Some of the Ghosts had been with the Maceos since back in the bootleg days. I’d been with them not quite two years—but I’d been Rose’s main Ghost from the time I joined him. Whenever he had to go out of town on business, I went with him, and if it was just the two of us, I did the driving. The other Ghosts got their orders through various captains but I took mine directly from Rose and I answered to nobody but him. And after he’d agreed to let me have them as my regular partners, Brando and LQ answered only to me.
This had been a busy week. Just a few days before Rose sent us on the Ragsdale business, Brando and I had tracked down a pair of strongarms who’d been working the island for about two weeks. They’d been stalking big winners out of the Hollywood Dinner Club—the Maceos’ biggest and fanciest place. They’d follow them back to their hotel and jump them in the parking lot, in one case even busting into the guy’s room. A Ghost captain had put some boys on the problem but they hadn’t been able to get a lead on the thugs, and Rose was fuming. By the time he put me on it, six customers had been robbed and two of them beat up. I collected Brando and we started hunting.
Two days later we found them on the mainland, in the Green Dolfin Motor Court just east of Hitchcock. They had a suitcase with twelve grand and were ready to cut for New Orleans. If they had settled for the eight thousand they got off the first few muggings, they would’ve made away clean, but they got greedy—just one more job, then just one more. It’s how it was with smalltimers. No discipline. No sense of professionalism. An hour after we caught up to them they were on a freight train bound for Kansas City. We’d had to load them aboard the boxcar because their hands and knees didn’t work anymore after Brando used a claw hammer on them.
As we started back to the office with the suitcase, Brando did his impersonation of Rose, adjusting and readjusting his necktie knot, eyes half-closed, mouth slightly pinched, saying in a heavy Sicilian accent: “Goddamn, but I hate a fucken thief.” It made me grin every time.
At first Rose was angry when I told him the strongarms were still alive, but when I told him what we’d done to them he paced up and down for a minute, thinking about it, and then laughed.
“You see why I love this kid?” he said to Artie Goldman, his head bookkeeper. Artie just sat there and looked a little out of sorts. He never did like to hear about my end of the business. “Goddamn genius,” Rose said. “Every time those two punks even think of how nice it’d be if they could walk into the kitchen for a glass of water, every time they need to blow their nose or wipe their ass, they’re gonna remember how stupid they were to try thieving in Galveston.” He adjusted my necktie and then his own and beamed at me.
The next day he saw to it that the money got back to the customers who’d been robbed. The strongarms had spent about three hundred of it but he made up the difference from his own pocket. That’s how he was.
LQ told the owner at each place where Ragsdale had put his slots that the machines now belonged to the Gulf Vending Company and the standard fee for their use was 50 percent of the take. A company representative would come by every night to collect. If the owner had any complaints, any trouble from the cops or anybody else, he was to contact the main office on the island and the company would deal with the problem.
None of this seemed to be news to the owners. Even the ones who didn’t really want any machines in their joint weren’t about to argue. They knew the score. What the hell—they got 50 percent of something as opposed to 100 percent of nothing, and they knew they could count on Maceo protection. What was there to complain about?
By the time we were done making our visits it was close to ten o’clock. We stopped at a diner to buy beer for the rest of the drive to town.
The joint had a jukebox, and “Blue Moon” was playing when we came in. A Christmas tree in the corner was blinking with colored-glass electric candles, half of its needles already on the floor.
It wasn’t the sort of place to pull them in on New Year’s Eve. The only customers besides us were a mushy young couple at a back table. Brando and I went into the men’s room to take a leak while LQ went to the counter and ordered the beer.
When we came out of the john, “Blue Moon” was playing again. The cooler beside the front counter was out of order but the guy had some beer on ice in the back room and had gone to get it. “Blue Moon” played out and the mushy guy went over to the juke and punched it up again. The girl stood up and they held each other close and swayed in place to the music.
“Goddamn,” LQ said in a low voice, “I like the song myself, but there’s such a thing as overdoing a good thing. There’s bound to be other lovey stuff on that juke they can dance to. I bet ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ is on there.”
Brando said that was an all right love song but not nearly as good as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
LQ said that one sounded like a song about a bad disease. “I bet the guy who wrote it was thinking about some dame who gave him the worst case of clap he ever had.”
“Jesus, it’s no wonder your wives all left you,” Brando said.
“At least they wanted to marry me,” LQ said. “Only thing women want from you is as far away as they can get.”
“You don’t know a damn thing about me or women.”
The counter guy came back with the beer and put it in a sack. While LQ was paying him I went over to the juke and scanned the titles, then put a nickel in the coinbox and pressed a number button. I stood there till “Blue Moon” finished playing and I watched the selector arm pick up the record and replace it in its slot, then swing over and pick up the one I’d punched and set it on the turntable. The record began to spin and the tone arm eased into the starting groove and the speakers started putting out “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.”
The lovebirds turned to see what was going on. The girl looked confused and the guy was frowning. I nodded at them and touched my hatbrim.
LQ and Brando were waiting at the door. As we went out to the car LQ said, “That wasn’t very nice.”
“That’s Jimmy’s trouble,” Brando said to LQ. “He’s like you. Not a romantic bone in his body.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “That’s the most romantic song I ever heard.”
“Cowboy probably means it,” LQ told Brando.
For a time after we first met, LQ had called me Cowboy because of my boots and the frontier Colt and the wide-brimmed hat I wore back then before I switched to a fedora—and because I’d grown up on a ranch, which was all I’d ever told him and Brando about my past. As he got to know me better he eased off on the nickname and it had been a long time since he’d used it. He was no cowboy himself—he came out of the East Texas piney woods, which made him closer kin to Southern good old boys than to any Texan raised west of Houston.
He slid behind the wheel and started up the Dodge. I sat up in front with him. Brando uncapped three beers with a church key and passed two of them up to me as LQ got us back on the road. I waited till LQ shifted into high, then handed him a beer.
“Salud, amor, y pesetas,” I said, and we all raised our bottles in the toast.
A few minutes later we were on the causeway and looking at the low stretch of lights ahead of us that marked Galveston across the bay. Thirty miles long and some three miles across at its widest point, the island had long been a haven to pirates and smugglers, to gunrunners, gamblers, whores, to shady characters of every stripe. Geographically it was completely different from the place where I’d grown up, but I felt at ease with its character, which Rose had described pretty well as “Live and let live unless somebody fucks with you.”