“Got it,” said Les. He patted his suit pocket where his near six grand had been wadded into a big roll. The Thompson had been broken down, buttstock separated from the receiver, the drums laid flat, the whole thing wrapped in canvas and stored in a large suitcase. Les still had a .45 aboard, and his .45 full-auto pistol between the seats, if it came to shooting, though with kids in the car, he knew he could never blast it out with the cops.
On the drive back to the cottage, as flat, dark Indiana slipped by, Les said to John Paul, “When we get back—first thing, we got to look for some new jobs or opportunities. Put out the word we’re looking for action, any action. Last time I’ll let Homer set anything up. He ain’t got the brains of a squirrel.”
“And with a bullet squashed against his skull,” said John Paul, “that would be a dumb squirrel.”
14
SOUTH BEND, INDIANA
July 3, 1934
AFTER THREE TWENTY-HOUR DAYS, they were pretty much done. Every witness had given a deposition, every bullet hole marked and charted, every surface read for fingerprints (none), every spent shell located, every square inch of the rather large crime scene examined, and examined in depth, then examined again. It was scientific crime fighting at its best, with pix of the suspect sent out by wire nationally, all small-town sheriffs and police chiefs notified: “These men are heavily armed and dangerous. Do not approach. Contact Justice Department, Division of Investigation, Washington, D.C.”
Now a last meeting, in the grand ballroom of the South Bend Excelsior, where the fifteen tired agents gathered, with shorthand notes taken and transcript typed by Mrs. Donovan, as all conclusions were hashed out and formalized.
Finally, Purvis got around to Charles.
“Sheriff, you looked at the shooting aspects of the event. I saw you on your knees most days, taking close notes over spent casings, so I’m betting you have something for us.”
“Well, Mr. Purvis, I don’t think I come up with anything you and all these bright young fellas don’t already know. I do have some observations.”
“Please, go ahead.”
“Here’s what I got, not IDs so much as personalities. Maybe some help when we get close and have to figure how to arrest. What I see is two cool hands, one dumb ox, one nothing, and one nutcase.
“Johnny and Homer are the cool hands. They make this robbery work, and, in a funny way, they keep the casualty numbers down. First, look at Johnny. Never fires a shot, or at least I could find no .45 shells on the floor inside the bank that, under the magnifying glass, didn’t have the little ejector-nick characteristic of Pretty Boy Floyd’s Thompson. So Johnny doesn’t shoot, and he even jokes with the folks he’s robbing, that’s how calm he is, but, at the same time, he knows it puts them at their ease, so they don’t panic and bust for the door, which would mean Pretty Boy would hose them down. We owe Johnny on that one. It stays a robbery and doesn’t become a massacre because of Johnny’s coolheadedness. Meanwhile, outside, Homer and his .351 are holding off the cops. He plugged one dead—Officer Wagner, God rest his soul—but after that he shoots accurately, driving cop after cop back, and I have to believe that as good a shot as he is, he could have killed cop after cop. But he knows that America sort of loves its bank robbers and that makes him feel good, that’s part of what he’s after, to be a ballplayer figure as much as an armed robber, and he knows if he kills ten small-town cops, it’ll be a different game. He won’t be no hero but instead a rabid mutt to be shot on sight. He needs that wide sense of public celebration to operate and he skillfully preserves it while taking fire. Also, while he’s up there taking fire, he’s letting all the others get to the car. Maybe he’s dead now, as several witnesses say they saw him take one in the head, and that’s a hit you don’t come back from too often. Anyway, he’s the hero of the bank crew, give it to him.
“Then there’s the dumb ox. That’s Pretty Boy. He’s really the fool that turned the whole thing into a gun battle. He makes a stupid decision when nobody obeys him and fires a thirteen-shot burst into the ceiling, walking the gun all over the place. It was a dumb move, the dumbest. He could have got their attention with one shot. And on the outside, what’s one loud noise? Could be a backfire, a bucket of paint falling off a ladder, one tenderfoot ramming another tenderfoot’s Model A, a door slamming, the baker hitting his wife, anything. Folks’d wonder, but that’s all. A good man on a Thompson don’t even have to move the lever to semi-auto, he’s got a light touch and can feather off a single. Ed Hollis over there can fire singles on full auto all day long, I’ve seen him do it. Not Pretty Boy, and once the sub gun goes rat-a-tat-tat, the jig’s up. And from then on he don’t do much except spray, pray, and take up space. Didn’t hit anybody, could only come up with a few bullet holes in windows, which means he was mostly hitting sky. Oh, he did manage to hit Clark Gable in the head on the movie poster across the street.
“That leaves two. The least interesting is the lookout. No long gun because he had to stand outside so long trying to be invisible, no spent shells, which means he never reloaded his wheel gun. I guess he was their tip-off man, but other than a nod, he didn’t do much. Again, I couldn’t find anything he hit, but if you get around to digging all the bullets out of all the walls, you might find a few was .38s, and that’d be his contribution. The names I hear are John Paul Chase, Jack Perkins, Fatso Negri, all Baby Face cronies. Maybe it’s one of them, maybe he’s a Johnny fan or even, God help us, another Oklahoma sodbuster. Don’t know.
“Finally, Nelson. This punk has a firecracker where his brain ought to be. He’s a hophead who don’t need no hops. Don’t know what makes him tick, but he don’t have no trouble spraying a city street full of moms and kids with his Tommy gun, and if he didn’t hit nothing, it wasn’t for lack of trying. God must have had his eye on South Bend that day. I counted, all told, seventy-seven spent .45 casings with the mark of his Thompson extractor on them, meaning he ripped off one full drum, reloaded, and ripped off half of another. Then he stood over that hero kid, Joe Pawlowski, and put rounds into him, though by the grace of God and Nelson’s excitability, he managed to miss everything but the boy’s hand.”
“Sheriff, is he the most dangerous?”
“Yes sir. By far. He’d be shoot-on-sight, in my opinion. Tricky, nasty, crazy sonovabitch. You see him, put him down hard, that’s my advice, and if I get a chance, that’s what I’ll do without a second thought. He’s too dangerous to take alive.”
“And the others?”
“Charlie will do something stupid to get himself killed. He won’t think nothing out. Mr. X is a pussycat, he’ll go into the cuffs without a fuss. He knows he ain’t got the constitution for Thompson gunwork. Johnny and Homer could go either way. Both are smart and disciplined. I don’t quite see them as shoot-on-sight, but you got to hit them with maximum manpower so that they see no escape is possible from the get-go. Cornered, they’ll give up. Johnny’s escaped already twice, and he believes he can get out of any jug. Probably the same with Homer, so it’s in them that tomorrow is another day, and on that day they’ll pull a wood-gun trick and go free. Plus, they ain’t haters. They’re in this for the money and the glory, not to burn the world down. They really ain’t trying to hurt nobody, whereas Baby Face likes to hurt folks and gets his laughs thinking about all the tears been shed.”
“Mrs. Donovan, did you get all that?”
“I did.”
“Great, Sheriff. One more question: since you know so much, how many banks have you robbed?”
There was a lot of laughter, and even Charles rewarded Purvis with a rare-enough smile, enough to insert him further into legend, but then he said, “None that I can tell you Yankees about,” and more laughter busted out.
When it had died down, Purvis addressed them all.
“Please mark that if you get yourselves into an arrest situation, Nelson gets a slug in the face; the others, depending. Fair enough? O
kay, anything else?”
A few minor questions about per diems came up, another big laugh—say, wasn’t this turning into vaudeville?—and Purvis fielded them gracefully enough, and then said, “Okay, fellas, good work, y’all did well, you have an hour to pack, and Mr. Cowley already has our Tri-Motor on the runway. Sleep late tomorrow, but the duty day will start at one p.m., and I expect to see you in the office. Sheriff, got a sec?”
“Sure,” said Charles.
When the room was empty, Purvis said, “As I said, I think that’s good work. We don’t get that kind of thinking. But you have to understand—and think this through—you can’t just crash ahead. That’s what we did wrong at Little Bohemia.”
“Just trying to apply common sense,” said Charles.
“Gunfighter’s common sense, hard-won. Anyhow, this is personal, I didn’t want to say anything in front of the men, but your wife called the Chicago Office and she needs to talk to you. They said she sounded kind of upset. If you come to need a weekend off, just let me know and it can be easily arranged.”
Charles had a sinking feeling. Had Bobbie Lee wandered off into the woods again and this time nobody could find him? Or maybe he’d been hit by a car. The weight of the damaged child was never far from Charles’s shoulders.
“Yes sir.”
“I’m going to get some lunch. Go to my room and call from that phone. Don’t worry about the cost. I’ll see you in a bit.”
Charles thanked his supervisor, acknowledging the thoughtfulness of the offer, took the key, and went upstairs.
He found himself in the Excelsior’s best room—no surprise—as befits the celebrity that Purvis had become, and the maid had already come through, so it was immaculate and impersonal. But it had probably stayed that way, as Purvis’s personal neatness was already a legend.
He picked up the phone, got the hotel operator, and after the connections were made, heard his own phone ringing, the operator asking her if she wanted to take the call, and finally he was on the line with the woman he married, the mother of his sons.
“Hello,” she said, her voice crackily over the long-distance wires as they hopped from connection to connection.
“It’s me. They said you called. Anything the matter? Is Bobbie Lee—”
“He’s fine.”
“You have to watch that fool kid. He’ll end up facedown in a pond or eaten by bears.”
“Charles, he’s fine, he’s been quiet. He stays in his room and draws rocket airplanes. Every once in a while, he says, ‘Where Dada?’ That’s the only thing.”
“You know I don’t believe that. He don’t even know who I am.”
“He loves you very much, Charles, if you’d let him. Anyway, got a letter from Earl. He made corporal. He likes the field, he says he hasn’t been in a fight yet, but his mind is all set for it if it happens.”
“He’ll do well. He’s got sand, even if he’s no booster of his mean old father. You’re getting the money okay? They said it would take a while for the paperwork to go through.”
“We’re fine, Charles. Better off than most. You provided for your family, Charles, when so many weren’t able to.”
“So what’s this about?”
“Charles, the judge came by yesterday.”
“What?”
This was unprecedented. The judge rarely left the courthouse. It meant something significant.
“Yes. He said he had a message from some folks in Hot Springs. He said—and I wrote it down—he said that you should go to the World’s Fair Saturday at four p.m. and sit on a bench across from an exhibit called Midget Village. They have a whole town there of little midget people.”
“Ain’t that something?” said Charles. The sarcasm was lost on her, however.
“Go there, sit there, have an ice-cream cone. A man will come and talk to you. Do you know what this is about?”
“No idea,” he said. But he had an idea. If this came out of Hot Springs, it meant someone from the Italians was reaching out, because the Italians had connections and influence everywhere.
“Anyhow, anything else?”
“No, Charles.”
“Okay,” said Charles, and hung up.
15
McLEAN, VIRGINIA
The present
BOB HAD COME TO Nick’s under urgent entreaty. Nick had something. Good old Nick.
“I can’t wait to hear this,” said Bob. “I ain’t got nothing but the Underwood stuff.”
“Well, this is substantive, but it’s not empirical. As I said before, not ipso facto evidentiary. But it is solidly circumstantial.
“I’ve read these reports over and over again,” he continued, “and after a while you learn the tone and the way of thinking behind them. Mostly, they’re assembled by lawyers, and they seem to be very thorough legal documents. They proceed logically, they conform to format and outline, they’re put together in such a way as to yield their information quickly—for prosecutors, that is, other lawyers. It’s like you’re reading internal memoranda from a law firm. If I remember, I went to law school three thousand years ago and even passed somebody’s bar, so I think I know what I’m talking about.”
“Makes sense.”
“So I’ve read all the Dillinger reports and all the Nelson reports, going back to Itasca, Illinois, October 3, 1930. Lots of others. Plainfield; Hillside; Peoples Savings of Grand Haven, Michigan; First National of Brainerd, Minnesota; Security National in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; First National in Mason City, Iowa; and, finally, South Bend.”
He gestured at the stacks of Xeroxes of ’30s-style typing, with the odd diagonal designations of CLASSIFIED or FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY randomly stamped across them. They lay on the worktable in Nick’s office/den.
“They’re all the same, and, frankly, they’d put a sugared-up child to sleep. But finally, in South Bend, I get— Well, you read it yourself. I’ve marked it in yellow.”
Bob took the page, put on his reading glasses, and stared at the Xerox, typed up so long ago by the ubiquitous and efficient EPD, and read:
“Noted that robbery team consisted of five different individuals whose shooting actions revealed personality traits. Two, thought to be Dillinger and Van Meter, were cool, collected, and professional. The third, possibly Floyd, exhibited poor decision making and then slow reactions . . .”
And so on, culminating in a set of recommendations of arrest strategies.
“Thus, Nelson demands instant-shooting action without warning (this should be cleared by legal), while great care must be exercised to take only Dillinger and Van Meter, under controlled circumstances, far from public access, and finally Floyd may be counted on to make a bad decision. The unknown suspect is thought to have little criminal experience, and less initiative, and will probably yield to arrest quickly.”
Nick said, “I’d recognize that voice anywhere, though clearly it’s been slightly edited by EPD. That’s pure Swaggerspeak. That’s someone who’s thought hard about this sort of thing, learned lessons, has insightful observations no one else in the office is capable of making. That’s Charles through a screen of bureaucratspeak.”
“I think you’re right,” said Bob. “But what’s this?”
Someone had scrawled Very good! Disseminate! in fountain pen in the margin of the document.
“If you’d ever been in the Bureau, you’d recognize the author of the comment,” said Nick. “Even today, you’d recognize it. It’s that hallowed.”
“God himself?”
“God himself. And that’s tantamount to an offer of lifetime service, with a guaranteed high finish. It’s the original FBI ticket to ride.”
“Wow,” said Bob. “Charles must have really screwed up to go from there to oblivion in so few months!”
16
MIDGET VILLAGE
CHICAGO
July 14, 1934
CHARLES WAS EVEN LESS IMPRESSED with the future than he was with the present. The future, according to the genius architects of the World’s Fair, was a soaring white boulevard made up of cheesy buildings out of some screwball Hollywood picture show with rocket airplanes in it, like the machines Bobbie Lee so tirelessly drew as his brain decomposed further into nothingness. Charles saw lots of flags, pennants, things to blow and flap in Lake Michigan’s stout offshore breeze, all white and tall, but shaky. Towers, triangles, trapezoids, all the features of geometry, turned to stucco in imitation of stronger engineering substances meant to last a while, then go down under the steam-shovel’s grind without much trouble. Get a good blow in and the whole damned contraption-city would end up in the lagoon, and that included the giant zeppelin that hovered overhead, said to be the future of travel but looking to Charles like a bag of gas ready to dissolve in flame. He’d seen a few smaller varieties shot down on the Western Front, and nobody wanted to be near that much hydrogen lighting up.
He walked down the broad cavalcade that transected the peninsula jutting off the Chicago shore and passed by the grand exhibits from the big boys, like GM and Chrysler and Sears, Roebuck, then “Halls” of various things, such as Religion, Science, Electricity, and the U.S. Government. Mock Greyhounds transported folks on the ground, or through the air on something termed a Skyway, a big gizmo that hauled little cars of people through the blue ether on wires, tower to tower. Or you could just walk, which Charles did, noting it all with a dyspeptic heart and an abiding cynicism hard acquired through acquaintance with the century’s charnel houses and hellholes. He passed the French village, where beyond a gate and behind fencing a fraud Frog street was visible, and he wondered if you got the bonus dose of clap that was a part of every GI’s Paris experience in ’18. Other displays to the art of counterfeit included complexes from Belgium, Germany, China, and little Japan.
After a bit the grandeur wore itself thin, and the fair became the Midway, full of honky-tonks, Cracker Jacks, and Sally Rand (not showing her ass till nightfall), where hucksters of various disciplines plied their gaudy trade. He bought himself an Eskimo Pie and sat on the designated bench across from the hutch of buildings claiming to be the famous Midget Village, where all kinds of tiny delights were promised, though Charles could see nothing amusing in that prospect.
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