boxing champ.
Now that Charley was divorced Louly wanted to write and sympathize but didn’t know which of his names to use. She had heard his friends called him Choc, after his fondness for Choctaw beer, his favorite beverage when he was in his teens and roamed Oklahoma and Kansas with harvest crews.
Louly opened her letter “Dear Charley,” and said she thought it was a shame Ruby divorcing him while he was still in prison, not having the nerve to wait till he was out. What she most wanted to know, “Do you remember me from your wedding?” She stuck in with the letter a picture of herself in a bathing suit, standing sideways and smiling over her shoulder at the camera. This way her full-size sixteen-year-old breasts were seen in profile.
Charley wrote back saying sure he remembered her, “the little girl with the big brown eyes.” Saying, “I’m getting out in March and going to Kansas City to see what’s doing. I have given your address to an inmate here by the name of Joe Young who we call Booger, being funny. He is from Okmulgee but has to do another year or so in this garbage can and would like to have a pen pal as pretty as you are.”
Nuts. But then Joe Young wrote her a letter with a picture of himself showing him as a fairly good-looking boy with big ears and blondish hair. He said he kept her bathing-suit picture on the wall next to his rack so he’d look at it before going to sleep and dream of her all night.
Once they were exchanging letters she told him how much she hated picking cotton, dragging that duck sack along the rows all day in the heat and dust, her hands raw from pulling the bolls off the stalks, gloves after while not doing a bit of good. Joe said in his letter, “What are you a nigger slave? You don’t like picking cotton leave there and run away. It is what I done.”
Pretty soon he said in a letter, “I am getting my release sometime next summer. Why don’t you plan on meeting me so we can get together.” Louly said she was dying to visit Kansas City and St. Louis, wondering if she would ever see Charley Floyd again. She asked Joe why he was in prison and he wrote back to say, “Honey, I am a bank robber, same as Choc.”
It seemed like every week there’d be a story about Charley robbing another bank and his picture in the paper. It was exciting just trying to keep track of him, Louly getting chills and thrills knowing everybody in the world was reading about this famous outlaw who liked her brown eyes and had mussed her hair when she was a kid.
Joe Young wrote to say, “I am getting my release the end of August. I will let you know soon where to meet me.”
Louly had been working winters at Harkrider’s grocery store in Sallisaw for six dollars a week. She had to give five of it to her stepfather, Mr. Hagenlocker, the man never once thanking her—leaving a dollar to put in her running-away kitty. Working at the store from fall through winter, most of six months, she hadn’t saved a whole lot but she knew she was leaving. She might have timid-soul Sylvia’s looks, the reddish hair, but had the nerve and get-up-and-go of her daddy, killed in action charging a German machine gun nest in that woods in France.
Late in October, who walked in the grocery store but Joe Young. Louly knew him even wearing a suit, and he knew her, grinning as he came up to the counter, his shirt wide open at the neck. He said, “Well, I’m out.”
She said, “You been out two months, haven’t you?”
He said, “I been robbing banks. Me and Choc.”
She thought she had to go to the bathroom, the urge coming over her in her groin and then gone, Louly took a few moments to compose herself and act like the mention of Choc didn’t mean anything special, Joe Young’s grin in her face, giving her the feeling he was dumb as dirt. Some other convict must’ve wrote his letters for him. She said in a casual way, “Oh, is Charley here with you?”
“He’s around,” Joe Young said, acting shifty, like he was being watched. “Come on, we gotta go.”
“I’m not ready just yet,” Louly said. “I don’t have my running-away money with me.”
“How much you save?”
“Thirty-eight dollars.
“Jesus, working here two years?”
“I told you, Mr. Hagenlocker takes almost all my wages.”
“You want, I’ll crack his head for him.”
“I wouldn’t mind. The thing is, I’m not leaving without my money.”
Joe Young looked at the door as he put his hand in his pocket saying, “Little girl, I’m paying your way. You won’t need the thirty-eight dollars.”
Little girl—she stood a good two inches taller than Joe Young, even in his run-down cowboy boots. She was shaking her head now. “Mr. Hagenlocker bought a Model A Roadster with my money, paying it off twenty a month.”
“You want to steal his car?”
“It’s mine, ain’t it, if he’s using my money?”
Louly had made up her mind and Joe Young was anxious to get out of here. She had pay coming, so they’d meet November 2 at the Georgian Hotel in Henryetta, around noon.
The day before she was to leave Louly told Sylvia she was sick. Instead of going to work she got her things ready and used the curling iron on her hair. The next day, while Sylvia was hanging wash, the two boys at school, and Mr. Hagenlocker was out on his tractor, Louly rolled the Ford Roadster out of the shed and drove into Sallisaw to get a pack of Lucky Strikes for the trip. She loved to smoke and had been doing it with boys but never had to buy the cigarets. When boys wanted to take her in the woods she’d ask, “You have Luckies? A whole pack?” It didn’t cross her mind she was doing it for fifteen cents.
The druggist’s son, one of her boyfriends, gave her a pack free of charge and asked where she was yesterday, acting sly, saying, “You’re always talking about Pretty Boy Floyd, I wonder if he stopped by your house.”
They liked to kid her about Pretty Boy. Louly, not paying much attention, said, “I’ll let you know when he does.” Then saw the boy about to spring something on her.
“The reason I ask, he was here in town yesterday, Pretty Boy was.”
She said, “Oh?” careful now. The boy took his time and it was hard to keep herself from shaking him.
“Yeah, his family came down from Akins, his mama, two of his sisters, some oth
ers, so they could watch him rob the bank. He had a tommy gun, but didn’t shoot anybody. Come out of the bank with two thousand five hundred and thirty-one dollars, him and two others. Gave some of the money to his people and they say to anybody he thought hadn’t et in a while, everybody grinning at him.”
This was the second time now he had been close by: first when his daddy was killed only seven miles away and now right here in Sallisaw, all kinds of people seeing him, damn it, but her. Just yesterday…
She had to wonder if she had been here would he of recognized her, and bet he would’ve.
She said to her boyfriend in the drugstore, “Charley ever hears you called him Pretty Boy, he’ll come in for a pack of Luckies, what he always smokes, and shoot you through the heart.”
The Georgian was the biggest hotel Louly had ever seen. Coming up on it in the Model A she was thinking these bank robbers knew how to live high on the hog. She pulled in front and a colored man in a green uniform coat with gold buttons and a peaked cap came around to open her door—and saw Joe Young on the sidewalk waving the doorman away, saying as he got in the car, “Jesus Christ, you stole it, didn’t you? Jesus, how old are you, going around stealing cars?”
Louly said, “How old you have to be?”
He told her to keep straight ahead.
She said, “You aren’t staying at the hotel?”
“I’m at a tourist court.”
“Charley there?”
“He’s around someplace.”
“Well, he was in Sallisaw yesterday,” Louly sounding mad now, “if that’s what you call around,” seeing by Joe Young’s expression she was telling him something he didn’t know. “I thought you were in his gang.”
“He’s got an old boy name of Birdwell with him. I hook up with Choc when I feel like it.”
She was almost positive Joe Young was lying to her.
“Am I gonna see Charley or not?”
“He’ll be back, don’t worry your head about it.” He said, “We got this car, I won’t have to steal one.” Joe Young was in a good mood now. “What we need Choc for?” Grinning at her close by in the car. “We got each other.”