All Honest Men

by Claude Stanush

  And, of course, they chased after gals. Jess was still the worst of ’em when it come to that. He’d hit a café and take out ever’ gal in it—starting with the head waitresses and then going down to the lower waitresses, the cooks, the dishwashers, and finally the scrub girls.

  Dock was the one that had the most trouble keeping his spirits up. I’d warned him to lay low, so I bought him a radio for his room. Back then the radio was a pretty new invention, and I bought Dock something called a “crystal set.” It had a little thin wire called a “cat whisker” that you put down on different places on a little round silver “crystal” to find different stations. You listened with a headset over your ears. Most of the programs was music—Dock ‘specially liked country music, the polkas and waltzes that was the favorite of all them Germans and Polacks that lived in Chicago.

  Still, before too long Dock got tired of laying low. And after a while, Jess and Joe was starting to get restless too. Whenever the boys started to complain, I’d remind ’em they was living better than millionaires. “Millionaires can’t take time off whenever they want. Or do whatever they want,” I said. But Jess was starting to do some thick drinking again, I could smell it. You ever got a whiff of a rotted orange? That’s how hooch stinks when it’s stale on your breath.

  Well, I gotta be straight here—I was getting itchy too. It was driving me crazy not to be with Louise; she was always in my head. It woulda been real easy for me to hook up with another gal there in Chicago, or any of them big cities I was passing through looking for marks. Women was swarming all over them days—good-looking gals that didn’t just show their knees, they showed their arms too. I seen in the paper how Mister Henry Ford’s wife hated it that the city gals was wearing skirts that “left the knees open to public gaze and showed their bare limbs.” But that Missus Henry Ford didn’t know the half of it! Lots of them city gals’d do things with a man you could only get from a whore back in the old days. You can’t believe how forward some of the women was in the 1920s.

  Only I didn’t have a lick of interest in any of ’em. Not a lick.

  Just Louise.

  Most thieves I knowed hopped from one skirt to the other like they hopped from one mark to another. One woman’s just about the same as the next, long as she’s got the goods. But that’s where I was diff’rent. When a woman got under my skin, she was in there for good, even if she wasn’t there. It’d happened with Vela way on back. And now with Louise. What was it about that little Jew lady that drove me crazy, just plumb crazy, when she wasn’t around? I was missing ever’thing there was to miss about her. Ever’thing! How she pushed her hair outa her eyes, how her leg twitched when she’d had a Scotch, how she winked when I let her trump me playing cards.

  Still, I had to keep going.

  Glasscock had good tipster friends in Chicago, and it wasn’t long before I’d got me a new list of out-of-the-way towns that still had them old-fashioned square safes. When September come around, me and the boys started back to work. But once we got things rolling, I seen that it was gonna be hard to keep ’em rolling. Even if a town had a square safe in August, there wasn’t no promise it’d have a square safe in October. Marks was drying up. And more banks was getting slicked-up burglar alarms that was hard to trip.

  And where’d that leave us?

  In the middle of drought, that’s where.

  I thought about hitting Canada again, checking out the little towns in the east, where we’d been heading when we got hung up in Toronto. But then I seen in the paper where the banks up there was getting wise, too. “Many vaults,” that story said, “when opened by explosives, will contain an unpleasant surprise for the bandits. The breaking of the vaults will explode bombs.”

  Crazy Canucks!

  All this was getting me more and more edgy. Where was I going from here? What now?

  Then, one Sunday afternoon, I got a call from Glasscock.

  “I have a different kind of tip this time,” he said. “This one can throw us right down onto Easy Street—forever. If this job goes down, you can drill a thousand oil wells! I’m telling you, Willis, this is it. My tipster’s a Chicago big shot. He’s rich. He’s politically-connected. And he wants to talk.”

  Well, I thought, what the hell?

  You put a cowboy in a drought, he’ll drink horse piss if he has to.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The big shot was big all over.

  Him and Glasscock showed up at our meeting place—a dock off Lake Shore Drive—in the fella’s long black Peerless. And when the fella got outa the car, the whole thing rocked.

  His name was Jimmy Murray.

  Murray looked just about how you’d think a Chicago big shot would look. Lots of gold rings and coal-black hair oiled on top of his head. Even with a strong wind a-blowing offa the lake, his hair wasn’t moving a mite. And he had two chins, the bottom one bigger’n the top one. When he talked, his voice was kinda muffled, like it was pushing up through both them chins, up into his mouth.

  But what he had to say made me set up straight as I ever set up in my life.

  “I run booze,” he told me. “That’s my bread and butter. Along with a few other things. But this job, what I’m proposing here, is something real different. And real big. I think you boys are just the eggs to do it. We don’t want any killing, see. And the Chicago boys don’t know how to do anything if somebody doesn’t bleed.” He lowered his voice like he was afraid somebody’d hear him, even though we was setting on benches at the end of the dock and wasn’t nobody around but some birds.

  “My inside man’s an ace U.S. postal inspector …”

  I near blowed off the dock.

  A U.S. postal inspector!

  Murray seen my jaw drop. He give me a smile.

  “Me and this bird, we go way back,” he went on. “We both grew up on the south side—same block. We’re tight. Stayed that way. Only now my pal’s pants are tight, if you know what I mean. He likes gin too much. The girls too much. The ponies too much. And all that ‘too much’ means too little right here.” Murray stuck his hand in his pocket. “He’s in deep. He needs fast dough, and he knows how to get it. He just can’t do it himself. And when I say fast dough, boys, that’s what I mean. One night’s work. And you’ll wet your pants when you hear how much we’re talking about.”

  Jimmy Murray. Chicago politician and beer runner.

  This was the idea. Chicago was such a big, rich city there was always big mail trains going in and outa town filled with treasures—U.S. currency, negotiable bonds, jewelry, all sorts of other loot. Because Murray’s pal was a U.S. postal inspector, he knowed exactly which of them mail trains carried what, where and when. If somebody wanted to tap into one of them treasures, all they had to do was to stop the train out in the country and rob it.

  The best part of it: Murray’s pal wasn’t just any old corn pone postal inspector. He was a top ace that some folks called “Old Incorruptible.” He’d put the screws on some of the biggest mail-train thieves in Chicago, like “Big Tim” Murphy. Story was, that inspector had spit in Big Tim’s face when Big Tim’d tried to bribe him with $100,000.

  Who would ever suspicion the top ace inspector of the U.S. Postal Service, a man who’d cracked open the last five big mail-train robberies, and spit in Big Tim’s face, would ever be on the inside of a job?

  “I wanta meet him,” I said.

  I met the “inside man” on a chilly day at the back of Jacobsen’s Restaurant at 11th Street and Michigan Avenue. I was alone. Glasscock and me agreed it’d be better if the fella only seen one of our faces, “just in case.” The “just in case” was if we run into trouble with the laws later on, or if it was some kind of a double-cross.

  We set on a box in the alley where nobody could hear us. I told the man my name was James H. Watson.

  First thing the fella said to me: “I’m going to indulge you in some strong talk here, Watson. Hear me out. I know my groceries. I can tip you off to just about anything that goes into the m
ail trains. The one I like best goes from Chicago to Milwaukee to St. Paul. It’s short, it’s fast, it’s loaded.”

  I wasn’t sure I much liked how he looked or how he talked. He was a skinny thing, jug-headed, and he only used one side of his mouth. And he was one of them “smart-guys.” Used big words and mixed ’em up with street talk. But when it come to the job and the money, I liked what he had to say.

  The inside man said his plan was: The robbers would take one share each while him and Murray would divide one.

  “I’m not one to toot my own pipe, Watson,” he went on, “but I can tell you this—nobody plays me for the chump. Some of these postal inspectors are the dumbest Caucasians you’ve ever seen. They don’t even know there’s enough in just one of those cars for all of us to be sitting pretty the rest of everybody’s lives.”

  “How much you need to set pretty?” I asked.

  “My needs are modest. Sometimes there’s seven or eight on these trains.”

  “Seven or eight what?”

  “Mil.”

  Jesus Christ! A jolt shot from my ears to the ends of my toes!

  ’Course, I knowed nobody was gonna just hand that kinda money over to a band of robbers without a fight.

  “That much money,” I said back, “somebody’s gonna be keeping a close eye on it.”

  “Oh, yes. The clerks on the train have guns. I’ll be clear with you about that. But they won’t shoot ’em. They don’t know how. I know. I’m in charge of gun training.”

  I laughed. I don’t know if I was laughing with that old boy, or at him. But I laughed anyhow.

  “How ’bout the gangsters?” I asked next. “It’s their backyard.”

  “Oh, their minds are on other things right now, like the new mayor and the new police chief. Mayor and the chief are talking about ‘reforming’ this town. But what happens when you clean out a toilet, Watson? That’s right. You have to slop out a lot of crap first. The gangsters are all too busy protecting their own turfs to pay attention to us. Besides, you can pull this job way outside of the city. Out in the country. That’s nobody’s turf.”

  He nudged me like we was already partners.

  “If I didn’t love my wife and kids so much, Watson, I’d go to California after this job goes down and buy me one of those pink mansions; you know, the ones with a swimming pool shaped like a kidney bean. And I’d live just like Fairbanks. Or who’s that pouty-mouthed one? Rudolph Valentino. I’d live like Valentino.”

  Hell, I didn’t care nothing about moving to California and living like no movie star. I didn’t even care about living like one of them Chicago millionaires in the big mansions that set along the edge of that Lake Michigan. I seen a few of them millionaires, and they all looked like they was dead men a-walking. Just bored silly. But the sound of them millions, that I loved! Yeah, this’d be it! The job. And it would get me back the woman.

  It’s true me and my brothers’d never made much outa robbing trains before. But we’d never had the right inside man.

  I wanted to be sure.

  For three whole months, I watched that inspector. He let me do it. I went to the postal station and into a big office that had his name on the door in black letters: “Inspector Frank Fahy.” He had a peephole that looked out onto the loading dock, and I’d look through that little hole at all the Irish and Polack mail-handlers, big sweaty men with big bulgy muscles, piling bags into mail trucks. Bag after bag after bag. Then I’d hit on over to the depot and watch ’em take them bags outa them trucks and load ’em onto the trains. Bag after bag after bag.

  I checked times and dates and schedules.

  Ever’thing checked out. Fahy was on the square.

  ’Course, that jug-headed postal inspector was a odd one, lemme tell you what. That first time I’d talked to him, he was cocky as a jaybird. But as the weeks was going by, he was getting more and more jittery. He’d bit up his bottom lip so much it was scabby. And the sleep circles under his eyes was getting blacker and blacker, ’til he was looking like a raccoon.

  Me, it was the other way around. I didn’t sleep a wink after our first meet. Hearing about all them mail trains sent my mind going helty-skelty. But the more I was working out the plan, the calmer I was getting. Fact is, I was starting to get that “old slow feeling,” like how I felt about Louise. Where things just felt right. Hell, ever ’thing about this job felt right. There I’d been wanting to make me a million dollars, and here it was.

  I just had to work a few things out.

  We knowed we wanted to do the job out in the country, at night. But where, and how, and what then?

  One afternoon, I got in my Studebaker and drove northwest, outa Chicago. I went the same direction as the tracks used by the Milwaukee-St. Paul mail train. And about thirty-five miles up, a couple of miles past a little town called Rondout, I found the perfect spot.

  It was where a country road called Buckley crossed the tracks.

  It was very, very lonely. At night, it’d be very, very dark.

  I stood at that spot, and I closed my eyes, and I went over the whole job in my head—from beginning to end.

  How was we gonna get the train to stop?

  I come up with a plan.

  How would we deal with all them mail clerks without nobody getting hurt?

  I come up with a plan.

  Where was we gonna take all them mail bags, and how was we gonna get them there?

  I come up with a plan.

  How was we gonna deal with the laws that was gonna come after us and the Chicago gangsters that was gonna get jealous?

  We was gonna hightail it to Mexico!

  That whole time I was studying up for the big train job, I never said a word about it to my brothers. I didn’t want ’em giving me no mouthing if things didn’t work out. But after I’d watched enough, and seen enough, and thought about it all enough, I was ready to tell ’em.

  I called a special meet at the hotel. And ever’body showed up but Jess. Jess’d been sharing a room with Joe, so I asked Joe “where’s Jess?”

  “He’s on a drunk, I reckon. Ain’t seen him for a week. But you ain’t been around much to rein him in, old man.”

  Rein him in?

  What I wanted to do was strangle that old boy! A good business team is like a machine, see, and you can’t just yank out one of the parts when the whole thing is oiled and humming. Even if that one part is getting itself oiled with ninety-proof hooch.

  I had to find Jess, and I had to find him right off. So I done what any good detective woulda done: I hunted down his skirts. Joe helped me. We talked to maybe six or seven of the café gals Jess’d been messing with. And number seven, a brawny, busty waitress, give us the goods. “He said he was tired of cities,” she said. “He was going to Nebraska to join up with Booger Red’s Wild West Show.”

  Booger Red’s Wild West Show?

  THIRTY-TWO

  “BOOGER RED’S—The Last of the REAL Wild West!”

  We seen the first poster on a outhouse.

  We’d just crossed over the Nebraska state line, and Booger Red posters was ever’where. On outhouses. Sides of barns. Tacked up on fences. We followed ’em to a little town called Tekamah, me and Glasscock in one of our getaway cars. (I’d left Joe in Chicago so he wouldn’t get a whiff of horse again; left Dock, too, to keep him laying low.)

  There was a big banner stretched across the main street in Tekamah: “Come and See Booger Red Ride—the Ugliest Man Living or Dead. A $100 Prize for any Person who brings in Anything that Can’t be Rode. Anything you can Lead, Ship, or Drag in.”

  We didn’t even need to ask where the show was. Just followed the trail of horses and buggies and automobiles.

  The show was all set up in a field about a mile out of town. There was a big tent puffed out like a giant balloon with a ticket booth out front. And not far away was a smaller tent that had a sign: “Performers and Contest Animals.” That’s where I hit to right off.

  I blowed past a line of peop
le bringing in rowdy animals—broncs and bulls and a coupla crazy-eyed burros—for the $100 prize, and started to walk in through a flap in the tent. But a big hand come down on my shoulder.

  “Can’t go in there, pal,” said a big deputy sheriff.

  “My brother’s in there. Our pa’s bad sick.”

  The law shook his head. “Yeah, I heard it all. Ever’body wants to get a peek at Mister Booger Red’s booger face has either got a lost dog or a sick somebody. Sorry, pal. Gotta buy a ticket like ever’body else.”

  Well, I didn’t know nothing about no booger face, and I didn’t care; all I wanted to see was a fat one—Jess’.

  Me and Glasscock bought tickets.

  We got inside the grandstand just in time for the start of the three o’clock show. A little band with a couple of shiny trumpets begun to play, and there was drums sounding like Injin tom-toms, and then, whooping and hollering, ten cowboys and ten Injins come galloping out of a slit and went around in circles. You didn’t know if the cowboys was chasing the Injins, or the Injins was chasing the cowboys, but it really didn’t make no diff’rence. The idea was to get the crowd all stirred up, and that’s just what it done. The people was cheering and whooping and hollering.

  I peeled my eyes for Jess. But I didn’t see him.

  Then out come Booger Red!

  He was on a huge black stallion, had his thumbs tucked in his suspenders, was a-smiling and a-crowing. And ever’ now and then he’d yank off his big old high-crown hat and flap it around in the air. And that’s when you seen the hair that give him his name; wasn’t a whole lot of it, but it was bright red. And the “booger face”? I found out later what that was about: When he was a kid, some gunpowder’d blowed up right in front of his face, knocking out a eye and scarring up his mug. But if Booger Red had a ugly face, you couldn’t hardly tell it, that old boy was moving so fast.

  That show went on for hours.

  There was cowboys bulldogging steers; pigs balancing apples; men throwing Bowie knives at ladies, knocking cigarettes outa their mouths.