by Amy Reading
Just then, another insistent sound was joined to the steady click of the stock ticker and the booming waves—the buzz of a motorboat. Norfleet looked down to see a single man sitting in it. The man was heading directly for the dock at the foot of the cliffs under the clubhouse. The stock ticker clicked. The waves boomed. The motor churred, but still no one said anything. To Norfleet, it simply did not feel right. Since he could find no trace of Furey, he decided to leave. He moved toward the front door, through which he could now see the man from the motorboat running up a set of stairs, but before he could get to the door, Steel stepped in front of him, blocking his view.
“We have an ideal location for work, haven’t we?” Steel asked. Norfleet replied that it seemed to suit Steel’s purposes perfectly. “In that minute of fill-in conversation,” Norfleet later recalled, “Steel and I knew that we were wise to each other. I could feel that he knew I knew he was ready to use desperate methods.” This gang’s method, apparently, was to lure wealthy men up to their club and then “roll” them for everything they had on them. Steel and Norfleet stared at each other. It was as if the gauntlet had been thrown, but the fight could not start until the man from the motorboat finished his ascent up the stairs on the cliff.
At last, the man burst into the room, looked wildly around, and then moved over to Steel. He tried as surreptitiously as he could to slip Steel a piece of paper. The other men in the room studiously went about their business. Norfleet did his part by pretending not to notice, but it was impossible for him to ignore the change that came over Steel as he read the note. He blanched and his hands began to shake. He tried to speak, but his dry throat wouldn’t let the words through.
It was Norfleet’s chance, and he began to move toward the door. Steel moved with him, synchronizing his backward steps to Norfleet’s forward ones. Johnson called out from across the room for Norfleet to join him and start the betting. Without turning around, Norfleet declared that he must be going. Then he saw Steel move slightly to the side, as if trying to position himself behind Norfleet’s back. This alarmed him as much as anything else he’d seen that afternoon. Norfleet sidled up to the edge of the room with the wall at his back. Turning to face the rest of the men, he waved his arm in a broad good-bye to the assembled company. Steel lunged. He grabbed Norfleet’s waving hand and pulled the shorter man toward him, but Norfleet was ready for him. Norfleet’s other hand suddenly held a six-shooter, which he jammed into Steel’s solar plexus, drawing out a wince. “Stick up your hands! Hold ’em high!” Norfleet yelled. Most of the other men in the room were frozen by Norfleet’s gun, the money guards without cover to reach for their own rifles, but Johnson was coming at him with a rope held taut in his two hands, ready for Norfleet’s neck. Norfleet pulled out his other automatic and fixed Johnson in place with it. “Now you two young fellows just walk out of this front door straight to that automobile,” he commanded, relishing the look of surprise on their faces when they realized that their car and driver had not, actually, returned down the hill as Steel had ordered. Norfleet had paid the driver to wait for him. As they headed to the car, Norfleet addressed the other men: “If you fellows start anything with me, I’ll finish it for you. I hope that’s plain to you!” And he backed out of the clubhouse.
Norfleet guided the two men into the backseat of the convertible and shut the door. He climbed onto the running board and stretched over the back of the car so that he could keep his guns trained on Johnson’s and Steel’s backs. Thus arrayed, they slowly wound their way down the cliff to Daytona Beach. Despite the dire situation, Norfleet felt distinctly cheerier than on the drive up: the menace he’d sensed was now explicit, and that made his strategizing much easier. Yet the game that he’d begun a few days earlier as a celery farmer was nearly played out.
He asked the driver to let them off at a city park of live oaks and Spanish moss. Johnson and Steel sat down on one of the log benches and began imploring Norfleet to let them go. First they tried the sympathy angle: Steel told the sad tale of his eighty-four-year-old mother whose heart would break if her only son went to jail, and Johnson implored Norfleet to think of his invalid wife with their four baby girls. Then they resorted to money: they both spilled out gold, silver, and bills onto the bench. The note that the man in the motorboat had delivered to Steel also tumbled onto the bench. Steel reached for it, but a little puff of wind blew it down to Norfleet’s foot. He picked it up and stuffed it in his pocket.
Norfleet relished having the upper hand, but he knew he had no charges against Steel and Johnson, and his recent experiences had taught him exactly how much he could expect from the local police force. Johnson and Steel’s importuning was therefore unnecessary, for he had to let them go. He sent them off with a wave of his hand, but as they started to speed walk out of the park, he called them back to retrieve the money they’d thrown at him. The two men paused, suspicious of the request. “Make it snappy,” Norfleet growled, “because I’ve something to teach you the quick-step with if you don’t!” Johnson and Steel scooped up the bills and coins, stuffed them back in their pockets, and disappeared.
Norfleet returned to his bungalow, packed his bags, and caught a ride to the train station. Once he was settled into his car on the train, he remembered the note that Steel had received in the clubhouse. He dug into his pocket and pulled it out. It read, “That is Norfleet, himself. Don’t get him started. If you do, he’ll kill every dam one of you. Don’t let him get away, boys. Don’t let him get away!—Joe.” So Johnson and Steel had been working with Furey. They had failed to keep Norfleet in their grasp, and he had failed to detain them long enough to learn how they were connected to his man. He wondered just how close he had come to a violent end in the clubhouse. Many months later, he would have a chance to ask Furey that very question, and Furey would reply, “Johnson might have strangled you with that rope; Steel might have shot you; or they might have bound and gagged you, then weighted and dropped you from a boat a mile or so out at sea; all depending on the circumstances, and the originality, imagination and resourcefulness of the one doing the job.” So much for the swindler’s pride in committing only nonviolent crimes.
It wasn’t long before Norfleet started to catch more tantalizing clues of his prey. He took the train down the Florida coast, and since he had nothing else to do, he resumed his round of visits to sheriffs and police chiefs. In Miami, he met a mayor from a town in Ontario who’d just been swindled out of his savings by three men. When Norfleet showed him Furey’s photograph, he shouted, “That’s the man who did the job! He’s the one who got my money!” He sent Norfleet to the hotel where Furey had been staying, and the landlady confirmed that a man matching Furey’s photo had just checked out the day before. Neither the mayor nor the landlady could provide Norfleet with any hints as to where Furey might have gone. But then Norfleet chatted up some federal officers, and they alerted him to a con they’d tried to track in Key West. An Illinois farmer had fallen into the old stock swindle, but on the train home to gather up his savings, he’d gotten suspicious, so he’d gotten off the train in Miami and alerted federal agents. The only way the feds could get involved would be if the swindlers used the mail or telegraphs, so the farmer had tried to entrap them. He had wired his son back in Illinois and instructed him to wire the swindlers to ask if the farmer could send the money rather than deliver it himself. But the swindlers never replied, so the feds could not press charges. The farmer went back to Key West to collect his belongings. As soon as he arrived in the train station, the three swindlers grabbed him, threw him in their car, and drove him outside the town limits for a thorough beating. When Norfleet arrived in Key West, the farmer was only too happy to show him where the fake stock exchange was located, right before he left the state for good.
Grimly, Norfleet began a round-the-clock stakeout. He reasoned that Furey and his accomplices would stay in Key West until they’d made at least one score. The farmer had directed him to a long, three-story office building facing a busy street on one side an
d backed up against a seawall on the other. During the daytime, Norfleet had no problem blending in with the pedestrian crowds on the sidewalk in front of the building. His only problem was outlasting the storm that had blown in from the ocean. He stood there hour after hour, completely drenched, craning his neck to see past the thick chain of umbrellas slowly moving down the sidewalks. As darkness wore on and the crowd of business-people began to disperse, he worried about finding a secluded place from which to spy, but the storm that he’d been cursing brought him a bit of luck. The wind blew down a fir tree almost directly in front of the entrance to the building. The felled tree was across the street and catty-corner to a fence, making a little triangular pen that was perfect for Norfleet’s ambush.
And then he saw him. Just as dusk was shading into night, a man of Furey’s size and build entered the offices. Norfleet couldn’t make out his face, but he instantly recognized his stride. All Norfleet would have to do now was wait until the con man reemerged, and then he’d run up and arrest him. So Norfleet waited. All night long, he crouched in his corner, and when morning light began sifting back into the sky, he was soaking wet, stiff with cold, aching from immobility, and bleeding from scratches on his arms that he had gotten as he’d held back the branches to peer at the building. The man he’d thought was Furey had not emerged.
Certain his target was still inside the building, Norfleet decided to risk abandoning his post just long enough to gather reinforcements. He went to the sheriff’s office, and as fast as he could, he explained the scenario. The sheriff understood at once. Apologizing that he himself could not take on the job owing to a foot injury, he promised to send two of the best men on his force to help Norfleet take down the gang leader. Norfleet returned to his post.
Two hours later, the officers arrived. The larger of the two took command. “You take care of the front,” he told Norfleet; his colleague would watch the side; “and I’ll go through the place an’ if I don’t catch him I’ll scare him out to one of you!” Norfleet returned to his vigil at the entrance while the other two men took up their posts. Just seconds later, what should he hear but the incredible sound of a motorboat chugging at the back of the building. He dashed around to see Furey and the two officers speeding out to sea, already too far away to reach by pistol shot.
Well, at least he’d been right that it was Furey. Norfleet was not one to stand around cursing the gods. He assumed the trio was heading to Cuba, eighty-one nautical miles to the south. Within hours, Norfleet had a new passport in his pocket and a chartered hydroplane under his feet. Binoculars glued to his eyes, he ordered the pilot to head first to Miami before turning south to survey Havana and all the little islands in between, but he could not spot the three men or their boat. He returned to land, and a few days later he returned to Texas, called home by a telegraph from his son Pete to attend to ranch business.
Back at Hale Center, Norfleet had some time to think. It was the spring of 1920, and Ward, Gerber, and Hamlin were in jail. Furey and Spencer were still on the loose, but he’d followed up and laid to rest every last clue that he’d generated in the months since his swindling the previous November. He had no leads, and Furey knew Norfleet was onto him. Well, there was one lead. In the days after his swindling, on his way to his friend Cathey’s ranch in Corpus Christi just before his fateful trip to San Bernardino, Norfleet had stopped in San Antonio. He’d spotted Furey’s handwriting in the signature of J. Harrison on the register of the St. Anthony Hotel, and then he’d gone to the police station. The cops, as usual, were unhelpful, but he’d gotten into an intriguing conversation with a girl who had just been arrested, and it was that conversation that seemed newly promising in retrospect. The girl was a pretty, slight young woman with a foul mouth and an arrest warrant for shoplifting. She brayed her innocence as loudly as she could. “I didn’t swipe all of the things they found in the room,” she cried. “I only copped one piece of junk, a Hudson Seal coat. I swear to God! I never lifted nothin’ else.” When Norfleet suggested that she simply return the coat, she laughed bitterly. The coat was the one thing she no longer possessed, having sold it to a big spender at the St. Anthony Hotel. Norfleet now recalled that the girl didn’t know the man’s name, only his room number: room 113. Could that have been Furey? If it had been, would that tiny fact lead him anywhere else?
Norfleet was dying a slow death at home. He was caught between two increasingly miserable circumstances. On the one hand, his swindling losses and the money he’d spent on the manhunt had brought him close to broke, and his absence from the ranch had begun to affect its day-to-day workings. Eliza had taken on the ranch duties but had pared them down to fit her capabilities; she switched from cattle to turkey and hog raising and began to grow crops on a small scale. On the other hand, as he later confessed, “My hot-blooded ambition to accomplish what I had set out to do warped my judgment.” His life’s work now aimed straight at Furey, and everything else was subordinated to his need to avenge the injustice Furey had perpetrated on him. The winter before he’d met up with Furey, he’d purchased about three hundred cattle at $50 a head. Now the clue given to him by the shoplifting girl grew in his mind and formed itself into a plan. He sold the cattle at $23.75 a head, pocketed the cash, and headed back out into the world. As he wrote, “I turned my attention to trailing a fur coat instead of a live man.”
And so he traveled back to San Antonio, but this time he was not alone. He brought with him Jesse Brown, the Fort Worth district attorney who’d proved so helpful with Ward and Gerber’s capture. Brown’s presence paid instant dividends: the San Antonio chief of police was suddenly entirely willing to help Norfleet on his quest. The three of them went to the St. Anthony Hotel and soon confirmed that J. Harrison had indeed stayed for three days in room 113 last December. Since Furey had not been wearing a seal coat when he’d dashed down the fire escape after Cathey kicked to the San Bernardino police, and since the coat was not found in the luggage he left behind in his mad escape, Norfleet reasoned that perhaps Furey never brought it with him to California. Perhaps he shipped it from San Antonio before he left. The three men combed through the express mail records but found nothing that might correlate with a fur coat mailed during Furey’s three days in San Antonio. The parcel post records were off-limits, but Jesse Brown found a federal official who could grant them access. And there it was on the now-dusty record: a package, weighing several pounds, shipped to no one, from no one, during the span of days in which Furey had resided in San Antonio. It was the only package without a sender’s or recipient’s name. It was not insured, because that would have required a signature. It certainly looked like a package that was meant to slip through the mails unnoticed. It was directed to No. 506 Stanford Court Apartments, San Francisco, California. And as soon as he saw that address, Norfleet headed to California once again. He and Brown left that very night.
The westbound train left them in San Bernardino, and they decided to wait until the next morning to head up to San Francisco. Since they had some time to spend, they stopped in to see Sheriff Shay. He had no new leads for them since he’d handed over Ward and Gerber just after Christmas, but he was glad to see the two men and invited them out to dinner. Brown accepted, but Norfleet was just too restless. While his friends entertained each other, he visited the Stewart Hotel, where he now knew that Furey had stayed under the name of Peck during Cathey’s swindle. Norfleet’s detective skills had evolved since he’d first consulted the “tattle-tale” in the St. Anthony Hotel. This time, he asked the clerk for the hotel register and the phone log, and by cross-referencing the two, he discovered that Furey had sent a telegraph to “684 Glendale.” Furey knew someone in Los Angeles.
Norfleet charged out of the Stewart Hotel, fairly flew up to his hotel room long enough to leave Brown a note, and caught the very next train to Los Angeles. The first thing he did upon arrival was check into the Alhambra Hotel and call 684 Glendale. A woman answered and Norfleet asked, “Who is this speaking?” “This is Mrs. F
urey,” the woman replied. “Whom did you wish to speak to?” Oh, how Norfleet wished he could have answered her question truthfully! But instead he apologized for dialing a wrong number and hung up. He’d tracked Furey to his own home. Norfleet danced around his hotel room as if he were riding a bucking bronco. As he later put it, “I do not think if I live to be one thousand years old that I will ever again feel the same wild thrill of triumph.”
For the second time in two days, Norfleet did not wait for Jesse Brown; first thing the next morning, he looked up Furey’s address in the phone directory and headed to the suburb of Glendale. Norfleet walked the wide, palm-lined streets, past block after block of modern bungalows on neatly trimmed lawns, and then noticed in quiet amazement as the bungalows gave way to mansions. He turned onto Piedmont Park, made his way down to number 412, and stared at the Furey residence, a large manor with stone pillars and a lush garden. Nothing moved in the early morning haze, and the cowboy just gaped at the columns, trees, and vines. And then Norfleet’s appreciation of Furey’s real estate turned practical. He surveyed the house for its exits and, in addition to the front door, noted three doors in the rear of the house letting out onto the orange grove, the vineyard, and the garden. Directly across from Furey’s manse was a park, and farther down a hospital was under construction. Norfleet decided to pose as a landscape gardener.
For two days, he shaded his eyes to peer up into trees, got down on the ground to sift the soil, drove stakes he’d whittled into the ground, and scrutinized a set of blueprints he’d filched from the construction site trash. In those two days, he saw nothing of interest at 412 Piedmont Park except a young woman who exited the house on the second day. She was about thirty years old, pretty, and well dressed, and she got into her sedan and drove away, then returned a short while later.
Norfleet’s breakthrough came on the third day. A little boy in blue linen pants ran out of the front door and began to play on the sidewalk, bouncing a rubber ball into the gutter. He looked to be about eight years old. Norfleet asked himself if it was ethical to pump the boy for information about his father. “It wasn’t a pleasant thought,” he admitted. “But as I stood watching him springing up and down in play, I thought of the countless other children, hungry, destitute and orphaned, that this little fellow might have his pretty ball and smooth green lawn to play upon.” His plan thus justified, he sauntered over. “Well,” he called, “that’s a fine ball you have there.” The boy agreed that it was, and when it bounced over to Norfleet, the boy gladly engaged with him in a game of catch. Casting about for an opening, Norfleet ventured, “You ought to have a nice little puppy to play with. They are great play-fellows for little boys.” Jackpot on the first try! “I’m going to have my doggy soon as my papa comes home,” the boy informed him. “And he’s coming home in a few days too.” With a start, Norfleet realized that in a few days it would be Christmas; for the second year in a row, the holiday had almost passed him by in his engrossment with chasing Furey. “That will be fine to have the little dog,” he said, already beginning to back away from the little boy. “They are good friends for boys.” And he turned and began to walk quickly away. “When my papa gets home my pockets will just stick out with money,” called out the boy.
