She said You kidding? I can spot a cop a mile away.
It was late when we rolled into Cincy and all of us were ready to call it a night. We agreed to meet at my place for a late breakfast in the morning and put our heads together about our next move.
The girls had been dozing on the sofa but they woke up when John and I came in. Billie let out a little yip and ran to John and jumped into his arms, locking her legs around his waist and kissing him all over, her short nightie riding up and exposing a fine ass in pale green underpants. John spun her around and said How’s my favorite squaw? She said she better be his only squaw.
Mary planted a big welcome home smooch on me and I hummed a few bars of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and danced her around the room. John set Billie down and gave Mary a hug and said he was happy as hell to see her. She said there was coffee made and beer in the icebox, but it was obvious what John was in the mood for the most, and he and Billie said goodnight and hustled off to their room.
They weren’t as noisy about it as Russ and Opal—nobody was—but we could hear them as we undressed in the adjoining bedroom. Mary giggled and said Isn’t it nice? Then we were in bed and going at each other and all I heard was her breath in my ear. She didn’t ask about Lima and I didn’t bring it up.
I woke in the morning to her mouth on me. She teased and played and made the pleasure last a long time until I couldn’t hold back any longer. Then she kissed her way up my belly and chest and snuggled close and said Happy birthday, baby—how’s it feel to be thirty-one? I said the way she celebrated it, it felt just grand.
We didn’t get out of bed till almost nine, but John and Billie were still asleep. I told Mary the other guys were coming for breakfast and she started some coffee brewing and began slicing bacon. I put on my hat and fake specs and headed out for the newsstand at the end of the street.
It was another beautiful day, the air sharp and cool, the sky cloudless and deeply blue. Bad news always seems extra bad when it comes on a pretty day. Our pictures were on the front page, John’s and mine—and the sheriff’s. John’s was a mug shot from Dayton, mine from M City.
I was steamed. I hate having my picture in the papers. People who wouldn’t dare look you in the eye in person can study your photograph to their heart’s content. It’s a kind of spying is what it is. I’ve detested cameras from the time I first had one pointed at me, back when I was a kid in Muncie and my mother took me to a studio for a portrait. The framed faces on the walls made me think of mounted animal heads. When the photographer bent behind the camera to focus the lens, I felt like he was sighting a weapon. Before he could snap the picture, I jumped up and ran out of the place. I thought Mom would scold me but she didn’t. A few years ago I read about some South American Indians who killed a photographer because they believed that in taking their picture he was stealing their soul. They burned his camera along with his corpse. A lot of people called them stupid savages. Not me.
The sheriff’s name was Sarber. He’d lasted about an hour before croaking in the hospital. His son was a policeman too and said he wouldn’t rest till his father’s killer was brought to justice.
Justice…Christ. The man would still be alive if he’d done what I told him. I wasn’t robbing him, I wasn’t about to harm his wife, I wasn’t being unreasonable. He had a cocked pistol pointed at him and the fool still went for his gun. The newspaper called him courageous. My ass. He was a fool and his foolishness is what killed him. If there was any true justice in the courts or any real honesty in the press his death would be called a suicide.
They hadn’t been able to find the cell keys so they’d had to use an acetylene torch to free the sheriff’s wife and the deputy. The two of them picked me and Charley and Russell out of a mug book. All the main roads in the region were blocked, and vigilante posses as well as an army of cops were conducting a manhunt all over the northern borderland of Ohio and Indiana.
When I got back to the apartment, John and Russell and Charley were at the kitchen table having coffee and laughing it up. Charley tapped his spoon against the rim of his cup to get everybody’s attention and said All right, boys and girl, me-me-me.
They sang “Happy Birthday” as Charley waved his spoon like a conductor’s baton and I stood there smiling like a dope. Then they applauded and Russell said in a singsong voice And ma-ny mooorrre.
Mary ratted you out, John said.
There was a platter of crisp bacon on the counter and Mary was now frying chopped potatoes. The smell was wonderful. I asked where Billie was and John said she was still snoozing. That Indian can sleep like nobody’s business, he said.
Mary said Red had phoned a few minutes ago to say he and Shouse were on their way over.
I dropped the newspaper on the table and they all stared at the photos and the headlines. Mary stepped over to have a look and her face went funny for a second, and then she went back to tending the potatoes. I poured a cup of coffee and stood sipping it at the counter.
John didn’t like the picture of himself. He said it made him look like a banker, the kind whose bank you’d go to rob only to find out the son of a bitch had already cleaned it out himself with a lot of crooked bookkeeping.
Russell said he’d been hoping the sheriff would pull through even though it had been obvious he wouldn’t.
Charley cleared his throat and glanced at Mary at the stove. She turned around and looked at us and asked if she should leave the room.
I said Let’s both leave the room for a minute.
She took the potatoes off the burner and turned off the gas. We went into the parlor and I shut the kitchen door.
So? she said.
I told her she had a right to know how things stood. We weren’t just prison escapees and bank robbers anymore, at least not me and Charley and Russ. They’d have murder warrants on us now, and the worst kind—for killing a cop. They’d never quit hunting us. We’d always be on the run, always be looking over our shoulder. I didn’t have plans beyond tomorrow and there was no telling if I’d ever have the chance to make any. And the thing she absolutely had to understand was that I didn’t care. I couldn’t imagine what it’d be like to not have the cops after me. What it came down to, I said, was that she probably ought to get out while the getting was good. If the law put the arm on her when she went home, she could say we’d kidnapped her. Every man of us would back her story.
She hardly blinked the whole time I talked. When I finally shut up, she asked if I was telling her to go.
I told her I didn’t say that. I only wanted her to know how things stood so she could decide for herself.
Well, we’d already had this conversation, she said. When the Jenkins boy was killed. Had she done or said anything to make me think she’d changed her mind?
I said I’d seen how upset she was by the headlines.
Well of course she was upset, mostly by the thought that I might’ve been hurt, or even worse. Of course she wished I hadn’t killed that man, but she knew I’d only done what I had to do.
I jabbed a finger at her and said That’s right, that’s right, and no telling what I might have to do tomorrow or the day after that.
I was surprised to feel my hand trembling and I quick put both hands in my pockets and tried not to show how scared I was that she might choose to leave.
She said she knew the way I had to live and she didn’t care. She said she loved me and did I understand that.
I said yeah, and did she understand that as long as she was with me she’d never have any kind of a normal life?
She made a face of mock horror and put her hands to her cheeks and said Oh noooo.
I said Ha ha, you know what I mean.
She gave me a thin-eyed look and now it was her turn to point a finger. She said to listen good, Handsome Harry, she’d had about all of so-called normal life she could stand and she would thank me most kindly not to ever let her have any more of it. She said she wanted me to promise her she’d never have a normal life wi
th me.
I had to laugh. I said it was like asking water to promise to run downhill.
Promise, she said.
All right, girl, I said, I promise.
She went up on her tiptoes and pulled my face down to hers and kissed me hard.
Mary Northern, ladies and gentlemen…the one and only.
When I told John that Sheetz wanted us for another job, he was hot to go for it. I didn’t like Sheetz, but unspecified dislike wasn’t much of an argument against the fact that he’d been on the square in his deals with both of us. The only hard objection I could make to doing further business with him was the one-third cut he’d taken from the St. Marys job.
John agreed it was excessive, but pointed out that we’d still cleared eight grand, which was nothing to sneeze at.
I said okay, we’d set up a meeting and talk to him, but I’d be damned if I’d cut him in for a third again. If he insisted on a third, I’d tell him to piss up a rope. John said good enough.
That was fine with the other guys too. Whatever John and I agreed on would always be fine with them.
Once that was settled, Russell and I went to a pharmacy down the street and made some long-distance calls from a booth in the back corner. Russ called Opal and found out that she and Patty had rented three apartments, each with two bedrooms and all of them ready to move into. John and I and the girls had already decided we’d go on living together. Opal and Patty would move out of their little place and share one of the other apartments with Russell, and Red and Charley would share one. Shouse would move in with Knuckles.
I called my mother and she sang me “Happy Birthday” before telling me that an army of cops had come charging into the house the night before, waving warrants and badges and guns and carrying on like marauders. They turned the place upside-down even worse than the last time, and were fit to be tied not to find any sign of us on the property.
I asked if one of them was an Indiana cop named Leach, and she said Oh golly, yes, how did you know? She described him as a tall, skinny man with piercing eyes and a sour expression like he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him. He’d warned her that he’d have her put in jail if he found out she’d been helping me in any way.
It enraged me that the bastard had threatened my mother. But she could always sense exactly what I was feeling, even over the telephone, and she said not to worry, she wasn’t the least bit scared of Captain Matt Leach, and made me promise not to do anything rash. They were watching the farm again, she said, and she didn’t want me to even think about going to visit her anytime soon. But she promised to bake me a belated birthday cake the next time I did.
Then I called Sheetz. He wasn’t in, but I got Cohen on the line and we arranged a meeting for two days later.
The next morning we cleared out of Cincy. While the rest of the bunch headed straight for Chicago, John and Charley and I went up to northern Indiana and robbed a police station.
A police station! Wooo! How many times you heard of somebody heisting the cops—and right in their own jail? Well, we did it. And it wouldn’t be the only time.
Some guy John met in the Lima jail had once done thirty days in the lockup in Auburn—a burg about twenty miles above Fort Wayne—and he’d told John the place had a Thompson submachine gun in its gun case. The guy couldn’t believe a hick force of a half-dozen cops would have a tommy. It didn’t seem right to us, either. We had a lot better use for it than a bunch of rube cops did.
We went in my car and stuck to a crisscross route along the Ohio-Indiana border. If we got recognized by cops on one side of the line we could quick cut over to the other side where they couldn’t follow. We didn’t see but three cop cars on the way, however, and none of them gave us a suspicious look. John’s cheek bulged with a chaw of tobacco and he was hatless, and with his hair plastered on his scalp and parted down the center he looked like a hayseed from the turn of the century. He added to the disguise when we stopped in at a five-and-dime in Fort Wayne and he bought some plain-glass spectacles like mine. We had supper in a café and lingered over our coffee till nightfall, then stole a license plate off another black Ford and put it on my Vickie. Then drove up to Auburn.
We parked at the curb in front of the courthouse and directly across from the jail. It was a Saturday night but you’d never know it by the nearly empty streets and the hush of the place. The only sounds were of leaves stirring in a light wind and a dog barking in the distance. Charley said they ought to change the name to Snoresville.
Fat Charles manned the front door while John and I took care of business. There were two cops on duty, both of them at the desk and reading funnybooks. They were nothing more than farmers with badges, and their jaws dropped when we walked up with our pieces in our hand.
As we locked them in the holding cell, one of them asked Who are you fellas?
I said I was the fella who was going to shoot him in the teeth if he said another word.
The rube nodded real quick and made a little twisting motion with his fingers at his lips like he was turning a key on them. I don’t know if he was a nervy guy or just simple, but it was all I could do to keep from laughing.
We made fast work of cleaning out the gun case. There was a Thompson, all right, with both a fifty-round drum and a standard twenty-round magazine. And a pair of bullet-proof vests. Imagine—bullet-proof vests for a two-dog-town police force. They were nicely made and looked like blue serge suit vests with pockets and everything, but they were heavy as overcoats. The rest of the stuff in the case was a mix of weapons that had probably all been confiscated from local troublemakers. A few rifles and shotguns of different types and a half-dozen handguns, and none of them in very good shape except for a .30-06 Enfield rifle. We took it all simply to shame the cops even more by cleaning them out to the last bullet. Except for the Enfield, we later sold the whole kaboodle to a street gang on the South Side.
We spent that night at a motor court in South Bend, and next morning—John and me wearing our phony glasses—we had breakfast in a little café that was buzzing with talk about the cop station robbery. The few tables were all taken so we sat at the counter. We were ready to scoot out of there at the first suspicious look we got, but once again we were pretty much ignored. The fact is, most people are too self-conscious or wrapped up in themselves to pay much attention to anybody around them.
A radio was playing music next to the kitchen pass-out window, and the harried counterman told us the robbery news had been repeated every fifteen minutes since the station came on the air at dawn and he was sick of hearing it. He no sooner said it than the music was interrupted and here came the report again. He was about to switch it off, but I told him I wanted to hear.
The announcer’s delivery was so breathless I couldn’t help getting a little excited myself. He said one of the robbers had been positively identified as John Dillinger, recently set free from the Lima, Ohio, jail by gunmen who murdered the high sheriff in the process. It was suspected that the same accomplices had been with him in the police holdup.
You could tell the radio guy liked saying John’s name. It’s a dramatic name, bold and dangerous-sounding, and people love to say it. Back in Pendleton, John used to complain that nobody pronounced it correctly, but by the time he left M City he knew it sounded better the wrong way. I told him once that he never would’ve gotten so famous if his name had been Patterson or Bratkowski or Jones. Or Clark, Russell said. Charley agreed that there was much in a name. Take Pierpont, he said, that’s a name for a railroad baron or an oil man. Yeah, I said, Pierpont sounds like one of the biggest robbers of them all.
Three locals claimed to have seen us exit the station house with a bagful of firearms and drive out of town. They couldn’t agree on the make of our car—one said a Ford, the other two said an Olds and a LaSalle, for Christ’s sake—but they all agreed that we were snappy dressers.
A bony waitress with rat-nest hair came over to hand in an order as the counterman was saying it was
a hell of a note when even the cops got robbed. Charley said he couldn’t agree more, things in this country had certainly reached a new low.
Maybe so, the waitress said, but doggone if that Dillinger wasn’t a bold sonofagun—a police station, by God.
John said he’d always heard that the jails and the graveyards were full of bold sonofaguns.
You got a point there, mister, the counterman said. It’s the cocky ones get it the soonest, that’s for sure. He and the waitress moved off to other customers, and the three of us fought down our snickers.
We were in the news that morning in another way as well. The paper carried a report that Sheriff Jess Sarber’s funeral had been held the day before and was attended by three thousand mourners. I put my finger on the three thousand number for John and Charley to see, and I whispered Bullshit. I wasn’t about to believe so many people would mourn the passing of a damnfool car salesman.
John said maybe he owed them all money.
That afternoon we were in East Chicago, meeting with Sheetz. As usual, Hymie Cohen was there and smiling his nervous smile. The guy with the black goatee was there too, at his post by the door, but I’d never seen him smile at all. John agreed he looked like a pirate and said he’d never been introduced to him either. Between ourselves we called him Captain Kidd.
Sheetz had a set-up for us. It’s a fat one, he said. In fact, it might turn out to be obese.
A bank he’d been skimming from by way of its chief accountant was in need of being robbed before a state audit scheduled for next month. The bank would of course claim a loss sufficient to balance its books, Sheetz said, but the heist would be good for an actual fifteen to twenty thousand bucks of bank money.
I said that was fat, but I wouldn’t call it obese.
I haven’t finished, Sheetz said. He went on to say there was a small outfit in St. Louis run by four brothers named Quarry who had prospered in the bootlegging business and come to own several riverfront speakeasies. Now that Prohibition was about to end, they were moving over to gambling. But the gambling in St. Louis was locked up by an outfit with tight ties to Chicago, and while the Quarrys had a reputation as a rough bunch, they had gotten as far as they had by being careful not to get crosswise of the Shytown mob. So they’d moved into southern Indiana, which was open territory to anybody with the capital to set himself up. The Quarrys now had controlling interest in two gambling joints in Terre Haute and two others in Indianapolis.
Handsome Harry Page 17
