Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places

by Loren Estleman

  Nothing came of that, as no one cares about such creatures; but as happens in the course of things, something far more trivial set events against me.

  It wasn’t the boy at the West India docks, for I paid him handsomely in return for his silence; nor even the vagabond I doused with coal-oil and touched off with a match in Soho. They didn’t even make the Telegraph. An anarchist bombing in the Underground drove them square off the columns.

  I wonder just how one goes about constructing a bomb? Black powder is easily obtained, fuses and timers even more so; and books on the subject are available in certain places with which I’m familiar. I should like to blow up the Tower, at a peak time when all the tourists are filing past the crowned jewels, the blood and entrails of the innocent commingling with the baubles of the privileged few. But I suppose that’s an impossible dream now.

  No, it was a trifling affair that undid me, scarcely worth including in one’s memoirs. A filthy little girl in pinafores ran square into me on my way home from a public-house, long after the hour when such creatures should be in bed. I stomped her, of course. There happened to be witnesses present—busybodies, who ought to mind to their own affairs—and I was forced by sheer numbers to retreat to Henry’s laboratory and scribble out a cheque for some petty amount in the way of repairs—contusions and abrasions, that’s all the thing was about. Given time, I’d have put the little baggage in crutches for life. But everything can be bought off, even indignation. The worst consequence was I’d been identified in connection with my dear benefactor.

  The incident worked on Henry. I wonder if that precious conscience of his is at all diminished by sharing some of it with me. In any event he laid off the drug that led to my delivery for months.

  Guv’nor, have you ever spent months in confinement, separated by iron bars from your true nature? Well, the Jekyll in me—curse the prude—hopes you never will.

  I’d have none of it. When first he made my acquaintance, I was nearly a dwarf, stunted by decades of repression. Now, having feasted on the septet of sins, I stood close to his height. I’d grown too strong to remain incarcerated by anything so juvenile as temperance.

  But attaining liberty was no small challenge. Henry was a man to keep vigil. As long as I was in his thoughts, I might as well have been in chains.

  Well, even a genius needs to sleep; or relax his guard and slip into a daydream. And Edward Hyde has no need of rest. Evil feeds upon itself, like a mushroom growing in the dark.

  I sprang forth as he sat on a public bench, ruminating; a dim silly memory of his mother giving him a biscuit for some darling act of sweetness on his part. I might have vomited if I hadn’t been waiting for just that moment. He had time, in the instant before the transformation was complete, to register shock and horror: He’d fallen into his repose a man erect and clean-shaven, nails pared, an exemplar of civilisation, and awoke bent and hirsute, a brute from an age of savagery and stone, where men took their pleasures with club and spear.

  I was as a wild horse unbridled; a lion, rather, suddenly released from its cage. I charged across the heath, coattails flying, swinging my stick to open a path through the strolling sluggards standing between me and the orgies I craved. How well I remember their faces changing from annoyance to fear when they looked upon mine, black with engorged blood and white with gnashing teeth.

  Storming across a revoltingly charming footbridge, I came upon a stranger, immaculately attired for the evening, with snow-white whiskers. He tipped his hat and bade me good evening.

  Had he said nothing and stepped aside, he might have been spared. The mere kindness of his diction drove me to fury. I bludgeoned him to death.

  How he pleaded for mercy! How he mewled when the gold knob of Jekyll’s stick broke his skull. When the blood spurted from his lips, I’d have gladly shattered every bone in his body. But by then he was inexorably dead; his eyes stared sightless at what I have to own was a sky sprinkled beautifully with stars.

  I am an unfortunate man.

  The fellow I’d killed was a member of Parliament, one Sir Danvers Carew, and to put the fine point upon it happened to be popular with both the voters and the press. He was a generous donor to charities; of all things for a politician to be.

  And I’d been seen.

  By a fool housemaid, mooning in a window, who’d observed me well enough in the gaslight to provide an accurate description for Scotland Yard.

  So I went underground, into the safe house of the body of Dr. Henry Jekyll.

  Understand, my memories were his. He was fully aware of what I’d done, and of his own complicity in keeping it secret. O, I know my Henry, better than he knows himself. He would never condone my conduct, but neither would he expose it, lest it reflect upon himself. I ask you, who is the hypocrite here?

  I blended the ingredients of the elixir from memory and crawled back under his skin. The old agony was now nearly gone. Hyde slid into Jekyll, and Jekyll into Hyde, as easily as a button passing through a worn eyelet.

  And like that button it slid out just as easily, and at the most inopportune times; but we were both unaware of that as yet.

  I lay doggo for a while, as who would not? Safe in the carapace of the good Henry Jekyll, setting the broken bones and draining the pus of the poor, pooh-poohing their gratitude whilst reveling in it; pretending there had never been little naughty Eddie inside noble Hank since Cain slew Abel. No man had ever invented a better place of concealment. I was the luckiest scoundrel ever born—had I been born.

  Was it a mistake to leave the broken half of Henry’s own stick at the scene of the murder of Sir Danvers Carew? Or did I want to implicate him?

  Does anyone care? I hate the man. I would never have existed but for him.

  I am back inside him now, but we can both feel the restorative wearing off. My accursed strength is the culprit. He fears to leave the laboratory lest the most wanted criminal in London should suddenly appear in the middle of Piccadilly.

  He blames the impurity in the original powder, which can’t be duplicated, for his inability to maintain his original identity. What he doesn’t understand—which I do, as his Greater Understanding—is he prefers to remain Edward Hyde. I’m younger, to begin with, having appeared late in his awakening, and I have delicacies yet to taste, virgins to deflower, innocents to sully, purses to pinch, banks to rob, dogs to kick, and kittens to drown. We could own the Empire, would we just put decency aside. All he must do to banish me to limbo is confess his humanity.

  This he will never do.

  The beaker stands, in appearance no more prepossessing than a pint of beer in a friendly pub. Peace awaits upon the consumption. He reaches for it.

  But before he can grasp it, his hand is covered with coarse hair and ropy veins. It’s the hand of a murderer. It closes into a fist and draws away.

  Not yet, Henry. Not just yet.

  A gentleman keeps his appointments.

  I have an assignation in Whitechapel, with a comely piece named Mary Kelly, a delectable flame-haired daughter of Erin, and available for a shilling. She’s far more fetching than the others I’ve encountered in that neighbourhood. I’m unable to use my name now; events beyond the control of us both have forced me to be circumspect.

  She knows me only as Jack.

  You Owe Me

  I never pass up the opportunity to write about Depression-era crime. My first novel, The Oklahoma Punk (terrible title, forced on me by the publisher; I’ve retitled it Red Highway in all subsequent editions), was my first foray into that territory. I doubt “You Owe Me” will be my last.

  • • •

  Robbing banks is a tough habit to break.

  I’ve got the old itch; disaster whispering in my ear, its lips warm as a woman’s. I get stiff as a fencepost just thinking about it.

  It’s been months since South Bend. Gigantic foul-up that it was, with too many heroes and that gun-silly Nelson shooting up half the town, I’m ready to go again. My face is about healed, except
for some puffiness around the eyes, and in the mirror I look like a cousin of mine a couple of times removed. I doubt even Pop would know me at first glance. Doc Cassidy does good work.

  As he should, for the money.

  This being on the lam is costly. I don’t recommend it, unless you’ve got cash in the bank; but I don’t recommend that, either.

  I just might take it.

  They call me “John the Killer” in the Literary Digest—a rag I’d never have gotten into under normal circumstances. Which is a raw deal. I only killed one person, a cop, and he shot me first.

  The name didn’t stick, though; no one else uses it. Of all the Baby Faces, Pretty Boys, Mad Dogs, and Machine-Guns this and that, I’m the only bandit known almost exclusively by his last name. “Dillinger” in a headline is enough to sell out several editions.

  Public Enemy Number One; that stuck, and how. But it isn’t really a nickname, now, is it?

  I’ll need three things.

  The car’s easy. I can boost one off the street or grab a brand-new demonstrator from a dealership, like in Greencastle. Guns are more challenging, but if I drive around long enough I’ll see the Stars and Stripes hanging from a pole and do some shopping in a National Guard armory. I keep a .45 handy for just such errands.

  A crew, that’s something else. Nelson, Van Meter, Charley Floyd are scattered all over the forty-eight, and the screws in Indiana are measuring Handsome Harry for the hot seat. That means a trip to St. Paul and the mail drop there to see if the others have left any word. You can’t stick up a bank alone.

  You need a man at the door, preferably with a chopper, a man to clean out the vault, someone outside for crowd control, and a wheel, the best you can find. Two or three more top hands, just for insurance. They don’t come cheap, so all this guff you hear about John Dillinger’s hidden loot is strictly for Dime Detective. It goes out almost as fast as it comes in. If anyone had told me how expensive it is to live the Life of Crime, I’d have trained for the stock market; it’s just as crooked, but the risks are less fatal.

  Not that I’d choose that route. I’d rather go down in a hail of lead than molder away in some office, waiting for my heart to blow out.

  I’m at least partly to blame for all the bother.

  They didn’t install all those time locks and solid oak tellers’ cages to keep out a hick like Clyde Barrow and his slutty gal-pal, that’s certain. And if I put any more armed guards to work I’ll clear up the Depression single-handed. I should be with FDR’s Brain Trust.

  But I don’t do it for the money.

  Sure, I like twenty-dollar shirts, suits cut to my build, a legit new car every few months for joy-riding, room service in St. Paul—a good old town where the graft’s reasonable so they mostly let you alone—and a fat roll in my pocket; but I’d knock over the brokest bank in Podunk for no more than you’d get from a cash register in a Piggly Wiggly, just for kicks.

  Regrets? Some; I wish I’d kept my head that time in East Chicago. Nelson thinks a day without killing is a day wasted, but not me. That poor sap was just doing what they paid him for, and not enough in these times. I miss Billie, my one-and-only. That midget Purvis locked her up after Little Bohemia, just for hanging around with me. Little Bohemia, I regret that one major-league; though not as much, I bet, as the G-men who put us wise by opening fire on a group of law-abiding fishermen, thinking it was the “Terror Gang.”

  I wish my mother didn’t die when I was three.

  I’d do a lot of things different, given half the chance. But I don’t regret not being a straight.

  In 1923, I knocked a greengrocer over the head and stole his roll. They said if I turned myself in, the judge would go easy on me. They said I wouldn’t even need a lawyer. I was twenty years old. I was thirty when I got out of the Indiana State Penitentiary.

  You support these jokers; you make them possible.

  You owe me ten years’ wages; counting penalties and interest, you’re deep in the red.

  I met useful people in the Michigan City pen: Bankrobbers who’d worked out all the wrinkles, based on past mistakes. No one ever learned anything from his successes. I can quote Dale Carnegie on that.

  That was just fourteen months ago, but I’ve been busy ever since.

  A year ago May I was just another ex-con, dumped out into the middle of an economic emergency. Now I’m more famous than Babe Ruth. Even that crumb Hitler knows my name: He says America’s chock-full of gangsters like John Dillinger.

  I’m no gangster. They’re foreigners, Eye-ties and Micks, stirring up illegal booze in bathtubs and gunning down one another in the streets; and God help the innocent that wanders into the crossfire. Me, I go where the money is and take it straight from the source, just like Jesse James. All clean and straightforward: Robin Hood, if he had V-8 Fords and General Thompson’s gun. Imagine what Billy the Kid could do with those.

  I’ll never get shut of the stink of that craphole in Michigan City. I sure as hell am never going back. That’s why I didn’t hang around Crown Point any longer than I had to.

  Truth to tell, though, that bust-out was almost as much fun as pushing in a First National.

  I walked square into the arms of the cops in Tucson like a dumb cluck. You can put that one on my list of things I’d do different. They flew me back to Indiana; only time I was ever in a plane. I didn’t enjoy the experience. I thought they were going to dump me out at a thousand feet and save the state the expense of an electric bill.

  But I survived, to cool my heels in the Crown Point Jail awaiting trial for the murder of a sheriff in Lima, which wasn’t even my deal. I was still in my cell when Pierpont and Boobie Clark split open his skull with a gun-butt busting me out. I’m almost as much a whiz at getting arrested as I am at avoiding it.

  Crown Point was no crackerbox, I can tell you that. It took up a city block and was built better than most prisons. And the sheriff, Lillian Holley, wasn’t the creampuff the press made her out to be, based on her sex, after I crashed out. She’d stepped into the office after the former sheriff, her husband, was shot to death by some screwball, and she didn’t waste any time. She took firearms training, learned to pick ants off a hill with a chopper, and looked me square in the eye when they brought me in wearing bracelets: Public Enemy Number One face-to-face with Molly McGee. She was a tall woman, dressed like the president of a ladies’ garden club, and brought sandwiches and beer for the gang of laws crowded around to make sure they got the credit they thought they had coming to them; but for me all she brought was that steely-eyed stare. Not in a million years would she have let her picture be taken with my arm on her shoulder, like that dope of a prosecutor. That was the finish of him; the press came down on him like a flock of crows.

  But it wasn’t the finish of me.

  They said I carved a wooden gun and bluffed my way out of that hole. Well, it was a fake, sure enough, but it wasn’t all wood, and I’m nobody’s idea of an artist with a jack knife even if it was. The barrel was bored out with a drill press by Mr. None-of-Your-Business in Chicago, with the hollow handle of a safety razor slid in to make it look more genuine. You can get almost anything in jail if you’re good to the turnkeys and you’ve got somebody on the outside; a decent imitation, if not a real gun. But it’s part of the legend now. I gave it to my sister Audrey to hand down to her grandkids someday. See, I was a celebrity now, thanks to the press I got in stir. I scooped Stalin’s purge.

  That toy gun got me through a dozen doors. I don’t know how many times I marched the length of that building, forward and back, collecting hostages and information on the layout, the number of armed men outside, and whether I could get to the garage without stepping into the open. At the end I had to cross through an exposed courtyard, every nerve standing on edge, in a scrum of hostages. I guess they were just as agitated as I was.

  I smashed the carburetors in all the vehicles that could chase me and hopped into a sweet black Ford V-8 sedan, which was always my automobile of choice
when I was working. It turned out to belong to Sheriff Holley. She took heat for that along with everything else.

  Then I made the mistake of my life: Regret Number Six, if you’re keeping count.

  I drove a stolen car across the Indiana state line into Illinois. That made me a federal case. Before that, J. Edgar Hoover, that sawed-off little fairy, couldn’t touch me. They’re talking about making bank-robbing federal now, which is something else you can thank me for; but not then.

  So now I was number one on the G-men’s hit parade. It meant there was no place in the United States I could hole up safely for more than a few days.

  Everyone knows about Little Bohemia. It was supposed to be a vacation for me and the boys and girls, a quiet lodge in the woods in Wisconsin, and it would have ended peaceful if the mom-and-pop that owned it didn’t rat us out to the locals. All it came to was their house shot to pieces, a bunch of drunken fishermen with it, and Nelson two more notches on his belt. That made three feds for him; so far nobody’s matched his record.

  We had to leave the girls behind, but all of us desperate characters crawled out second-story windows and ran away through the woods like a herd of deer.

  I went to cover after that, holing up in Chicago with a new face and a new girl. I can’t be without a woman: Call it my weakness if you like, but I can never get such tender mercy from anyone else in this world. Polly’s good company, though she’s no Billie. She thinks I’m a salesman named Jimmy.

  St. Paul will probably cost me double, given the present situation; that city understands the basic principles of supply and demand. I may have to go on the cuff until I make the score. But I need the contacts if I’m going to round up a crew I can count on.