“Which way is west?”
“Ask the doorman.”
Kirkpatrick nodded and felt for the.38 he’d tucked into his trousers. Jones looked at him and reached out for the gun with his right hand. Kirkpatrick took a breath and then passed it over.
“Just walk,” Jones said. “And don’t look back. Just keep walking till they make contact. I’ll be behind you. Give ’em what they want. Don’t negotiate and don’t try to be a hero. Just hand over the money.”
“And then what?”
“We pray these moneygrubbing bastards are honest men.”
YOU COULDN’T MISS THE SON OF A BITCH. IT WAS THE SAME AS watching a drunk man trying to walk straight; they do everything cockamamy. And here was Mr. E. E. Kirkpatrick, executive of Tom Slick Enterprises, trying to act normal. He strolled along the boulevard on a hot Sunday evening with that goddamn beautiful Gladstone grip. Kathryn even loved the color, a light butternut brown. She thought she could even smell the leather from the open window in the big Cadillac, scrunched down in the backseat that would fit four fat men, the Thompson she hocked her life to buy clutched in her arms in case there was trouble. Across the street, in a stolen Chevrolet, Albert Bates had a rifle poked out a side window. And George was in an alley, waiting for Albert to bump the lights, and then he’d move down Linwood Street, down that tony row of dress designers and shoe shops and hatmakers and a dozen places Kathryn wanted to visit, to make contact with the sucker.
She knew this would work out from the first time she’d read the Urschels’ wedding announcement. They went to Saint Louis or somewhere for their honeymoon and they both shared some children and all that tra-la-la. But what she read was “Come and get me.” Kirkpatrick wasn’t twenty paces from the hotel when he set down the suitcase and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Head skyward and cigarette upturned, he struck a match and glanced around him, lighting it, inhaling and taking in the scene.
Kathryn took a breath, waiting for fat-faced detectives with bad shoes and G-men with bullhorns and billy clubs to come out from the sewers.
But nothing happened as she watched the big, broad back of George, in a two-tone summer shirt and tie, wearing two-tone shoes and a fashionable Panama tilted into his eyes, strolling along in the opposite direction, growing closer to Kirkpatrick, who was trying to remain cool and low-key. She could almost see the bastard shaking.
George passed by the Cadillac, and, with nothing to it, gave her a wink.
Five feet from Kirkpatrick, George R. Kelly said: “I’ll take that grip.”
Goddamn, she loved him. She loved that smooth, honeyed way he gave directions. I’ll take that grip… She’d remember that forever.
Kirkpatrick was frozen, staring at him. Kathryn leaned into the window and poked the barrel of the gun out of the car, finger on the trigger, teetering over the edge so that nobody could see it even if they were walking close.
“Hurry up,” her husband said.
“How do I know you’re the right party?”
“Hell, you know damn well I am.”
“Two hundred grand is a lot of money,” Kirkpatrick said. She could tell his mouth was dry when his voice cracked a bit. “We are carrying out our part of the agreement to the letter. What assurances have we that you’ll do what you promise?”
“Don’t argue with me,” George said, nodding to a row of cars across the street. “The boys are waiting.”
“When can we expect Mr. Urschel home?” he asked. “I’m going back to the hotel to telephone his wife. What shall I tell her?”
“You shall tell her that this is money well spent.”
Kirkpatrick set the bag at George’s two-tone shoes.
George bent down and grabbed the handle, and as he reached for it Kathryn shuddered, tongue moving across her upper lip and tasting her sweat.
“Wait,” Kirkpatrick said. “Wait one moment. You tell me definitely what I can say to Mrs. Urschel.”
“He’ll be home within twelve hours,” George said, the suitcase in his right hand. “Now, you turn and walk back to the La Salle and don’t look back. Whatever you do.”
George remained on the sidewalk for a good ten paces and then turned back to the Cadillac, Kathryn crawling over the front seat into the driver’s side and cranking the big sixteen cylinders, both of ’ em watching Kirkpatrick till he disappeared from view. She pulled out onto Linwood and then down to Harrison Street and kept on going south till they found the highway, and she drove for a good six hours, white-knuckled and laughing, with a big, fat moon-a “lucky moon,” is what she’d call it-overhead. They only stopped for gasoline and oil, and a couple of sandwiches and pickles wrapped in paper, ice-cold Coca-Colas in small green bottles.
She never left the money. She kept it on her lap after she and George traded places with the driving. George’s Panama slipped back far on his head, big, hairy arm hanging out the window. The brand-new radio picking up some signals and then going out, hearing some news about that one-eyed flier Wiley Post making it around the globe but nothing at all about Charles Urschel. There was no music in this dusty, godforsaken land, only preachers and blithering morons talking about the Bible and healing and the road to happiness.
“We’re on that road right now, aren’t we, Kit?”
“You’re goddamn right.”
She smoothed her long fingers over the Gladstone, peeking every once in a while at the stacks and stacks of money, the scent of it making her mouth water. She smoothed it some more and rocked that bag back and forth.
A little past midnight, in some no-name town south of Wichita, George pulled into a motor lodge and rang for the manager. The manager was an old woman with a pinched face who said she sure was glad to get a nice married couple and asked them three times if their children were in the machine. And Kathryn gave her an eye like “Beat it,” although the old woman didn’t quite get it and kept on puttering around till Kathryn had to slam the door in her face.
They were wrung-out, road-tired, nerve-frazzled, and finally alone.
George locked the door behind them. They hadn’t brought a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. She carried the grip, and George carried some Log Cabin bourbon.
They drank from some tiny glasses found in the bathroom. And they drank some more. Kathryn took a shower, and when she came out George was next to the bed counting the cash, splayed open from the spread to the sheets. Stacks of twenties had been laid out in row after row, and Kathryn walked to him, feeling lazy-eyed from the booze, and dropped her towel, seeing herself in the long mirror over George. George sat astride a ladder-back chair, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, and his eyes moved up from the money and to his naked wife.
He smiled.
She stretched and fell back into the cash, some of the twenties knocked up into the air with a woosh, and she thought George might’ve been sore. But she should’ve known better. He about tripped getting off his seat and wrestling for his belt, not even removing his socks, garters, and shoes as he turned off a lamp and mounted her. In the moonglow from the window, he took her hard from behind, making animal grunts and saying how much he loved her and how beautiful she was, and all that tripe, as she pushed back hard against him and stretched out her arms before her, her finely manicured hands breezing through a stack of bills and making sure not a single one of ’em was marked.
They did it once in the bed, and then she straddled him in the chair. He looked good in the moonlight, like a lantern-jawed hero, and she liked the way the glow made her skin soft and white and young. Her arms and legs reached around George R. Kelly. Her hands clutching stacks of twenties as she rode him.
“I love you, Kit. I sure love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, soft and meaning it, “you dumb ape.”