They told me about their getaway from Verte Rivage, how the truck they’d stolen had busted a wheel in a bad rut and they’d fled into the swamp and were two days slogging through it before coming to another road. They stole a picnicking family’s car to get to Plaquemine. Buck won a twenty-dollar bet with Russell when they found the Model A unharmed beside the police station. When they got home they had to wash the mud off the money and spread the bills all over the house to dry. The report that they’d made away with ten grand was bullshit—they got a little over five. And if I’d been wondering what happened to my share, Buck said, it’s what they sent to Sharp Eddie to pay for my defense.
“You all ever see the fella gave you the tip on that bank?” I said.
“We did,” Buck said. “Claimed he didn’t know about the sheriffs’ convention. I believed him.”
“Me too,” said Russell. “It’s why all we did was bust his arm.”
Charlie stared into her glass of beer. I had a hunch there were aspects to the criminal life she hadn’t yet got used to.
After Verte Rivage they kept away from banks for five months. They went back to smalltime stickups, to working the poker and dice tables. Then a couple of weeks before Christmas they got a tip from Bubber Vicente about a Jackson bank. It had never been hit. No guard on the premises. They took on a driver named Buddy Smalls and did the job. It went slick as lard and they came away with over six grand. They figured they were back in bigtime business. Three weeks later, on another tip from Bubber, they hit the bank in Bogalusa. The news report Jimmyboy told me about was true—they didn’t get a dime.
“The teller was putting it in a sack when this peckerwood hops on my back like it was some goddam rodeo,” Russell said. “You could say our attention was pretty much distracted from the money for the rest of our visit.”
“I should’ve had that dumbshit guard kick the piece to me,” Buck said. “I never figured he’d try for it. Man’s stupidity got him killed, plain and simple—and added a goodly bit to our troubles.”
“Things did get a wee hairy,” Russell said. “Bang-bang-bang.” He grinned and affected to duck gunfire.
Charlie got up and went to the kitchen, saying we needed more beer. The quart on the table was half full. Russell watched her go, then looked at me and shrugged.
“And here’s the kicker,” Buck said. “We get outside and Buddy’s already flown. Left us high and dry. So I stop this sheba in a little roadster and say we’re taking her car. She says, ‘Ah shit,’ just like that. Cute little thing. Showed me a lot of leg as she got out. I should’ve asked her to come with us—you never know.”
They’d left their own car in Hammond—the yellow Pierce-Arrow, which they’d bought less than a week before Bogalusa—but when they got there the car was gone. They figured Buddy Smalls had it, so they drove the roadster on into Baton Rouge and stole another car and made for Buddy’s place in Metairie. Sure enough, the Arrow was parked around the side of Buddy’s house. While Buck knocked loudly at the front door and called out he was the Western Union man, Russell peeked in the back window and then jimmied the kitchen door and tiptoed to the living room and there was Buddy hunched down next to the sofa and holding a gun pointed at the front door.
“I kicked him in the back of the head so hard I near broke my foot,” Russell said. He let Buck in and they splashed water on Buddy’s face to bring him around. He started crying and saying they always said if a job went bad it was every man for himself. They reminded him that the rule applied only when your partners didn’t stand a chance, it didn’t mean you ran off and made their chances worse. They took him for a drive way out into the boondocks with Buddy talking the whole way, making every pitch he could to save his ass.
“I felt a little sorry for him,” Russell said. “I figured it was partly our fault he run out on us. We should’ve known he didn’t have the sand for a bank job.”
Maybe so, Buck said, but if a guy told you he’d be there, he had to be there, and if he wasn’t you couldn’t let it go. It was one of those lines you had to set, a line a man can’t cross without paying a price, otherwise nothing would mean anything.
“Just because it’s a world of thieves out there,” he said, “don’t mean there ain’t no rules to it.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard him say it.
They figured nobody’d ever find Buddy in those boonies except by accident, and even if they did, they’d never know whose bones they had.
The next morning they’d read about the robbery in the paper and learned that the guard was dead. Then came the afternoon edition with Russell’s sketch in it.
“It was only a so-so likeness, I thought,” Buck said, “but Russell thought it was a little too like for comfort.”
They didn’t waste any time in removing themselves from Louisiana. They packed their bags and closed their bank account and didn’t take the time for anything else except to stop at Charlie’s to see if she wanted to go along—and to leave the notes for me at Brenda Marie’s and Jimmyboy Dolan’s.
They’d come straight to Galveston. They’d been here before and liked it. It struck them in some ways as a smaller version of New Orleans, and not only in the weather.
“It’s always been an easygoing town,” Buck said. “The cops’ll usually give a fella a break in appreciation of a cash contribution to their fight against crime.” He looked toward the kitchen, where Charlie was still keeping herself, then said in a lower voice, “When I first heard it’s got more cathouses than Narlens, I didn’t believe it, but it’s true. Most of the cats real young and sweet, too. Two bucks for your regular pussy, three dollars a throw for the best in the house. And every one of them so far real understanding about my, ah, deprived condition.”
“There’s no shortage of places to get laid, get drunk, or get a bet down,” Russell said. “They don’t call it the Free State of Galveston for nothing.”
“Seems just the place for some sharps I could name,” I said, grinning from one to the other of them.
“For relaxing, yeah,” Buck said, “but not for working, sad to say.” He said that all the big gambling joints and the local booze operations were run by a powerful pair of brothers named Sam and Rose Maceo who didn’t look kindly on outsiders trying to profit at their expense. Sharps who tried their trade at the Maceos’ tables, bootleggers who tried dealing their wares behind the Maceos’ backs—all such interlopers ended up going for a walk in the Gulf of Mexico in a pair of concrete shoes.
“You won’t believe how fancy their nightclubs are,” Russell said. “In the high-stakes rooms you get free booze while you’re playing. We saw the chief of police there one night, drink in one hand and dice in the other. We’ve had some good times in their places, but all told they’ve taken more of our money than we have of theirs. I’ve been tempted to use a trick or two but figured I’d best wait till I grow me some gills.”
“We saw them catch a dude playing card tricks at a poker table one night,” Buck said. “The strongarms were real polite. Would you come this way, please, sir? Got his coat from the checkroom and helped him on with it. Let him take his drink along. Right this way, sir. Week or so later somebody finds a leg on the beach. Just the bottom part. Still wearing a shoe. Florsheim, like this fella had been wearing. Of course, it could’ve been some other fella in Florsheims.”
“Or could be one kind of shark met another,” Russell said.