“Now,” I said, getting a yellow pad and a pencil out of a desk drawer, “if you’ll give me your name and the nature of your business…”
“I’m a farmer. Or used to be.”
I’d meant his business with me, but never mind. He was too young to be retired—despite his lined face, his hair was thick and black with just a salt-and-peppering around his ears. Maybe he wasn’t a paying customer after all.
I said, “Did they foreclose on you?”
“No!” he said, as if offended. Then thinking it over, softened his tone and repeated, “No. Plenty folks I know did get their notice. It’s better, now.”
“Thanks to FDR and Henry Wallace, you mean.”
He rested the hat on my desk, off to one side, near the edge. “No,” he said, flatly. “Just folks sticking together. When the banks were holding farm sales, not so long ago, those of us with any money a’tall would go and bid a nickel for a plow, dime for a horse, quarter for a tractor, and then just give it all back to the real owner, afterwards. We spread word anybody was to bid against us would be dealt with severe. And there’d be a couple hundred of us at the auction, so…”
“But you still have your farm.”
“No. I sold out. Took a loss, but I sold.”
“Excuse me, mister, uh…?”
“Petersen,” he said, rising, stretching his hand across my desk for me to shake, “Joshua Petersen.”
I shook his hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Petersen.”
He sat back down. “I live in De Kalb, these days. Used to live just outside of there. But now I’m in town. And I took the train this morning to come in here just to see you, Mr. Heller.” Taking the train was clearly a major decision in his life.
“Was I recommended to you?”
He shook his head. “I seen your name in the paper. When they killed Dillinger.”
So—it did pay to advertise. I said, “Why are you here, Mr. Petersen?”
He seemed momentarily confused, as if the answer to that was self-evident.
“Why, Mr. Heller—the only detectives in De Kalb are the police kind. I need somebody private.” He cleared his throat, and formally made his intentions clear: “I come by train seeking the help of a big-city detective.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead I just scribbled circles with my pencil and asked, “Why are you seeking a detective’s help?”
He leaned forward; there was no self-pity in his gaunt face, just tragedy.
The reason for which was now explained: “My daughter,” he said. “She’s missing.”
“I see.”
“She’d be…nineteen, now.”
“Has she been missing for some time?”
He nodded. Kept nodding as he went on: “Last I knew she was running with a bad crowd.”
“A bad crowd.”
He looked at me with those empty light blue eyes; they were as barren as an unplanted field.
“I better tell you the story,” he said.
He told me the story. At seventeen his daughter Louise had married another farmer, only a few years her father’s junior. Her father, a widower since the girl’s childhood and a rigidly religious man, admitted having been a strict disciplinarian with his only child.
“By that,” I said, “you mean you beat her.”
Nodding, head gazing down, blue empty eyes finally filling with tears, he said, “I make that admission freely.”
“Mr. Petersen, this isn’t a court, and it isn’t church, either. You don’t have to punish yourself, here. And I’m certainly not going to judge you. But you do have to tell me the facts, so I can help you.”
He nodded some more. Said, “No need to punish myself.”
“That’s right.”
“The Lord will take care of that.”
I sighed. “I suppose he will. Please continue your story.”
He went on in a voice as hollow as his eyes; his words had a formal, practiced sound—as if he’d said these words to himself every night, over and over again, when he should have been sleeping.
“It was my cruel treatment of Louise that drove her from me,” he said. “Into his arms. But he was worse than I was. More cruel, more jealous than ever I was. His punishment exceeded the crimes.”
“Mr. Petersen, I’m not following you. What man are you taking about? Her husband?”
He looked at me sharply. “Yes. Her husband.”
“And he was a farmer, too?”
“Yes. And she’d go off to town without asking him. And do Lord knows what. Men. Drink.” He covered his face with one weathered hand and wept. Tears found their way through the cracks of his fingers and fell on his lap. I’d never had a client cry in the office before—not even when I handed ’em my list of expenses—and it made me uncomfortable. This man was devastated by the road his daughter had gone down. His moral and religious convictions must’ve been strong, I thought, for him to take having a loose daughter so hard.
I got up and began filling a cup of water for him from the cooler, which said, “Glug glug.” I said, “So her husband beat her, and she skipped.”
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, dried his eyes, blew his nose. “Yes. She ran off.”
I handed him the cup of water; he drank it greedily, then didn’t know what to do with the cup. I took it from him and wadded and dropped it in the wastebasket behind the desk. Sat again.
“Did she come home to you?” I said. “After she left her husband?”
He shook his head. “She never thought to. She never even thought to. She lumped me in with Seth—I must’ve seemed just as bad as he was, in her mind.”
“Seth is her husband.”
One quick curt nod.
“How’s he feel about getting Louise back?”
“Ain’t interested. He’s took up with several other ‘ladies,’ hear tell.”
“I see.”
“But I want her back. I want to do right by her. Make it up to her. She’ll like livin’ in town….”
“I’m sure. You mentioned something about her running with a ‘bad crowd.’ How bad?”
The blood drained out of his face.
“That bad?” I said.
“Ever hear of a man called ‘Candy’ Walker?”
“Jesus.”
He sighed heavily. “I take it you heard of him.”
I had. I’d never met him, but Clarence “Candy” Walker was a small-time hood from the North Side, a handsome ladies’ man of about thirty, a wheel man who drove beer trucks for Bugs Moran in the old days and had been in Nitti’s stable till maybe a year ago. Since then—like Baby Face Nelson and a few other graduates of the Capone mob who’d been laid off after Repeal—he’d been seen driving for the Barkers. The bank-robbing Barkers.
He’d also driven for Dillinger a few times in the last six months, if I wasn’t mistaken. Small world.
I said, “I take it from your tone you know who Candy Walker is.”
“He drives what they call in the papers the ‘getaway car’ in robberies. He’s a bank robber.”
“He drives getaway cars, and he’s a bank robber. Yes.”
He dug in his left suitcoat pocket. Took out a folded newspaper clipping; as he did, he said, “She ran off to Chicago about a year ago. She was seen with him here. She was living with him, as a matter of fact.”
“How did you find this out?”
“Seth reported her as a missing person. He left it pretty much drop, after that. But I kept after the sheriff’s office, and the sheriff’s office said the Chicago police knew she was in Chicago living with this Candy Walker feller.”
“If you’re thinking Walker is still around Chicago, I’d doubt it…”
“That’s what the sheriff’s office’s been tellin’ me. And I can figure that for myself. Melvin Purvis has made your town too hot for them gangsters. This Walker’s living out on the road somewheres. Going from here to there. Stealing. May the Good Lord damn him to hell for eternit
y.”
“Good odds on that,” I said, taking the clipping he was holding out. It was an interior page from a Daily News from July 2 of this year, detailing the robbery of the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, Indiana.
At 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, June 30, five men (later identified as John Dillinger, Homer Van Meter, Baby Face Nelson, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and Clarence “Candy” Walker) parked their Hudson in front of the bank. Walker remained at the wheel, and Nelson, his machine gun under his coat, took up position near the rear of the car. Van Meter, with a rifle, took position just down the street, in front of a shoe store. Inside the bank Dillinger and Floyd made a withdrawal—only when the tellers weren’t filling their sacks up quickly enough, Floyd fired a burst from his machine gun into the ceiling, to perk up the proceedings. Outside, a traffic cop heard the commotion and came running. Van Meter fired his rifle and the cop fell in the street, stopping traffic. The owner of a jewelry shop down the way ran out of his shop and shot at Nelson, whose bulletproof vest saved him as he spun and began firing wildly. Only the cop was killed, but several pedestrians were wounded, including the hostages who were made to ride the running boards as Candy Walker wheeled out of town, with around twenty-five thousand of the bank’s money in tow. On the west side of South Bend, the hostages were set free; the group split in two and climbed into separate cars.
This was, as far as anybody knew, Dillinger’s last caper.
Of course that wasn’t what made this clipping noteworthy: it was the other story, the sidebar. A Pontiac with Indiana license plates stopped at a filling station near Aurora, Illinois, later that same afternoon. Two men and two women were in the car. The men seemed to be Candy Walker and Homer Van Meter; police sketches of them were reproduced, as well as of the “unidentified molls” who’d been with them.
Petersen stood and pointed at one of the molls pictured. From an inside coat pocket he produced a snapshot of himself and a pretty teenage girl with blond bobbed hair, a farmhouse glimpsed behind them. He had his arm around her and was smiling—a real smile, not a crease—and she had a glazed smile, behind which unhappiness clearly lurked. Still, these were happier times (at least for him).
And, of course, the girl in the snapshot closely resembled the police sketch of one of the women seen with Candy Walker and Homer Van Meter.
“Mr. Petersen, this police sketch resembles your daughter, but she’s a pretty woman, a young woman, and a lot of pretty young women look pretty much like this….”
“It’s her,” he said, flatly. “Now let me show you something else.”
This guy had something in every pocket; he reached into his right suitcoat pocket and produced another clipping. He spread it before me.
“This was in this morning’s paper,” he said. “I read it and went and got on the train—I knew I’d waited long enough. Maybe too long.”
I’d already seen this: a story from this morning’s Trib. But it took on a new significance, now.
The St. Paul police had shot about fifty bullets into Homer Van Meter yesterday. Not surprisingly, it killed him.
Petersen, trembling, sat back down.
“I’ve been reading the papers,” he said, “reading the blood in the headlines. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker…John Dillinger…now Van Meter…the outlaws, they’re all going to die like that, aren’t they? In hails of bullets?”
I shrugged. “More or less.”
“I’m afraid for my daughter, Mr. Heller.”
“I don’t blame you.”
He sat forward; earnestness engulfed his face. “Retrieve her for me.”
“What?”
“Get her back for me.” He pointed to the Van Meter clipping. “Before she meets a similar fate.” He sat back, as if to say, I rest my case.
I looked at this gaunt Midwestern ghost sitting holding onto the ebony armrests on the chrome tubes of my silly goddamn chair, and I wanted to laugh. Or cry.
Instead I simply said, “Mr. Petersen, surely you understand what you’re asking is, well…a tall order. Maybe an impossible one.”
He said nothing, just leaned forward, with anticipation. Waiting for me to say yes. Or even no. Something.
His daughter would go to jail, upon capture—if she was lucky. She could just as easily die—go down “in a hail of bullets,” as he had said. But since she was just another faceless moll (but for one police artist’s sketch), a name that hadn’t got into the papers as yet, it was vaguely possible it wasn’t too late, that she could be rescued, that she might be pulled from out of the fire before the fat fell in….
“Okay, Mr. Petersen,” I said. “I tell you what. I’ll snoop around a bit. Walker used to live in Chicago, so maybe through some of his old contacts I can find out if your daughter’s still with him. If so, maybe I can get a message to her that her father would welcome her home, with open arms.”
He shook his head no. “That wouldn’t be enough. You have to find her. You have to bring her back. Whether she wants to come or not, Mr. Heller.”
“How can I promise to bring her back, if she doesn’t want to come? Be reasonable, Mr. Petersen. After all, that’d be kidnapping….”
“Is it kidnapping to return a daughter to her father?”
He had me there.
And knew it. He stood and dug in another pocket; right pants pocket this time. He took out a thick fold of bills, money-clipped. Counted out five hundred dollars in twenties.
I watched this, amazed. With probably about the same look he’d given my modern chair, coming in.
I picked the stack of money up in one hand; it felt heavy.
“Mr. Petersen—why five hundred dollars?”
He got oddly formal again: “Because you will take risks. You will need to go among the wolves.”
He had a point; it would be dangerous to go around asking questions about the girlfriend of a wanted man, a public enemy. But five hundred dollars was five hundred dollars.
“What do you expect for your money, Mr. Petersen?”
“I want you to look for Louise, Mr. Heller.”
“For—for how long?”
“For five hundred dollars’ worth.”
“At ten bucks a day, that’s a long time.”
“Find her, and you can keep what you don’t use. If you use it up, call me…” He reached in his left pants pocket and removed a slip of paper with his name and phone number and address written on it, and gave it to me. “…I will probably authorize you to continue.”
Petersen picked his hat up off my desk.
“And,” he said, putting on the hat, “there’s a thousand more if you deliver her to me.”
That knocked the breath out of me. I was stunned by the kind of money this simple retired farmer was throwing around. “Mr. Petersen, excuse me for asking this—I don’t mean to pry, or look a gift horse in the mouth. But how can you possibly afford this, in times like these? Or any time?”
His crease of a smile seemed weary, now, and somehow worldly. “My health is bad, Mr. Heller,” he said. “I’m a lunger. Picked it up in the war. I got my pension to get me by and then some. That’s how I was able to sell my farm, and get this money together—to find my girl. I got my little house in De Kalb, where we can live together. On my pension. She can make a new start. Find herself a nice little job, and find a good new man, to take care of her after her daddy’s gone. Which will be soon, Lord’s will be done.”
He extended his hand across the desk and I stood and shook it.
“Tell her that when you find her,” he said. “Maybe then she’ll come home of her own volition.”
I nodded.
“But find her,” he said, and slammed the desk with his fist with sudden force on the “find”; the lamp shook. Then more quietly, and a little embarrassed, he said, “Please find her. Bring her home.”
And he left me alone in the office with my modern furniture and his old-fashioned money.
26
When Frank Nitti wasn’t holding court
at the Capri Restaurant, or meeting with the inner circle of the Outfit at his home in suburban Riverside, he would occupy a suite in various Loop hotels. This was standard operating practice, for meeting with politicians and labor leaders and the like. It made a safer, more neutral ground.
So it was no surprise to me, after I called the Capri and sought an audience with Nitti, that the return phone call I received was a male voice that did not identify itself telling me to be in the lobby of the Bismarck Hotel, two o’clock Monday afternoon.
The Bismarck was on the corner of LaSalle and Randolph, across the street from City Hall—making it a natural place for Nitti to hold meetings. The recently rebuilt hotel dominated German Square, the group of German clubs, steamship offices and shops at the west end of the Rialto Theatre district. But my meeting that Monday afternoon would have a distinctly Italian cast.
I went past the uniformed Bismarck doorman and through the revolving door and up the wide, red-carpeted stairway and my footsteps echoed across the marble floor of the high-ceilinged, elaborate lobby, where I found an overstuffed sofa and sat. Pretty soon a rather short man in a gray suit approached me; his shortness meant nothing: this was a big man. He had shoulders broad enough to balance a midget on either side of his oblong head. His hair was dark and starting to thin; his dark eyes were colder and harder than the marble floor beneath us.
He was Louis “Little New York” Campagna, Frank Nitti’s personal bodyguard.
He didn’t speak. He just stood in front of me and had a faintly disgusted look—and Little New York Campagna looking faintly disgusted was scarier than Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff put together, I might add—and jerked his head, indicating I was to get up. I got up.
I followed him onto an elevator, and the uniformed operator didn’t ask for our floor; he just took us up to the seventh, where Campagna waited for me to get out first.
As we were walking down the hallway, I said, “I hope there’s no hard feelings about that other time.”
I’d knocked Campagna out once; it’s a long story.
Without glancing at me, just walking alongside me, he said, “As long as Frank says there’s no hard feelings, there’s no hard feelings.”
True Crime Page 21
