Authors: Max Allan Collins
“Mr. Quarry,” he said. “You are kind to come, sir. At such short notice and all.”
“Make it ‘Quarry.’ Or John if you like.” I sat, shrugged. “Maybe Johnny, since we’re past the Mason-Dixon line.”
He winked and shot a forefinger at me. “Let’s make it Quarry, then. John sounds like a crapper, and I already
got
a damn Jack in my life.” He waved a hand heavy with gold-and-diamond rings toward the generous liquor cart. “May I offer you a libation?”
“No thanks.” I jerked a thumb behind me. “I don’t see much security here, Mr. Colton.”
“Make it ‘Mr. Woody.’ Everybody and his mother calls me that. Might attract undue attention, otherwise. As for the scant security, I have never had no need. It’s been my experience that if you deal with people in a straight-up manner, rarely does anyone kill your ass.” He shook his head, his manner regretful. “The same, I’m afraid, can’t be said to apply to Jack Killian.”
I leaned back in the chair, crossed my arms and my legs. “I don’t have any kind of cover story, Mr. Woody. Just a driver’s license. Michigan.”
His head was a little too small for the specs, so when he nodded, it was like the eyeglasses were doing it. “That should work handily. I have bidness contacts in Detroit, as our mutual friend the Broker well knows. That was probably his thinkin’.”
“You didn’t discuss this with him?”
His shrug was elaborate. “We’ve had minimal contact, Broker and me, since the attempt. After all, one never knows with phones. The FBI aren’t the only ones use bugs these days. But if I tell Jack Killian you’re from Detroit, we won’t need any ’laborate cover story. He won’t question the recommendation. All he’ll likely say is, ‘Fine. Long as he’s not black.’ ”
This was the second time he’d referred to his first-in-command in that oddly formal both-names manner.
“Tell me about Killian,” I said.
“Positive I can’t get you a little somethin’?” he asked. He was on his feet, drifting to the liquor cabinet. A pink sportcoat was around the back of his swivel chair. He began pouring himself some Scotch in a tumbler.
“Any pop in that fridge?”
“Yessir. Root beer okay?”
“Sure.”
He got a cold sweaty bottle of Barq’s out. “Biloxi is strictly a root beer town. This is our home-brewed drink, y’know.” He delivered the bottle, then he and his Scotch got behind the desk, which was free of work—just a phone and a notepad with pen.
His expression grew suddenly somber. “You must understand, Quarry, that I take no pleasure in bringin’ you in for this necessary but most unfortunate task.”
My head bobbed back, like I was ducking a punch. “Meaning no disrespect, sir, my contract is with the Broker.
He
sent me here. Although if you have an arrangement with him. . .if you’re helping fund this. . .I’d just as soon
not
know. I view you as my contact, and a sort of. . .facilitator. Are you cool with that?”
He was nodding slowly, smiling, not big, but smiling. “I can see why the Broker sent you. You are obviously an intelligent young man. Vietnam, I assume.”
“Yes, sir.”
He gestured vaguely. “Some of the people on our staff—Jack Killian’s staff included—are likewise veterans, and you should know that I respect and admire your service. I was too young for World War Two, more’s the pity, and too old for Vietnam.”
That left Korea, but I let that go.
He sneered. “Some of these boys from the piney woods who think they’re so goddamn tough got out of servin’ one way or t’other. Political pull or medical reasons or ’cause of unstable mental health, which I guess is also medical, bein’ crazy, when you come right down to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now where was I?”
“Jack Killian. Necessary but most unfortunate task.”
He nodded gravely. Sipped his Scotch. This might be a root beer town, but he wasn’t having any. “Jackie is like a brother to me. That’s why this pains me so.”
From “Jack Killian” to “Jackie”—interesting.
He raised a palm and an eyebrow. “What you have to understand about Jack Killian is that he is highly unusual among the ranks of those that I,
we
, have done bidness with over the past thirty-some years. Most of those I done bidness with crawled out of a mire of poverty to scratch out a livin’, maybe not an honest one, but a livin’. They come from backgrounds of utter despair and abject need. We’re talkin’ lowlife rabble, quite frankly, creatures that crawl.”
“Then why do business with them?” I resisted the urge to say “bidness.”
He raised his chin. “Because such men—and women—flawed though they may be, have overcome adversity. They are the dark underbelly of the American dream, true capitalists one and all. They value a dollar and there is little they won’t do for one. My role in all of this is as a liaison between these hardscrabble entrepreneurs and the upright world.”
If they were so upright, why were they doing business with creatures that crawled?
Mr. Woody was saying, “Biloxi is a venerable, respectable, churchgoin’ Southern community, Quarry. The Strip here is abided with only for two reasons: one of them is money. Can you guess the other?”
“You,” I said.
The big teeth overtook the face again, very white against the dark tan. “You are sharp, son. Sharp indeed. But, uh, have I gotten off the road again?”
“Maybe you were headed back on. Jack Killian?”
He nodded and the smile faded. “Jackie is an unusual case. A unique case. He does not come from indigence. His background, in fact, is privileged. He’s an Oklahoma boy whose father made a fortune as a criminal attorney and whose mother was from oil money. Jackie’s pappy ran for governor and damn near made it—even today, he sits on the Oklahoma court of appeals.”
“We’re talking a silver-spoon hood.”
“Absolutely. And a bad boy from birth. Grade school, gettin’ in fights and beatin’ other boys half to death. Knockin’ up girls in junior high. Gettin’ a Corvette in high school for his sixteenth birthday and celebratin’ with a high-speed chase with the sheriff’s patrol. Only stayed out of reform school by goin’ to a military academy, not that any damn discipline got instilled there.” He chuckled. “He was a wild one, ol’ Jackie.”
I frowned. “Why, did you know him as a kid? I thought you said he was from Oklahoma.”
Another vague gesture. “His parents vacationed here. You see, his daddy—who served in both the House and Senate of the Sooner State, before becomin’ a judge—had plenty of ties to folks right here on the Biloxi Strip. Like old Blackjack Boorman, who took me under his wing. Then, of course, Jackie at nineteen avoided a jail sentence by joinin’ the Air National Guard, and got a year of active duty here in Biloxi. And that’s when I took him under my wing, put him to work on his off-duty hours. Back then, I was just startin’ out—four strip clubs and a bingo parlor.”
“What did he do for you?” I didn’t figure he sat at a mike calling out, “Bingo!”
“Jackie’s a good man with a deck of cards, a regular mechanic, blackjack, poker, three-card monte, you name ’er. Big, dark-haired, good-lookin’ charmer. Could make a friend out of a mark, usually promisin’ to fix a fool up with a girl. Hell, he could clean damn near anybody out. I paid him a nice percentage of the take, too. But, of course, he got greedy, and back around ’64? We come to a temporary partin’ of the ways.”
“Why was that?”
Another sip of Scotch. “He was gettin’ the players drunk so’s he could roll ’em in the parkin’ lot. And he didn’t just take their money, he would kick the holy ever-livin’ shit out of them. To scare ’em, he said, from complainin’ to the management or the cops.”
“But you did get complaints.”
“Sure. Shit, he was runnin’ the badger game right out of this club for a while, settin’ Air Force guys up with my girls and then robbin’ them at one of my motels.”
“This was not on your menu.”
Fire flared in the magnified eyes. “Hell, no! We have always kept things on the straight and narrow, where the kids from Keesler is concerned.”
He meant the Air Force base. Not the elves who make cookies.
He was saying, “It’s unpatriotic, fuckin’ them boys over, plus which it rubs the local powers-that-be very damn fuckin’ wrong. When it’s off-season in Biloxi, we depend on them boys for their paychecks. They need to feel they’re gettin’ somethin’ for their money.”
“American way,” I said. “So how did Killian come back into the fold?”
“Well, once he struck out on his own, he made a name for hisself as a heist artist. Fearless and smart if a little on the loco side. He ran a stolen car ring for a while, top chop shop racket in the South, and he put together a big bankroll. Over those years, we grew close again, because he became one of my best clients.”
“Not sure I follow—a client how?”
That got a big smile out of Mr. Woody, but this time one showing no teeth; this one created a wealth of creases in the tanned flesh. “You must understand my role in all of this, Quarry—on one hand, I’m the post office. A communications source for all the freelancers out there in the world of, well, let’s call it left-handed endeavor. Who’s lookin’ for a jug artist? Who needs a wheelman? Kind of thing. On the other hand, I am their banker. I hold cash. I launder cash. I sometimes invest for them. And I sometimes invest
in
them.”
Bankrolling heists, drug deals, what-have-you.
“And that’s all the Dixie Mafia is?” I asked. “A loose conglomeration of thieves and con men who depend on you here in Biloxi to help them deal with their proceeds?”
This assessment seemed to disappoint him, perhaps even hurt his feelings.
He said, “That’s a major part, Quarry, surely. . .but there’s more. Much more, really. Here on the Strip, these strip clubs are just the bait. But gamblin’—the rear of this buildin’ is a casino, which is open right now. I’ll give you a tour shortly. And there are a dozen more gamblin’ dens of mine, ours, along this highway, although I take particular pride in
this
facility. Most of the girls workin’ the stage are also trickin’, high-end, hundred up. We help distribute bootleg liquor, tax-free stuff, a hangover from decades of Mississippi bein’ dry. And most of the drugs in this and the adjacent states flow through our portals.”
“Okay,” I said.
This was definitely weird—I was hearing all the inside shit that the Broker usually protected me from. But to deal with Killian from the inside, I needed to know the inside of what.
I sat forward. “So what makes Jack Killian a problem?”
He tented his hands and rocked gently in the swivel chair. “I’ll be frank with you, Quarry. Until he sent people to remove the Broker, I hadn’t fully accepted that Jack Killian
was
a problem. I knew he was dangerous. A threat to the status quo. But just not how
serious
.”
“Explain.”
He nodded, the eyes behind the big lenses almost shut as he gathered his thoughts. Then: “Beyond our interests here on the Strip, the major functions of this organization remain those two I first mentioned: post office and bank. Part of what has allowed us to stay under the radar of both state and federal guv’ment is the fairly, uh. . .scattered nature of our clientele.”
“I guess I follow that. You are not one central organization begging to be taken down.”
He beamed. “That’s well put, son. But in the past six months to a year, Jack Killian has been expandin’. He has been buyin’ out clubs left and right—we now own every bar and club on this Strip, and that’s dozens of ’em. He has moved into rural areas where similar strips of sin, shall we say, have been run by this one and that one. The strip in McNairy County on the Tennessee-Mississippi border is a prime example—a dozen clubs run by maybe six, seven individuals. Jack Killian has bought out all but a handful.”
“And this attracts the wrong kind of attention.”
“It does.” He frowned. “But it goes beyond that. When somebody doesn’t wanna sell, Jackie beats the shit out of ’em. He’s had more than a few killed. This reflects badly on me.”
“Can’t have that.”
“Which is why I am cooperatin’ with you and my old buddy, the Broker. I reluctantly agree that Jack Killian has got to go. And I am in a position to put you next to him.”
I took a last swig of Barq’s. “What makes you so sure that it’s Killian who sent that pair of shooters after the Broker?”
“Two things, really,” he said, sitting forward, elbows on his desk. He ticked off a finger. “First, Jack told me a month ago that he was plannin’ to cut off ties with outsiders.”
“Like the Broker,” I said.
A crisp nod.
“And second,” he said, ticking off another finger, “one of Jackie’s bodyguards drives a two-tone green Fleetwood. Which wouldn’t be so tellin’ if I didn’t also know that Jackie’s
short
a man on his staff right now. Asked if I knew of a top-notch replacement. Turns out I do.”
“You know, Quarry,” Mr. Woody said with a chuckle and a gesture of a gold-ring-laden hand, “they call Biloxi the poor man’s Riviera—only they ain’t necessarily poor when they first get here.”
The man in the pink sportscoat, gray slacks and white shoes was showing me around his casino, which took up the north half of the warehouse-like
MR. WOODY’S
building. We’d entered from the strip club through an Employees Only door and were now at the rear of the Lucky Seven, as this part of the facility was called.
That this was nothing you’d confuse with the Riviera—whether you meant the French vacation spot or the Nevada hotel—seemed an understatement.
Starting with tacky gold-and-black brocade wallpaper and a wood-pattern linoleum tile floor, the surroundings were less than lavish. The casino, about the same square footage as the strip-club side, was doing a similarly modest off-season business; the main difference was an older crowd with some women mixed in, mostly blue-hair gals seated along the walls at old-fashioned slot machines, metal jobs that looked like Vegas cast-offs.
On either side of the room, seated in elevated chairs, middle-aged hardcases in white shirts with string ties and black trousers were watching everything, like shoeshine-stand customers wondering where the shine boy went.