He Was Her Man Page 8

  “What note?” Jinx screamed. “What note?”

  “The ransom note that was pinned to y’all’s bed in that big old expensive room. A family of ten could live in there easy.”

  “Ransom note? What ransom note? Mother, have you gone crazy?” Jinx looked like she might stroke out any second. “You are the meanest woman I’ve ever known in my entire life. You’re just making up all this crap to ruin my party. You hate me. You’ve always hated me!” Jinx was about to go into orbit. Even Sam was beginning to feel a little sorry for her.

  “Shhhhhhhhh! Not so loud,” said Loydell. “I didn’t bring the note down because I know better than to mess with the scene of a crime, all those years I spent in the law enforcement, but basically what it said was that if you want to see Speed alive again, it’ll cost you a million dollars, and you’re not to go to the police under any circumstances, or they’ll kill him. Dead.”

  “Holy cow,” Sam said.

  “Double holy cow,” Kitty added. “If this doesn’t take the cake.”

  “So to speak,” said Sam.

  “DEAD?” Jinx shrieked. “DEAD?”

  “Shhhhhhhh!” said Loydell. “No, Julia Alice, I did not say he’s dead. But he will be if you don’t quiet down. They said not to breathe a word of this. Not to anybody.”

  Jinx whirled like a comet and raced out of the room as fast as she could in her skin-tight gold lamé.

  Loydell went right on. “I don’t know that I’ve ever run up on a man I thought was worth a million dollars, and I’ve encountered a gracious plenty of ’em in my time. Now, Jinx’s dad, he knew some tricks that I guess I’d have paid for on a piecemeal basis, one by one, sort of like them men used to pay Olive, which reminds me, I need to go and call her again.” Then Loydell was off in her sensible shoes, her words trailing behind her. “I can’t imagine where Olive’s got off to. This isn’t like her. Not one bit.”

  9

  EARLY TRULOVE WAS four when he went horse crazy. At least that’s what his momma called it when she’d carried him to downtown Daytona Beach, “to sit on a pony and have his picture took. He wouldn’t get off that pony. I say I’m gone beat him with a stick, he say, Go on, this little horsey’s mines. The man owned the pony, took the pictures, he just laughed. Say, boy like you, think you’d grow up out in the country, be used to horses ’fore now.”

  But that wasn’t how it was. Early’s mom, Valeen, had escaped the green prison of the deep Arkansas countryside, where you could live and die and meet your maker, all the time seeing nothing more exciting than two dogs in a dead heat chasing a squirrel. Valeen had been looking to bust out. And when a cousin, a daughter of Aunt Odessie, wrote her from Daytona Beach saying that there were not only jobs for black folks but a blue ocean and a sandy beach and real speed, race cars going around and around like a house afire in the Five Hundred, well, Valeen had started packing.

  Grabbed up Early, her only son—named because he arrived at the end of her seventh month, small, but fully formed and raring to go—and headed for Daytona thinking a boy as in-a-big-hurry as Early could probably find himself something to do around the race cars when he grew up, mechanic maybe, he was handy—even if he was black in a white man’s world.

  But it wasn’t cars that Early fixed on. It was that pony, and by the time he was 16, Early had migrated due west from Daytona Beach a little over an hour’s drive to Ocala and Marion County, which claims the highest density of thoroughbred farms per square foot in the United States. Valeen said, Humph, could have stayed home in Arkansas, I knew horses what you be studying.

  It was in Ocala that Early was taken in by Asphalt, a black groom who knew all there was to know about thoroughbreds—and young boys who had the bug. Asphalt taught Early that a horse was something you honored, that you were proud to serve them with the hard, low-paying work because there was glory in it. Besides, if you had the bug and you were black, what were your options? You’d never be a jockey, even if you were a small man with good hands like Early, nor a trainer. And as for owning, well, you might as well dream of being the lord of one of those castles that came with a yacht down in Palm Beach. But you could groom, you could hot-walk, you could travel the circuit of racetracks working with other good people, black and white and brown, good people who honored horses.

  It was while he was down in New Orleans grooming for Joey the Horse’s trainer that Early had met Jack Graham.

  It was Jack who was waiting now behind the wheel of a tobacco brown Rolls when Early stepped out the back lobby door of the Palace Hotel. Jack, the same large silver-haired man Early had signaled to in the lobby only a few minutes earlier. Jack, the boss operator of Hot Springs’s underground gambling machine, whom the locals called Mr. You Know Who, a term of both endearment and respect.

  “You want to slide over, Jack?” Early hoped that he would. He’d never seen anyone so awful behind the wheel.

  “I’ll drive,” said Jack, giving him his fishy grin.

  Early knew that Jack knew how much he hated to ride with him and insisted on driving now and then just for the devil of it. It was those times that Early became a God-fearing Christian again, in fact, wished he were a Catholic, had himself some of those little beads.

  They were heading out toward Lake Hamilton and Gardiner Place, one of Jack’s two casinos. Jack had just missed grazing a Lincoln Town Car pulling out of a parking place on Bathhouse Row when he said to Early, “She’s a looker. Doc’s partner.”

  “What’d you expect? Aren’t they always, the women, that is?”

  “Yeah.” Jack hoisted his big body in the leather seat, which creaked. “Doc always did have pretty good taste in women. I never knew what they saw in him, though. Even less now, he’s showing his age. And the booze has got to be eating away his brain.”

  Then Early watched Jack check himself in the rearview mirror to see if you could say the same of him. Well, you couldn’t. For a white man Jack was pretty sharp-looking, in Early’s opinion, which probably didn’t count for much, his being a better judge of horseflesh or womanflesh.

  Jack Graham was about 50, six foot three, 200 pounds, maybe 205, with a powerful body, a nice big square-jawed face, and a nose that hadn’t been broken but once. He had a full head of silver hair and bright blue eyes. Take that actor Brian Dennehy, subtract a few years, you’d pretty much come up with Jack Graham.

  Jack himself had grown up in New Orleans’s Irish Channel, out on Magazine Street, and could trace his lineage in the Big Easy’s underworld back to his grandaddy, who was a bootlegger and had worked out the original accommodation with the Italians.

  Jack was charming and smooth and bent—all prerequisites for the state’s governorship, which he could have taken with a fingersnap, except that Cut to the chase was Jack’s motto. Why go to all that trouble pretending to be straight when he had the juice to run numbers, cards, shylocking, bookmaking, all at the indulgence of Joey the Horse, who took a healthy cut, of course.

  It was a horse named Lush Life, in fact, that had come between Jack and Joey and had brought Early into the picture.

  Joey had desired that the filly win the last race of a Pick-Six, which would have resulted in Joey’s bagging a half-million dollars and Lush Life not only breaking her maiden but becoming a rising star. Forget the details, the bottom line was Joey passed the responsibility for said scenario along to Jack, who not only understood the subtleties of such a delicate operation but also loved horses. Jack meticulously explained the game plan to one of his men out at the track, Doc Miller, who’d in turn explained it to Speed McKay. They’d fucked up (Speed from stupidity, Doc out of avarice, trying to cut his own angles) so ignobly that the end result was not only did Lush Life lose, but she literally died in the stretch due to the enormous amount of phenylbutazone pumped into her—bute not having been part of Jack’s game plan at all.

  Early had been broken-hearted. He’d loved that filly. Nonetheless, when he came stumbling into his backside barn after the race and found three of Joe
y the Horse’s men about to club Jack’s brains out, he thought three against one plus the tire iron was chickenshit odds, no matter what the big silver-haired man had done. So he’d mounted a horse named Caliban and, with a ferrier’s tool, whacked each of the three upside their heads as neatly as if they’d been polo balls.

  Jack had reached in his pocket on the spot and counted out 5,000 dollars in hundred-dollar bills as a thank you. A few months later he’d called Early up, said, Come guard my body, be my man-of-all-trades, I’m going into the casino business. I’m up in Hot Springs, that being where Joey the Horse has decided he’ll allow me to continue breathing.

  Early wasn’t sure. It would be tough to trade in the dawn smells of freshly farrowed track, manure, new-mown grass for cigarette smoke and booze in some casino room where you never saw the light of day. Especially after the time he’d pulled in the state pen in Angola, Louisiana, for a seriously dumb mistake, Early didn’t fancy anything that felt like lockup. But, on the other hand, Hot Springs was home. His birthplace.

  Jack said, “Oaklawn’s up here, you know. Awfully sweet track. We’ll buy us some horses, run ’em. First one, we’ll call her To Lush Life.”

  That did it. Early had hung up his manure-caked rubber boots and overalls, got himself fitted for a neat navy blue double-breasted suit complete with bulletproof lining. He’d taken a quick course in target shooting, for which he found he had a natural aptitude, as he did for the martial arts, and he began to shadow Jack Graham, who quickly set up undercover casino operations in Hot Springs as if the town were ripe for sin. Which, not having had much to speak of since the feds shut down all the fun back in the sixties, it was.

  And things had been good, except Jack had been steaming since the day Lush Life was put down. It wasn’t even so much his exile. He said the mountains were a nice change from the swamp. It was that that perfectly beautiful filly had died for no good reason, Doc’s cupidity not being a good reason.

  That’s what Jack had said to Doc when he’d called him out on the matter. Jack wasn’t one to blindside you with a tire iron. He’d called him out like a man, the last day he was in town before he shipped out for Hot Springs. Early hadn’t been there, but he’d heard it wasn’t much of a fight, at least not on Doc’s part. Jack, who’d grown up with knocking around the ring in the Irish Channel, had stepped right up to Doc and started punishing him with his jab, put a couple of combinations together before he staggered him with a short left hand to the head. Doc fell facedown like a redwood. When he got to his feet, he didn’t say a word, but there was murder in his eye.

  Jack had brushed himself off and gone on his rounds to say his good-byes around town.

  But that night when he got home, Jack found his two beloved Irish setters, Yeats and Maude, to whom he’d promised a big yard and long runs in the Arkansas hills, decapitated with their guts pulled out and strung around the bushes in front of his house like Christmas lights.

  The pain had gone deep. Jack had truly loved those dogs.

  But he was a patient man, and he knew how to bide his time. He’d gone on along to Hot Springs and set up his casinos, of which Joey the Horse got his 20 percent. One out on Lake Hamilton at Gardiner Place, a handsome former mansion now a superb restaurant with full-tilt gambling in the gigantic basement, which you could reach through an underground tunnel that led right from the marina where you could pull your boat up. Another in the old Quapaw Bathhouse right in the middle of town on Central Avenue.

  Jack had been very busy—and very successful. He’d pat his pocket and say, “Early, I’ve got the sixth tailbone of a black cat in there, brings me luck.” But it wasn’t any Irish Channel mojo that made the man so good. He knew what he was doing, he wasn’t afraid of work, and he was a good guy. People liked him. Early liked him a lot.

  So things were going great, just rolling along, until that day just a couple of weeks ago, To Lush Life’s running in the sixth, and Jack’s in his favorite spot, way over at the top of the grandstand, you can see the horses making the last turn. Early’s up in the Oaklawn Club with the white linen napkins and the roses on the tables, which he likes to do every once in a while just because he can, Jack gave him the membership as a little perk. All of a sudden Early spots Speed McKay. He can’t believe his eyes, but it’s the little man all right, romancing this curvy blonde, a couple of years on her, but you could tell she’d been the real article in her prime, and Speed’s saying to her, “I once knew another filly named Lush Life, just Lush Life without the To, but she was a lazy nag, couldn’t go the distance, dropped dead rather than run.”

  Early wants to pull out his gun, pop the stupid little son of a bitch right there. Damn him! But the Oaklawn Club wasn’t exactly the place to do that, not that he would really, he just wanted to so bad he could taste it. As soon as the race was over, To Lush Life won, bless her sweet heart, paid ten to one, he ran to find Jack.

  “I want you on him like a fly on shit,” had been Jack’s response. Early knew that Jack was hoping that where there was Speed, there’d be Doc. So Early had spent the past few weeks following the little man, watching him romance the blonde. It wasn’t long before he reported to Jack that their little Speed McKay seemed to be getting himself engaged to the ex–beauty queen who had won herself a million dollars in the Texas lottery not all that long ago.

  “You don’t say?” Jack had smiled and told Early to keep on keeping on. So Early followed them to the gate when the lovebirds flew off to the Bahamas and to New York, though he hadn’t gone on either trip. Jack said he was interested in what was happening here at home. Like Speed renting a big stone house out on Lake Ouachita. Early kept watching, and one thing he noticed that was real odd was that the bride-to-be never showed at the lake house. Never set foot in it. Never drove by. Never bought even a lamp for it. Now wasn’t that strange, that she wouldn’t take an interest in their love nest?

  “Let Speed go, watch the house,” Jack had said.

  Which is how Early came to see Doc and then Mickey drive up to the big stone house yesterday.

  Jack had said, “So who’s the woman?”

  Early did some backtracking through friends of friends in New Orleans and found out that Doc and Speed hadn’t been working together for a long time now, that Doc had been partnered with this Mickey Steele for a few months. And he was almost sure she was the woman he had seen Speed having lunch with at the Carousel Club the week before.

  Now Jack, behind the wheel, puffed on his little cigar and goosed the gas so he almost hit a Toyota that was halfway through a left turn. He said, “What’s Doc’s angle, Early? He has to know I’m here. Got to know first chance I get, I’m going to even the score.”

  Early peeked through his fingers. “I don’t know what they’re up to, Jack. Like I told you, Speed rents the house, then these two show up. I drive by, I see their Mercedes sitting in the driveway pretty as you please. Doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Jack agreed. “And you actually saw Doc? You’re sure it was him?”

  Early nodded. “I parked down a way, sneaked back on foot. Got up close enough to see Doc sitting in the kitchen, drinking a beer, eating a big bag of potato chips, sour cream and chives.”

  “We wait long enough, he’ll have a heart attack. The man always was stuffing his face with junk.”

  Though Jack himself was carrying a few extra pounds, it was what he called good weight. Made of the finest ingredients, gumbo and crawfish étoufée and lamb stew, he ordered the baby lamb direct from a grower in Marin County. He had a man in southern California who air-shipped his restaurant produce, the best grown on God’s green earth, from the Chino Farm twice a week. Jack himself was a most extraordinary cook.

  Early said, “Well, you can’t say that about the woman. Doc’s partner’s a runner. Up and down the hills. Wears those little shorts.”

  “Interesting.” Jack blew a smoke ring. “And cards are her speciality?”

  “She’s a righteous player. Wouldn’t even have to cheat
to make a decent living on poker tournaments. Except she likes to cheat.”

  “Well, you know, lots of them do.” Jack grinned. And then the grin faded, and he said, “You know, what bothers me is Doc’s not stupid like Speed. Mean as a five-foot rattlesnake with a six-foot poker up his butt, but clever.”

  And that was as far as he went. Jack never mentioned the animals. Never said a word about Lush Life or Yeats or Maude. He blew another smoke ring. “Do you think it’s possible, Early, this has anything to do with Joey the Horse? Maybe Joey’s decided he wants to muscle me out up here now that things are going so well, sent Doc to do the job.”

  Early shook his head. “Joey loves you, boss. That’s why he told you to come up here, because he couldn’t bear to kill you. So why would he change his mind now? Besides, you think Joey’d pick those two?”

  “Nawh. If Joey were in the same room with Doc and Speed, he’d step on them like they were water bugs. He wouldn’t send those bums to do me. The man has more respect than that. Besides, you’re right, he loves me too much.”

  Early glanced over at Jack. The big man’s mouth was turned down at the corners, like he tasted something rotten. Early really liked Jack. Actually, he’d grown to love the man. Which meant he liked to see him happy. “So, what do you think, Jack, you want me to shoot ’em?”

  At that Jack Graham wheeled the big heavy car right off the road into the parking lot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, cutting in front of a pickup truck that squealed and fishtailed, but stopped, the driver inside glad he’d listened to his wife and had that 500-dollar brake job.

  “What do you mean, shoot ’em?” Jack looked like he was going to blow up, like he might explode all over the inside of the Rolls.

  Early was confused. Wasn’t he a bodyguard, for chrissakes? Wasn’t that what Jack had been talking about for months, doing Speed and Doc?

  Though to tell you the truth, at first Early didn’t think he wanted to. He was nervous about it, lay awake nights thinking how that would be. He knew it’d be nothing like that time he’d got real thirsty after a track kitchen meal of white bread and chicken wings, swaggered in the front door of the liquor store with his finger poked in his jacket pocket like it was a gun, and said Gimme y’all’s cash and a six-pack of Bud. The liquor man had laughed, busted his arm with a baseball bat, next thing Early knew he was doing 37 months at Angola in West Feliciana Parish, compliments of the Louisiana State Penal Authority. But that time hadn’t been for real. No gun.