Handsome Harry

by James Carlos Blake

  I gave him a friendly wave in return and pulled over, and the cops parked behind me. I thumbed off the safety on the .45 under my arm and drew the .38 from its belt holster on my side and held it in my left hand, against the door. Be ready, I whispered to Mary.

  She was looking back at them and said she didn’t think they were wise to us. They didn’t seemed scared enough.

  The one on the passenger side got out with his hands empty and came up to my window all smiles. Nice brown suit. He said he was sorry to trouble me but apparently I wasn’t aware that visitors with out-of-state license plates were required to register their vehicles with the city police. I said I’d never heard of any such ordinance anywhere, and he said neither had he. It was intended to cut down on smuggling cars across the Mexican border—a pretty useless law, if you asked him, but what could you do? Every officer on the force—uniform and plainclothes, mind you—was under orders to strictly enforce the ordinance or lose his job.

  I thanked him for letting me know about it and promised to take care of the registration first thing in the morning. He said if I didn’t take care of it right away, I’d be getting pulled over every few blocks, and as much as he hated to admit it, there were fellows on the force darn quick to ticket an out-of-state car if it didn’t have a registration decal—and even to impound the car if they got an argument. That’s what happened to his own cousin visiting from Oregon two weeks ago, believe it or not. His cousin swore never to set foot in Tucson again and who could blame him. Wait till enough tourists got mad and stopped coming to town, see how fast they got rid of the stupid law then and quit wasting police manpower. Meantime, the best thing was to get my car registered right away. Wouldn’t take two minutes, and he’d even ride with us to give me the quickest directions to the station and make sure we didn’t have to wait around when we got there.

  I had to decide fast—shoot him and run, or play it like a good citizen and see what happened. If he was on to me, he was cooler than any cop I’d ever come across. But for weeks I’d been going unrecognized by cops all over the Midwest, so how could this hick be wise? Not likely. I turned to Mary and she made a face and said she wasn’t the least surprised about the dumb law and let’s just get it over with.

  Hop in, officer, I said, and slipped the .38 under my belt at my side.

  He directed me to the station, chatting like an old buddy, asking about Florida, saying he’d always wanted to take a vacation there. I said he should, it was a great place and I ought to know, having lived there for the last ten years. We pulled up in front of the station and I told Mary I’d be right out. The other cop had followed us, and he parked in back of me and got out of his car too. He was bigger than Brown Suit and came ambling behind us.

  Brown Suit said the registration forms were in the chief’s office and led the way through the door. The chief was standing beside his desk. His eyes widened when he saw me—and I saw Russ and Charley’s luggage piled against the wall behind him.

  The next few seconds were pretty much a blur. I grabbed for the .45 but the big cop got me in a bear hug from behind and I couldn’t pull the piece out of the holster. Brown Suit tried to get my hand off the gun and I kneed him in the balls and sent him banging into the chief. I bucked and twisted, trying to shake the big one off me, and there was a lot of shouting as we crashed around the office and lost our hats and my glasses flew off and then Brown Suit and the chief were on me too and the four of us went down in a struggling heap. I got the gun out but couldn’t cock it because the big guy had his hand around the hammer. Then here came more cops, cursing, kicking me in the ribs, stomping on my head. Somebody wrenched my arm hard enough to make me holler and the .45 dropped out of my hand and the .38 was yanked off my belt. They wrestled me onto my belly and somebody sat on my head and somebody else pinned down my legs and they got the cuffs on me. And that was all she wrote.

  They pulled me up on my feet and the chief grabbed me by the hair and said Oh yeah, oh yeaaah—we got us Mr. Handsome Harry here. You’re under arrest for a whole bunch of shit, Pierpont. And you’re gonna burn for killing that cop.

  Christ on a crutch, I walked into that jail! I should’ve let that cop have it the second he stepped up to my car window, then jumped out and let the other one have it, then made a run for it.

  Shoulda, woulda, coulda…. What could’ve happened did.

  I’d been a free man exactly four months.

  They hustled me off to the county jail, which was bigger and more secure than the city lockup. When we got there the cops had to clear a way to the doors through a crowd of reporters shouting questions and popping flashbulbs. I couldn’t believe how fast they’d got the word about me, but a cop said they’d been hanging around the jail since my buddies got brought in a couple of hours earlier. They were all locals so far, he said, but reporters were on the way from every corner of the country.

  They took my prints, then sat me in front of the mug camera. I closed my eyes before the shutter clicked, so they tried again and I did it again. The booking sergeant said Piss on it, who cares? And they took me up to the cell block.

  Charley and Russ were in adjoining cells and didn’t look happy to see me. Russell’s face was beat up and he had a bandage around his head like a big turban. They put me in with Charley, who quick stuck his hand out said The name’s Charles Makley, sir, what might yours be?—letting me know he’d been made, but he didn’t know if I had. We shook and I said I was Harry Thompson. He introduced Russ as Mr. Clark. The cops at the bars laughed at us and said we could quit the act anytime, that as soon as my prints were run they’d have me cold too. I asked what became of my lady friend and they said what did I think—she was under arrest for aiding and abetting. So was Opal, who in addition had been charged with assault.

  When the cops moved out of earshot, the guys told me the sad story. Charley had been collared around two o’clock. He and Tweet were shopping for a radio in a store when suddenly there was a cop on either side of him and a gun in his ribs. One of them grabbed him by the hand and took a look at his mutilated finger and said Got you, fatso. They weren’t interested in a thing he had to say. The last time he saw Tweet, a cop had her by the arm out on the sidewalk, waiting for a squad car to come for them.

  Russell they took at the house, but not without a scrap. A guy in a Western Union cap came to the door with a telegram for Mr. Long. He was such a shrimp Russ never suspected he was a cop. When he opened the door to sign for the message, the guy went for a gun under his jacket. Russ grabbed him and yanked him inside and they wrestled for the gun all over the house. The guy was little but he was a bulldog. Two more cops barged in through the back door and there was a lot of swearing and yelling and Russ caught a glimpse of Opal swinging on them with both fists. Then he was on the floor with three guys on him and one of them whacking him on the head with a pistol like he was driving a nail. Next thing he knew they were dragging him out in cuffs and he could hear Opal cursing them but he could hardly see for the blood in his eyes. Later he found out that another cop had come running up to the front porch and Opal slammed the door on his hand and broke one of his fingers.

  Our undoing, as Charley called it, was on account of the hotel fire. He’d awakened to the sound of an alarm and the smell of smoke and he ran out of his room just as Russell and Opal came rushing out of theirs, all of them in bathrobes. They got downstairs before remembering they’d taken all their guns out of the car and put them in one of the suitcases and the suitcase was up in the room. Except for a twenty-dollar bill Charley had in his robe, all their cash was in their bags too. They tried to go back upstairs but the firemen wouldn’t let them. Charley offered them the twenty if they’d save their luggage, and the firemen did it. He and Russ considered themselves lucky, not only because of the bags, but because they’d rented a house the day before and had been assured it would be ready to move into that morning. Russ took charge of the suitcase with the guns and Charley got some money from his bag and paid a hotel worker to ta
ke the rest of the luggage to their new place.

  That, Charley said, was a stupid move on his part.

  I didn’t see the need to say how much I agreed with him.

  The way the cops told it to Charley, the two firemen had raved to everybody in the firehouse about the double sawbuck tip. Somebody wondered what the luggage contained that was so important, and somebody joked that maybe the big tippers were gangsters, and somebody said maybe they really were. They started going through a stack of true-crime magazines, and bingo—there’s an article about John and his pals, and it’s got mug shots of all of us. The firemen called the cops. The cops interviewed the hotel staff. And soon enough they talked to the guy who’d taken Mr. Davies’ and Mr. Long’s luggage to their new address. They staked out the house, then followed Charley to the store and pinched him, then pulled the phony telegram business to get at Russell. In addition to all the guns and cash they found in the house, they came across a piece of paper with the address of a local tourist camp. Thinking John and I might be staying there, they’d sent a couple of men to scout it.

  And now here you are, Charley said. It boggled his mind that a bunch of cowboys had apprehended the three of us with not a shot fired or an injury among them except for a fractured finger.

  Listen, I said, as long as John’s still out there, this ain’t over, not by a long shot.

  Ten minutes later here came John—wearing cuffs and leg irons. They’d laid for him at Russ and Charley’s, hoping he’d drop in. And he did.

  We were allowed a phone call but it had to be local, so Charley called Tweet. Her mother answered and he identified himself as Leo Davies and the old lady gave him an earful before Tweet was able to get the phone away from her. Tweet said the cops had grilled her for two hours before she convinced them she’d had no idea of his real identity and let her go. Was there anything she could do? There was indeed, Charley told her. She could call Paulette Dewey, our attorney in Kokomo, Indiana, and tell her we were in severe need of legal representation. Charley didn’t enlighten her as to who Paulette Dewey really was—the less Tweet knew, the less legal risk she ran. We figured Pearl would call Sonny Sheetz, and he would either do something for us or he wouldn’t. Charley told Tweet that after making the call to Kokomo she was to stay out of the whole business and not contact him in any way. If she ever claimed she knew him as anyone other than Leo Davies, he would say she was a lying, publicity-hungry bimbo. She cried but said she’d do as he asked. As far as I know, they never exchanged a word again after that phone talk.

  At our arraignment the next day we had a lawyer, a guy from Los Angeles named Van Buskirk who we nicknamed the Dutchman. By that time I had been positively identified too, but not John. When they called his name in court and he was told to stand up, he said why should he, he wasn’t Dillinger. He insisted he was Frank Sullivan right up until his prints proved otherwise later in the day. The girls were in court too, all three of them charged with abetting us in some way or other. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Mary, but I gave her a wink and she managed a little smile in return.

  During the next few days we were besieged by reporters at our cell doors. Russell said he now knew what the animals in a zoo felt like and all that was missing was peanuts for them to throw at us through the bars. One idiot asked Charley his opinion of the jail, and Charley said he had been in better bastilles. The guy started to write it down, then looked confused, and Charley spelled it for him. Another newshound turned out to be the son of an old friend of Charley’s back in St. Marys, and they chatted about mutual acquaintances and the old home ground. The kid couldn’t understand why a man as highly educated and well mannered as Mr. Makley would choose to become a gangster. Charley told him the reason was quite simple—because as a gangster he lived more in forty minutes than his old man had lived in forty years. The kid said Oh, I see. But you could tell that he didn’t see a thing.

  For the most part I ignored the reporters, and whenever they came with a camera I’d turn my back to the bars. But of course just because I didn’t say anything didn’t stop them from quoting me. According to one guy, I said the first thing I was going to do when I broke out was kill the cops who caught me. Another one said I bragged about paying a thousand dollars a week in protection to the Chicago mob. You’d think they got paid by the lie.

  Fortunately, most of them wanted to talk to John—after all, it was the Dillinger Gang. At first he ate up their attention with a spoon and yakked like a magpie, though most of what he told them was bullshit of course. Like the sad information that our partner Jack Hamilton was dead. He gave them the story we’d agreed on to try keeping the heat off Red back in Chicago—that we had dumped Hamilton’s body in the Calumet River after he died of wounds he received during an East Chicago bank robbery the week before last. John was quick to add that none of us had been on that job with Hamilton, but we got the word from friends. When a reporter said that various eyewitnesses had identified John as the man who killed Officer O’Malley during that very same robbery, John got peeved and said most so-called witnesses couldn’t identify shit from brown sugar and the guy could quote him on that.

  Even the governor dropped by for a look at us. I said it was the first time I’d seen a governor where he really belonged—although that’s not the way I was quoted in the papers. We also got a visit from the cops who’d rounded us up. John posed for the cameras with them, but I said Sorry boys, no pictures. I did tell them they were the best cops I’d ever run into. The cops in Indiana and Ohio, and especially in Chicago, would’ve bushwhacked us the first chance they got rather than try to take us alive.

  We’d been in that cow town jail about three days when Matt Leach showed up. I was sitting at the rear of my cell and heard somebody say Well, Johnny, we meet again—say now, that’s a nice mustache.

  I stood up and saw him in front of John’s cage right next to mine, with his hands in his pockets and looking smug. And I couldn’t help it, I saw red. I sprang to the bars and grabbed for him, intending to break his neck or strangle him, whichever came first. He barely managed to jerk away in time. He went white as a sheet and I wouldn’t be surprised if he pissed his pants. I cursed him up and down for a low son of a bitch who bullied women and a lousy coward who jailed my mother. I said the only thing I was sorry about was that I hadn’t killed him when I had the chance. Which of course only confused him, since he never knew I’d had him in my rifle sights.

  J-j-jesus, he said, you’re ins-s-sane.

  My rant got the other inmates all worked up and the whole cell block was in a clamor. The jailers hustled Leach out of there, but it still took a while for the joint to settle down.

  Leach had come to Tucson with a bunch of other officials who wanted to extradite us to Indiana. They wanted John for killing the O’Malley cop, and the rest of us for busting out of M City and the Greencastle heist. But Ohio wanted us too—John for robbery, and me and Charley and Russell for killing the sheriff in Lima. And then Wisconsin jumped into the fight and said it wanted all of us for the Racine job.

  There was no question where we preferred to go to—Wisconsin was the only one of the three states without capital punishment. The Dutchman brought the Wisconsin prosecutor to see us, a man named John Brown. I said he certainly didn’t look as if he had been a-moldering in some grave, and John Brown nodded and gave a tired little smile, like it was the thousandth time he’d heard a joke about his name. We signed the papers Brown put in front of us, and the Dutchman said all we needed now was a something-or-other writ that he’d have ready to put before the judge in the morning. And then we’d be off to Cheeseland. We thought we’d pulled a slick one.

  But the Arizona governor made some kind of underhanded deal with Indiana, and that night the Hoosiers came in and grabbed John. He put up a fight but didn’t stand a chance. They pried his fingers off the bars and dragged him out of the cell by force and clapped him in irons. He hollered he was being shanghaied and we were swearing and raising hell as they muscled h
im out of there. The way we heard it, they had him in an airplane and out of Arizona in less than half an hour.

  The Dutchman didn’t find out about John’s abduction until the next morning, and he was outraged, for all the good it did. The rest of us then went before a judge who released Billie and Opal but not Mary, who’d been charged with helping us bust out of M City. He denied the Dutchman’s writ and handed us over to Matt Leach and the state of Indiana.

  As we were leaving the courthouse a mob of reporters swarmed around us, yelling questions and taking pictures. I ducked my head to hide my face under my hat brim, but some of the cops pinned me between them and one snatched my hat off and two others forced my head up and all I could do to defend myself against the cameras was close my eyes. I heard the shutters snapping like jaws and the bulbs popping. One of the hounds yelled Make him open his eyes, willya? A cop said The hell with these leeches, and they shoved my hat back on my head and hustled me out of there.

  An hour later, we were in a special car on a train bound for Chicago, each of us sitting in a different row, all of us in cuffs and leg irons and surrounded by armed guards.

  For some reason—and without me asking for the favor, since I wouldn’t have asked the son of a bitch for the time of day—Leach told the policewoman in charge of Mary to let her sit beside me for the whole trip. I don’t think she and I exchanged a dozen words during those two days. There was nothing to say we didn’t already know. We simply held hands and gave each other a look now and then. I could see she was scared about what might happen to her. The way it went, she’d do almost a month in the Indytown jail before they dropped all charges against her—but that little stretch would have its effect.