I didn’t bother to solicit an opinion from Jenkins or Shouse.
One other thing, Pearl said, taking a folded piece of paper from her shirt pocket and handing it to me. Written on it was the name of Evelyn Frechette and an address. Pearl said she was the tootsie John had been seeing in Chicago. He wanted me to go get her and have her waiting for him when I sprung him.
Well Jesus Whore-hopping Christ, Red said. Anything else he’d like? A chauffeured limousine, maybe? With a bucket of champagne in the backseat?
I was tickled by John’s audacity. Even before I’d made it out of M City, he was planning on me rounding up his girl and having her standing by when I busted him out of jail. Talk about confidence.
He said to tell you she’s Patty Cherrington’s friend, Pearl said to Russell.
Small world, Russell said. He told us Patty Cherrington was Opal’s sister, who our old pal Knuckles Copeland had been dating for the past few weeks. But to hear Opal tell it, Patty wasn’t nearly as keen on Copeland as he was on her.
Ah yes, Charley said, that old sad song.
While Mary and Pearl were buying clothes for us, Red and Shouse went off to another part of town and abandoned the Phaeton in a grocery store lot and pilfered another V-8, a year-old Deluxe Ford Fordor.
Around midafternoon Knuckles Copeland showed up. Pearl had phoned him and told him where to find us, and he’d wasted no time driving down to Indy. Poor old Ralph must’ve felt like his little house had been turned into a hotel lobby. I didn’t want him listening in on us so I had Jenkins take him out in the backyard. I introduced Knuckles to the others, and Russell asked him how Opal was doing.
She says to tell you she can’t wait, Knuckles said, and wagged his eyebrows.
Russell said She can’t?
I asked him if he knew a woman named Evelyn Frechette and he said sure, she was John’s girl, her friends called her Billie, and it was Patty who’d introduced them. He said he’d seen her the day before yesterday and told her about John getting pinched, but he didn’t tell her about the blonde John was with at the time. She seemed almost as angry as sad about the news. She was a hard one to figure, Knuckles said, but man, she was a nice piece of work. He described an hourglass shape with his hands.
Knowing John, I already knew what she was a nice piece of.
Charley cleared his throat and asked if we could dispense with the small talk. He wanted to know if Copeland had found us a place to hide out.
He sure had—a secluded country place in Ohio, a big roomy farmhouse on the Great Miami River, just outside of Hamilton and about fifteen miles north of Cincy. The bad news was that the owners were still finishing up a few repairs on the place and it wouldn’t be ready for another two days. Knuckles said not to blame him for the delay. John hadn’t given him the job of looking for a hideout till about two weeks ago, and it hadn’t made the job any easier that he’d insisted the place be within an hour’s drive of Dayton.
Golly gosh, Russell said, I wonder why he wanted to be so near Dayton?
Charley was speaking for all of us when he said a country place was a bad idea. Bumpkins took too much notice of outsiders. They were too damn nosy and loved to gossip. They were too likely to blab to the cops. The best place to hide was in the heart of a large city, where everybody was a stranger and nobody gave a damn about anybody else, including the people next door. Anonymity is our great ally, Charley said. He had assumed John knew that and would get us a hideout in Chicago. As much as he hated to say it, he thought perhaps Johnny Fairbanks’s good judgment had been fuzzied by his carnal yens.
I knew there was no perhaps about it, but I said that under the circumstances we didn’t have much choice but to go to the country place and we’d see about getting a better hideout later on. We spread a road map on the table and Copeland made a little x on it to show where the house was. I made him give us specific directions for getting there, in case any of us got separated on the way.
When the girls got back from shopping and Pearl heard about the delay with the hideout, she said some of us could stay at her house in Kokomo for the two days till it was ready, and she had a trusted friend who could put up the rest of us.
She and Mary did a good job of getting all of us some nice clothes in proper fit. They’d played it smart and gone to a variety of stores, shopping for one of us here, another of us there, so as not to raise curiosity about buying so much men’s clothing in a lot of different sizes. It was a wise precaution. The talk in every store was about the Michigan City break. Everybody was wondering where the fugitives might be. People were dreaming out loud about how they’d spend the reward money if they were the first to spot the escaped convicts and tip off the cops.
As we got ready to leave, Pearl said she could kick herself for not having brought a set of license plates to replace those on whatever stolen car we were driving. I said forget it, we wouldn’t be driving this one for long, anyway.
I took Mary aside and asked what she wanted to do.
What do you mean, she said.
I mean do you want to stick with us or what, I said.
I can’t, she said, I have to go home.
I’d been afraid she would say that, and my chest suddenly felt hollow.
She had to see her mother, she said. She had to talk to her. She needed to take care of things.
Yeah, I said, I get it.
And I need to pack a bag, she said. And then you better pick me up on your way back, mister, and I don’t mean maybe.
She giggled at putting one over on me. I couldn’t stop smiling even as we kissed.
Ralph didn’t know our plans and there was nothing he could tell the police that would do us much harm. We’d already told Mary that if the cops ever got hold of her she should say we forced her to take us to Ralph’s. Just the same, I warned Ralphie-boy not to blab to anybody about our visit, and he said he never would, never. Do you swear on the Bible, I said, ribbing him a little, and he said Yes, oh yes, I have one in the bedroom, I’ll get it. I had to laugh. Never mind, I told him, I believe you.
Jesus, how do guys like that live with themselves?
We left late in the afternoon—Red riding with Pearl in her roadster, Copeland following her in his Olds with Jenkins and Shouse. Russell and Charley were with me in the Ford. We dropped Mary off at home and headed for Kokomo.
It was a short drive, a little more than an hour, and we didn’t talk much on the way, Russ and Charley and I. The rain had quit and the low sun was shining bright. It was a pleasure simply to gawk at the broad, flat countryside passing by.
At all that free and open world.
Pearl owned her house under the name of Dewey, the same name she used for her telephone listing, and of course had a driving license in that name too. Dewey was her Good Citizen identity.
I hid the Fordor in her garage and then she phoned the friend she’d mentioned, Darla Bird, who agreed to stash some of us for the next two nights and said she’d be right over. Pearl said we could trust Darla to keep things under her hat. Besides being Pearl’s friend, she was the most popular girl at the Side Pocket, and when she showed up it was easy to see why—she was a blond knockout, far prettier than most women you’ll find in a cathouse. Pearl said she was one of those rare working girls who knew how to manage their money, which was how she’d come to own a two-story house on a large piece of wooded property on the edge of town. She lived by herself except for three cats. Her house was bigger than Pearl’s, so Red and Shouse and Jenkins all went with her, and Charley and I stayed put. Copeland and Russell had gone to Chicago together to spend some time with Opal and Patty before rejoining us for the drive to Ohio.
The next day we laid low and caught up on our sleep and Pearl arranged a meeting between me and Sonny Sheetz. After supper I telephoned my mother. She was elated to hear from me. She said the police had been there early that morning and searched for me over every inch of the place. She said she should’ve been an actress, she’d wept so convincingly as she to
ld the cops how much heartache I’d caused her with my criminal misdeeds. Two of them stayed in the house most of the day in case I showed up or telephoned, and she made sandwiches for them to show what a good citizen she was, but it was all she could do to keep from putting rat poison on the salami. A car finally came and got the two cops, and she’d waved goodbye to them even as she was wishing they would all be killed in a crash. She had me laughing and I said Easy does it, Killer. She wasn’t sure if they had anybody watching the house but she intended to take a long walk all the way around the property twice a day and see what was what. She said for me not to go see her until she gave the all clear. I said she was a champ and I’d call again in a few days.
Pearl and Charley were playing double solitaire and drinking wine at the kitchen table. I said goodnight to them and went off to the guest room with its comfortable twin beds. When I woke in the morning I saw Charley’s bed hadn’t been slept in. I found him and Pearl still in the kitchen, only now they were wearing fresh clothes and Charley’s thin hair was wetly combed. Pearl said good morning and went to the stove to fry me some eggs. Charley was smiling very big.
I sat down and glanced at Pearl’s back, then grinned at Charley and raised my brow in question and lightly tapped the top of a fist against my palm. His own grin got even wider and he nodded, and we both tried to stifle our snickers with our hands.
Without turning around, Pearl said I know what you guys are giggling about—you sound as silly as schoolboys, I swear. Then she gave us a scolding look and all of us busted out laughing.
An hour later she and I were on our way to East Chicago in her roadster. I wore a rube’s straw boater and plain-lens eyeglasses she’d bought for me at a novelty store, and we wore matching wedding bands. If we should be questioned by the cops we would say we were Mr. and Mrs. George Elliott of Kokomo. Pearl could produce a driving license and automobile registration to verify the Elliott name and address, but I couldn’t because I’d recently been assaulted and robbed of my wallet while taking a stroll in the park—and where were the police when you needed them, anyway? Despite our careful preparations and cover story, I was a little jumpy about going back to the region I’d fled less than two days earlier. But we must’ve looked respectable enough because we were waved through without questioning at both of the roadblocks we came to.
Sheetz’s headquarters was in an old three-story building with the paint peeling off and a sign saying INDIAGO INDUSTRIES. It was flanked by a smoky refinery on one side and, on the other, by a dark green canal that ran out to the lake. Sheetz’s office, however, was nicely appointed with dark leather armchairs and sofa. His bare desktop gleamed like brown glass. I sat across from him, and Pearl made herself at home on the sofa. Also in the room were a nervous, portly man named Hymie Cohen, whom Sheetz introduced as his associate, and a big guy with a black goatee who looked like a well-dressed pirate and whom nobody introduced. He stood next to the door and his nicely tailored jacket almost hid the pistol bulge under his arm.
Sheetz was perfectly groomed, every hair in place, his fingernails buffed to a shine. He was one of those guys whose age was impossible to tell by his looks—he might’ve been thirty years old or fifty. He had a diamond in his stickpin and another in his ring. His manner was casual but his eyes were constantly on the prowl. He thanked me for coming to see him and said he appreciated the risk involved in doing so, although the events of the day before had made it clear I wasn’t any more afraid of risk than our mutual friend John. He said he had enjoyed his dealings with John, which had been fruitful for them both, and he was sorry to hear of his predicament in Ohio. He hoped things worked out for him.
I said I hoped so too, and we left the subject of John at that.
As I’d expected, what he had for me was a bank, only it wasn’t a set-up. Like a lot of other banks around the country in these hard times, this one had been officially closed down, but it was still serving local business in such matters as lease and deed contracts and so forth, transactions that called for little cash beyond service fees. Through one of his sources, Sheetz had learned the bank would soon be reopened, and that a few days before then it would receive a large shipment of cash from the federal mint. Between ten and twelve thousand dollars, according to the source.
I asked what was in it for him and he said a third. I said that was a hell of a cut for just pointing me to a bank that wasn’t even a set-up.
He said he ought to take more than a third because it wasn’t a set-up. This wasn’t one of the banks he got skims from. The only money he’d ever see from it was a cut of the take.
I said it was still a big slice for nothing more than steering me to a bank.
He said I was free to say no and go find my own jug to rob, see how easy it was to find a fat one.
He had me over a barrel. I’m sure he knew I meant to get John out of jail and I needed some fast cash to work with.
All right, I said. Deal.
It took a while for Fat Charley to realize I wasn’t joking when I said the job was the First National Bank in St. Marys, Ohio.
Gadzooks, he said, my old sweet home.
Which all of us except Pearl and Mary had already known. Naturally we ribbed him plenty about it. Russell said it was a pretty sad state of affairs when a man celebrated his homecoming by robbing the town bank. Red wondered how a community with a sacred name like St. Marys could have produced such a lowdown individual as Charles Makley. And so on. For all the kidding, though, our excitement was like an electric charge. Three days out of M City and we had a score lined up. Wooo.
The only drawback to the job was that St. Marys was so close to Lima, little more than twenty miles between them, Charley said. There was bound to be a hullabaloo after we hit the bank—cops all over, probably some roadblocks, the locals all worked up and wary—and so the smart thing to do would be to let things cool a little before we set out to spring John. The way Charley saw it, the delay would actually work to our advantage. Once the excitement about the robbery died down, the locals would relax their guard even more than usual, simply out of relief. If we waited a week or so between the bank job and John’s deliverance, we’d stand a better chance of catching his keepers with their pants down and have an easier time of it.
The way I figured it, John wanted out of that cell as soon as possible, but Charley had a point and we all knew it.
Copeland and Russell had got back from Shytown shortly after Pearl and I returned from East Chicago. Knuckles had picked up a .38 revolver for Shouse, so now all of us had a piece. Pearl added even more to our arsenal when she got me a sawed-off twelve gauge from her office at the Side Pocket. There’s nothing like a shotgun to ensure everybody’s full attention and prompt cooperation in a holdup.
That night we all took supper together at a café, then said so long to Pearl and Darla and left for Indianapolis to retrieve Mary before heading to the Ohio hideout. Shouse and Jenkins went with Copeland in his car. Russ and Charley and Red rode with me.
On the drive down, Russell told us about his two days in Chicago. He said Opal shared a one-bedroom apartment with her sister Patty Cherrington, and the girls flipped a coin to see who got the bedroom. Opal won the toss, so Knuckles and Patty made do with the foldout sofa bed in the living room. But Knuckles got drunk and started accusing Patty of cheating on him, and Russell finally had to get out of bed and tell him to knock off the yelling or go home. Copeland said to look who’s talking, that Russ and Opal sounded like feeding time at the zoo when they were humping. That got a good laugh out of Opal, but Patty’d had enough of Knuckles’ ranting and told him to get the hell out. The next day he telephoned her and they had a long talk and he must’ve said the right things because Patty relented and said okay, she’d go spend the night at his place. Russell didn’t see them again till it was time to get back to Kokomo.
As for himself and Opal, Russell said, they never left the bedroom in those two days except to go to the bathroom, and all they had to eat was cheese and c
rackers.
Truth to tell, we didn’t really care all that much about eating, Russell said, if you get my drift.
Red said if crackers and cheese was all Russell ate, then he wasn’t treating his lady friend as well as he ought, if he got his drift.
Fat Charley said he thought the conversation would be better served if we didn’t speculate about Mr. Clark’s skills or lack thereof in the perverse sexual arts.
Fuck you guys, Russell said.
Now that would be perverse, Red said.
Charley said he was sure what Mr. Clark meant to say was that he and his lady had nourished themselves almost exclusively on love.
Exactly right, Russell said.
Red said that on their first night at Darla’s house Shouse made a pass at her and she said nothing doing. Shouse then offered to pay her but said she’d have to put it on the cuff since he didn’t have any money. She said she never did business on credit or in her own home.
She says to Ed, I live here, mister, Red said, and man, you could’ve chilled your drink with her tone of voice.
Jenkins was polite the whole time they were there, but he generally kept his distance from Darla. Red thought the little fruit was scared of her. He himself got along with the lady just swell. He mowed the lawn and helped her re-pot some plants, and after they did the supper dishes they danced to music on the radio. Shouse tried to cut in, and Red was willing, but Darla told Shouse Sorry, my dance card’s full up for the night.
I guess he’ll think twice before offering a working girl money under her own roof again, Red said.
He and Darla danced and talked until Shouse and Jenkins turned in, and then she took him to her room. He slept with her on the second night too. In the morning he’d asked her if she’d like to come along with him and live the exciting life of an outlaw-ette. She said it sounded like fun, but no thanks, her life was satisfying enough as it was. Satisfying wasn’t the same as exciting, Red told her, and she said he was right about that, but it tended to last longer.
Handsome Harry Page 13
