II
The Breaks
It took another four months to pull it off, four months of the same old suffocating routine, never mind that we got a new warden. Wardens come and go, but prison routine never changes. This one was another hardnose but he liked to keep his distance from the cons, and none of us ever got a look at him. We called him Bashful Louie.
Before he’d been out a month, John hit his first bank—in New Carlisle, Ohio—and took away $10,000. Not bad at all, especially for a beginner. Pearl brought the news on visiting day, giving it to me in her expert whisper so the guards in the room couldn’t hear. Unfortunately, the bills had been brand new and in consecutive serial numbers and John couldn’t risk passing them, so he’d had to fence the bundle. He got a good rate—three for five—but still, that’s 40 percent down the rathole. After splitting the take with his partners and covering his expenses, he was way short of what he needed to finance our arrangements. Just the same, it was an encouraging start and we were sure that one or two more jobs and he’d have the necessary grubstake. Then bring on the guns.
New Carlisle, however, proved to be a fluke. We hadn’t figured on the damn Depression. It didn’t mean much to us inside the walls, but as John quickly came to find out it was kicking hell out of the real world. He’d go to case a bank on our list and as often as not it turned out to have boards on the windows and a padlock on the door. And of the banks still in business, most weren’t holding enough cash to make them worthwhile. Pearl told me he had hit some drugstores and a few supermarkets but none of those jobs got him more than pin money. I said to tell him to quit the penny-ante heists, they weren’t worth the risk. He could get collared on one of them as easy as on a bank.
Then there was no more word from him. A month went by and Pearl had no idea what he was up to. The absence of news put us all on an edge. Russell got in a fight and beat up a guy for no reason except raw temper and did two days in the hole for it. Charley had a rare case of the grumps and Red was ready to bite off heads. Okie Jack’s chronic ulcers were eating him up.
Walt Dietrich said that for all we knew John had been arrested and was cooling his heels in some hick jail. He could’ve been killed and how would we know? We could be waiting on a dead man, Walt said.
I said that was possible, but more likely he’d met some looker and was enjoying himself for a while.
Russell said it was a hell of a note if John was spending his time dicking the chippies while we were waiting on him to set things up.
As if any of us would not do likewise, Charley said.
He’s supposed to be taking care of business, Shouse said.
I told them not to worry about it, John would come through.
Red said I sounded like the president of the optimists’ club.
Why’s that, I said. Because I think every cloud has a silver lining? Because I think it’s always darkest before the dawn? That for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows? That he who laughs last laughs loudest?
He who laughs last, Red said, is the dimmest fucken wit in the room.
Charley said his favorite adage about laughter held that a man who can laugh at himself is truly blessed, for he will never lack for amusement.
John Burns chuckled for a moment and then suddenly looked puzzled and asked what the hell that was supposed to mean.
Which got a laugh from everybody. Then Burns joined in and we all nearly split a gut.
The next time Pearl came to see me she was smiling when I entered the visiting room, and so I knew John was all right. She said he’d shown up at the Side Pocket one night and told her he’d been in Ohio hunting for fat banks, but he’d only found slim pickings. He’d then come back to Indiana and with a couple of partners hit a bank in Daleville for about three grand.
Three grand wouldn’t leave much to put in the breakout kitty, not after the split and expenses. At the rate he was going, I said, we’d die of old age before he got the dough together.
Maybe not, she said. She leaned even closer to the screen and told me she had talked to Sonny Sheetz, her old pal and East Chicago outfit boss. When she told Sheetz that New Carlisle and Daleville had been John’s work, he said he might have something for the guy and to send him around.
John’s in East Shy right now meeting with him, she said.
I’d learned a lot about Sonny Sheetz in the time I’d been at M City. They said he got a cut of every illegal dollar that changed hands in Indiana between Kokomo and the Michigan border. There wasn’t a cathouse or gambling joint or speakeasy in the northern part of the state that didn’t pay him for something, if only for protection. The other guys knew about him too. Red said the man was well named, because anybody who got on the wrong side of him ended up under a sheet.
I asked what Sheetz might want with John, and Pearl said he might want to make some banking arrangements with him is what he might want. For a second I didn’t know what she meant and she said You know…set-ups.
Of course. Fat Charley had explained them to me once, except he’d called them cover-ups. He’d even done one for an old pal who managed a bank in Ohio and was headed for an embezzlement rap until he thought to ask Charley for help. Pearl said Sheetz had people in a number of banks—including one or two in Indianapolis—regularly skimming the books for him or doing some other kind of inside larceny. Usually all it took to cover such theft was a talented bookkeeper. But there were times when even the most creative accounting wasn’t going to get past the auditor on his next visit, and the best way out of the jam was to get robbed. Robbery was a swell solution because the bank could claim a loss that balanced its books, plus it got fully reimbursed by the insurance company. Fat Charley said it wasn’t unheard of for insurance agents to be included in such operations for a cut of the profits. The only ones left holding the bag were the insurance company itself and the depositors. Of course the insurance company wasn’t about to go broke, no matter what, and the depositors, well, they got what they deserved for trusting a bank. The American way of business, Charley once said to me and John, was designed to let the intelligently greedy fleece the stupidly greedy, never mind the plain stupid, and the law was their set of rules for keeping it that way. I said he took the words right out of my mouth, and John laughed and said Me too.
A set-up by Sonny Sheetz, Pearl said, meant that the vault at such and such bank would be found unlocked at a certain hour of a certain day and all the cash would be ready to go. It meant that, under the guise of protecting the customers, certain bank employees would not set off the alarm until the robbers were on their way. It meant that erroneous serial numbers could be reported for the stolen money in case the cops decided to send the numbers out around the state.
And how much of the take from a set-up, I wanted to know, did Mr. Sheetz get?
A third, Pearl said.
Let me see if I got this straight, I said. He skims who-knows-how-much from a bank, then has the bank robbed to cover the skims, and then gets a third of the rest of the bank’s dough?
And then, she said, he goes back to skimming the same bank after it collects on the insurance.
Nice work if you can get it, I said.
She said guys like Sheetz weren’t called bosses for nothing, but to keep in mind that the other two-thirds of the take was practically found money for the guys who did the job. The way she figured it, if John got one or two set-ups from Sheetz our financial problems were over.
I didn’t get why Sheetz didn’t use his own people for the set-ups. Why bring in somebody from outside?
Because strictly speaking, she said, Sonny wasn’t in the holdup business. His main dealings were in booze, whores, gambling, and loansharking. Now and then he would also broker certain projects—including an occasional bank robbery—but he never used his own people for those projects because even in a set-up there was no guarantee that nothing would go wrong. Something could always go wrong. And if it did, Sonny did not want the robbers to have any record of connection to himself o
r his associates. He liked to use stickup men with no known ties to the mob and who could be trusted to keep their mouths shut. John had no mob associations, none of us in the gang did. And because I’d vouched for John to her, she had vouched for him to Sheetz.
I’ve told him about you, baby, she said. Play your cards right and you can do business with him yourself when you’re out of here.
I didn’t say anything to that. The way I saw it a boss was a boss, whether he was a prison warden or the head of some outfit, and I was never one for taking orders.
Pearl was a smoothie—before she left she managed to pass me a small wad of paper through the wire mesh without the guard noticing. Back in my cell I saw it was a newspaper report about the Daleville robbery. A young female teller had been the only employee in the place when two men entered the bank and announced a stickup. One of them jumped up on the teller counter and then vaulted over the barrier into the cashiers’ cage and started gathering the money. The cashier said she didn’t know why he made the leap, since the door to the cage was wide open. Several unsuspecting customers entered the bank while the holdup was in progress and the other robber rounded them up as they came in. The holdup men herded everybody into the vault and made their getaway with $3,500.
That newspaper article was the first time I ever heard of Captain Matt Leach of the Indiana State Police, and we would sure get to know that bastard well enough in days to come. He was quoted as saying he already had a good lead on the identity of the robbers and expected to make an arrest very shortly.
When the other guys read the report, Red said What’s with the acrobat stuff? I’m telling you, if he breaks a leg and gets put back in here I’ll bust his other fucken leg for being such a dope.
I agreed it was a stupid stunt.
Johnny Fairbanks, Charley said. Our boy has a flair for the dramatic and likes to impress the ladies.
What bothered Dietrich was the business about Leach having a lead on the robbers. He asked Fat Charley if he thought it was true.
Charley said of course not, it was simply a standard police pronouncement. More troublesome to him was the size of the take. He thought it was rather meager, considering the sum John needed to raise.
That’s when I told them about Sonny Sheetz and the possibility of John getting a set-up bank.
Man alive, Russell said, a set-up from Sonny Sheetz would be a piece of luck.
Maybe so, Walt said, but he wasn’t going to count that chicken till it was hatched.
The following Sunday Jenkins got an unexpected visit from his sister. I caught a look at her through the screen as I went past them to where Mary was waiting. Sis was a honey, all right, as pretty as her picture, with a dark blond bob and nice-looking tits in a yellow dress. When I had told the guys it wouldn’t surprise me if John was spending time with some girl, she was the one I had in mind.
After my visit with Mary I found Jenkins waiting for me in the yard. He was holding a basket of fruit Sis brought him. She had also given him a message for me. John says go to the Crow’s Nest, he said.
Go there when?
His sister hadn’t specified, but he guessed she meant now. Oh, and she said give you this, he said. It’s a present from him.
He handed me a banana. I figured it for some kind of joke and stuck it in my pocket.
Say Harry, he said, what’s the Crow’s Nest?
I ignored him and went over to the mess hall. They kept the coffee urns full all day on Sundays. I poured a cup and casually ambled over to the bank of north windows. I was aware of the mess guards watching me closely from the far side of the room like I might try to bust the thick glass and wriggle through the six-inch-square grillwork of iron bars and drop two stories to the concrete pavement of the exercise yard below and then run across the yard and scale the twenty-foot-high perimeter wall like a fly in full view of the gun bulls in the towers and drop down on the other side and run all the way to Lake Michigan and swim out of sight.
The windows offered one of the few views a convict could get of the outside world. I’ll grant you it wasn’t much of a view, which explains why most guys didn’t look more than once if they ever bothered to look at all. There was nothing beyond the perimeter wall except scrub grass and dunes and an isolated strip of sandy road. Some of the visitors and prison staff used the road as a shortcut to the old Gary highway. John and I had liked to go to the window after breakfast on Sundays and have a long look. We liked to see for ourselves that the free world still existed and was out there waiting for us, no matter how scrubby it was. I forget which of us named the spot the Crow’s Nest, but we’d kept the name to ourselves.
I was the only one at the windows. It was a brightly sunny day and there wasn’t a thing unusual about the view. I wondered what I was supposed to see. Then here came a green Chevy roadster with the top down. There was no mistaking John at the wheel or Sis Jenkins in her yellow dress beside him. Another girl was in the rumble seat, a longhaired brunette wearing blue. He stopped the car directly in view of the Crow’s Nest. I didn’t think he could see me through the window bars, but later on when we talked about it he told me he could just barely make out a silhouette and figured it was me.
He was wearing a white suit and fedora. He turned and said something to the two girls and they stood up on the seats. They were hatless and even at that distance I could see their grins. They raised the hems of their dresses way up high and started doing a sort of clumsy little rumba step in place. Sis wasn’t wearing stockings and garters like her friend and her legs were long and pale. My dick swelled in my pants. It was all I could do to keep a straight face and not give the game away to the mess hall guards. The hacks in the corner towers were either paying the car no mind or they were enjoying the show as much as I was. John held his arms toward the girls like a stage host presenting an act and then said something to them and Sis stopped dancing and shook her head no-no-no. The brunette laughed kept on dancing and showing those garters. John turned up his palms to Sis like he was making some special plea while she looked down at him. She tossed her head back and laughed big and he reached up and stroked that long bare thigh. Whatever he said did the trick because the girls turned around and bent waaaay over and pulled their skirts up to show me their panties. The Jenkins girl’s were yellow and the brunette’s white and, oh man, I wanted to howl like a moonstruck hound. They were waggling their behinds and just as I was thinking the entertainment couldn’t get any better John reached up and yanked down Sis’s underpants to expose her ass—and I glimpsed a dark patch between her legs. I heard a faint Woooo! from one of the guard towers. Sis jerked up and around so fast she lost her balance and John caught her by the skirt to keep her from falling out of the car. She dropped down on the seat and started beating at him with her fists and knocked off his hat. He hunched a shoulder against her assault as he worked the gearshift and got the car rolling. The brunette was sprawled in the rumble seat and looked like she was dying of laughter. As the car pulled away, John raised a fist up high in the air and shook it. And then they were out of sight.
I hadn’t seen that much of a woman’s legs in nine years—never mind a female rump or a furpatch—and I had a hard-on for the rest of the day. That night I tossed and turned for I don’t know how long before I finally quit fighting it and jacked off so I could get to sleep.
Before breakfast the next morning I peeled the banana and bit into it and chewed a time or two before realizing something wasn’t right and spitting the mush into my hand. In it was a tightly rolled pair of ten-dollar bills.
I told the others about the money but not about the show John gave me. That merry little incident always stayed between the two of us.
During the next month he hit two banks, one in Montpelier, Indiana, and the other in Blufton, Ohio. Pearl said Montpelier was a Sonny Sheetz set-up and went smooth as glass. The newspaper claimed the bandits took twelve thou but the real take was seven.
Blufton was a different story. John did that one because he’d
gotten a tip that it was fat, but he’d been misinformed and the take was only two thousand. What’s more, the bank alarm started ringing while he was in the vault and his partners panicked. They ran outside and started shooting up and down the street to ward off the curious. It didn’t help their nerves a bit when a waterworks whistle suddenly started wailing. It did that every day at noon, but John and his guys didn’t know that, though they should have. They shot holes in store windows and windshields and generally scared the beans out of the citizens until John came out and they piled into the car and took off. John told Pearl the job didn’t take five minutes but between the bank alarm and the waterworks whistle and his rattled partners’ gunfire it sounded like a battle in a crazy house.
As she told me all this, I was thinking Jesus he’s having a swell time.
Sonny was arranging a fat set-up for him a couple of weeks down the road and John was sure the take from that job would do the trick. He’d said to tell me he’d have everything arranged by the middle of September.
The set-up turned out to be in Indianapolis. John made away with fifteen grand, although the bank claimed twenty-five. He told Pearl to let us know that Harry Copeland had been with him on most of his jobs, including this one. She hadn’t met Copeland, but Russell and I knew him from years back when he’d done a short fall in M City. His name had been on the list of contacts we’d given John. Russell had recently heard from his girlfriend Opal that Copeland was living in Chicago and dating her sister. Everybody called him Knuckles because the three middle fingers of his right hand had been broken so bad they now looked like they had an extra set of joints. He’d never told any of us how it happened, but Russell had seen fingers like that before, on a guy he’d known back in Detroit who once worked as a drop man for the local outfit. One day the guy was late delivering a cash payment of some sort and the tardiness cost his boss an extra day’s interest. The boss was so displeasured he had a goon hold the guy’s hand in a dresser drawer and then he kicked the drawer shut.
Handsome Harry Page 9
