Handsome Harry

by James Carlos Blake

  Then it was Russell’s turn. His disposition by then can be described as sheer indifferent gloom. He’d been sleeping eighteen, sometimes twenty hours a day. Jessie said he even nodded off in court a time or two. When they’d bring him back at the end of the day, we’d ask how it was going, and if he bothered to answer at all, he’d only shrug and stretch out on his bunk and be asleep as soon as his head was down.

  But he got the luck. The verdict was guilty but with a recommendation of mercy. That was as it should’ve been. He never laid a hand on the sheriff.

  The judge rejected Jessie’s motion for new trials, and we all got the sentences we expected. Russell drew life. Charley and I got the chair. We were scheduled to ride the lightning on a Friday the thirteenth less than four months away.

  All during the trials, I kept an eye out for John. But the news always had him a long way from us. He robbed a bank in South Dakota, of all places, three days after breaking out of Crown Point, though we didn’t hear about it till well after that. Mr. X told me there’d been a lot of shooting on that job and somebody wounded a cop. He said the gang took hostages on the running boards for the getaway, and I was reminded of Racine.

  A week later, during Charley’s trial, they hit a bank in Iowa, and it was a wonder they got away. There was more wild shooting and the cops used tear gas and some of the citizens joined the police in taking shots at the robbers. To top it off, although they got around twenty grand, they left behind more than $150,000. Christ almighty. The whole thing smacked of bad comedy. I was sure Red was working with John on those jobs and I couldn’t believe they were capable of such sloppy work. But when I found out Homer Van Meter was in with them, plus that trigger-happy runt named Nelson or Gillis, whichever it was, it was clear enough to me why the jobs were going rocky. Still, I figured John was working on a plan for our deliverance, and I kept watching for him.

  And he did show up. On the day we were sentenced.

  We were being led back to the jail, shuffling in our shackles between two rows of National Guard riflemen forming a wide corridor across the street and holding back the crowd of spectators braving an icy wind to have another look at us. The three of us were bareheaded and the wind whipped our hair. It had the cops holding on to their hats. And as we started up the jailhouse steps, I spotted him.

  He was well beyond the crowd, standing at the foot of a monument in front of the courthouse, bundled in an overcoat and with his hat low over his face—but I knew it was him. It was only a few seconds, but long enough to see him raise his fist.

  I’m out here, brother…hang on….

  I laughed as I went through the door. Fat Charley arched his brow at me like I might be losing my grip, and I shook my head and laughed some more. I never did tell him about seeing John that day. I was afraid he’d say I couldn’t be sure it was him, not at that distance, and my disappointment in Charley would’ve been hard to take.

  We were transferred to the Ohio state prison in Columbus on a frigid morning of blowing snow, once again in separate vehicles and accompanied by a caravan of cop cars. We sped along country roads and barreled through town after town, and even the bad weather didn’t keep the folk from gathering on the sidewalks, huddled in their coats, to squint at us as we whizzed by.

  At one point, the car I was in fishtailed for a moment as we went through a curve, and I said to the driver What’re you trying to do, kill me? A couple of the cops snickered. One said it was too bad I was such a crumb or I might’ve made a good cop. Not on your life, I said—too many rules and too many bosses. I was sure right about that, the cop said.

  Another crowd was waiting in front of the prison. Those good citizens were taking a chance. In addition to the riflemen up on the walls, there were National Guard machine guns aiming at us from the backs of trucks. If anyone had made a wrong move, we wouldn’t have been the only ones to get all shot up.

  They processed us into the joint and then led Russell off in another direction and took me and Charley to the death house.

  We passed through gate after gate as we went down one corridor after another, with armed guards at each gate except the last two, where the guards carried only clubs. The last corridor ended at a heavy steel door with a small barred window. A guard peeked out at us, then unlocked the door and swung it open and said Welcome to the Hot Seat Hotel, gents.

  The front of the row was an open area with a desk near the door, a small shower room on one side and a set of stall lockers on the other. The cells ran down both sides of a center aisle, separated from each other by stone walls and fronted with bars. They put us in adjacent cells.

  When they turned the lock on me, I felt like I was buried under the ocean floor.

  Charley and I never saw each other except when one of us was taken out to go to the shower. It was easy to talk through the barred doors, but of course you didn’t have any privacy. Because we were in neighboring cells, though, it wasn’t hard to exchange notes. You balled up the paper tight and small, checked the hallway with your little shaving mirror to make sure nobody was watching, then quick reached out and flicked the little ball through the bars of the other cell.

  The other inmates on the row were all as dumb as dirt if not outright deranged, and we generally ignored them. Two of the cells across the aisle faced directly into ours, but one of those guys spent most of his time sleeping or jerking off and didn’t seem to recognize our existence, and the other was the looniest guy on the row, always babbling to himself about who-knows-what. The guards said he’d chopped up both his mother and his wife with an axe. Everybody called him the Bug.

  The only visitor we could meet in private—that is, without a double layer of steel mesh between us, and with the guard required to stand far enough away that he couldn’t overhear us—was our lawyer, Jessie Levy. She came to see us fairly often. She was working on another motion for new trials.

  At first my mother came to visit too, about every other week, but I had to put an end to that. She’d always been a good soldier, but my being on death row was too much for her. Each time we faced each other through the thick steel mesh in the visiting room she ended up in tears. I couldn’t take it. I told her not to come see me again until I got off the row.

  As for Mary, she wrote me every day during my first weeks in Columbus. To avoid the prison censors, she’d send her letters to Jessie, who would slip them in among legal papers she’d give me to review in my cell. The truth is, except for some pretty explicit sex stuff, most of what she wrote me would’ve passed the censors with no trouble. She’d always say she loved me and missed me and hoped I was doing well. She’d tell me about her waitressing job at the same restaurant where Margo was a hostess, and about the garden she was raising in the backyard. She hoped I understood why she hadn’t come to see me, but she didn’t want to make the police more suspicious of her than they already were. I supposed that was also why she never mentioned John in any of her letters—she was afraid of what would happen to her if the letters fell in the wrong hands. She said she was sorry she was such a sissy, but jail had been awful, and she didn’t believe she could bear it again. Besides, she said, she had spoken with my mother and knew how her visits had affected me. She didn’t think she could keep from crying any more than Mom could, so it was just as well she didn’t come see me. She was sure I agreed.

  I didn’t agree at all, but I didn’t say so. I wanted to see her, never mind how bad I’d feel when she went away again, or that we couldn’t even touch fingertips as we did through the wire mesh at M City. But it wouldn’t be the same if I had to ask her to come. Besides—and Christ, I hate to confess this, but why not?—I couldn’t help wondering how much she and John were seeing of each other. I mean, what could be more natural? They trusted each other, they liked each other, they’d played together naked in the surf at Daytona Beach. I’m not saying I thought they were fooling around. But if they were, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

  By the end of my first two months on the row, her letters had
become a now-and-then thing. I didn’t complain to her about it. Under the circumstances, I didn’t have much to say either, other than what I’d said to her a hundred times before.

  I heard from Pearl Elliott once. A brief note saying she thought of me often and wished she was more of a religious person so she could pray for me without feeling like a sap. She was still laying low, but if there was anything she could do, say the word.

  We weren’t allowed newspapers or radios, but the hacks kept us up on the news about John, and what we didn’t hear from them we got from Jessie Levy. We hadn’t been in Columbus a week before he and Billie shot their way out of a police trap in St. Paul. A week later they paid another visit to his dad in Mooresville, twenty miles from Indytown. They spent two days there, even though the entire region was crawling with federal cops hunting for him. Most of the neighbors knew he was there and nobody gave him away. Newspapers ran headlines about it. The feds had a fit. Jessie told me a gang of cops barged into Mary’s house, waving warrants and making threats, but the bullying bastards hadn’t harmed any of them, not Mary or Margo or their mother. Mary made no mention of it in her letters.

  Then came the bad news of Billie’s arrest. She was caught in a Chicago bar where she and John had gone to meet someone. She told the press that as soon as they got there John excused himself to go to the men’s room, and while she was waiting in the foyer the feds rushed up and collared her. Some fink had tipped them to the meeting. She said when John came out of the gents’ and saw the situation—and that there were too many cops for him to rescue her—he wisely walked out, passing within a few feet of the cops and giving her a wink of encouragement. Her account enraged the feds. They insisted she was lying, that John couldn’t have been in the bar or they’d have spotted him. She laughed at them and stuck to her story.

  The next thing we heard was that John and Homer Van Meter had robbed the police station in Warsaw, Indiana, and made off with a load of guns and bulletproof vests. It irked me to hear he was partnering with the scarecrow. Then again, with us out of the picture, it was only natural he’d turn to Van Meter.

  Then came a hell of a shootout with the feds in Wisconsin that made headlines from coast to coast. John and the gang had been laying low at a vacation lodge up there called Little Bohemia, but once again somebody ratted. More than a dozen federal agents snuck up in the middle of the night and opened fire with machine guns and shot the place to pieces. The gang fought back, killing one fed and wounding another, plus a local cop—and every man of them got away. The feds managed to kill one citizen and wound two others. Their only captives were three of the gang’s women. John had made the federals look like fools before, but Little Bohemia was the capper.

  Within an hour of getting the news of the battle in Wisconsin, the warden doubled the guard in the death house. The papers revived the rumor that John and his gang were in Ohio with plans to snatch the governor and his family and hold them as hostages till we were released. We heard that the governor’s yard looked like an army outpost, there were so many soldiers posted around the place.

  The more I heard about what John was doing out there, the smaller my cell got, the deeper I felt buried. Time turned strange—the days dragged by even as the day of execution seemed to be coming at me like a train. I had a recurrent nightmare in which I’d see myself strapped in the electric chair. There’d be a burst of blue-yellow sparks from under the steel cap on my head and I’d feel my eyes bulging from my skull and I’d smell my roasting blood and feel my muscles wrapping tight around my cracking bones. I’d bolt awake in a terrified sweat, choking on my heart, biting my tongue to keep from screaming.

  To get hold of myself, I’d think hard about the last time I’d seen John—outside the Lima courthouse, his fist raised high.

  Hang on, brother, hang on….

  Our appeals for a new trial kept getting turned down. Jessie was quick to file a new motion on the heels of every rejection, but her services didn’t come cheap, and Charley and I started getting worried about how we’d continue to pay her. We’d both had some cash hidden away and we had let her know how to get it, but it wasn’t much and we figured it would soon run out, if it hadn’t already. When I brought up the subject the next time we met, she said we didn’t need to worry, that John had given her enough money to keep her retained and working on our case. Mary had delivered the cash to the Indianapolis office of one of Jessie’s associates.

  It was nice to know we didn’t have to worry about losing our lawyer, but I had a bad feeling that John was putting up all that cash because it was all he could do for us.

  We didn’t get the news about Red till almost a month after it happened. Jessie got it from Mary, who heard it straight from John. I don’t know why he took so long to tell her.

  John and Red and Homer Van Meter had escaped from Little Bohemia in the same car, but hours later they ran through a roadblock and the cops went after them. There was a lot of shooting and Red was hit in the back. Nobody thought it was serious at first, and after they lost the cops they ditched the getaway car and hijacked another. That’s when they saw how bad Red was bleeding and that the hole in his back was the size of a silver dollar—which Jessie said was how John described it to Mary. They treated the wound the best they could, but Red got worse as they pressed on to Chicago, and by the time they got there, he was delirious. The entire Chicago Police Department was scouring the city, and every crooked doctor in town was too scared to tend to Red, including that bastard Moran. They were on their way to try somebody else when Red died in the car. They buried him out in the countryside, but John didn’t tell Mary where.

  When I told Charley the news, he didn’t say anything for about an hour. Then he came up to the bars of his cell and said poor Red got shot more often than anyone he’d ever known.

  No, wait, he said, permit me to restate that in the man’s own mode. I mean the fucken guy got shot more often than anyone I know.

  Yeah, I said…fucken guy.

  In late May, Billie was convicted of harboring and got two years in the federal penitentiary at Milan, Michigan. A week later, Patty and Opal were arrested in Chicago on the same charge, and ended up in the same pen with her on two-year jolts of their own. I bet those three ruled the joint like queens.

  About a month after Billie’s fall, John and his cowboys hit a bank in South Bend, and it was another crazy mess. The cops shot some of the citizens the guys used for shields. Van Meter shot a cop. Then some citizen shot Van Meter in the head and they say the scarecrow went down like he’d been pole-axed. Then he got back up and got in the car like all he’d done was trip on his own big feet. A dozen people witnessed it and none of them could believe it. I can believe it—hell, you can’t hurt a dummy by shooting him in the head. Another citizen shot Nelson point blank but the runt’s vest saved him. And he shot the hell out of the citizen. Then a high school kid jumped on Nelson and rode him piggyback all over the sidewalk, trying to take him down like it was some kind of rodeo event. The runt finally managed to throw the kid off and gave him a burst from the tommy gun and managed to hit him once. In the hand. And the kid fainted.

  One hit with a tommy gun. Jesus, what a bunch of clowns. I don’t know how they managed to keep from shooting themselves in all those left feet.

  Nevertheless, they got about thirty grand in South Bend. John dropped down to Indy and gave Mary another couple of gees toward the Pete-and-Charley fund, as he called it. He also said that if some stranger came up to her on the street some day soon and gave her a little goose in the behind, not to be too quick to slap the mug, because it would probably be him. He was going to see a plastic surgeon.

  When the court pushed back the date of our execution so it could consider Jessie’s latest motion for a new trial, Charley and I joked about dodging a live wire and so on. But Jessie said she was running out of ideas.

  I was still hoping against all reason that John would think of some way to deliver us. I kited a note to him through Jessie, who pa
ssed it on to Mary. It included a diagram of the row. I said he didn’t owe me a thing—he’d helped us bust M City and we’d busted him out of Lima and the scales were all even. Just the same, I’d sure appreciate it if he could come up with something. And if he couldn’t, that was okay, no hard feelings, and I’d see him in hell.

  He sent back a note. Before she gave it to me, Jessie made a point of letting me know that as far as she knew it was just another love letter from Mary. I said I understood completely.

  It was short and to the point. Columbus couldn’t be cracked. He’d paid a bunch of ex-cons who’d done time in the place to draw him a detailed map of the prison, and he’d personally cased the outside of the joint twice. He’d probably been within fifty yards of me, he said, but I might as well have been on the moon. He’d gone to S.—meaning Sheetz, of course—and told him to name his price for getting us out. Sheetz told him there was no way, not at any price. It was one thing to buy off a few people at Crown Point in order to sneak in a gun, but it was something else entirely to try buying somebody out of the death house. John said it looked like snake eyes, no matter how we rolled the dice. If he got to hell first he’d save me a spot next to his in the mess hall.

  I read the note twice, then put a match to it and watched it fall apart in flames over the toilet, then flushed the ashes away.

  When I whispered the news to Charley the next day, he was quiet for a minute. Then, so softly I barely heard him, he said: Well, they can only hang us once.