The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  Nelson Tare just stood like a snow man, or rather like a snow boy. He kept the rabbit covered; his dirty blue finger didn’t move. The trigger waited, the shell in the barrel waited, and so did we.

  Nelly’s face was deathly white under the dirt that streaked it. The eyes were blank little marbles, as always; even his nose seemed pointed like the sights of a gun. And yet he did not shoot.

  Clyde said, half under his breath, “I guess that’s what they call buck fever. You got the buck, Nelly.” He hurried over to take the shotgun.

  Blood from the last-killed rabbit made little dots on the snow around my feet, though the animal was freezing fast.

  “Can’t you see him, Nelly?”

  Nelson said, “Yes. I—”

  Clyde lost all patience. “Oh, for gosh sake!” he exclaimed, and grabbed the gun. But our combined motions startled the jackrabbit, and he vanished into the creek gorge beyond.

  Something had happened there in the snow; none of us knew exactly what had happened. But whatever it was, it took the edge off our sport. We tramped along a cattle path next to the stream, with Clyde carrying the shotgun. We boys didn’t scare up any more game. Nelly kept looking at the rabbits, which bounced and rubbed their frozen red against Clyde Boston’s overalls.

  Clyde teased him, all the way back to the Boston barnyard. He’d say, “Nelly, I thought you were supposed to be the Daniel Boone of the neighborhood. Gosh, Nelly, I thought you could shoot. I thought you were just gun crazy!”

  We walked through the fresh warm mire behind the Boston barn. Clyde said that he didn’t need three rabbits; that his mother could use only two, and would Nelly want the other one?

  “No,” said Nelson. We went into the barn, and Nelly picked up his .22 rifle.

  “Look out while you’re on the way home,” said Clyde, red-faced and jovial as ever. “Look out you don’t meet a bear. Maybe he wouldn’t set around and wait like that jackrabbit did.”

  Nelson Tare sucked in his breath. “You said I couldn’t shoot, didn’t you, Mister Clyde?”

  “You had your chance. Look at Dave there. He’s got a rabbit to take home that he shot himself, even though he didn’t kill it first crack.”

  “I can shoot,” said Nelly. He worked a cartridge into the breech of his rifle. “Dave,” he said to me, “you throw up a snowball.”

  “Can’t anybody hit a snowball with a twenty-two,” said big Clyde Boston.

  Nelly said, “Throw a snowball, Dave.”

  I stepped down from the sill of the barn door and made a ball about the size of a Duchess apple. I threw it high toward the telephone wires across the road. Nelly Tare pinked it apart with his .22 before the ball ever got to the wires. Then he went down the road to the creek house, with Clyde Boston and me looking after him. Clyde was scratching his head, but I just looked.

  * * *

  —

  Nelly began to get into trouble when he was around fourteen. His first trouble that anyone knew about happened in the cloakroom of the eighth grade at school. Miss Cora Petersen was a great believer in corporal punishment, and when Nelly was guilty of some infraction of rules, Miss Petersen prepared to thrash him with a little piece of white rubber hose. Teachers used to be allowed to do that.

  But if the pupil did not permit it to be done to him, but instead drew a loaded revolver from inside his shirt and threatened to kill his teacher, that was a different story. It was a story in which the superintendent of schools and the local chief of police and hard-faced old Mr. Tare were all mixed together in the climax.

  There was some talk about the reform school, too, but the reform school did not materialize until a year later.

  That was after Meisner’s Hardware and Harness Store had been robbed. The thief or thieves had a peculiar taste in robbery; the cash drawer was untouched, but five revolvers and a lot of ammunition were taken away. A mile and a quarter away, to be exact. They were hidden beneath planks and straw in Mr. Barton Tare’s wagon shed, and Chief of Police Kelcy found them after the simplest kind of detective work.

  This time the story had to be put in the paper, no matter how much my father regretted it. This time it was the reform school for sure.

  We boys in the south end of town sat solemnly on our new concrete curbstone and talked of Nelly Tare in hushed voices. The judge had believed, sternly and simply, that Nelly was better off at Eldora than at home. He gave him two years. Nelly didn’t serve all of that time. He got several months off for good behavior, which must have come as a surprise to many people in Elm City.

  He emerged from the Eldora reformatory in the spring of 1918. His parents were out of the picture by this time. His mother was dead; his father had moved to South Dakota with the two youngest girls, and the other girls had married or drifted away.

  Nelly may have been under age, but when he expressed a preference for the cavalry, and when he flourished a good report sheet from the reformatory superintendent, no one cared to say him nay. Once he came home on furlough from a camp in New Mexico. I remember how he looked, standing in front of Frank Wanda’s Recreation Pool Hall, with the flashing badge of a pistol expert pinned upon his left breast, and all the little kids grouped around to admire the polish on his half-leather putts.

  He never got a chance to use any guns against the Germans. He wasn’t sent to France, and came back to Elm City in the spring of 1919. It was reasonable for him to come there. Elm City was the only real hometown he had, and one of his sisters was married to Ira Flagler, a garage mechanic who lived out on West Water Street. Nelly went to live with the Flaglers.

  He began working at Frank Wanda’s pool hall. I have spoken about his skill with his hands; he employed that skill to good advantage in the pool hall. He had developed into a remarkable player during his year in the Army. He also ran the cigar counter and soft drinks for Frank Wanda, who was getting old and couldn’t stand on his feet very long at a time.

  It used to be that in every pool hall there was somebody who played for the house, if people came along and really wanted to bet anything. Nelly would play on his own, too, taking money away from farm boys or from some out-of-towner who thought he was good. He was soon making real money, but he didn’t spend it in the usual channels. He spent it on guns.

  All sorts. Sometimes he’d have an especially good revolver down there in the billiard parlor with him, and he’d show it to me when I dropped in for cigarettes. He had a kind of private place out along the Burlington tracks where he used to practice shooting on Sundays. And in 1923 a carnival came to town.

  * * *

  —

  Miss Antoinette McReady, the Outstanding Six-Gun Artiste of Two Nations, was supposed to come from Canada. Maybe she did. They built up a phony Royal Canadian Mounted Police atmosphere for her act. A fellow in a shabby red coat and yellow-striped breeches sold tickets out in front. An extra girl in the same kind of comic uniform assisted the artiste with her fancy shooting. They had a steel backstop at the rear of the enclosure to stop the bullets. I went to the carnival on the first night, and dropped in to see the shooting act.

  The girl was pretty good. Her lady assistant put on a kind of crown with white chalks sticking up in it, and Miss McReady shot the chalks out of the crown quite accurately, missing only one or two shots and not killing the lady assistant at all. She did mirror shooting and upside-down-leaning-backward shooting; she balanced on a chair and shot. She was a very pretty redhead, though necessarily painted.

  Then the Royal Canadian Mounted manager made a speech. He said that frequently during her extensive travels, Miss McReady had been challenged by local pistol-artists, but that she was so confident of her ability that she had a standing offer of one hundred dollars to anybody who could outshoot her.

  The only condition was that the challenging local artist should agree to award Miss McReady an honorarium of twenty dollars, provided she outshot him.r />
  Nelly Tare climbed up on the platform; he showed the color of his money and the bet was on.

  Miss Antoinette McReady shot first, shooting at the tiny target gong with great deliberation; she rang the gong five out of six times. Nelly took her gun, aimed, and snapped it a few times before ejecting the empty shells, to acquaint himself with the trigger pull. Then he loaded up, with the whole audience standing to watch him. He fired his six rounds, rapid fire, and everyone yipped when he rang the gong with every shot.

  Miss Antoinette McReady smiled and bowed as if she had done the shooting instead of Nelly; she went over to congratulate him. They got ready for the next competition. The girl assistant started to put on the crown thing with its chalks sticking out of the sockets. Nelly talked to her a minute in a low voice; he took the crown and put it on his own head.

  He stood against the backstop. His face was very red, but he stood there stiff at Army attention, with his hands against his sides.

  “Go ahead, sister,” he told Miss McReady.

  Well, they made him sign a waiver first, in case of accident. You could have heard an ant sneeze in that place when Miss McReady stood up to do her shooting. She fired six times and broke four of the chalks. The people in the audience proceeded to wake up babies two blocks away, and Miss Antoinette McReady went over to Nelly with those little dancing, running steps that circus and vaudeville folks use. She made him come down to the front and take applause with her. Then she said she’d wear the crown for Nelly, and this time there was no waiver signed.

  Nelly broke all six chalks in six steady shots, and Miss Antoinette McReady kissed him, and Frank Wanda had to get a new fellow for the pool hall when Nelly left town with the show after the last performance on Saturday night.

  It was six months later when I heard my father exclaim, while he was taking press dispatches over the out-of-town wire. He often did that when some news came through which particularly interested or excited him. I left my desk and went to look over his shoulder, while his fat old fingers pushed out the story on the typewriter.

  HAMPTON, COLORADO, April 2.—Two desperate trick-shot artists gave Hampton residents an unscheduled exhibition today. When the smoke had cleared away the Hampton County Savings Bank discovered it had paid more than $7,000 to watch the show.

  Shortly after the bank opened this morning, a young man and a young woman, identified by witnesses as “Cowboy” Nelson Tare and Miss Antoinette McReady, walked into the bank and commanded tellers and customers to lie down on the floor. They scooped up $7,150 in small bills, and were backing toward an exit, when Vice-President O. E. Simms tried to reach for a telephone.

  The trick-shot bandits promptly shot the telephone off the desk. They pulverized chandeliers, interior glass, and window lights in a rapid fusillade which covered their retreat to their car.

  Within a few minutes a posse was in hot pursuit, but lost the trail near Elwin, ten miles south of this place. A stolen car, identified as the one used by the bandits, was found abandoned this noon near Hastings City. State and county officers immediately spread a dragnet on surrounding highways.

  Nelson Tare and his female companion were easily recognized as stunt shooters with a traveling carnival which became stranded in Elwin a week ago. A full description of the hard-shooting pair has been broadcast to officials of five nearby states.

  * * *

  —

  All the time I was reading it, I kept thinking of Nelly Tare, half-pint size in a dirty red coat, asking me, “Dot any duns?”

  They were captured in Oklahoma that summer, after another robbery. Antoinette McReady, whose real name turned out to be Ruth Riley, was sent to a women’s penal institution; Nelly Tare went to McAlester Prison. He managed his escape during the winter two years later, and started off on a long series of holdups which carried him south into Texas, over to Arkansas, and north into Missouri.

  Those were the days of frequent and daring bank robberies throughout that region. There were a lot of other bad boys around, and Nelly was only one of the herd. Still, he began to appear in the news dispatches with increasing regularity, and when some enterprising reporter called him Nice Nelly, the name stuck and spread. It was a good news name, like Baby Face or Pretty Boy.

  They recaptured him in Sedalia; the story of his escape from the Jefferson City Penitentiary in 1933 was front-page stuff all over the nation. It was always the same—he was always just as hard to catch up with. He was always just as able to puncture the tires of pursuing cars, to blast the headlights that tried to pick him out through the midnight dust.

  Federal men didn’t enter the picture until the next January, when Nelly kidnapped a bank cashier in Hiawatha, Kansas, and carried him nearly to Lincoln, Nebraska. That little state line made all the difference in the world. The so-called Lindbergh Law had come into existence, and Nice Nelly Tare became a public enemy on an elaborate scale.

  It is not astonishing that some people of Elm City basked in this reflected notoriety.

  Reporters from big-city papers, photographers from national magazines, came poking around all the time. They interviewed Nelly’s sister, poor Mrs. Ira Flagler, until she was black in the face—until she was afraid to let her children play in the yard.

  They took pictures of Frank Wanda’s pool hall, and they would have taken pictures of Frank if he hadn’t been dead. They managed to shake Miss Cora Petersen, late of Elm City’s eighth grade, from asthmatic retirement. Her homely double-chinned face appeared in a fine-screen cut, in ugly halftones—a million different impressions of it. READ TEACHER’S STORY OF HOW NICE NELLY, BABY BANDIT, DREW HIS FIRST BEAD ON HER. OTHER PICTURES ON PAGE SEVEN.

  Clyde Boston and I used to talk about it, over in Clyde’s office in the courthouse. Clyde Boston had been sheriff for two terms; he was just as apple-cheeked and good-natured as ever, though most of his hair was gone. He would shake his head when we talked about Nelly Tare, which we did often.

  “You know,” he’d say, “a lot of people probably doubt those stories about Nelly’s fancy shooting—people who haven’t seen him shoot. But I still remember that time he had you throw a snowball for him to break with a rifle. He certainly is gun crazy.”

  * * *

  —

  It was during the late summer of 1934—the bad drought year—when Nelly held up a bank at Northfield, Minnesota, and was promptly dubbed the Modern Jesse James.

  Officers picked up Nelly’s trail in Sioux Falls, and that was a relief to us in Elm City, because people had always feared that Nelly might be struck with a desire to revisit his boyhood haunts and stage a little shooting right there in the lobby of the Farmers’ National Bank. Nelly’s trail was lost again, and for two weeks he slid out of the news.

  Then came the big story. Federal men very nearly recaptured him in Council Bluffs, though he got away from them even there. Then silence again.

  About two o’clock of the following Thursday afternoon, I went up to the courthouse on printing business. I had stopped in at Sheriff Clyde Boston’s office and was chewing the rag with Clyde, when his telephone rang.

  Clyde picked up the phone. He said, “Yes…Yes, Barney…He did?…Yes…Glad you called me.” He hung up the receiver and sat drumming his fingers against a desk blotter.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “That was young Barney Meisner, down at the hardware store.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “He said that one of the Flagler kids was in there a while ago and bought two boxes of forty-five shells. Funny, isn’t it?”

  We looked at each other. “Maybe Ira Flagler’s decided to emulate his wife’s folks,” I said, “and take up trick shooting on the side.”

  Clyde Boston squeezed out a smile. “Guess I’ll ride up to their house and ask about it.”

  So I went along with him, and when we got to the green-and-white Flagler house on West Water Street, w
e saw a coupe parked in the drive. Clyde breathed rapidly for a moment; I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel, until he could read the license number of the car. Clyde relaxed. It was a Vera Cruz County number; it was one of our own local cars; I remembered that I had seen Ira Flagler driving that car sometimes.

  Clyde parked across the street, although down a little way. He got out on the driver’s side and I got out on the other side. When I walked around the rear of the car and looked up at the Flagler house, Nelly Tare was standing on the porch with a revolver in his hand.

  I guess neither Clyde nor I could have said anything if we had been paid. Clyde didn’t have his own gun on; sheriffs didn’t habitually carry guns in our county anymore. There was Nelly on the porch, covering us and looking just about the same as ever, except that his shoulders had sagged and his chin seemed to have receded a good deal more.

  He said, “Lay down on the ground. That’s right—both of you. Lay down. That’s right—keep your hands up.”

  When we were on the ground, or rather on the asphalt pavement which formed the last block of Water Street, Nelly fired four shots. He put them all into the hood and engine of the car, and then we heard his feet running on the ground. I didn’t look for a minute, but Clyde had more nerve than I, and got up on his haunches immediately.

  By that time Nelly was in the Flagler coupe. He drove it right across their vegetable garden, across Lou Miller’s yard, and out onto the pavement of Prospect Street. Prospect Street connected with a wide gravel road that went south toward the Rivermouth country and the town of Liberty beyond. Nelly put his foot on the gas; dust went high.

  Those four bullets had made hash out of the motor. The starter was dead when Clyde got his foot on it; gas and water were leaking out underneath. Mrs. Ira Flagler stumbled out upon the porch with one of her children; they were both crying hysterically.

  She said, “Oh, thank God he didn’t shoot you, Mr. Boston!”