Nice-looking guy, in a way. Lean and dark and tall. But those gray eyes of his could look right through you and come out the other side. He came into town five, six years ago. Just discharged after three months in the Army. Heart or something. Twenty-six, he was then. Nice dresser. Sam Jorio and Buddy Winski were running the town between them. Anyway, Johnny Howard went to work for Sam Jorio. Two months later I hear talk that they’re having some kind of trouble and that is ten days before Sam Jorio, all alone in his car, goes off that cliff just south of town. Burned to nothing. Nobody can prove it isn’t an accident, but there’s lots of guessing.
With the boss gone, Buddy Winski tried to move in and take over Sam’s boys. But he didn’t figure on Johnny. He met Johnny at the bar of the Kit Club on Greentree Road and Johnny busted his beer bottle on the edge of the bar and turned Buddy Winski’s face into hamburg. When Buddy got out of the hospital, he left town. There wasn’t anything else to do. All his boys had teamed up with Johnny Howard.
Inside of a year Johnny not only had everything working smooth as glass in town, but he had things organized that Sam Jorio and Buddy Winski hadn’t even thought of. Take a little thing like treasury pools. Syndicates are always trying to move in on a town this size. Buddy and Sam used to each have their own. Not Johnny. He folded up Sam’s pool and Buddy’s pool and let the syndicate come in. He gave them protection in return for two cents on every two-bit ticket. He made more out of it than Winski and Jorio ever thought of.
Another thing. No flashy cars for Johnny. No, sir. A little old black sedan with special plates in the body and special glass in the windows. That was Johnny. No going into the clubs, even the two that belonged to him, with a big gang and a batch of fancy women. Johnny had all his parties in the suite on the top floor of the Baker Hotel. All kinds of wine. Good musicians.
And, of course, Bonny was always with him. Always the same girl. Bonny Gerlacher is the right name. Bonny Powers, she called herself.
Five-foot-two on tiptoe with ocean-color eyes, dark red hair, and a build you wanted to tack on the wall over your bed.
Twenty-three or so, and looked sixteen.
Nobody messed with Bonny. And kept on living. Not with Johnny Howard around.
Well, things went along for a few years, and I guess Johnny was filling up safe-deposit boxes all over this part of the country with that green stuff. Johnny and Bonny. He was smart. Nobody could touch him. Estimates on his personal take went as high as a million and a half a year. He paid taxes on the net from the two clubs. Nothing else. The Feds smelled around for a long time, but they couldn’t find anything.
The way he kept on top was by cracking down on anybody who stepped out of line so hard and so fast that it gave you the shivers.
Then Satch Connel got sick and the doc told him to retire and go to Florida if he wanted to live more than another half-hour.
Satch Connel ran a store next to the big high school. And he gave his regular payoff to Johnny Howard. Howard’s boys kept Satch supplied with slot machines for the back room, reefers for the kids, dirty pictures and books. Stuff like that. I don’t think Johnny Howard’s end of the high school trade ran to more than three hundred a week. Peanuts to a guy like Johnny Howard.
So Satch sold out and a fellow named Walter Maybree bought it. This Maybree is from out of town and he had the cash in his pants and he buys it.
The same week he takes over, he tosses out the pinball machines and the punch boards and the other special items for the high school kids. You see, this Maybree has two kids in the high school. It gave him a different point of view from what Satch had. With Satch, nothing counted.
This Maybree paints the place inside and out and puts in a juke box and a lot of special sticky items at the soda bar and pretty soon it is like a recreation room you can maybe find run by a church.
Johnny Howard sends a few boys over to this Maybree, but Walt Maybree, being fairly husky, tosses them out onto the sidewalk. If that was all he did, maybe Johnny would have let the whole thing drop. But, no. Maybree writes a letter to the paper, and the stupid paper lets it get printed, and it says some pretty harsh things about a certain racketeer who wants him to cheat the school kids and sell them dope and filth.
Some of the wise boys around town talk to Johnny Howard and Johnny says, in that easy way of his, “Maybree’ll either play along or stop breathing.”
You got to understand about a statement like that. Once Johnny makes it, he has to follow through. If he doesn’t, every small fry in town will figure Johnny is losing his grip and they’ll try to wriggle out from under and maybe the organization will go to hell.
So, being in the line of business he’s in, once Johnny Howard makes a statement like that, he has to do exactly like he says.
It would have been like pie, a shot from a car or even a ride into the country, except that a number of citizens are tired of Johnny Howard, and they get to Maybree and convince him that he is in trouble. The next thing, Maybree’s wife and kids leave town with no forwarding address and the talk is that when the heat’s off they’ll come back and not before.
Walter Maybree moves a bunk into the back of the store, so there is no chance of catching him on the street. A whole bunch of square citizens get gun licenses before Johnny can get to the cops to stop the issuing of them, and they all do guard duty with Walt Maybree.
Business goes on as usual, and Maybree has a tight look around his mouth and eyes, and without it being in the paper all of Baker City knows what’s going on and are pulling for Maybree. That’s the trouble with ordinary citizens. They sit on the sidelines and cheer, but only once in a blue moon is one of them, like Maybree, out there in front with his guard up.
The bomb that was tossed out of a moving car didn’t go over so good. The boys in the car were in a hurry, so the bomb bounced off the door frame instead of going through the plate-glass window. It busted the windows when it went off, but it didn’t do any other damage. At the corner, the sedan took a slug in the tire and slewed into a lamppost and killed the driver. The other guy tried to fight his way clear and took a slug between the eyes.
The next day Johnny Howard was really in trouble. His organization began to fall apart right in front of his face, and everybody in the know was laughing at him because a punk running a soda shop was bluffing him to a standstill.
I can’t tell you how I found out about this next part, but Johnny spends two days thinking, and then he gets hold of Madge Spain, who keeps the houses in line, and gives her some orders, and she shows up at the Baker Hotel with three of her youngest gals.
Johnny looks them over carefully, but they won’t do because they look too hard and no amount of frosting on the cake is going to make any one of them look like a high school kid. Their high school days are too far behind them.
But he knows the idea is good and he is doing a lot of brooding about it and he has the dope he wants from Doc Harrington, one of his boys, who is sort of an amateur physician. He has the method all worked out, but nobody who can do it.
Bonny is worried about him, and finally she gets him talking and he tells her all about his plan, and she says that the whole thing is simple. She’ll do it.
You’ve got to understand that in their own funny way they love each other. It just about makes Johnny sick to think of his Bonny killing anybody, because that is not woman’s work. And maybe Bonny wouldn’t normally knock anybody off, but because it is her Johnny who is in this mess, she will wiggle naked over hot coals to get him out of it.
The plan isn’t bad. As soon as Maybree dies, all this trouble Johnny is having dies with him. It doesn’t much matter how Maybree gets it, as long as he does.