That was pretty much it for me in the City of the Angels—Mrs. Fitts was only going to be conveniently out of town once, at least to hear Mr. Fitts tell it—so after that episode I turned my attentions south, to Hot Springs, the crookedest little town no one has ever heard of.
Hot Springs had been an open city since as long as anyone could remember, right back to the Civil War. It was a tiny little burg, squeezed in between two hills, North Mountain and West Mountain, which I suppose you could view as the Arkansas equivalent of the North River and the East River of my youth, and it had a splendid row of bathhouses—the Superior, the Maurice, the Quapaw—lining the main drag, where people from all over would come to take the waters.
The town liked to boast that the waters were good for a variety of ailments, whether you bathed in them or drank them, but the main ailment they were supposed to cure was venereal disease, which is what had made Bubbles so popular with the folks up North. A gentleman who’d caught a dose from a drab could leave, say, Pittsburgh on a business trip, scoot down to the Ouachita Range and while away a pleasant couple of weeks or so, especially since Hot Springs had a thriving sporting house district. So you could get cured of one dose of the clap then turn right around and pick up another, all in the same locale.
It was Lansky’s idea to go South. Meyer was looking for a spot between our business interests in Florida, which consisted mostly of racing and gambling, and the big cities of the East. A place off the beaten track, but not entirely uncivilized. We looked around, at Nashville, Charlotte, Savannah, but couldn’t find nothing suitable. Until one day we were talking about baseball.
Maybe we were thinking back to Big Al’s performance at Atlantic City, I dunno, but anyway the topic of baseball came up and of course the Yankees, and I remember that the Yanks used to stop off in Hot Springs on their way north from spring training. It was the kind of town built for Babe Ruth, with food, drink and whores, and no inconvenient lawmen to make trouble for people like Colonel Ruppert, the Yanks’ owner. The town also had a thriving gambling industry, which was mostly conducted in back rooms in the stores across the street from Bath House Row, and with all that moonshine being distilled in the Ouachitas, there was booze aplenty.
“I been there a couple of times,” I told Costello one afternoon. Of the three East Siders, I liked Frank the best, he had the most class. The Little Man was smart and Charlie Lucky was cunning, but Frank was the kind of guy you could be seen with in public. Nobody didn’t like Frank, and Frank didn’t like nobody. “There’s an Irishman mayor, McLaughlin. We can do business with him. Might be a good play.”
“Right in New Orleans’s backyard too,” mused Costello. He was a big guy even back then, beefy, looked like a well-fed diplomat or something, dressed in $350 suits. Judges loved him and he loved them, especially when they were on his pad, which most of them were. Frank had moved up to Harlem as a kid, which was another thing I liked about him. We were the same age too, older than the other mugs. Plus you had to love a guy whose first beef was robbing his own landlady and then beating the rap. “Sam Carolla, his boy Carlos Marcello—they ain’t gefilte fish.”
I had another reason for wanting to go to Hot Springs. The Dutchman, who had an eye for such things, had told me about a cute little frail working the gift shop of the Arlington Hotel, Capone’s old hangout when he was taking the water. The Arlington was a big fancy pile, commanding the turn of Central Avenue as it threaded its way between the hills, and I could see why the Big Fella liked it. From a fourth-floor suite—Al always stayed in room 442—gunners could command the avenue coming and going, so Mr. Brown could sleep easy when he was in town.
My first stop in Hot Springs was to see Mayor Leo P. McLaughlin—“the Jimmy Walker of the Ozarks,” the press called him. He was a type I knew well, a kind of cut-rate Big Tim Sullivan, not as nutso and not as dangerous. He rode around town in a horse-drawn carriage with a pair of horses he called Scotch and Soda and generally was the picture of self-important paddywhackery. The two of us got along well enough, although he could probably tell I was fixing to move the Combination into his territory, and I could tell that he could tell, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t care. I told him I’d be back with a more refined business plan, and we shook hands.
My next stop was the gift shop, to see the little filly. She was as cute as a bug in her pert cloche, with a neat figure and a nice pair of ankles.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?”
That was not the kind of question a gentleman asked a southern lady, but I was from up North.
“Miss Demby, sir.”
“You got a first name—you know, a Christian name?”
She blushed a little. Maybe she reminded me a little of Freda Horner, maybe she didn’t. “Agnes.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do say.”
“Always liked that name.”
“How come?”
“My mother’s middle name. ‘The little lamb.’ ”
“Huh?”
“You know, like Agnes Day, the lamb of God.”
She gave me the fisheye. “Is that some of that Catholic stuff? Papa says to keep clear away from that Catholic stuff. It ain’t Christian.”
“How’d you like a soda, Miss Agnes?”
She blushed again, which meant she’d had plenty of practice. She was obviously used to strange men sweet-talking her. She came out from behind the counter, so I could feature her gams through her dress. It was almost always hot in the South. Diaphanous. Nice.
“I’m working.”
“All day?”
“I get off at five.”
“Soda shop’s still open then, I’ll bet.”
She gave me the eye. I was taller than she was, which was a plus. “I guess so.”
“So we got a deal?”
“I don’t know your name.”
“Madden.”
Now she frowned, and I wondered if my reputation had preceded me. “That Irish?”
“I’m from England, as a matter of fact.”
I could see the relief. “For a minute there you had me worried. Papa says—”
“Papa?”
“The Postmaster.”
“Pick you up at five.”
She was dumb, but not much dumber than most geese. “Papa says I have to be home by seven. Eleven at the latest.”
We had a swell time. Agnes showed me around Hot Springs, up and down Central Avenue along Bath House Row, then north, heading out of town. I was driving my Doozy. She was plenty impressed, which was the way it should be with a dame.
“We call this Park Avenue.”
“We got one of those back in New York. Maybe you heard of it?”
Ixnay. “Is it as nice as this?”
I looked at the houses, big frame dwellings for prosperous hillbillies.
“Nah,” I said. “Not a patch.”
I got a good gander at the whole town, better than Dutch had. I have to say it wasn’t bad at all.
Because I believe in planning ahead, I wrote her as often as I could. Mostly mushy stuff. “To my Agnes, whom I know to be the swellest fella in the whole world and believe me I met nearly most of the men and women worth meeting in this little world. Agnes, you’re the most marvelous girl I have ever met and I adore you and I idolize you with all the love in my…” You get the idea. The things we do for safety, if not love.
We were engaged six months later. For the ring I gave her a rock bigger than the Ritz. She’d never heard of that either, but then, she was a Republican.