Handsome Harry

by James Carlos Blake

  I had already decided that Copeland couldn’t lick his booze problem and had to go, and John no longer had any objections. We went to Knuckles’ place to pay him off, but he wasn’t home, so we left a note saying to get in touch. A few days later he dropped by, and you could see in his face he knew what was coming. When I broke it to him, he asked for one more chance. He swore he quit drinking.

  I said he’d had his one more chance.

  He turned to John, who said Sorry, pal.

  I gave him his share of the kitty money and wished him luck. He went out the door looking worn as an old man.

  We didn’t think he would rat us if he got collared and the cops leaned on him, but then again why take the chance? The next day we all moved to new apartments. Billie and John continued to live with Mary and me, but now Red moved in with Patty and Russ and Opal. Charley took a small place of his own in the same building as theirs, even though he was spending most of his nights at Tweet’s place on the lake.

  In only a few days, however, we’d all have to move again.

  For all the fun we were having, we hadn’t lost sight of business. Just as we were about to get in touch with Sonny Sheetz to see if he had something for us, Pearl Elliott came up from Kokomo, bringing us a half-dozen cold license plates and a big fat tip on a bank.

  It had nothing to do with Sheetz and it wasn’t a set-up. An associate of hers—Let’s call him George, she said—had it on good authority that a certain bank not far from Chicago would soon be receiving a shipment of cash to finance federal work projects around the state, something in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars.

  Twenty-five, Russell said, is that all?—and got a good laugh. Before the Greencastle haul, not a man among us wouldn’t have drooled at the thought of a twenty-five-grand haul.

  Most of the money wouldn’t stay in the bank for long before being routed to its various recipients. In exchange for the name of the bank and the date the cash would be there for sure, this George guy wanted 15 percent of the take. Pearl’s cut would come out of his.

  It sounded too good to pass up, and the other guys were all for it. I told Pearl she had a deal. It was the American Bank and Trust in Racine, Wisconsin, some sixty miles north of Shytown, and the cash would be there in eight days.

  The next morning Charley and Mary and I drove up to Racine and spent two days doing the usual case—noting the bank’s routine, diagramming the layout, coming up with three getaway routes to a lakeside camp a little north of Milwaukee, where we reserved a pair of cabins for three days in the coming week.

  We were heading back into Chicago on an icy morning, the skyline coming into view, when we heard a radio report that on the previous evening John and two companions, a man and a woman, had been in a gunfight with more than a dozen policemen.

  According to the report, the cops had set a trap for him outside an office building where they’d been informed he had a doctor’s appointment. But John somehow managed to get to his car and take off before they could arrest him. One of the police cars gave chase through the city streets with the cops shooting at him as they went. They said they’d had to open fire and risk hitting bystanders because all three of the fugitives were shooting at them—Dillinger and the girl firing pistols from the windows, the other man shooting a machine gun from a porthole in back of the car—and they said they had a shot-up windshield to prove it. They claimed the fugitives’ car had been made bulletproof. The chase lasted about five miles before John gave them the slip.

  Holy Joe, Mary said.

  Machine-gun fire through a porthole, indeed, Charley said. A bulletproof car. What patent nonsense.

  Cops and newspapermen, I said. They have to pass a liar’s test before they can get the job.

  Charley said he’d wager the whole gang had already changed residences.

  He was right. John was waiting for us at the apartment, sitting at the table and reading the newspaper, and when we walked in he grinned big and held it up so we could see the headline about his skirmish with the cops. He said we didn’t live there anymore, everybody had moved to new places a few hours earlier. He and Billie had already transferred Mary’s and my belongings, and Russ and Opal had taken Charley’s stuff to a hotel apartment they’d got for him two streets over from the one they’d moved to with Red and Patty.

  He tapped the newspaper and said You seen this?

  I said we’d heard about it on the radio. I skimmed the report and saw it was much the same thing—he’d got away from sixteen cops while a hidden machine gunner shot at them from a concealed porthole in the Terraplane and a gun girl fired from the window.

  As we drove Charley to his new place, John gave us the real story. He said it was an ambush, plain and simple. He was tipped off to it when the doctor happened to look out the window and said he wondered why there were so many police cars on the street. John took a peek and saw two squad cars parked about twenty yards ahead of his Terraplane, and another one at the corner of the intersection directly behind it. He could’ve left the building through a side exit and lost himself in the evening crowds except that Billie was waiting in the car. There was nothing to do but try to make it to her and play it from there. He walked out with his hand in his jacket pocket, gripping a .45.

  When the cops didn’t come at him as he walked toward the Terraplane, he knew they planned to wait till he got behind the wheel and then block him in with their cars and shoot him while he was hemmed in. Which meant the bastards were willing to kill Billie too, for no more reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  He got in the car and Billie asked if he’d seen them and he said yeah and told her to hang on. Rather than go forward, as the cops must’ve been expecting him to, he put the car in reverse and floored it and went screeching backward and swung out into the intersecting street—causing cars to swerve and crash into each other—then he took off with the tires shrieking and gunshots cracking behind them. In less than a minute he was doing sixty and weaving through traffic with an unmarked car after him, a cop at one window shooting with a pistol and one at another window blasting with a shotgun, bullets and buckshot smacking the rear of the Terraplane and popping through the back window and one round spider-webbing the windshield.

  He and Billie never fired a shot, never mind what the news reports said. He wished he could’ve shot back but he was too busy trying to keep from crashing the car. When the passenger side of the cops’ windshield blew apart, John figured they’d either shotgunned it by accident or on purpose so they could claim they’d been fired on.

  I couldn’t believe those cowboys, John said. It’s a damn wonder they didn’t shoot each other, never mind some of the citizens on the street.

  He managed to get in front of a truck that blocked the cops’ view of him, then cut off his headlights and turned sharply into a side street. The cops went whizzing past. By the time they realized their mistake, he’d lost them.

  He ditched the Terraplane on a back street in the North Side and stole a Lincoln—like switching from a speedboat to a barge, he said—and he and Billie went home to pack their bags. First thing this morning, he’d sent her and Opal with pursefuls of cash out to get new places to live, and well before noon everybody had moved. The others had apartments again, but Billie had rented a small house for the four of us a few blocks out of the Loop.

  The police had found the Terraplane last night, and reporters on the scene said it had three or four holes in the rear window and more than twenty bullet and buckshot dents, but not one round had passed through the car’s body. John said he was thinking about writing a letter to the Essex company and congratulating them on a terrific getaway car. He was high as a kite about the whole thing, and he couldn’t stop talking about what a great little soldier Billie had been.

  You shoulda seen her, Pete. Cool as ice. Not a nerve in her body.

  Christ’s sake, I told him, a guy couldn’t leave town for two days without missing out on the fun.

  It was
no mystery, by the way, about who tipped the cops to his appointment with the doc. A scummy little fink named Artie. We’d known him few years before in M City, and John had been using him as an errand boy since before the rest of us busted out of the joint. There’d been rumors in M City that Artie was a fink, and even though there’d never been proof of it, I had a hunch the rumors were right. Not John. He liked Artie, and John being John, he trusted him far more than he should’ve. But the minute he saw the squad cars outside the doctor’s office, he knew Artie had ratted. It was Artie who’d set up the doctor’s appointment for him under a phony name after John complained about a neck rash that was giving him fits, and he was the only one outside the gang who knew about that appointment.

  If there’d been the slightest doubt about Artie’s guilt, it vanished along with him. We looked all over Chicago for him that night and couldn’t find a hair of him anywhere. The chest of drawers and closet in his boardinghouse room had been cleaned out, and nobody at his usual haunts had seen him since the day before.

  But every rat meets a bad end sooner or later, and about two months ago I got word Artie had taken a fall for—get this—robbing a bunch of old ladies at a bridge game. He got sent down to the Illinois state pen. The way I heard it, he’d been there only a few weeks when he was found in the shower one morning sprawled in his own blood. Somebody had cut his throat. Prison justice for a fink.

  John’s close brush with the cops didn’t affect our plan for Racine. Neither did an incident with Ed Shouse a couple of days before the job. John had asked Shouse to check with the Essex dealers to see what kind of Terraplane models they had on hand and let him know, but when Shouse dropped by our house that evening to report what he’d learned, only Mary and Billie were there. John and I were still at Red and Russell’s place, going over the heist plan with them and Charley.

  Mary offered Shouse a glass of beer while he waited for us, and Billie insisted on having some too, even though John had forbidden her to touch alcohol when he wasn’t around. The way Mary told it to me later, Billie was in a snit because John was supposed to take her to dinner that evening and there she was, all ready to go, and he still hadn’t shown up.

  They sat at the table, talking and drinking, and pretty soon Billie and Shouse were swapping dirty jokes. Mary told them they better take it easy if they knew what was good for them, but Billie paid her no mind. She turned on the radio and asked Shouse to dance. I don’t know if he didn’t take my warning seriously or if the combination of the beer and Billie’s flirting simply got the better of him—but when John and I came through the door, they were dancing belly to belly, and the way Billie was laughing there was no question she was drunk. Mary was at the table and told me with her eyes she’d tried to keep this from happening. Shouse saw us and let go of Billie like she’d suddenly caught on fire.

  John’s face showed no expression at all as he started toward them. Billie put herself between him and Shouse, talking fast about how mad she was at him for keeping her waiting while he was doing who-knew-what rather than taking her to dinner like he’d promised—and that’s as far as she got before John’s backhand swat sent her sprawling over a coffee table.

  He whaled into Shouse with both fists, driving him against a wall, and even if Shouse had been sober he wouldn’t have stood much chance. John hit him with some terrific punches that spattered the wall with blood. Shouse slid to the floor and curled up and tried to protect his head with his arms as John started kicking him.

  Mary said Stop him, Harry—not yelling but saying it with a frightened urgency. Billie scrambled up and grabbed John by the shirt and the sleeve ripped as he flung her hard enough to put her on her ass again. I bear-hugged him from behind and pulled him away, saying Enough, man, enough. I didn’t care if he killed Shouse but I didn’t want him doing in it the house. Then you had the problem of getting rid of the body and maybe the neighbors getting an eyeful when you lugged it out.

  Okay, Pete, John said, okay. It was the first thing he’d said since we’d come in the house. I felt his muscles unflex and I let go of him.

  Billie was up again, a small mouse swelling under one eye. You bastard, she said.

  John grabbed her by the arm and pulled her down the hall toward their room, Billie kicking at him and cursing him like a dockhand as they went. He shoved her through the door and went in and slammed it shut.

  I leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette and watched Shouse laboring to get up. His nose was pouring blood and was obviously broken. If the carpet he was dripping on had been mine I would’ve given him a few more kicks for messing it. His lips were bloated purple and one eye was nearly closed and he favored a leg. In less than a minute John had worked him over good, but he wasn’t hurt that bad. He hadn’t even lost a tooth. And he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned.

  You’re gone, Ed, I told him, you’re out. I said if he talked about us to anybody we’d hear of it and hunt him down and drop him into Lake Michigan with his legs chained to an axle.

  He was a little shaky on his pins but was able to walk unassisted. Mary handed him his hat at the door just as Russ and Opal showed up. They were taking us to supper at some Chinese place across town they said was great.

  Shouse didn’t look at them as he left. Opal gave him a double-take, then turned to us all big-eyed with curiosity. Russell came in grinning and said to me You do that?

  John, I said. Then told him what happened.

  Russ was sorry he’d missed the show but was glad I’d booted Shouse. He guessed we’d seen the last of him. But of course we hadn’t. We’d see him one more time.

  We could hear John and Billie still going at it down the hall. If we’d been in an apartment and sharing walls with neighbors, I would’ve had to tell them to pipe down before somebody called the cops. The girls were worried about Billie and wanted to wait a little bit before we went out to eat, so I poured beers and we sat in the parlor. Mary was keeping up a good front but I could tell how much the whole thing had jangled her nerves.

  A minute later we heard a door open and Billie’s soft crying and then the door shut again. John came in the parlor and said Hey, kids to Russ and Opal and flopped down in an easy chair.

  Russell said How’s things, Johnny? He wasn’t trying too hard to hide his amusement.

  That bitch is gonna drive me crazy, John said.

  You act like you’re already crazy, Mary said. And you’re driving me crazy. And Billie too.

  I’d been hoping she’d keep out of it, but no such luck.

  John said You defending her?

  Mary said damn right she was. All Billie had done was get a little tipsy and ask a guy to dance. She hadn’t been fooling around behind John’s back and he didn’t have any cause to get so jealous and no matter how jealous he got he had no right to hit her or even talk to her the way he did and if he couldn’t take her as she is then he could tell her to go but no real man hit a woman and all real men knew that and John was acting like a stupid crazy jealous ignorant cowardly bully and a bully was the lowest kind of man there was in the world and if she was Billie she would’ve left his low-down bullying ass long before now—either left him or bashed his skull in with a frying pan while he was sleeping.

  Boy howdy, did she let him have it. He’d sunk deeper into his chair as she tore into him, looking like a bad-behaved pup, and it was all Russell and I could do to keep from laughing. Mary cut a look at us and said What’s so damn funny, and we shut up quick. She didn’t seem to mind that Opal was grinning like she was at a Chaplin flick.

  You owe her a big apology, mister, Mary said, and you damn well better give it to her. But to tell you the truth, I hope she tells you to fold your lousy apology four ways and stick it where the sun don’t shine.

  She stood and picked up her purse and said she was ready to go and headed for the door with Opal right behind her and laughing.

  We watched them go out. Then John turned to me and Russ and said in a low voice Bash my skull while I’m
sleeping? Jesus. I hope she doesn’t give Billie any ideas.

  Russell said Ain’t love grand?

  As we headed for the door I told John to try not to shoot her or get himself scalped while we were gone.

  Oh, go to hell, he said.

  After you, sir, I said, after you.

  He faked a punch that made me flinch and said I’d get there long before him, watch and see if I didn’t.

  The girls were waiting for us on the sidewalk. Opal said Guess what?

  Russell said Where’s my car?

  I asked where he’d parked it.

  Here, Opal said, gesturing at the curb in front of us.

  Russ looked up and down the street and said Where the hell’s my car?

  Gone, Opal said.

  Gone? Russell said. Whaddaya mean gone?

  Well, honey, Opal said, you see, it was here, but now it’s not. It’s what’s called gone.

  Parked across the street was a Model T with a missing front fender. I pointed at it and said I believed it was Shouse’s car.

  Russ looked at it for a moment, then looked up and down the street again. Then looked at me and said The bastard stole my car. He said it like he couldn’t quite believe it, the way a guy might say he just got the word his mother died. He stole my goddamn car.

  Sure looks it, I said.