True Crime

by Collins, Max Allan

  I walked her down to the room, carrying her bag.

  “Twin beds,” she said. “Too bad.”

  “Louise,” I said. “I’m not so sure what happened this morning is something we ought to repeat….”

  She pretended to be hurt by that; the wide-set brown eyes looked comically woeful. God, she looked cute—the bobbed blond hair, the rosy cheeks, pouty lips, slight but rounded figure well displayed in a form-fitting pink-and-white-print cotton dress with a shoelace bow at the neck. She sat on the edge of one of the beds and hiked her skirt up to where the milk of her thighs said hello above her rolled stocking tops.

  “You’re too much of a gentleman sometimes, Jimmy—don’t you think?”

  Then there I was with my pants down around my legs and her skirt up and I never said I was perfect, did I?

  She went into the bathroom for a while, came out looking fresh and sparkly, and we lay together, clothes more or less buttoned up and back in place, and she had a smoke. I hadn’t seen her smoke before.

  “You want a drag?” she asked, offering the ciggie.

  “No thanks. Never picked up the habit.”

  “My daddy’d whip me sure, if he saw these lips touching tobacco. Candy got me started.”

  She spoke Candy’s name with a sense of history; he’d retreated into the past. Dead a day.

  It wasn’t that she was cold, or heartless; she was a warm little thing, in about every way you could imagine. She’d just learned the facts of life on the outlaw road.

  She said, “Should be suppertime soon, shouldn’t it?”

  “Real soon. Ma’s cooking out back.”

  “She’s a good cook.” Puffed the cig. “This is a nice room.”

  “No outhouse tonight.”

  “Yeah, and a bath and everything. That’s ugly wallpaper, though. Is that purple or brown or what? It makes the room seem small—why would they pick something so dark?”

  “To keep us from noticing the cockroaches.”

  “Oh,” she said, nodding. She didn’t seem to be inhaling her smoke.

  Bedsprings making their unmistakable music came through the thin wall.

  She giggled. “Somebody else is being naughty.”

  “Who’s next door?”

  “I think it’s the Nelsons.”

  “Well, then they’re not being naughty. They’re married, so it’s okay with God and everybody.”

  She nodded; she had a disconcerting way of taking my wisecracks at face value.

  From next door, a woman’s voice said, “Less…less…oh, less!”

  I said, “Doesn’t she mean ‘more’?”

  “She’s saying Les—the name, Les. Short for Lester? That’s Nelson’s real name. Lester Gillis.”

  That was news to me.

  “Louise, honey. Can I be serious for a second?”

  She shrugged. “Sure.”

  “You said this morning you couldn’t have kids. You’re a young woman. Are you sure about that? Have you checked with a doctor, or…?”

  She tried to be nonchalant, puffed her cigarette. She definitely wasn’t inhaling. She said, “A doctor made me this way. Candy knocked me up one time, and the doc that took care of it didn’t do me right.”

  Next door, Baby Face Nelson’s wife was moaning.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She shrugged facially. “A real doctor looked at me later. He told me I couldn’t have kids. It’s okay. I don’t think I want kids anyways. They’re just a bother.”

  The bedsprings sang next door; Nelson’s wife said, “Les! Les!”

  I hugged the girl to me. “Don’t you worry about anything,” I said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  She looked at me; the big brown eyes were wet. “Really?”

  “I promise.”

  She hugged me. Hard. Desperately hard.

  Silence next door.

  A few minutes later somebody knocked and hollered, “Soup’s on!”

  Nelson.

  “Time to chow down, lovebirds! Ha ha ha.”

  Behind the central cabin, in which Ben and the little woman and their two kids lived, was a little brick patio, surrounded by a stone wall about waist-high. A slatted brown-stained picnic table, large enough for a dozen or so people, was in the middle. At the left was one of those white swings that looked like an inverted wooden V with the top squared off, in which two people could sit facing each other. At the moment Baby Face and his wife Helen were doing that very thing. To the right was a brick barbecue oven, the lower part as tall as a man and wide as his reach, with two openings, wood burning in the bottom, smaller one, and iron grids in the larger arched opening above that, at which point it narrowed into a chimney. Ma, wearing her calico apron over one of her familiar floral tents, was poking at various halfed chickens spread out on the lower of two grills, basting them occasionally from a bowl of thin red sauce; a pot of baked beans was biding its time on the upper grid.

  The picnic table began to fill up, and soon the whole gang—if you’ll pardon the expression—was having at the platters of barbecue chicken and the several bowls of coleslaw and the pot of baked beans; beers, Cokes, glasses of milk were scattered about, as were plenty of paper napkins. Baby Face Nelson and Helen, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker brothers and Fred’s girl Paula, Old Creepy Karpis and Dolores, chowing down like this was a family picnic. Speaking of family, Ben, the little woman and their two kids were down at one end of the table. The little woman had, in fact, made the slaw, which was very good, and had got the fire going earlier in the afternoon that had made the chicken possible. But that was the extent of her being sociable, and she wasn’t eating much, just picking at her paper plate.

  Her kids would look down the table toward Nelson, who would wink at them, and the kids would grin at him, and each other. I’d seen this at the farm, too—Nelson got along famously with Verle and Mildred’s two boys, as well—and wondered if somehow I was seeing the real George Nelson. Or anyway, Lester Gillis.

  His wife Helen picked up on the byplay between him and the kids, and said to him, “I miss our two.”

  Nelson looked momentarily sad—the only time I ever saw sadness touch his face—and said, “We got to find a way to get to Mom’s and see ’em. We just got to.”

  Louise whispered to me, “That’s sweet,” without sarcasm. I don’t think she and sarcasm were acquainted, actually.

  Next to Nelson was a dark-haired, dark-eyed man, eating quietly, holding the messy chicken in his hands almost daintly, like the dead barbecued bird was a teacup. He was handsome, a lady-killer type, but on the cadaverous side, with a little Ronald Colman mustache, and even sitting down you could see he was tall, much taller than Nelson. This was John Paul Chase, Nelson’s dog-loyal sidekick, who’d been posted in the barn back at the Gillises’. I hadn’t seen him arrive, so he’d apparently come later in a car of his own.

  He said, “Pass the salt, please.”

  It was the only thing I ever heard him say.

  Nelson would speak to him occasionally, and Chase would just nod. Nelson called him J.P. Using initials for nicknames was a trend Nelson was trying to set in these circles, with no apparent success.

  There was no talk of crime at the table. The subjects at hand were baseball (did the St. Louis Cardinals, a.k.a. the “Gashouse Gang,” have the pennant sewn up or not?) and boxing (would Ross take McLarnin in their rematch next month?) and how good Ma’s cooking was (better ’n Betty Crocker’s).

  Doc Barker, who’d taken little part in the small talk, did at one point say, “Where’s your friend Sullivan?”

  Floyd, hands red with barbecue sauce, glanced above the half-eaten half a chicken he was eating (his second) and said, “He don’t feel so good. We tied one on last night.”

  Fred Barker paused mid-chicken to grin, gold teeth flashing. “Hung over, huh?”

  Floyd smiled; he had sauce all over his lips and teeth. “Way over.”

  Doc said, “Is he going to be up for it?”


  “Sure,” Floyd said, matter-of-factly.

  “I never worked with the guy.”

  “I have,” Floyd said. Friendly but with a hard edge.

  “I never even heard of him.”

  Floyd put the chicken down. “I don’t work with just anybody, Doc.”

  “I never said you did, Chock.”

  Nelson, working on a bite of baked beans, said, “Yeah, why isn’t your pal Richetti in on this one? I thought he was your right-hand man.”

  “He’s on the mend. Caught a bullet while back.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” Nelson said. “Suppose he’s holed up in the Cookson Hills, huh?”

  Floyd shook his head no. “We been havin’ to avoid the hills. Ever since the feds and the state militia did that sweep through there February last, we been stayin’ out.”

  Karpis, who was sharing half a chicken with Dolores, said, “I heard they only nailed a dozen or so crooks, all of ’em small-timers, with that search party.” Small laugh. “A thousand men combing the hills for small change.”

  Floyd nodded. “Still, with the governor willin’ to turn up the heat that high, we been keeping out of there. We been holing up ’round Toledo way.”

  Doc said, “Licavoli mob’s helping you out, I suppose.”

  “Yeah,” Floyd said. “For a price.”

  Doc sighed, nodded. “Yeah. This ol’ life ain’t cheap, is it?”

  “Life’s cheap enough,” Floyd said. “It’s livin’ that gets expensive.”

  Louise, who was an even daintier eater than John Paul Chase (she was the only one at the table cutting the meat off the chicken with her knife and fork, instead of just using her hands—her daddy must’ve beat some manners in her), had finished her meal and was starting to complain of getting eaten up by mosquitoes. The sun was going down and the bugs were coming out.

  Floyd stood. “You nice gals can clear the table, if you would, and get in away from the skeeters. Us men got work to do.”

  Karpis wiped his face and hands with a napkin and stood as well. “Yes we do. Let’s go down to my cabin.”

  The men went down to his cabin.

  37

  Karpis’ cabin was identical to ours, except with the beds on the opposite side of the room. In addition he’d had some folding chairs brought in. Everybody found chairs or sat on the edge of one of the beds, which was where I ended up, over to the far left, by the wall, facing Karpis, who, looking more and more like a schoolteacher, stood by the facing wall where he’d tacked a big homemade grease-pencil map of the Chicago Loop.

  Floyd was the last to come in, with his hungover partner Sullivan in tow, the little-man-who-wasn’t-there at dinner, an average-looking guy in a dark suit, wearing sunglasses and a fedora, despite being indoors. They took seats across the room, near the door, where I couldn’t quite see ’em.

  It was a little warm, a little stuffy in the room, with all these men crowded in, most of them smoking; no cigars in the crowd, at least. There was a breeze tonight, coming in the half-open windows, and it was appreciated. Most of the men were in shirt sleeves; I wore the lightweight white suit, gun tucked under my arm. If I was going to play in the World Series of crime, I figured I ought to have my bat along.

  Karpis, in a white shirt buttoned to the neck and baggy brown pants, stood with folded arms, slouching a little. He was, like me, wearing his window-glass wire-rims. “I guess everybody knows our objective.”

  Nelson laughed, but bitterly. “We’re going to snatch the big fed. The loud-mouth son of a bitch who calls us yellow rats from behind a goddamn desk. We’re going to snatch him, haul in the big dough, and then fuckin’ kill him.”

  “No,” Karpis said, pointing a finger at Nelson like a kid in his class. “We don’t kill him.”

  “Why?” Nelson said. It was almost a whine.

  “Because,” Karpis said, “he’s more trouble to us dead. Better we embarrass and disgrace and humiliate the bastard, and then cut him loose, than have him be a dead hero for the feds and press to rally ’round.”

  From across the smoky room came Floyd’s voice. “I agree. The son of a bitch likes to call us ‘vile’ and ‘vicious’ and ‘mad dogs’ and that. Kill him and we make him look right.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Nelson said evenly.

  Floyd said, “That’s just handin’ Hoover’s attorney general boss more ammunition against us. Then he just sticks another son of a bitch in Hoover’s chair, and what’s to gain? The days ahead is gonna be hot enough.”

  Karpis took over. “George, listen. Sure, picking Hoover for our mark comes partly out of wanting to even scores with the son of a bitch. Make him look bad, make him look stupid, put him on the spot. Of course. But the real point of this, the main point, is to grab a public figure so important the government’ll cough up some real dough to get him back. The fact it also makes the feds look sick is just frosting on the cake.”

  Doc Barker was sitting next to me; he seemed impatient as he said, “Quit chasing your tails, fellas. I ain’t convinced yet this is even gonna come off. I’m not in unless somebody can show me how this fool thing can really work.”

  Fred Barker nodded, said, “Yeah. Yeah, me too!”

  Karpis said, “That’s why we’re here, Doc.”

  Doc said, “From what you told me before, I take it you’re planning to snatch Hoover right on the street, right in front of the feds’ own office building.”

  Jesus.

  “Last time we tried something in the Loop we damn near got our asses shot off,” Barker was saying.

  “That’s not fair, Doc,” Karpis said. “If we hadn’t got in that accident, we’d been in the clear.”

  “Bullshit. You got in a accident ’cause of traffic, and then them cops swarmed on us like flies on shit.”

  “The basic plan was sound, Doc. We can make it work this time.”

  “You’re going to use the same plan as for the post-office heist?”

  Karpis smiled a mildly embarrassed version of his ghastly smile. “Well, yes, sort of, as a stepping-off point anyway—the Banker’s Building is right across from the post office, where we made the other hit. Direct across. We can build on that same plan, and learn from our mistakes.”

  Doc was shaking his head. “Learn from our mistakes? What you should learn from that post-office flop is not to pull jobs in the Loop. City jobs are a bitch in general. Now, in the country, shit, you can hit a place, drive like hell, know your back roads and you’re home free. But in the city, fuck.”

  Karpis was getting worried. “Come on, Doc, keep an open mind….”

  “You got traffic to deal with, cops on every block, one call and the word’s out to hundreds of radio cars…shit. And a plan that went bust one other time. Creepy, I’m surprised at you.”

  Nelson said, “Doc, you knew what this was about coming in—why bitch now?”

  Doc said, “I’m all for snatching Hoover. Its a sweet way to get even and get rich. Understood? But why not snatch him at the track—he likes the ponies, you know—or at the train station, when he comes to town, or leaves.”

  Karpis said, “Those are city jobs, too, Doc.”

  “Yeah, sure, but they’re easier to deal with than the goddamn heart o’ the Loop. Don’t forget—I was there, on that post-office heist. I saw the fuckin’ bullets fly.”

  “Doc,” Nelson said, an edge in his voice. “Why don’t you let Karpis lay it out for us?”

  Karpis laid it out.

  He pointed to the map as he spoke, using a grease pencil to trace various routes.

  They had inside word that Hoover was coming in tomorrow morning to spend a day at the Division of Investigation’s Chicago bureau, giving the boys in the trenches pep talks and confabbing with Purvis and Cowley. Of more interest to Karpis, however, was Hoover’s evening dinner date with State Attorney Courtney and the Chicago police commissioner. This was a pass-the-peace-pipe powwow initiated by Hoover, seeking to build more cooperation between the feds and the local cop
s; my guess was the state attorney and the police commissioner were going along with the meeting in order to ask for Purvis’ ouster. The cops had covered the feds’ trail any number of times (the Probasco “suicide” fall, for one thing) and all they’d got in return was bad-mouthing in the press by self-aggrandizing Little Mel. So a meeting was in order.

  None of this was anything Karpis went into; these were simply thoughts that flitted through my brain as he stated that Hoover was planning dinner with Courtney and the commissioner at seven o’clock at the Bismarck Hotel. Shortly before seven, a car from the state attorney’s office was to pick up Hoover at the Banker’s Building and escort him to the Bismarck.

  “Where’d you get that kind of inside dope?” a smiling Nelson asked.

  Karpis smiled his awful smile. “Friends in high places,” he said, and let it go at that.

  My guess was attorney Louis Piquett had sniffed this piece of news out; he had plenty of lines into Courtney’s office.

  Karpis’ basic plan was simple if cunning. The state attorney’s car was distinctively decorated: a black Hudson with one red and one green headlight, and a red star on the spotlight. Karpis had arranged with “our favorite underworld garage, in Cicero” to have another Hudson similarly decorated—and, in addition to police siren, equipped with such accessories as bulletproofing, shortwave radio and a sliding panel in the doors through which guns could be fired.

  Karpis planned to have this car pick up Hoover.

  The real state attorney’s car, in a city parking garage near City Hall, would have a convenient flat tire, delaying the Hoover pickup a few minutes—long enough for the ringer to make the pickup instead.

  Karpis was drawing on the map, saying, “If the pickup goes smooth, our Hudson just continues on down Clark to Jackson and turns west—like we were heading back to the Bismarck. After that we switch cars.”

  Nelson said, “We’ll have a extra car stashed? Where?”

  “In a loading dock in this alley,” Karpis said, pointing to the map. “It’s after work; deserted. We stuff Hoover in the trunk of the second car, and drive away, nice and easy.”