Handsome Harry

by James Carlos Blake

  The only kiss we had on that train ride was when the policewoman came to take her to another car a few minutes before we pulled into Chicago. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that I might never see her again.

  There were a hundred cops waiting at the station, and God knows how many gawkers. They put each of us in a separate car and we drove off in a motorcade a block long. We crossed the state line into Indiana and sped through East Chicago. I caught a glimpse of the Indiago Industries building over by the lakeshore and I wondered if Sonny Sheetz was in there at that moment, maybe counting money. It was a cold gray morning and the windblown lake looked like crumpled tin. Nobody talked as we rolled along, drawing curious looks from everyone we passed.

  We knew where we were headed, but still, it’s hard to describe how I felt when we came in sight of the M City walls. Like for a minute I forgot how to breathe.

  As they marched us toward the gate, Charley said if anybody would care to shoot him in the head before we passed through those portals, they would be doing him a colossal kindness. Better a quick death than what awaits us within those walls, he said. A cop told him to shut up.

  You can imagine how the warden and his hacks were slavering over having us back in their power. We had humiliated the bunch of them, and they meant to make us pay for it. Half an hour after getting to M City, we were stripped and in the hole.

  I sat with my back against the wall and hugged my knees to my chest, shivering in the freezing darkness. I pretty much succeeded in not thinking about anything except that as long as you’re alive there’s hope for escape. I had no doubt whatever that the M City goons intended to kill us, one way or another, and they probably wouldn’t take long to get to it.

  After a few days, though, they came for me and gave me a set of grays to put on, then chained me up and took me to the warden’s office.

  The room was crowded, what with the guards plus the warden and some guy in a pinstriped suit, plus Russ and Charley, who were in chains too. Charley grinned at me and Russ gave me a nod. Charley had never done time in the hole before, but he looked all right. A little less corpulent than I’d ever seen him, since the whole time we were in solitary we got nothing to eat but a few slices of bread. Russell still had the bandage on his head but it was now filthy brown with black patches of dried blood. None of us had shaved or washed since we’d been on the train, and it was amusing to see all those faces pinched up at the smell of us.

  We were in the warden’s office because Indiana and Ohio had made a deal—the Hoosiers got John and Ohio got the three of us. Mr. Pinstripes had papers that would send us to Lima to stand trial for shooting the sheriff. The odds in Ohio didn’t look good, but they were better than our chances of staying alive in M City.

  None of us hesitated to sign the waivers. The warden looked like a kid who’s just been told there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.

  As you’d expect, defense measures at the Allen County jail were a whole lot beefier than they’d been the last time we were there.

  They had round-the-clock guards, a pair of them with Thompsons at the entrance to the building, two more with twelve-gauge pumps in the corridor between the office and the cell block, and two guys armed with clubs in the cell block runaround. We were the only prisoners in there—all the local miscreants had been transferred to other jails. The cells were partitioned from each other by bars, not solid walls, and we were kept in separate cells with an empty one between us. It was impossible to talk without the guards overhearing, so we mostly kept our mouths shut. They can take away your privacy but they can’t get in your head. During our first weeks in Lima I constantly racked my brain for some way to escape. Every morning I’d look at Russell and Charley in hope of seeing some sign that maybe one of them had come up with an idea. But none of us came up with anything, not in that tight little lockup and under constant watch.

  We hired a team of lawyers to represent all three of us, the main one being a woman named Jessie Levy, as good as any mouthpiece I ever met—and by far the best-looking. I had the feeling that if she ever took off those glasses and let down her hair she’d be a ball of fire.

  She told us John was in jail at Crown Point, Indiana, and the joint was being guarded by cops, posse men, and the National Guard.

  I said maybe they better put a net over the place too, to make sure he didn’t fly out of there.

  We were arraigned in the middle of February. Each of us would be tried separately for the murder of Allen County sheriff Jess Sarber, me first. My trial was set for the sixth of March.

  Sad to say, but by the time of our arraignment Russell was showing clear signs of defeat. It sounds harsh, but the truth’s the truth. Charley saw it too. No question in my mind it had to do with the daily letters he was getting from Opal. I don’t know what she was writing to him, but each letter seemed to diminish his spirit a little bit more. I finally asked him one day how she was doing. But he only shrugged and lay on his bunk and stared at the ceiling.

  I got letters from my mother and Mary. My mother said for me to have hope, I would beat this thing yet. That was Mom, the eternal optimist. Mary was staying put at the Indianapolis apartment she shared with her mother and Margo. She hadn’t come to see me because she was afraid. The month she’d spent in the Indy lockup had spooked her bad, and she was terrified of going back to jail. She said she loved me and was praying for me. I wrote back that I loved her too and she was doing the right thing by staying away.

  I’ll confess that my own spirits weren’t exactly sky-high while we were waiting to go to court. I kept as active as I could—I did pushups, sit-ups, I ran in place till I was exhausted. I was hanging tight to the hope of breaking out even though I had no idea how it might happen. Still, when you feel like you’re about to drown, you hold on to anything that might keep you afloat.

  And then, three days before my trial began, John escaped from Crown Point.

  We got the news from Jessie Levy. It explained why the guards had been glowering at us even more than usual all day. Charley said he’d have to stop calling him Johnny Fairbanks and start referring to him as Johnny Houdini. One of the guards said it wouldn’t be long before everybody would be calling him Johnny Dead.

  Everybody knows the Crown Point story. Christ, they’ll still be telling it years from now. They had him behind bars and under the heaviest guard in the world, and still he got away. And the kicker is that he did it with a fake gun. They say he whittled it out of a chunk of washboard frame and painted it with black shoe polish and then used it to force a guard to unlock his cell. He rounded up more than a dozen guards and jail employees and locked them all up, taking his sweet time about it, singing and making jokes. He took up a collection from them so he’d have a little traveling money, then rattled the wooden gun along the bars and laughed at them for being suckered by a toy. He snuck down to the jail garage and got in the sheriff’s car—the sheriff’s car, I love it!—and drove out of there as casually as you please. Drove right past all those cops and soldiers standing guard outside the joint and armed to the teeth. He was long gone before they knew he’d made the break.

  It’s a great story, and all of it true—except for the wooden gun. I knew that part was bullshit the minute I heard it, and one of our lawyers said I was right. Never mind which one—Mr. X, let’s call him, though maybe it wasn’t a mister—and never mind how he got the story.

  Oh, there was a wooden gun, all right, but John wasn’t the one who made it, and it’s not what got him out of there. The toy was a cover for the real piece that was smuggled in along with it. A lot of money changed hands to arrange the break. Some of it went to certain jail guards and officials, some of it to a judicial authority, as Mr. X phrased it, who made sure John wasn’t moved to another jail. Where the dough came from, Mr. X didn’t know, but my guess was Sonny Sheetz. John had been doing business with him since before I got out of M City, and he trusted Sheetz more than I ever did. The wooden gun—which he’d made sure to show to the guards aft
er he locked them up—was what kept the inside guys off the hook, no matter how much suspicion fell their way, and no matter that several guards insisted it was a real gun John stuck in their face before locking them up. The plan was smart and worked smooth as Vaseline, but I hated to think of the price John must’ve paid for it. I had a feeling that anytime Sonny wanted to find John from then on, all he’d have to do was reach in his hip pocket.

  All the same, when I heard he was out, I didn’t have a doubt in the world we’d soon be out too. How could it go any other way? He’d helped us bust out of M City, and then we’d busted him out of jail, and now he’d busted out of a lockup everybody said was escape-proof. Escape-proof for ordinary guys, maybe, but not for the likes of us. Whatever his deal with Sonny Sheetz, I knew he wasn’t going to leave us to the wolves.

  Not him. Not us.

  Naturally Charley and I couldn’t talk about it, not with the guards right there in the runaround. But he could read my face from his cell. He cut his eyes around at the bars and at the guards in the runaround and made a gesture indicating all the guard-power posted outside the jail—and he shook his head and made a face that said I don’t think so.

  The guards weren’t looking, so I raised a fist and shook it and nodded hard—Yes, yes.

  He shrugged with uncertainty. Then showed a small smile. Then made a face: Maybe.

  Russell was watching us from his cell. I shook my fist at him too. Yes…yes, goddamnit.

  He seemed to sigh and his shoulders sagged. He stared at me without expression for a minute, then lay down and turned his face to the wall.

  I wanted to yell, to throw something at him.

  Word of John’s escape put Lima in a panic. Every cop and citizen out there was as certain as I was that he was rounding up a gang to come and liberate us. Overnight the town turned into a National Guard camp—and those soldier boys were not in a good mood after the way John had embarrassed their Indiana comrades.

  They built a fence around the jail and strung rolls of barbed wire around it. They swept searchlights over the streets and alleyways all through the nights. They had machine guns in sandbag emplacements at each corner of the courthouse and on the rooftops of neighboring buildings. They even set up a machine gun inside the jail, at the end of the corridor in full view of our cells. The officer in charge said if anyone tried to free us, the first thing to happen is we’d get shot into hamburger.

  I said it looked like they were expecting an invasion by the Prussian army. Charley laughed along with me, and I was glad to see Russell smile. The officer told us to shut the hell up, and Charley and I grinned and grinned.

  Matt Leach arrived with a warning. He’d received a tip that Dillinger and his confederates were planning on sneaking into town in National Guard uniforms. Another rumor had it that John intended to kidnap the governor of Ohio and use him to ransom us. Every day a team of mining experts checked the grounds around the jail for signs of tunneling. Every day an army airplane scouted the local roads and rail tracks.

  Jessie Levy brought word from Mary that she was thrilled to hear of John’s escape but was awful glad she’d been sticking close to home and that the cops had been keeping her under surveillance. Otherwise they would’ve accused her for sure of abetting John in some way or other.

  I went to trial shackled hand and foot, the cops shoving a path through the rubbernecking yokels and bellowing newshounds mobbing the front of the courthouse. I held my cuffed hands up in front of my face as the cameras snapped all around me. Some of the papers described the atmosphere of the trials as carnival-like, but nuthouselike would’ve been closer to the mark.

  The courtroom was packed, of course. Every spectator was patted for weapons before being allowed to enter, and a dozen men with shotguns were positioned around the room. Two guards, one in front, one behind, led me to the defense table. A man seated in a nearby chair held a submachine gun and stared hard at me. One of the cops said he was the son of the man I’d killed. He’d replaced his daddy as the high sheriff.

  I never killed anybody, I said. I was damned if I was going to make it easy for them.

  Not that the verdict was ever in doubt. The sheriff’s widow and the deputy who’d been on the scene each pointed at me from the stand and said I was the one who pulled the trigger.

  And then they brought Ed Shouse from the Michigan City pen. He’d agreed to testify against us in exchange for Indiana dropping all charges on him pertaining to the killing. I wanted to jump up and throttle the bastard with my manacle chains. He never looked my way as he testified about being part of the crew that busted John out of Lima, not until the DA asked him if the man who shot Sheriff Sarber was present in the courtroom. Shouse pointed at me and said That’s him, Harry Pierpont, and he quick cut his eyes away again. I yelled out he was a low-down yellow liar, which of course is what he was, never mind that it was true about the sheriff—everybody already knew that was true. The judge banged his gavel and said to strike my remark from the record. Shouse didn’t look at me again before they took him out. They would’ve nailed me even without his testimony, but that’s hardly the point. There’s nothing lower than a guy siding with the law against somebody he partnered with, no matter what kind of personal bitterness there is between them.

  My defense was that I wasn’t in Lima on the day in question, that, in fact, I’d never been in Lima in my life. So how did I explain that the revolver taken off me in Tucson belonged to Sheriff Sarber? I’d had no idea it was Sarber’s gun—John had given it to me after someone else, I didn’t know who, had given it to him in Chicago. The widow Sarber and the deputy who said I shot the sheriff were simply mistaken. They’d been subjected to a terrifying experience and their memories couldn’t be trusted to recall the details of it accurately. Besides, there were thousands of men who looked like me. As for Shouse, you couldn’t believe a word out of his mouth. He was bitter because John beat him up and we kicked him out of the gang for trying to poach his partners’ women. He even stole a car from one of us. On top of all that, he was insane and everybody knew it. Ask Charles Makley. Ask Russell Clark.

  Not much of a defense, I’ll be the first to admit, but it was all I had.

  My mother took the stand and swore I was having supper with her at the farm in Leipsic on the day the sheriff was killed. She said I hid in a secret nook in the attic when the cops came searching for me a couple of hours after the jailbreak. The jurymen looked at her like she was saying she could fly. I wanted to kick hell out of all of them.

  Like I said, the verdict was a foregone conclusion, and there was really no need for me to take the stand. But I did. I wanted to have my say. That gave the DA the chance to try to get my goat, but if you want my opinion, I got the better of him. The bastard said the only reason I’d agreed to stand trial in Ohio is that I wasn’t tough enough to take the hole at Michigan City. I said I’d been in the hole more times than he’d been kissed by women who weren’t his mother—which got a small laugh from the crowd. I said I’d done stretches in the hole so long that I couldn’t stand up when they took me out, that I couldn’t see straight and it took days for my eyes to adjust to the light. I said a guy like him would bust into hysterics before he’d been in the hole an hour.

  When he said we’d taken more than $300,000 from banks since breaking out of M City, I said if that was true I’d be retired in Miami Beach right this minute, sitting in the sun and sipping rum cocos. That got another laugh from the spectators and the judge warned them to keep order.

  The DA said I couldn’t deny robbing several banks since my escape from Michigan City—there were dozens of eyewitnesses who’d identified me. I said I wasn’t denying it, but I was honest enough to do my robbing with a gun and man enough to take my chances against anybody who tried to stop me. At least I wasn’t a two-faced, double-talking, hypocritical bank president who used crooked books to rob widows and farmers of their property and life savings. That one got a big roaring laugh, and had the judge banging his gavel lik
e a carpenter in a hurry.

  I told the DA that men like him hated men like me because they knew damn well they didn’t have the daring to do what we did. It was that simple. Every time you look at me, I said, you see what a coward you are.

  He acted all indignant, of course, but you could see in his face how hard the truth hit. I felt great, never mind that at the defense table Jessie Levy had her head in her hands.

  It took the jury about forty minutes to convict me of murder in the first degree. The only question was whether they’d recommend mercy and spare me a mandatory death sentence—and, I might add, give me another chance to bust out of whatever joint they put me in. But when they came filing back into the courtroom I knew the answer before they gave it. One or two of them couldn’t even look at me, but the others, oh man, you could see the pleasure in their eyes. A few of them were smiling at me the way sissies smile when the teacher pinches the ear of some classmate they’re all afraid of, some kid they show a completely different kind of smile to when it’s just him and them. I never smiled at anybody the way they were smiling at me. I wouldn’t be able to keep my self-respect.

  Guilty and no mercy. The judge said I’d be sentenced after all three trials were concluded, but that was a mere formality. I couldn’t help thinking that if it hadn’t been for Shouse, the jury might’ve made the mercy recommendation. Then I thought If, if, if, and had to laugh out loud—which got me a lot of horrified looks.

  The reporters swarmed up to the table, their flashbulbs popping. Mom rushed over to me and did her best to shield my face from them. She was crying and called them cannibals. I kissed her and whispered in her ear to not let them get her goat, to be strong. And then they took me away.

  Charley’s trial was next. A half brother I didn’t even know he had came to testify that Charley was with him in St. Marys at the time of the Sarber shooting. The trial ran four days and then his jury was out all night, which Jessie said was a good sign—somebody was obviously arguing for mercy. As Charley left for court the next morning, I wished him luck. He grinned and said Seven come eleven. He wasn’t grinning when he came back. I asked what he got, and he said The kit and kaboodle. And didn’t say another word the rest of the day.