“As I recall, you succeeded.”
“Right. Which is sort of why I’m here…”
“Sort of?”
“How well do you know Polly Hamilton?”
“Is there some reason why I should answer that question?”
“Is there some reason why you shouldn’t?”
She thought about it.
“I could insult you and offer you money, Anna,” I said, making a show of looking around the joint, “but I hate giving money to people who’re doing so much better than me.”
Annas smile shifted gears to madonna-like. “I won’t ask you for any money, Mr. Heller. I will ask if you’d like some tea, or coffee? Or something stronger?”
“How about something cool—ice water?”
“Fine.”
She rose and left the room; I thought I heard something off to the right. Like somebody moving around in the next room. There were six or eight rooms in this flat, at least. From the sound I heard, maybe she was taking in boarders. Or maybe some of her girls were staying here with her.
She returned with ice water for me and coffee for her; she didn’t seem to feel the heat, despite her almost wintery apparel.
“What’s your interest in Polly, Mr. Heller?”
“It has to do with a job I’m on. Nothing criminal, I assure you; Polly’s not in any trouble. Not…legal trouble.”
“What other kind is there?”
“Oh, well—there’s man trouble.”
“I’ve heard of that,” she allowed, sipping her coffee.
“Is Polly married, Anna?”
“She was. To a policeman in East Chicago.”
“A policeman?”
Anna nodded. “She met him when she was working for me.”
“At the Kostur Hotel?” That was where Anna ran her brothel, in Gary; there’d been an infamous speakeasy and gambling casino in the basement, called The Bucket of Blood. Shootings and stabbings were commonplace, though Anna was known to run a clean, straight house upstairs.
“Yes,” Anna admitted. “At the Kostur.”
“That’d be a few years ago. Polly looks pretty young to have worked for you at the Kostur, what, eight years ago?”
“She looked even younger then.”
“I bet she did. How’d she happen to meet a policeman?”
Now Anna really smiled. “However could a girl meet a policeman in a brothel?”
“Sorry. That was dumb. So she married a policeman.”
“Yes.”
“And it didn’t last.”
“It didn’t last.”
“Could you describe him for me?”
“Why? Mr. Heller, you’re really overstepping—”
“Please. Humor me. There’s no harm in it.”
She sighed. “He’s a tall man, rather lean. Brown hair, with a bald spot. Not unpleasant to look at.”
That didn’t sound like my client.
I hadn’t taken the brunette waitress back at the S & S too seriously when she said Polly was divorced; after all, my client had told me his wife was working under her maiden name, and—particularly if she was running around on him and possibly even hustling—she very well might not be spreading around the fact that she was married.
I tried again. “Her husband’s name wouldn’t have been Howard, would it?”
“No,” Anna said. “Keele. Roy Keele.”
“And they were divorced only a few months ago?”
“That’s right.”
My client had told me he and Polly had been married over a year. So much for the notion that my traveling salesman might be her second husband, on the rebound from Keele.
“Tell me,” I said. “Has she had any steady boyfriends?”
“Yes,” Anna said, nodding. “Several. Lately, one who calls himself…” And she paused here, as if what followed would be significant. “…Jimmy Lawrence. Says he works at the Board of Trade.”
“Gold-rim glasses, pencil mustache, kind of medium build? Nice dresser?”
She kept nodding, seeming suddenly vaguely troubled. “That’s him.”
“Who before that?”
She touched a finger to her cheek, thinking. “I believe—I’m not sure, mind you—I believe it was a traveling salesman.”
That was more like it. Now I could begin to make sense of this.
“Was his name Howard? John Howard?”
“I don’t know. I never knew his name. Why don’t you ask Polly?”
“That would be awkward, at least at this point. The traveling salesman, is he a blond man, also with wire glasses and mustache?”
“Why, yes.”
“Physically a bit similar to this Jimmy Lawrence?”
“I suppose. Why?”
“Nothing. I had a client who lied to me, is all. A man who said he was a husband when he was really just a jilted boyfriend. Who was afraid no self-respecting private detective would take on his case, if he weren’t the girl’s spouse.”
“He doesn’t sound like he’s from Chicago.”
“No,” I said. “He just passes through here, obviously.”
I stood.
“Thank you, Anna. And thanks for the ice water.”
“Are you going to talk to Polly?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why? I’ve finished the job I was hired to do. And I’ve answered the questions that had my curiosity up. You needn’t show me out, and thanks again….”
She reached out and touched my hand; her touch was warm, her hand was trembling. Trembling! This cool cucumber was trembling….
“Why, Anna,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, her face impassive, but her hand still trembling against mine. “Please—sit down. I’d like to talk to you. I need to talk to someone, and…you would do nicely. You’re almost a policeman, after all.”
I sat down.
Her dark eyes seemed very soft, then, and compelling; this big attractive woman had the ability to seem strong one moment, vulnerable the next—like many madams, she’d got out of hustling herself early enough to hold onto her looks; but had hustled long enough to remember how to push a man’s buttons.
Leaning forward in her chair, hands folded in her lap, she said, “You spent a night with Polly once.”
“In a manner of speaking. I was drunk, and I hadn’t been with a woman in a long time…I’d had some of that other kind of trouble—woman trouble. You’ve heard of that.”
My effort to lighten this conversation wasn’t having much effect: Anna’s ready smile was nowhere to be seen.
“She liked you,” Anna said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.
“She said she did. And you, maybe you liked her, a little?”
“I liked her in the sack, Anna, to be blunt, but that’s as far as it went. I was drunk, remember? And if you do remember, you’re one up on me.”
Her face looked pale and tragic, the dark eyes hooded, the red mouth a thin line. “I thought you might be interested in…helping her.”
“Well…sure. I guess. Anna, I’ve been shadowing her for a couple of days, and she hasn’t recognized me, even up close. We’re not bosom buddies.”
“But you’d help her, if you could. You’d help anybody in trouble.”
“Not really. But make your pitch. You’ve got my curiosity back up, if that’s what you’re after.”
She stood and paced; whether for dramatic effect, or out of actual nervousness, I didn’t know. I still don’t.
She stopped and said, “Polly may be in dangerous company.”
“How so?”
“This Jimmy Lawrence. She brought him here. For dinner. Polly, and several of the other girls, are more than just employees to me—they’re family. And I often invite them here. Have Romanian specialties, which I cook myself. I’m famous for my culinary arts, for my dinner parties.”
“I’m convinced. But you’ve drifted off the point, Anna.”
&nbs
p; She paced some more, then sat down next to me; put a hand on my knee. She smelled good—face powder and exotic perfume. She might have been as much as fifteen years older than me, and I was very much aware that she had been in the cold-blooded sex business for decades, that she’d been a hustler then and a madam now; nevertheless, she had a sultry sensuality that made me uneasy.
“My son Steve and his girl, they’ve gone out with them. Several times.”
“Gone out with who?”
“Polly. Polly and her boyfriend Lawrence.”
“So?”
“Do you know how much danger they’re in?”
“Who’s in? What danger?”
“My son Steve! And his girl. They’re just kids. In their twenties.”
“So am I, Anna, and your point eludes me.”
“Do you know what the other girls at the sandwich shop call Lawrence, behind his back?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“Dilly.”
“Oh. What’s that stand for? Has he got a pickle in his pocket, or what?”
“No,” Anna Sage said. “They think he looks like Dillinger.”
D
ILLINGER
7
I drove over to Pine Grove Avenue and parked just across and down from the ritzy digs where Polly Hamilton’s boyfriend lived. Since she had called in sick today, Polly might well be in there with Jimmy Lawrence right now; bedridden, probably. I hoped the poor girl got to feeling better….
I sat in my shirt sleeves on the rider’s side with the windows rolled down; I could actually feel something passing for a lake breeze. In front of me was this morning’s Herald and Examiner: “a paper for people who think,” according to Mr. Hearst. Well, maybe he was right—I wasn’t reading, but I was thinking.
Thinking about Anna Sage, and her contention that Polly Hamilton’s male companion Jimmy Lawrence was really one John H. Dillinger.
“Didn’t you notice the resemblance?” she’d asked.
No, I’d said; but, yeah, I guessed he looked a little like Dillinger.
So did a lot of people. Every few days, these last months, there’d be another story about a “Dillinger double” who’d been picked up by the police, somewhere in the Midwest. One poor guy in St. Paul had been arrested five times and was on his way to the local police station to try to work out this mistaken-identity problem for good when he was arrested again; he wasn’t sprung till they’d taken his fingerprints and compared them with Dillinger’s.
Less than a month ago, another unwitting Dillinger double had strolled out of the lobby of the Uptown Theater—where Polly and her beau and yours truly had seen Viva Villa last night—and faced six riot squads of Chicago cops, who advised him not to move or they’d blow his head off.
And just this past Sunday an insurance salesman in Columbus, Ohio, had got off a plane from a business trip to Indianapolis only to be greeted by a dozen shotgun-bearing cops who had received “positive identification” of his being Dillinger from the manager of the hotel where he’d stayed the night before. Whether the guy sold life insurance or not, the papers hadn’t said.
A sort of Dillinger fever gripped the country, and had ever since the bandit’s year-long spree of bank robberies came to a bloody head a few months ago, at the Little Bohemia Lodge in upper Wisconsin, when the feds’d had Dillinger trapped and managed only to kill a civilian or two, and capture a few of the gang’s molls, while Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson and crew slipped out the back door.
How this “public enemy” (a phrase borrowed by the feds from Chicago, where the Crime Commission had coined it for Al Capone) became a household word in one short year had more to do with the style the outlaw brought to his robberies than the robberies themselves. The outline of his legend was already known to every man, woman and child in the country—including this kid.
Given a twenty-year sentence by a hanging judge for his first, relatively minor offense, twenty-year-old Johnny Dillinger had gone from his father’s farm to the reformatory and on to jail, spending nine years going to school under the tutelage of the likes of Harry Pierpont, Homer Van Meter and John Hamilton—experienced, hardened criminals all, skilled in the art of robbing banks.
When Johnny was paroled, following a petition seeking his release to help work on his father’s farm (signed by the man Dillinger had robbed as well as the now-repentant judge), he immediately began robbing banks and stores to raise money to finance a jailbreak, to get Pierpont, Van Meter, Hamilton and six other of his buddies out of the state prison at Michigan City. He smuggled several guns into the prison in a barrel of thread sent to the prison’s shirt factory; the nine Dillinger pals escaped just in time to bust John himself out of the jail at Lima, Ohio. Seems he’d been captured while visiting pretty Mary Longnaker, one of his numerous girls. The press loved Johnny and his pretty girls.
They loved Johnny, period. Because when he robbed his banks, he leapt over bank railings, flirted with the ladies and was courteous to the men. When somebody got shot, Johnny never was the one to do the shooting; and he regretted such violence—such as when Pierpont shot the sheriff during the Lima crash-out, and Johnny paused to kneel by the dying man, whom he’d grown fond of during his incarceration, saying sadly to Pierpont, “Did you have to do that?”
The public loved that; they loved it when he allowed the depositers unlucky enough to be in the bank being robbed to hold onto their dough—he wanted only the “bank’s money.” And when he busted out of the Crown Point, Indiana, jail using a wooden gun he’d carved and then darkened with shoe polish (so the story went), the common man said, “Nice going, Johnny—you showed ’em, Johnny!”
The common man liked identifying with John Dillinger, and why not? He had the common man’s face. Oh, perhaps a shade on the handsome side, at least for a bank robber; and his photos often showed him with a wry smile worthy of a picture-show heavy. But he had the kind of face you passed in the street and didn’t think twice about.
Unless a sort of national hysteria was under way, as in these past three or four months, when “positive identifications” of Dillinger would be reported in, say, Massachusetts and Ohio—on the same day.
So when Anna saw a Dillinger resemblance in Polly’s dapper Dan, I was momentarily caught off guard, but not bowled over. Dillinger was on everybody’s mind, in every paper’s headlines; like this one I was pretending to read—DILLINGER SEEN IN FLORIDA—and the one Jimmy Lawrence had been reading a few nights ago in Anna’s flat. So she said.
It had gone like this: Anna had prepared a Romanian specialty for Lawrence, Polly, Anna’s out-of-work son Steve and his girl, whose name Anna didn’t mention. They’d eaten in the kitchen, next to several open windows, which helped with the heat. After dinner, the women cleared the table and began doing the dishes; there was talk of playing pinochle later. Conversation lagged—too damn hot for chatter. Still, despite the heat, Lawrence lit up a cigar—a big, fat expensive one. And he began to read the paper.
After a while he said, “Well—they’ve got me in St. Paul today,” and laughed.
Then he got up and went out on the back stairs to smoke some more, and get some air. Anna stopped polishing a dish long enough to look at the front page of the paper Lawrence had been reading; the face of John Dillinger stared at her, from a photo.
I had said to her, on hearing this tale, “How can he be Dillinger? He looks a little like Dillinger. Sure. But not just like Dillinger.”
Hadn’t I heard about plastic surgery? Gangsters go underground and get plastic surgery these days, she said. Like she was talking about the latest dance step.
Still, it was hard to dismiss Anna’s opinion. This was not the hysterical reaction of a harried housewife in Duluth, on her way to the bank with this week’s hard-earned deposit in hand, who spotted a man who looked like that John Dillinger and ran immediately to the station house. No. Anna had been around; she’d been dealing with crooks and crooked cops since I was in knee pants. If she thought this guy m
ight be Dillinger, well…this guy might be Dillinger.
And if he was, maybe I’d do something about it. After all, the reward money was hovering at around twenty thousand dollars, half of it federal, half of it from half a dozen states in the “crime corridor” of the Midwest, where Dillinger had been harvesting banks for over a year now.
Only I couldn’t go to the cops. I was persona non grata with too many of the boys in blue for that. And the head of the special Dillinger Squad—forty officers strong—was none other than Capt. John Stege (rhymes with “leggy”), who would rather shoot me than give me the time of day.
Stege was a rarity in Chicago—an honest cop; he was one of half a dozen individuals credited with being “the guy that got Capone” (my friend Eliot Ness was another) and, in a way, Stege was as worthy of that credit as the next guy (Eliot included). Stege had fought Capone’s Outfit all through the twenties and it was his raid on Capone’s Cicero joints that brought forth the ledgers that allowed the feds to put together the income tax evasion rap that finally sent the Big Fellow to Atlanta.
But Stege’d had his share of bad press, too. He’d lost his job as chief of the Detective Bureau over the Jake Lingle case; he’d looked dirty, guilty by association, because he was thick with the police commissioner, who in turn had been thick with reporter Lingle, who’d been thick with Capone and company. This all came out after Lingle was murdered in the subway tunnel under Michigan Avenue.
I’d been involved in that case; specifically, I’d been a traffic cop on Michigan Avenue, and had pursued, and failed to catch, the fleeing killer. I’d been a star witness at the trial. I’d lied, of course, to help put away the scapegoat the Outfit had given the D.A.’s office to satisfy the public and the press. And had gone on to be a plainclothes cop, as part of my good-conduct reward.
It was then that my father, an idealistic old union man who hated the cops and hated me becoming one, blew his brains out with my gun. But that’s another story.
Stege, like my father, smelled a bad apple when young Nate Heller traded his uniform, and his integrity, in for plain clothes. He—and a lot of people on the force—pegged me as a kid on the make, willing to go along with just about anything. That led to my being pulled in by two real sweethearts named Lang and Miller—the late Mayor Cermak’s chief bagmen and bodyguards (this was before Cermak was late, of course)—on an attempt on Frank Nitti’s life.
True Crime Page 5
