Handsome Harry

by James Carlos Blake

  I figured the crack about being overheard might get her goat, and it did. She said You think there’s somebody else here? Some guy?

  I said How would I know?

  Listen you, she said, I know your real name and it isn’t Pete. And I know about the crate of thread, you get me? I know things because Johnny trusts me. So get this straight—there’s nobody here but me, and don’t go telling Johnny any different.

  I would’ve laughed at stinging her so good if I hadn’t been pretty stung myself at learning John told her about how we’d pulled the break. I would come to think the world of Billie once I got to know her, but at that point I didn’t know Billie Frechette any better than I knew Billy the Kid. For all I knew, she was one more bimbo John had taken a passing fancy to, and I couldn’t help thinking he’d been a dope to trust her.

  I said I’d talk to her at breakfast, to name a place where we could meet at eight o’clock. She said she didn’t eat breakfast and never got out of bed before noon, so why didn’t I just tell her what I had to say? I said she could either meet me in the morning or forget the whole thing, it didn’t matter to me one way or the other.

  She gave a big exaggerated sigh and muttered something I didn’t catch, which was probably just as well, then said she’d see me at Paulie’s, a café about a block east of her place. I told her I was a tall good-looking blond guy and she couldn’t miss me. Yeah yeah, she said, and banged the receiver in my ear.

  At a quarter to nine I’d had two cups of coffee and three cigarettes and she still hadn’t showed. I was about to say the hell with it, let John fetch her himself, when she came through the door. She was coatless, wearing a black suit and cloche hat. Copeland hadn’t lied about her looks. She spotted me, and as she made her way across the room every eye in the place was on the swing of her caboose. She was a few inches taller than Mary and her cheekbones were a work of art and the hair curling out from under the little hat was black as crow feathers. She slid into the seat across from me in the booth and I wondered why somebody with such a pretty face would bother with so much makeup. Her eyes were bright and quick but a little bloodshot, no doubt from the booze I’d heard in her voice the night before.

  Without so much as a hello, she took a cigarette from her purse and held it in front of her mouth like the Queen of Sheba expecting some flunky to light her up. I thought about not doing or saying anything until she asked for the light, then immediately felt ridiculous, like she was gulling me into some stupid kid’s game. I struck a match and fired up her fag.

  She took a pull and blew a stream of smoke at me. Okay handsome, she said, you got me up with the roosters—now what’s the word?

  I kept it brief, telling her that John expected to get out of confinement in a few days and would like it if she was on hand when he did.

  For a moment she simply stared at me and I couldn’t read a thing in her face. Then she said You busting him out?

  Ask no questions, I said, I’ll tell no lies. You coming or not?

  Christ, she said, you still don’t trust me. She made a big production out of snuffing out the cigarette. Then said He really wants me with him?

  Why else would he send for her?

  I knew it, she said, I knew he wouldn’t forget me.

  I told her to be all packed and set to go by noon, but it didn’t surprise me that it was nearly two o’clock before she was ready. We gave Opal and Patty enough money to rent three downtown apartments while we were gone. I told them to get two-bedroom places, each in a different apartment house, to make sure each building had at least three exit doors on the ground floor and fire escapes at every hallway window. We wanted places we could get away from fast if the need arose.

  I drove and Russell rode shotgun and Billie sat in the back and talked our ears off. She said she was half French on her daddy’s side and half Indian on her mother’s.

  Do tell, Russell said. He leaned over the seat and gave her a good once-over and asked which half was which. She laughed along with us and said she could see she was among rascals.

  She said she got the name Billie when she was a kid because she was such a tomboy. She’d grown up on a Menominee reservation in Wisconsin. Smallpox nearly did her in when she was eight. She’d gone to an Indian school and hated the place with a passion. When she was sixteen she ran off to Milwaukee, and two years after that she moved to Chicago. She took up with a guy named Sparks, a stickup man, and why she married him she’d never know. Sparks’s partner was Bobo Cherrington, and Bobo’s wife Patty became her best friend. Patty’s marriage was no better than Billie’s, and when their husbands got convicted on a mail robbery rap and sent to Leavenworth neither girl shed any tears. Billie never once went to visit Sparks and they’d never exchanged a letter. She didn’t care if she never saw him again. She said Patty felt the same way about Bobo.

  Russell said So you’re divorced?

  She said As far as I’m concerned.

  For the past year she’d been working in the coat room of the same club as Patty. They were better buddies than ever and liked to go dancing in speakeasies. One night about a month ago Patty’s latest beau, Harry Copeland, showed up at a club with a friend he introduced to them as Johnny.

  The minute I laid eyes on him, Billie said, brother, that was it.

  I kept our speed slightly under the limit for the whole trip. We didn’t want to attract attention, especially not with a satchelful of pistols in the trunk. Whenever we spotted a police car, Russell and I would eyeball it on the sly until it was out of sight. The first time it happened, Billie kept right on chattering behind me and I thought she hadn’t even noticed the cop. But the next time I spied one, I glanced at her in the mirror and saw that even as she talked she was watching the cop car too. That’s when I knew Billie Frechette was no greenhorn.

  We got into Cincinnati around ten o’clock. It was a pretty night—a nearly full silver moon, the air chilly and tinged with river odors. I’ve never forgotten that town’s lovely fall evenings.

  We found Charley and Mary playing rummy and drinking beer at the dining table. When I introduced Billie, Charley kissed her hand and said You are exquisite, my dear.

  You smoothie, she said, I bet you say that to all the girls.

  Mary gave her a big hug and said Welcome to the club, honey.

  What happened in Lima two days later—on Columbus Day, to be exact—was in all the papers, it made the newsreels, and five months down the road it all came out at my trial. But the way things are reported in the news or presented in a courtroom is hardly ever the way they really happened. At best, what you get in a newspaper or at a trial are some of the facts, but facts are never the whole story. There can be a big difference between what happened and what happened, if you get my meaning. As far as most people are concerned, what happens is all that counts, not the whys and wherefores. Actually, I tend to agree. Just the same, I’ll tell you what happened.

  But first I want to set something else straight. There was a hick-head Lima lawyer who claimed that Russell and I went to his office that afternoon and tried to arrange for John’s sister to visit him in his cell. He said he told us he’d have to discuss it with the sheriff, and that even though he didn’t know who we were at the time he was suspicious, and that he tried to tip off the sheriff but the man didn’t take him seriously. Well, that shyster’s a liar. I never met him in my life. He’s one more guy who used us to get attention for himself. His story doesn’t even make sense. We didn’t need to get anybody in to see John. What for? To sneak him a gun? To check the layout of that shoebox jail? Christ, all we had to do was exactly what we did—walk in and take him. The whole thing was easy as pie.

  Except of course for that business with the sheriff.

  We got to Lima a little after six in the evening. We were in the stolen Chrysler and Studebaker and had left our own cars in Dayton. There was hardly anyone on the streets, which of course was why we’d chosen the supper hour to do it.

  Red parked the Chrysler in fr
ont of the jail office and kept the motor idling. Half a block behind us, Copeland pulled the Studebaker to the curb. He left the motor running too and Shouse got out and lit a cigarette and leaned on the fender. His job was to watch the street behind Red. Red’s job was to watch the jail door.

  I had a .45 in a holster under my arm and a .380 tucked under my belt at my side. All right, I said, let’s do it.

  Charley and Russell and I got out of the car and they followed me up the walkway and through the office door.

  The sheriff was at his desk and looked up from some papers when we entered. He was portly and his thinning hair was slicked with oil—and his eyes told me right off the bat he was no pushover. I thought Oh hell.

  Two others were in the room, a woman in a chair with a folded newspaper in her lap, and a lanky deputy playing with a pup on a couch. Against the far wall was an iron-barred door that Charley had said opened onto a short passageway to another barred door, the one to the cells. The deputy was unarmed, but a gunbelt with a holstered pistol hung on a hatrack next to the couch. There was a large round clock on the wall, and in the momentary silence I heard its clunking tick.

  Evening gentlemen, the sheriff said, can I help you?

  The badge on his vest had been polished to a gleam. He was smiling but his eyes were sizing us up. He eased his roller chair a little nearer to the corner drawer of his desk, and I figured that’s where he kept his piece.

  I told him we were state officers from Indiana, working the Michigan City break. He had a prisoner named Dillinger who was a friend of the fugitives and we wanted to have a word with him.

  The sheriff said sure thing, just sign the register and show him some credentials and we could talk to the prisoner all we wanted.

  I pulled the .380 and said Here’s my credentials, mister, now open the lockup.

  The woman said Oh my God. Russell told the guy on the couch Stay put, Mac, and I heard the hammer cock on his piece.

  Be reasonable, sir, Charley told the sheriff, there’s brave and there’s foolish.

  The wall clock seemed to hold its next tick like a breath while the sheriff stared at me with a sort of sadness, like he knew what was coming and it was already as good as done for the plain and simple reason that he was who he was and I was me. Then the clock ticked and his eyes went bright and hard as his badge and he said You bastards can’t do this. And he turned and grabbed at the drawer.

  The man gave me no choice. That’s the simple fact of it.

  In those close quarters the gunshot sounded like the slam of an iron gate. He spasmed and slid off the chair and the woman cried out No.

  There was hollering in the cellblock. The sheriff cursed and sat up and groped for the drawer again.

  Charley said You stupid man and whacked him on the head with his pistol—and accidentally fired a round that glanced off the cell house door and hummed past my ear and thumped into the wall.

  But the guy was an ox and he clung to the desk. Charley was wild-eyed now and cracked him with the pistol again, harder, and that did it. The sheriff slumped to the floor with blood running out of his hair. There was a thick red stain on his side.

  The woman yelled Stop it, stop, and threw herself on top of the sheriff.

  I opened the drawer and took out a .38 revolver and put it in my coat pocket. Russell had the deputy’s gunbelt over his shoulder and his gun to the deputy’s head. The pup was nowhere in sight.

  Charley rifled the desk but couldn’t find the keys. I told the woman to get the keys now and she said yes, yes, only please don’t hurt her husband anymore. She hurried into the kitchen and retrieved a big key ring and gave it to me.

  I opened the outer door and went to the inner one where John was already in his hat and coat and adjusting his tie. Some of the other inmates started crowding him at the door and saying they wanted out too and he tried to elbow them back. I fired into the ceiling and they jumped away from the bars and shut up.

  I unlocked the door and John scooted out and slapped me on the shoulder and said About time, brother.

  I gave him the .45 and he checked the load in the chamber. Russell brought in the woman and the deputy and put them in the cell and I locked them in. The woman was crying hard and the deputy had his arm around her. He gave John a hard look.

  John said I’m sorry, missus, but if she heard him she gave no sign of it.

  We hustled out to the office and I tossed the keys behind a filing cabinet. John’s face pinched up when he saw the sheriff on the floor, breathing hard and holding his side. He was a lot bloodier now and his eyes were shining with pain but not really focused on anything. The blood was bright red and we all knew what that meant.

  Some car salesman, Russell said.

  I went to the window and took a peek past the curtain. The coast looked clear except for an old couple talking to Shouse down the street. Whatever he told them did the trick, because they went strolling off around the corner.

  Then we were in the cars and tearing past the city-limit sign and out onto the highway.

  That’s what happened in Lima.

  III

  The Sprees

  John said he couldn’t wait to see Billie but he sure wouldn’t mind a cold beer first. So, after switching from the stolen jobs over to Red’s and Russell’s cars, we stopped at a roadhouse speak a few miles south of Dayton.

  The parking lot was jammed with vehicles and hazy with raised dust. Inside, the place was dim and smoky and crowded, raucous with laughter and loud talk and a steady blare of jukebox music. We were better dressed than most of the patrons and thought our suits might attract too much attention, but nobody paid us much notice. Three young couples at a secluded table in a corner accepted my offer to pay their tab in exchange for the table. The girls were all lookers and they knew it, and they put a lot of nice sway into their walk as they headed for the bar with their fellas. Red watched them and said what he wouldn’t give to take a little bite out of any one of those sweet rumps.

  Big bite, John said.

  Russell told our waitress it looked like everybody was jumping the gun on the end of Prohibition. She said Honey, where’ve you been? That poor horse is dead every which way but official.

  We yakked and laughed it up over bottles of beer and bowls of roasted peanuts, everybody butting in on everybody else to get a word in, to clarify a point or ask a question or crack wise. John wanted to hear everything about the M City break and about the heist in St. Marys. He told us about the jobs he’d pulled with Copeland and some other guys—we’d already heard about them from Knuckles, but John told the stories better—and about the girls he’d been sporting with. He got a lot of chuckles when he told about being at the Chicago World’s Fair with Jenkins’s sister and getting a policeman to take snapshots of them.

  I knew it, Russell said. There we were in M City, sitting on our thumbs and waiting on this Hoosier to set things up, and there he was, dicking with the chippies.

  It wasn’t easy having fun while you boys were still suffering the tortures of the damned, John said, but I did the best I could.

  He’d heard about Okie Jack and Jenkins. He wasn’t surprised Jack gave up so easily, what with his bad stomach, but when he heard Jenkins had been killed he got a little worried that the rest of us might have to lay so low we couldn’t risk trying to break him out of Lima.

  But hell, I knew you bums wouldn’t let me down, he said, and slapped me on the shoulder.

  Red said the bad news about her brother must’ve hit Jenkins’s sister pretty hard. John supposed so but couldn’t say for sure since he hadn’t seen or heard from her ever since he got arrested in her parlor. They’d been looking at some Kodaks from their Chicago trip when the landlady announced herself at the door and next thing he knew he had shotguns in his face and his sweetie was down on the carpet in a swoon. He’d written her from the Lima lockup but his letter came back unopened with a note scrawled on it that she no longer lived at that address.

  Fat Charley said t
hose police shotguns had probably dimmed her enthusiasm for outlaw adventure.

  I guess, John said. But let me tell you boys, she was really something.

  Red said he knew that. He hadn’t forgotten the picture of her on John’s cell wall.

  I said she was a tough one to forget, all right. John gave me a wink and we both snickered, remembering the Crow’s Nest coochie show.

  Well, that Billie girl ain’t exactly a hag, Copeland said. He was drinking faster than everybody else. He’d twice had the waitress bring him another bottle while the rest of us were still on a round.

  John wiggled his eyebrows at Knuckles and said She’s an eyeful, ain’t she?

  Then that jackass Shouse had to pipe up and say he sure wouldn’t mind having a go at that squaw.

  John gave him a smile that didn’t have any amusement in it at all and said not to call her a squaw or even dream of having a go at her.

  Shouse said he didn’t mean anything except Billie was a good-looker, that’s all.

  John said Okay then, Ed, if that’s all you meant.

  Somebody mentioned Matt Leach, and John said Leach had come from Indiana to interrogate him at the Dayton jail. He described him as a tall skinny guy who was so full of himself that even other cops didn’t like him. According to the Dayton cops, Leach was a big believer in psychology as a crime-fighting tool.

  I told John what Margo said about Leach’s stutter and he laughed and said she was right. When Leach grilled him, John shrugged at all his questions and said over and over that he had no idea what he was talking about. Leach got so mad he was stuttering like a rattletrap Model T and John could hear cops laughing in the other room. I’d pay money to hear him when he gets word I busted out, John said.

  The waitress came over to collect empties and see if we wanted another round. She smiled at our high spirits and asked if we were part of the policemen’s convention taking place in town.

  For a second we all went mute and simply stared at her—and then everybody was grinning big and Charley said why yes, we certainly were policemen, how did she know?