Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories

A New Man

The way things worked out, it was kind of funny.

It was a warm spring day as I wheeled into town in my Ford roadster. Every once in a while I’d glance in the rear view mirror and startle myself. That doc on the West Coast had done a real good job. He’d charged too much but I didn’t have much choice. I could’ve killed him, I suppose, but believe it or not killing doesn’t come easy to me. The papers and the radio would have you believe that I kill people all the time. But that’s just hooey to sell newspapers and hair tonic.

The place was the sort of dusty little town I’d expected to find along the Mississippi River on the Iowa side of the river. Three blocks of shopping, a town square with a bandstand, three or four churches, and a lot of small boats along the river, bobbing on the gentle waves. A lot of colored people along the dam, fishing. A bunch of white boys playing baseball in the parking lot of a small factory.

And some very pretty ladies sitting at a small outdoor café drinking lemonade and smoking cigarettes and listening to Al Jolson on the radio.

Now that’s the part of my reputation I don’t mind. The newspapers always gussied me up as a ladies’ man and I guess that’s true. They say I’m good looking and while I’m not likely to argue with that, looks don’t have nothing to do with my success with women. The gals like me for a simple reason: they know I really like and respect women and know how to treat them right.

I decided to have myself a lemonade.

I carried my glass out to the porch that overlooked the river. The four gals were all in summer linen dresses the pastel colors of flowers. They all wore their hair bobbed and they all smoked like Bette Davis, you know, with her wrist angled backwards when she was just resting her cigarette. I had to smile. I was the same way. I go into a pitcher show and darned if I don’t come out imitating the mannerisms of the hero. Sometimes I didn’t even know I was doing it.

The gals looked me over and whispered and giggled among themselves like schoolgirls. They were small-town sweet and I liked them. The way they smiled at me, I guess I must’ve passed muster.

I sat there and enjoyed the river. Though we were in the shiny new 1930s, you could still easily imagine the old paddle wheelers making their way up here from New Orleans. Gambling boats filled with beautiful ladies and fast-shuffling men. Nights of music and reckless love. I guess every generation looks back on the previous times as better somehow.

It wasn’t long before the law showed up. My instinct was to go for my gun. There were two things wrong with that. These days, I didn’t carry a gun. And there wasn’t any reason to get excited anyway. My new face didn’t in any way resemble my old face.

He was young and he had just about the right amount of swagger. Too much and he would’ve been a punk and too little and he would’ve been a coward. He wore a khaki uniform with a bright silver badge that glared in the sun. His gun was a Colt. 45, the kind that Bob Steele and Hopalong Cassidy pack in the picture shows. He was probably 25 and except for a broken nose he looked like a magazine cover. The altar boy ten years later.

He sat down. Didn’t ask. Just sat down. He wore a white Stetson and doffed it to the gals. He must’ve passed muster, too. They sent him several flirtatious smiles, little invisible valentines.

“Those’re the kind of gals who could get a married man in trouble,” he said.

He was drinking lemonade, too.

“I imagine that’s true.”

He pushed his hand across the table to me. He had a strong but easy hand. He wasn’t trying to impress anybody. “Name’s Swenson. Con Swenson. I’m the acting sheriff. Hasty, Bob Hasty the sheriff, he’s laid up with some kinda heart condition so I been sort of running things for the past two months. And you’d be?”

“Paul Caine.”

“And Paul Caine would be from?”

“Milwaukee. I sell kitchen appliances there.”

He nodded. “I’ve got a wife who’s got every one of ’em. You should see our place.” Then — still and always a lawman — “You’re just passing through?”

“Staying a few days then going on to Cedar Rapids. Got a cousin there. But he won’t be back for a couple of days so I thought I’d stay here and fish. Hear it’s good here.”

“Real good. Best fishing in the state except up near Devil’s Backbone and a few places like that.” Then: “Know anybody here?”

“Not a soul.”

He watched my face, my hands, the way I moved. I knew I’d passed muster with the gals. With him I wasn’t sure.

“You find a hotel yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Hell, then, let me take you over to the Paladium. My cousin Ned is the desk clerk there. I’ll get you a deal on a room. And it’ll be a nice one, too.”

I smiled. “You’re a little bit of Chamber of Commerce, too?”

“Not Chamber. Not yet. But Jaycee and Rotary. Sheriff thinks we need to be part of our community and I agree with him. The days of a peace officer just totin’ a gun around and tryin’ to scare people are over. At least around these parts. C’mon, I’ll walk over with you.”

He was a strange one for a copper and he made me uneasy. I don’t think he’d figured out who I was or what I was doing here. But something else was going on and I wondered what it was.

I grabbed my one suitcase from the car and we walked a block east. There sure were a lot of pretty girls here. Wagons went by, horses hot in the Iowa sun, leaving sweet-scented fly-specked remnants of their passage in the road. Roadsters went by; trucks went by; a big Packard with some fancy people in the back and Chicago plates went by. “Flying Down To Rio” with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire was on the picture show marquee.

The Paladium was on the other side of the street and just as we were approaching it, a woman was coming out of a dress shop next door. I couldn’t get a good look at her.

When Swenson saw her, he shouted, “Hey, honey!”

And then she turned toward us and squinted into the sun. And then her pretty face ignited into a smile and she returned the wave. And then went on walking in the opposite direction.

“That’s the little woman,” Swenson said. “My wife.”

“Pretty,” I said.

“She sure is,” he said proudly. “I hope you get a chance to meet her.”

But I had met her. Many times I’d met her. And that was why, in fact, I was here. Because I’d met her and she’d betrayed me and now I was going to kill her.

The fishing turned out to be all I’d heard. I spent two days collecting sunrays and catfish, and two nights drinking bathtub gin and squiring about a young woman who wore just a wee bit too many pieces of Kleenex in her bra. But her earnestness endeared her to me, and so we spent several sweet moonlit hours in a hushed cove next to where the water ran moonsilver at midnight.

Not until Tuesday did I start following the lawman’s wife. When I’d known her her name had been Ann Sage and she’d lived in Chicago. Here her name was Karen Caine. She’d put on ten pounds and dipped her hair a little too often in the peroxide bottle. She had a nice life. During the day, she went to the beauty shop and the picture show and the bakery.

Nights, her appointed rounds became even more interesting. I found a hill on the right side of the isolated Caine house on the edge of town. Through my field glasses, I saw that hubby, apparently tired, usually went to bed around 8:30, leaving Karen downstairs to read movie magazines, smoke Chesterfields and listen to the radio.

He came from the woods in back of the house, her lover. He was a big man with a handsome but fierce face and a lot of girly-curly dark hair. He went straight into the darkened garage. She came out promptly at ten. It was all pretty sensible, when you thought about it. You go anywhere with somebody, folks are bound to see you eventually. But if all you do is go out to your garage — and she carried a small sack of garbage as a pretext — who could see anything? If lover boy kept his mouth shut, who would ever know?

And hubby was upstairs asleep.

On my fourth day in town, I rolled out of bed an hour later than usual. That bathtub gin can do bad things to your system, especially your head.

He knocked and then came right in without my invitation. He had on a crisp new khaki uniform that would be sweated out and dusted out by day’s end and he had this strange smile on his face. One of those smug smiles that said he knew something I didn’t.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning,” I said, still in my boxers, still sitting on the side of my single bed. I fired up a Lucky.

He had a glass in his hand. A plain 6-ounce drinking glass.

“Recognize this?” he said.

Something was sure up. He was so excited he kept licking his lips and breathing very hard.

“Looks like a glass to me.”

“Yeah, but what kinda glass?”

“Drinking glass.” The hangover had left me irritable. “Look, I always like to have some breakfast before I play parlor games.”

The grin came — full force now. “This ain’t no parlor game I’m playing, Mr. Dillinger.”

So then I knew. “The glass I drank lemonade from?”

“One and the same.”

“You’re a bright lad.”

“Bright enough to match the fingerprints with the WANTED poster J. Edgar sent out when they thought you were still alive. I didn’t know who you were so I had to look through a lot of posters. You got a real funny whorl on your right thumb.”

“I cut it on a scythe when I was a kid.”

“Too bad. It’s real easy to spot you.”

“You tell them where they can find me?”

His wife Anne Sage had told the federales where they could find me on the night of July 22. She’d be wearing red when we left the theater and she’d be standing next to me. She’d pitch to the left and they’d open fire. What they hadn’t counted on was me figuring that something was going on. She’d been acting jittery all night. Just as we were leaving the theater, I grabbed her and used her as a shield. J. Edgar wouldn’t want his boys to gun down an innocent girl. It’d look bad in the press. So they didn’t have any choice but to let me get in my car — her along for the ride — and get away. That was three years ago. Since then that West Coast doc had worked on my face, turning me into a new man. And I’d been looking for Ann Sage.

Or had been.

I’d outrun J. Edgar once. I doubted I’d do it again.

“They’ve probably got this hotel surrounded,” I said, suddenly feeling a lot wearier than my thirty-seven years.

He shook his head. “Nah. I haven’t called them yet.”

I took a deep drag of the Lucky. The stream of smoke I exhaled was a perfect ice blue. Beautiful in its way. “You want all the glory for yourself, huh? ‘I Captured John Dillinger.’ Make you a regular folk hero.”

He looked kind of dopey then. And I realized just how young and unsophisticated he was. Despite all the tough talk, I mean.

Standing right there, a badge on his chest, a gun on his hip, for all the world a cold and serious lawman, he got tears in his eyes and said, “I can’t take it anymore, Mr. Dillinger.”

“Can’t take what?” I said.

So he told me.

I slept in again the next morning. This time it wasn’t the fault of bathtub gin. I was just tired. It’d been a long and industrious night.

The desk clerk, as I handed him the two dollars I owed him for my last night, said, “You must’ve slept through all the excitement.”

“Oh?”

“You met Deputy Caine.”

“Sure. Nice young man.”

The clerk, who had a mole, slick hair and breath that could peel onions, leaned forward on the desk and said, “His old lady was bangin’ this here young buck of a farmer, see? The way folks surmise it is the farmer wanted her to leave Caine and marry him. They musta had an argument, see, and the farmer killed her and then hisself.”

I shook my head. “Boy, what a sad old world.”

“I hear ya, brother.” Then: “Caine didn’t hear about it till this morning. He took a prisoner over to Dunkertown and stayed there all night right on a cot in the police station.”

Hard to find a better alibi than that.

I was just tossing my bag in my roadster when I saw Deputy Caine coming out of his office and walking into the dusty street. Several people stopped him. The way they kind of whispered and gently touched him, you could tell they were trying to console him.

I whipped the roadster around so that I’d drive past the sheriff’s office as I left town. When I got even with the small stone building, I stepped on the brake. Caine came over and put his foot on the running board.

“I guess we both got what we wanted,” he said.

I guess we did. She’d betrayed me with the feds and she’d betrayed him in bed. We’d both gotten what we wanted.

“So everything go all right?”

“Just fine.” The farmer had been big, all right, but dumb. Faking his suicide hadn’t been difficult at all.

“She say anything, you know, before she died?”

I knew what he wanted to hear. What any man would want to hear. That she was sorry she betrayed him. That she still loved him.

“I could lie to you, kid, but I’m not sure I’d be doing you any favors.”

“Yeah, I suppose not.” He squinted up at the sun. “That funeral parlor’s gonna be hot as a bitch tonight, with the wake and all.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Hot as a bitch.

“Good luck with everything — Mr. Thompson,” he said. And grinned.

That had been my part of the bargain. I kill his wife for him — something he couldn’t bring himself to do — and he let me go without informing the feds. Seemed reasonable to me.

“Good luck to you, too, Deputy.”

We shook hands. Then I gave the roadster some gas. With any luck I’d be in central Iowa by nightfall.