True Crime

25

A month later I was starting to wonder if Sally might not be right about my chosen profession. My name had been in the papers — including my address, in the News — but no business had been generated by this notoriety, not even a death threat or two from Baby Face Nelson or Homer Van Meter. All I had to show for my trouble was a few hundred bucks and the growing suspicion I was a horse’s ass.

“What good am I?” I asked her, as we lay in her soft bed, the silk sheets draped around us, Sally snuggled against me in the dark.

“You’re very good,” she said, smiling up at me.

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Do you have to be so gloomy, Heller?”

“Am I getting you down with this talk?”

She shrugged. “Not really.”

She was a better dancer than actress; I told her so.

“Go to hell, Heller,” she said. Good-naturedly. Sadly.

“I was right on top of this,” I said, “and it didn’t do a damn bit of good.”

“Why don’t you get right on top of this,” she said, snuggling closer.

“I quit the cops ’cause I was sick of being used. I quit and went in business for myself because people kill people in this town as casual as flushing a toilet, which is fine, which is great, that’s their goddamn business. Just leave me out of it.”

She pulled away from me and sat on the edge of her side of the bed, her back to me.

“What the hell kind of detective am I, if I can’t stop something like this from happening when I see it the hell coming?”

She was lighting a cigarette.

“Not that I give a damn about Jimmy Lawrence, whoever the hell he was. I never even met the son of a bitch. What’s it to me if Indiana and Frank Nitti want him dead. Just don’t make me part of it! Damnit!”

She sighed and blew smoke out at the same time.

“Helen... you okay?”

I touched her shoulder and she flinched and I took my hand away.

“I’ve been going on about this too much, haven’t I?”

Without turning to me, she said, “It has been a month, Nate.”

“I know. I didn’t mean to get going again.”

“I thought maybe you were over it,” she said, wistfully. “It’s been almost a week since you last went into this song and dance.”

That made me bristle a little. “It isn’t a goddamn song and dance. It’s something that’s eating me. Sorry!”

She turned and smiled over her shoulder at me; breathed smoke out her nostrils like Dietrich. “Whatever happened to the strong and silent type? I didn’t think you tough detectives ever wore shirts made outa hair.”

That made me smile and I touched her shoulder again; this time she didn’t flinch.

In fact she was in my arms after that and I kissed her on the mouth and remembered why being alive was worthwhile.

I kissed her neck, whispered into her ear. “Sorry. Sorry. I won’t go on about it anymore. I’ll let go of it...”

She pulled back to look at me and smile, just a little.

“I don’t mind that what you were caught up in bothers you,” she said. “That quality in you is probably why I love you so damn much...”

In our time together, this was the first love had ever come up; in words, anyway. Hearing her say that was like getting struck a blow. Pleasantly struck. But struck.

She put a hand in my hair, roughed it up, smiled her sad wry little half-smile. “I just hate seeing it eating you up like this.”

“I love you, too, Helen.”

“I know. Quit the business.”

“What?”

“I’ll be leaving in a few months to go on the road with my show. Starting in November.”

“Please, Helen. Not this again...”

“I listened to your song and dance, now you listen to mine.”

“Helen...”

“I need somebody smart and tough to handle the sharks in my business.”

“Your business.”

“Show business. I want you to be my personal manager.”

“What I know about show business you could store in a flea’s navel.”

“You know people.”

“I know crooks.”

Little wry half-smile, “Perfect.”

“We’ve been through this before...”

“Nate. We’d be together. Work together. Live together.”

“You’d marry me, you mean.”

“Sure.”

“What about kids?”

She shrugged. “Anything’s possible.”

“You’d need a bigger bubble.”

“I wish you’d take this seriously. I really want you to consider what I’m offering.”

“You make this sound like a business proposition; before it was love.”

“It’s both. You’re in a business that’s making you very little money and has given you a good deal of heartache. I’m giving you the opportunity of getting into a business that’ll make you a lot of money and warm your heart, among other things.”

“Helen, this Dillinger thing was...”

“Just a fluke. Not the sort of thing that happens every day in your business. Yes, I know. I’ve heard you say that over and over. I’ve also heard your stories about the Lingle killing and the Frank Nitti shooting and the Cermak assassination and Nate, give it up. Come live with me.”

“And be your love?”

She laughed. “Poetry, huh? You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Heller.”

“My father ran a bookshop. A little of it rubbed off.”

“My father had a farm. A little of that rubbed off on me — enough to make me long for some of the traditional virtues, like having a man who loves me around.”

“A bookshop and a farm. Neither one of us seems to have gone into the family business. Though we each have our own cockeyed idea of how to go about making a living, don’t we?”

She stroked my face with the back of her cool long-nailed hand. “Let’s merge.”

“Yeah,” I said, “let’s,” and kissed her again.

Now, the next day, a balmly Friday afternoon, I sat behind my desk in my dreary little office thinking about life with Sally Rand and show business and how any guy in his right mind would jump at this chance.

If I was so goddamn set in my ways, where the A-1 Detective Agency was concerned, I should’ve been doing my fucking job instead of sitting staring at my new office furniture. I had an afternoon’s worth of phone calls I was supposed to be making; credit checks. But I couldn’t seem to do anything but sit there and stare and wonder about my future. Would I be in this same office, a year from now? Five years from now? Ten years from now? Would I ever have a secretary? Operatives under me? How ’bout a wife and kiddies? Or was I destined to plod along making just enough money to deceive myself into thinking I had a “growing” business. Never getting far enough ahead to feel secure enough to make a home and family. Just sitting in this office till hell froze over.

I’d used up part of the six hundred-some dollars I’d cleared off the Dillinger fiasco to improve my office. I’d got rid of the patched brown-leather couch and put in a modern one, artificial-leather maroon cushions on the left and right and cream cushions in the middle, sitting on a swooping chrome-tube frame. I’d picked up a matching chair with maroon seat and cream back cushion; it looked like an electric chair out of Buck Rogers, and the couch was like something in the drinking car on the Silver Streak. A little steel smoking stand with an ebony Formica top was to one side of the couch, and in front of it was a steel, ebony-Formica-topped coffee table. The woman at Sears said the stuff was “as modern as tomorrow.” And on sale today.

Sally had helped me pick it out, and her thinking had been to make my office look more like an office, and in the showroom she seemed to make sense — this streamlined modern furniture seemed just the ticket to pull me up into the twentieth century. Today it all seemed silly to me, absurd in the same room as my Murphy bed and scarred old desk and cracked plaster walls.

On a more practical note I’d put in a water cooler, which was humming over against the wall near the washroom. No use carrying that bottle too far to fill it back up. I’d picked it up used from a small import-export business down the hall, that went under a few weeks before. The heat wave had let up a bit but wasn’t exactly gone, and the little paper cups of refrigerated water made life slightly more bearable.

I was filling one of the cups and the water cooler was saying, “Glug glug,” when somebody knocked on my door.

“It’s open,” I said, and drank my water.

The door opened slowly and a thin man of about forty stepped one foot tentatively inside and peeked in around as if looking to see if the coast was clear.

“Mr. Heller?”

“Yes. Can I help you?”

“Might I step in, sir?”

“Certainly.” I gestured with the now-empty paper cup toward the maroon-and-cream, chrome-tube throne I was now providing for clients, opposite my desk.

He came all the way in, a man about my height but twenty pounds lighter; his face was gaunt, weathered, lined with work, with eyes of that odd light blue color like the sky on certain washed-out summer days. He held his straw hat — not a boater — in his hands, and smiled one of those polite smiles that barely qualifies as smiling and nodded as I walked behind my desk and made his way uncertainly toward the chair of tomorrow.

He clearly was a man of yesterday. He slouched a bit — not from the weight of the world, but from something much heavier: he wore a sense of personal tragedy like a topcoat. A snug-fitting one. His clothes didn’t make as close a fit: his dark brown suit wasn’t cheap but wasn’t tailored (like my furniture, it might’ve been gotten at Sears — though in his case surely by mail-order catalog) and shiny brown shoes and his light brown bow tie were obviously Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, and he was less than comfortable in them. If he’d ever been comfortable in his life.

Certainly he wasn’t in the modern chair; he looked at it suspiciously before sitting, then did, as if he had no choice, like Zangara taking the electric cure. He smiled again — it was just a crease in his face — and patted the ebony armrests atop the tubing at either side of him and said, “Seen some things like this at the Century of Progress last year.”

I ventured a smile. “Nobody said the future was going to be a picnic.”

He tilted his head; it was like a hound dog trying to understand an abstract concept.

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, sir,” he said.

“Skip it. And let’s skip the ‘sir,’ too — you can put a ‘mister’ in front of the Heller, if you like. Or not. I don’t stand on ceremony.” I ventured another smile. “Not as long as you’re a paying customer.”

His face creased in the sort of smile again, but he still didn’t get my drift. Humor was as foreign to him as the chair he was sitting in.

“Now,” I said, getting a yellow pad and a pencil out of a desk drawer, “if you’ll give me your name and the nature of your business...”

“I’m a farmer. Or used to be.”

I’d meant his business with me, but never mind. He was too young to be retired — despite his lined face, his hair was thick and black with just a salt-and-peppering around his ears. Maybe he wasn’t a paying customer after all.

I said, “Did they foreclose on you?”

“No!” he said, as if offended. Then thinking it over, softened his tone and repeated, “No. Plenty folks I know did get their notice. It’s better, now.”

“Thanks to FDR and Henry Wallace, you mean.”

He rested the hat on my desk, off to one side, near the edge. “No,” he said, flatly. “Just folks sticking together. When the banks were holding farm sales, not so long ago, those of us with any money a’tall would go and bid a nickel for a plow, dime for a horse, quarter for a tractor, and then just give it all back to the real owner, afterwards. We spread word anybody was to bid against us would be dealt with severe. And there’d be a couple hundred of us at the auction, so...”

“But you still have your farm.”

“No. I sold out. Took a loss, but I sold.”

“Excuse me, mister, uh...?”

“Petersen,” he said, rising, stretching his hand across my desk for me to shake, “Joshua Petersen.”

I shook his hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Petersen.”

He sat back down. “I live in De Kalb, these days. Used to live just outside of there. But now I’m in town. And I took the train this morning to come in here just to see you, Mr. Heller.” Taking the train was clearly a major decision in his life.

“Was I recommended to you?”

He shook his head. “I seen your name in the paper. When they killed Dillinger.”

So — it did pay to advertise. I said, “Why are you here, Mr. Petersen?”

He seemed momentarily confused, as if the answer to that was self-evident.

“Why, Mr. Heller — the only detectives in De Kalb are the police kind. I need somebody private.” He cleared his throat, and formally made his intentions clear: “I come by train seeking the help of a big-city detective.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead I just scribbled circles with my pencil and asked, “Why are you seeking a detective’s help?”

He leaned forward; there was no self-pity in his gaunt face, just tragedy.

The reason for which was now explained: “My daughter,” he said. “She’s missing.”

“I see.”

“She’d be... nineteen, now.”

“Has she been missing for some time?”

He nodded. Kept nodding as he went on: “Last I knew she was running with a bad crowd.”

“A bad crowd.”

He looked at me with those empty light blue eyes; they were as barren as an unplanted field.

“I better tell you the story,” he said.

He told me the story. At seventeen his daughter Louise had married another farmer, only a few years her father’s junior. Her father, a widower since the girl’s childhood and a rigidly religious man, admitted having been a strict disciplinarian with his only child.

“By that,” I said, “you mean you beat her.”

Nodding, head gazing down, blue empty eyes finally filling with tears, he said, “I make that admission freely.”

“Mr. Petersen, this isn’t a court, and it isn’t church, either. You don’t have to punish yourself, here. And I’m certainly not going to judge you. But you do have to tell me the facts, so I can help you.”

He nodded some more. Said, “No need to punish myself.”

“That’s right.”

“The Lord will take care of that.”

I sighed. “I suppose he will. Please continue your story.”

He went on in a voice as hollow as his eyes; his words had a formal, practiced sound — as if he’d said these words to himself every night, over and over again, when he should have been sleeping.

“It was my cruel treatment of Louise that drove her from me,” he said. “Into his arms. But he was worse than I was. More cruel, more jealous than ever I was. His punishment exceeded the crimes.”

“Mr. Petersen, I’m not following you. What man are you taking about? Her husband?”

He looked at me sharply. “Yes. Her husband.”

“And he was a farmer, too?”

“Yes. And she’d go off to town without asking him. And do Lord knows what. Men. Drink.” He covered his face with one weathered hand and wept. Tears found their way through the cracks of his fingers and fell on his lap. I’d never had a client cry in the office before — not even when I handed ’em my list of expenses — and it made me uncomfortable. This man was devastated by the road his daughter had gone down. His moral and religious convictions must’ve been strong, I thought, for him to take having a loose daughter so hard.

I got up and began filling a cup of water for him from the cooler, which said, “Glug glug.” I said, “So her husband beat her, and she skipped.”

He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, dried his eyes, blew his nose. “Yes. She ran off.”

I handed him the cup of water; he drank it greedily, then didn’t know what to do with the cup. I took it from him and wadded and dropped it in the wastebasket behind the desk. Sat again.

“Did she come home to you?” I said. “After she left her husband?”

He shook his head. “She never thought to. She never even thought to. She lumped me in with Seth — I must’ve seemed just as bad as he was, in her mind.”

“Seth is her husband.”

One quick curt nod.

“How’s he feel about getting Louise back?”

“Ain’t interested. He’s took up with several other ‘ladies,’ hear tell.”

“I see.”

“But I want her back. I want to do right by her. Make it up to her. She’ll like livin’ in town...”

“I’m sure. You mentioned something about her running with a ‘bad crowd.’ How bad?”

The blood drained out of his face.

“That bad?” I said.

“Ever hear of a man called ‘Candy’ Walker?”

“Jesus.”

He sighed heavily. “I take it you heard of him.”

I had. I’d never met him, but Clarence “Candy” Walker was a small-time hood from the North Side, a handsome ladies’ man of about thirty, a wheel man who drove beer trucks for Bugs Moran in the old days and had been in Nitti’s stable till maybe a year ago. Since then — like Baby Face Nelson and a few other graduates of the Capone mob who’d been laid off after Repeal — he’d been seen driving for the Barkers. The bank-robbing Barkers.

He’d also driven for Dillinger a few times in the last six months, if I wasn’t mistaken. Small world.

I said, “I take it from your tone you know who Candy Walker is.”

“He drives what they call in the papers the ‘getaway car’ in robberies. He’s a bank robber.”

“He drives getaway cars, and he’s a bank robber. Yes.”

He dug in his left suitcoat pocket. Took out a folded newspaper clipping; as he did, he said, “She ran off to Chicago about a year ago. She was seen with him here. She was living with him, as a matter of fact.”

“How did you find this out?”

“Seth reported her as a missing person. He left it pretty much drop, after that. But I kept after the sheriff’s office, and the sheriff’s office said the Chicago police knew she was in Chicago living with this Candy Walker feller.”

“If you’re thinking Walker is still around Chicago, I’d doubt it...”

“That’s what the sheriff’s office’s been tellin’ me. And I can figure that for myself. Melvin Purvis has made your town too hot for them gangsters. This Walker’s living out on the road somewheres. Going from here to there. Stealing. May the Good Lord damn him to hell for eternity.”

“Good odds on that,” I said, taking the clipping he was holding out. It was an interior page from a Daily News from July 2 of this year, detailing the robbery of the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, Indiana.

At 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, June 30, five men (later identified as John Dillinger, Homer Van Meter, Baby Face Nelson, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and Clarence “Candy” Walker) parked their Hudson in front of the bank. Walker remained at the wheel, and Nelson, his machine gun under his coat, took up position near the rear of the car. Van Meter, with a rifle, took position just down the street, in front of a shoe store. Inside the bank Dillinger and Floyd made a withdrawal — only when the tellers weren’t filling their sacks up quickly enough, Floyd fired a burst from his machine gun into the ceiling, to perk up the proceedings. Outside, a traffic cop heard the commotion and came running. Van Meter fired his rifle and the cop fell in the street, stopping traffic. The owner of a jewelry shop down the way ran out of his shop and shot at Nelson, whose bulletproof vest saved him as he spun and began firing wildly. Only the cop was killed, but several pedestrians were wounded, including the hostages who were made to ride the running boards as Candy Walker wheeled out of town, with around twenty-five thousand of the bank’s money in tow. On the west side of South Bend, the hostages were set free; the group split in two and climbed into separate cars.

This was, as far as anybody knew, Dillinger’s last caper.

Of course that wasn’t what made this clipping noteworthy: it was the other story, the sidebar. A Pontiac with Indiana license plates stopped at a filling station near Aurora, Illinois, later that same afternoon. Two men and two women were in the car. The men seemed to be Candy Walker and Homer Van Meter; police sketches of them were reproduced, as well as of the “unidentified molls” who’d been with them.

Petersen stood and pointed at one of the molls pictured. From an inside coat pocket he produced a snapshot of himself and a pretty teenage girl with blond bobbed hair, a farmhouse glimpsed behind them. He had his arm around her and was smiling — a real smile, not a crease — and she had a glazed smile, behind which unhappiness clearly lurked. Still, these were happier times (at least for him).

And, of course, the girl in the snapshot closely resembled the police sketch of one of the women seen with Candy Walker and Homer Van Meter.

“Mr. Petersen, this police sketch resembles your daughter, but she’s a pretty woman, a young woman, and a lot of pretty young women look pretty much like this...”

“It’s her,” he said, flatly. “Now let me show you something else.”

This guy had something in every pocket; he reached into his right suitcoat pocket and produced another clipping. He spread it before me.

“This was in this morning’s paper,” he said. “I read it and went and got on the train — I knew I’d waited long enough. Maybe too long.”

I’d already seen this: a story from this morning’s Trib. But it took on a new significance, now.

The St. Paul police had shot about fifty bullets into Homer Van Meter yesterday. Not surprisingly, it killed him.

Petersen, trembling, sat back down.

“I’ve been reading the papers,” he said, “reading the blood in the headlines. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker... John Dillinger... now Van Meter... the outlaws, they’re all going to die like that, aren’t they? In hails of bullets?”

I shrugged. “More or less.”

“I’m afraid for my daughter, Mr. Heller.”

“I don’t blame you.”

He sat forward; earnestness engulfed his face. “Retrieve her for me.”

“What?”

“Get her back for me.” He pointed to the Van Meter clipping. “Before she meets a similar fate.” He sat back, as if to say, I rest my case.

I looked at this gaunt Midwestern ghost sitting holding onto the ebony armrests on the chrome tubes of my silly goddamn chair, and I wanted to laugh. Or cry.

Instead I simply said, “Mr. Petersen, surely you understand what you’re asking is, well... a tall order. Maybe an impossible one.”

He said nothing, just leaned forward, with anticipation. Waiting for me to say yes. Or even no. Something.

His daughter would go to jail, upon capture — if she was lucky. She could just as easily die — go down “in a hail of bullets,” as he had said. But since she was just another faceless moll (but for one police artist’s sketch), a name that hadn’t got into the papers as yet, it was vaguely possible it wasn’t too late, that she could be rescued, that she might be pulled from out of the fire before the fat fell in...

“Okay, Mr. Petersen,” I said. “I tell you what. I’ll snoop around a bit. Walker used to live in Chicago, so maybe through some of his old contacts I can find out if your daughter’s still with him. If so, maybe I can get a message to her that her father would welcome her home, with open arms.”

He shook his head no. “That wouldn’t be enough. You have to find her. You have to bring her back. Whether she wants to come or not, Mr. Heller.”

“How can I promise to bring her back, if she doesn’t want to come? Be reasonable, Mr. Petersen. After all, that’d be kidnapping...”

“Is it kidnapping to return a daughter to her father?”

He had me there.

And knew it. He stood and dug in another pocket; right pants pocket this time. He took out a thick fold of bills, money-clipped. Counted out five hundred dollars in twenties.

I watched this, amazed. With probably about the same look he’d given my modern chair, coming in.

I picked the stack of money up in one hand; it felt heavy.

“Mr. Petersen — why five hundred dollars?”

He got oddly formal again: “Because you will take risks. You will need to go among the wolves.”

He had a point; it would be dangerous to go around asking questions about the girlfriend of a wanted man, a public enemy. But five hundred dollars was five hundred dollars.

“What do you expect for your money, Mr. Petersen?”

“I want you to look for Louise, Mr. Heller.”

“For — for how long?”

“For five hundred dollars’ worth.”

“At ten bucks a day, that’s a long time.”

“Find her, and you can keep what you don’t use. If you use it up, call me...” He reached in his left pants pocket and removed a slip of paper with his name and phone number and address written on it, and gave it to me. “...I will probably authorize you to continue.”

Petersen picked his hat up off my desk.

“And,” he said, putting on the hat, “there’s a thousand more if you deliver her to me.”

That knocked the breath out of me. I was stunned by the kind of money this simple retired farmer was throwing around. “Mr. Petersen, excuse me for asking this — I don’t mean to pry, or look a gift horse in the mouth. But how can you possibly afford this, in times like these? Or any time?”

His crease of a smile seemed weary, now, and somehow worldly. “My health is bad, Mr. Heller,” he said. “I’m a lunger. Picked it up in the war. I got my pension to get me by and then some. That’s how I was able to sell my farm, and get this money together — to find my girl. I got my little house in De Kalb, where we can live together. On my pension. She can make a new start. Find herself a nice little job, and find a good new man, to take care of her after her daddy’s gone. Which will be soon, Lord’s will be done.”

He extended his hand across the desk and I stood and shook it.

“Tell her that when you find her,” he said. “Maybe then she’ll come home of her own volition.”

I nodded.

“But find her,” he said, and slammed the desk with his fist with sudden force on the “find”; the lamp shook. Then more quietly, and a little embarrassed, he said, “Please find her. Bring her home.”

And he left me alone in the office with my modern furniture and his old-fashioned money.

26

When Frank Nitti wasn’t holding court at the Capri Restaurant, or meeting with the inner circle of the Outfit at his home in suburban Riverside, he would occupy a suite in various Loop hotels. This was standard operating practice, for meeting with politicians and labor leaders and the like. It made a safer, more neutral ground.

So it was no surprise to me, after I called the Capri and sought an audience with Nitti, that the return phone call I received was a male voice that did not identify itself telling me to be in the lobby of the Bismarck Hotel, two o’clock Monday afternoon.

The Bismarck was on the corner of LaSalle and Randolph, across the street from City Hall — making it a natural place for Nitti to hold meetings. The recently rebuilt hotel dominated German Square, the group of German clubs, steamship offices and shops at the west end of the Rialto Theatre district. But my meeting that Monday afternoon would have a distinctly Italian cast.

I went past the uniformed Bismarck doorman and through the revolving door and up the wide, red-carpeted stairway and my footsteps echoed across the marble floor of the high-ceilinged, elaborate lobby, where I found an overstuffed sofa and sat. Pretty soon a rather short man in a gray suit approached me; his shortness meant nothing: this was a big man. He had shoulders broad enough to balance a midget on either side of his oblong head. His hair was dark and starting to thin; his dark eyes were colder and harder than the marble floor beneath us.

He was Louis “Little New York” Campagna, Frank Nitti’s personal bodyguard.

He didn’t speak. He just stood in front of me and had a faintly disgusted look — and Little New York Campagna looking faintly disgusted was scarier than Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff put together, I might add — and jerked his head, indicating I was to get up. I got up.

I followed him onto an elevator, and the uniformed operator didn’t ask for our floor; he just took us up to the seventh, where Campagna waited for me to get out first.

As we were walking down the hallway, I said, “I hope there’s no hard feelings about that other time.”

I’d knocked Campagna out once; it’s a long story.

Without glancing at me, just walking alongside me, he said, “As long as Frank says there’s no hard feelings, there’s no hard feelings.”

I left it at that.

At the end of the hallway was a little vestibule; the door within the vestibule said 737, with a little gold plaque that said Presidential Suite below it. I stood to one side of the door, within the vestibule, and cold-eyed Campagna stood to the other. He stood with his arms loose at his sides, big hands free.

“Wish I could find a suit like that,” I said. “I can’t find one a gun won’t bulge under.”

He said, “You couldn’t afford my tailor.”

I shrugged. “Probably not.”

It occurred to me then that he hadn’t patted me down for a gun; he could tell just looking at me I wasn’t armed — the suit I had on wasn’t tailored well enough to conceal one. Grooming hints from the underworld.

The door opened and a fat little man with wire-frame glasses, a loud tie and a black silk suit came out, smiling, calling back behind him, “Always a pleasure, Frank!”

Campagna reached over and shut the door for the fat little man, who put his hat on and was going past me when I said, “How you doing, Willie?”

Willie Bioff squinted behind his wire-frames, then said, “Heller?”

“That’s right.”

He smirked. “How’s it feel to be an ex-cop?”

“How’s it feel to be an ex-pimp?”

The smirk shifted to a sneer. “Once a smart-ass always a smart-ass.”

“Once a pimp always a pimp.”

Bioff thought about doing something about my mouth. I knew he wouldn’t. He was a former union slugger, but known for doing his slugging with a blackjack from behind. And in his pimp days he was famous for slapping his whores around. I’d arrested him, back in my plainclothes days, for that very act. Right before I was assigned to the pickpocket detail, I’d accompanied one of Chicago’s honest detectives, William Shoemaker, “Old Shoes” himself, on a brothel raid. We’d caught Willie going down the back stairs with a tally sheet, and when we hauled him back upstairs and one of his girls admitted Willie was her pimp, he’d hauled off and slugged her. We got a six-month conviction on the little bastard, but he never served it. Chicago.

Bioff was still standing there, trying to decide if he should get tough — maybe thinking Campagna would back him up. But then Bioff had no way of knowing why I was present; maybe I was on Nitti’s team, too, and he better not risk messing with me. He was nothing if not a coward.

Bioff said, “We should let bygones be bygones,” and waddled quickly off.

“I hate that little pimp,” I said.

Campagna looked at me impassively, then his tight mouth turned up at one corner. I took that to be a sign of agreement, and a possible softening of the tension between us. Still, if Nitti ever wanted me dead, Campagna would probably push to the front of the line to get the job.

For now he pointed one of his shotgun-barrel fingers at me and said, “Wait here — I’ll see how Frank’s doing.”

I waited; it was just a matter of seconds and Campagna was back, saying, “Frank wants to know if your business is private.”

“Pardon?”

Campagna looked faintly disgusted again. “Can you talk in front of anybody, or is it for Frank’s ears only?”

“Frank’s ears only,” I said.

Campagna nodded and went back in, came right out, said, “It’ll be just a few minutes. Frank’s getting a haircut.”

“Oh,” I said.

We stood there for a while, on either side of the door.

Suddenly Campagna said, “Me, too.”

“What?”

“I hate that little pimp, too. Bioff. You want a cigar?”

“Uh, no thanks.”

Campagna took out a cigar as thick as one of his fingers and lit it. It smelled pretty good, as cigars go. There were guys all over town who’d give their soul for a job that paid per day what that cigar cost.

Not that I blamed Campagna for enjoying himself; in his business, life was sometimes short — why not enjoy it while you had it? And I was grateful for the gesture he’d made — some human contact between me and him, however slight, might be good for my health. At least now I didn’t figure he’d be wanting to be first in line to bump me off.

The door opened suddenly and a white-smocked, skinny, swarthy man with a pencil-thin mustache and slick hair came rushing out, saying “’Cusa, ’cusa,” and shutting the door quickly behind him. Something smashed against that door — something glass, shattering.

The man, a barber apparently, seemed frightened but Campagna stopped him before he could run away and gave him a fin, saying, “You’re lucky to get it.”

The barber nodded, his eyes wide, terrified, and scurried off down the hall.

Campagna, his mouth turned up at either corner, genuinely amused now, pointed a thumb at the door and said, “Frank said you could go in as soon as his barber came out. So you can go on in, Heller.”

I swallowed. “You’re too good to me, Campagna.”

Campagna actually grinned for a moment — the first indication I’d had since knowing him that he had teeth — and opened the door and I went inside.

Glass shards from a small hand mirror crunched under my feet as I entered the plushly carpeted living room of the suite. Nitti was standing looking in a wall mirror, a white barber’s gown tucked in his collar; he was touching his hair, looking at himself with disapproval.

“Come in, Heller,” he said, not looking at me. “Find a seat.”

There was a high-backed chair near a sofa in this white-appointed, gold-trimmed, rather Victorian-looking suite. Black hair trimmings peppered the white carpet near the chair, so I sat on the sofa.

Nitti yanked the white gown from under his neck and pitched it behind him as he walked over to the chair and sat, placing his hands on his knees. He was in gray pants and a white shirt. His suitcoat and tie were on a coffee table nearby, but he didn’t put them on. He was shaking his head.

“They don’t make ’em like they used to,” he said.

“Uh, what’s that, Frank?”

“Barbers. That little cocksucker makes more money off me in fifteen minutes than I got in a week, when I was in the business, and look what he does to me!” He gestured to his immaculately cut black hair, slicked back, parted at the left, perfect.

“It looks pretty good to me, Frank.”

“Does it? Well, maybe I’m too fussy. That’s the fifth barber I tried this year. And they all got the same goddamn problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Their goddamn hands are shaking! Look—” He bent over and tipped his head to one side, folded his ear back; a little red showed. “I’m fuckin’ bleeding! They ain’t barbers, they’re butchers! In my day, a barber had hands like this—” And he held his hands out straight in front of him and demonstrated how rock-steady they were.

“Maybe they’re intimidated, Frank.”

That seemed to confound him. “What the hell for?”

“Well,” I said. “They’re cutting Frank Nitti’s hair. There’s a certain amount of pressure in that, don’t you think?”

He thought about that, nodded. “I never thought of it. But you’re right, Heller. It could make a barber nervous, knowin’ he’s cuttin’ another barber’s hair. You may be right. Now.” He slapped his knees. “What’s this about?”

“I’m here for a favor — if you’re willing to grant one.”

He shrugged expansively. “You know I owe you, kid. From way back.”

“Well, I don’t figure you owe me. But if you’d do this for me, I could maybe owe you.”

“You don’t sound nuts about owing me, kid.”

I admitted I wasn’t. “I would like to ask that if you ever call my marker in,” I said, “you’ll restrict it to more or less legal services. Maybe sometime you could use some investigating and wouldn’t want to use your own people — something on the q.t. I could be your man. No fee, no questions asked.”

He nodded, smiling rather absently, almost to himself. “Maybe I ought to quit thinking of you as a kid, Heller. You seem to’ve grown up on me, when I wasn’t lookin’.”

I smiled at him. “You’re always looking, Frank.”

He laughed, the haircut forgotten. “You got that right. Look, I am grateful to you for that last little job you did for me.”

I didn’t know what he meant; I didn’t say so, but he could see it in my face.

“You know,” he said, gesturing with one open hand. “When I gave you that C to mind your own business.”

He meant Dillinger; I was wearing the suit I’d used part of the money on.

“That’s okay, Frank.”

“You coulda gone to the papers, coulda found some news-hound who’d paid you good dough for your story. I ain’t sure anybody woulda believed you, but it’s nice that story never got told. Coulda made a ripple or two in the lake. And ripples can turn into waves, if you ain’t careful.”

“Lake’s real calm these days, Frank.”

“I know. Let’s keep it that way. Now. What favor you need?”

“Remember a guy named Candy Walker?”

Nitti nodded, and I told him my story. Told him Walker’s current moll was a client’s daughter and that client wanted me to try to retrieve her before she got caught in a crossfire somewhere.

I said, “Walker’s running with the Barkers, I understand.”

Nitti confirmed that. “That little penny-ante outfit’s come a long way. They’re in real tight with some of our friends in St. Paul.”

By “our,” he meant the Outfit’s friends, not his and mine. And those friends were the Twin Cities branch of the Syndicate and various corrupt politicians on the municipal and even the state level.

“I, uh, figured you might’ve had some dealings with the Barkers.”

He eyed me shrewdly. “How’d you figure that?”

“Can I speak frankly?”

He nodded.

“Well, when Shotgun Ziegler bought it in Cicero, I figured the Boys either did it or approved it.”

Ziegler, a Capone gunman said to be one of the bogus “cops” who gunned down Bugs Moran’s boys in a North Side garage on Saint Valentine’s Day back in ’29, had been cut in half, his head blasted into fragments, by four shotguns outside his favorite Cicero café this past March. Like Baby Face Nelson and Candy Walker, Ziegler had been a Capone soldier who defected in post-Repeal days to the army of outlaws, specifically the Barker-Karpis gang. Word was he had engineered the Hamm kidnapping for the Barkers — one of several crimes Melvin Purvis tried to pin on the Touhy mob, incidentally — but in the kidnapping’s aftermath the Barkers had soured on Ziegler.

Nitti smiled humorlessly and leaned forward, his legs apart, his hands loosely clasped together, dangling between his knees. “Let me tell you about Mr. Ziegler. A lesson can be learned, there. He drank too much. You ever see me drink too much, Heller?”

“I can’t recall seeing you drink at all, Frank.”

“Right! I’m a businessman, Heller, mine is a business like any other. And businessmen don’t get in their fuckin’ cups and tell tales out of school.”

“Ziegler told tales out of school.”

Nitti nodded, still smiling, still without humor. “He was hangin’ out at saloons and braggin’ about his accomplishments. Startin’ with a certain accomplishment that dates back to February of ’29, if you get my drift. Right up to a couple of more recent accomplishments — namely, snatches. And I don’t mean he was braggin’ about gettin’ laid.”

He meant the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings, said to be the work of the Barber-Karpis gang (said by everybody but Melvin Purvis and his “G-men,” that is).

“Frank, I think you know I can keep my mouth shut. So if you’re willing to put me in touch with Candy Walker — or put me in touch with somebody who could put me in touch with Candy Walker — I sure wouldn’t go spreading your Barker connection around.”

“I know you wouldn’t, Heller. I trust you. Besides, if you did, you’d wind up in an alley.”

I breathed out heavily. “Fair enough. Will you help me out?”

He stood. He walked across the room to the bar and poured himself some soda water on ice; he offered me some and I said no thanks. He came back and sat and sipped the soda water, which bubbled in his glass like the thoughts in my brain.

Nitti was thinking too. Finally he said, “I could help you. But the best favor I could do you is not to.”

I sat up. “Why’s that, Frank?”

“Haven’t you thought this through, kid?”

So now I was a “kid” again.

“Well, yes...”

“Don’t you realize your name was in the papers, associated with the Dillinger kill? As far as some of these dumb-ass farmer-outlaws are concerned, you helped set their pal up for the feds. You helped kill Johnny Dillinger.”

“I realize that...”

“How were you plannin’ to go about lookin’ for this girl, then?”

“You’re saying if I go around asking questions of Candy Walker and his associates under my own name, I’ll run into somebody who might want to do me in.”

“No,” Nitti said, shaking a finger at me like a disappointed schoolteacher, “you’ll run into everybody who might wanna do you in.”

“I figured if I could restrict my investigating to Chicago...”

“Candy Walker ain’t in Chicago.”

I sighed. “I didn’t figure there’d be much chance of that.”

“You’re probably gonna have to go out among them apple-knockers to find that girl. And you can’t go out as, what’s your first name again?”

“Nathan.”

“You can’t go out as Nathan Heller, private cop that helped get Dillinger. Not without comin’ back in one or more boxes.”

“I guess I knew that.”

“Got any ideas?”

I sighed again. “I could go out under a phony name. You know — undercover.”

Nitti lifted an eyebrow, nodded. “Like that fed your pal Ness sent around to suck up to Al. That guy sure looked, talked and acted like a real wop.”

I nodded too. “Yeah — and his testimony had a lot to do with putting Capone away.”

Nitti smiled, a little. “Maybe I should thank that guy — he made me what I am today.”

“Some people think Capone is still running things from behind bars.”

“He’s in Alcatraz now. You don’t run shit from Alcatraz.”

“Anyway, it can be done. Going undercover.”

“Yeah, but it’d be good and goddamn dangerous. I’d have to hand it to you, kid, if you pulled that off.”

“Would you be willing to help me do it?”

Not smiling, he tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes. “How?”

“Give me a name I can use, and a background. Somebody who’s out of circulation, in jail or whatever, who I can say I am, without risk of Candy Walker or anybody he runs with ever having met the guy. Somebody they might’ve heard of. Somebody they could call around and check up on. So I could get in and get this girl and get out again. In one piece.”

About halfway through that, he started nodding. He was still nodding as he said, “Possible. Let me make a phone call.”

He got up and went out of the room. I could hear his muffled voice, but not make out any of the words. Then he came back in, smiled meaninglessly and sat back down.

“It’s fixed. I got a name for you to use.”

“Good. Somebody in jail?”

“Better. Somebody dead.”

“Oh...”

“This guy worked out East till about a year ago, when he come to work for us.”

“Candy Walker never met him?”

Nitti shook his head. “No, but he’s heard of him. That’s the beauty part. There’s a chance he was pointed out to Walker once or twice, but they never met.”

“Well, if Walker saw him...”

“The guy had plastic surgery. That’s your explanation, if it comes up — it also happens to be true.”

“Oh — okay. How can I prove I’m this guy?”

“I’ll fill you in some more — I’m going to have a driver’s license in his name dropped off at your office tomorrow morning. We can make it work. A cinch.”

“Well, uh. Thanks. I appreciate this, Frank.”

“Actually, you’re doing me a favor.”

“How’s that?”

“This guy you’ll be playin’ — he’s dead, but nobody knows it. Or, not many people know it. And it makes things sweeter if he’s seen walking around. It confuses the issue, see? Makes him not dead.”

I didn’t follow this exactly, but I nodded.

“Now,” Nitti said, writing on a white pad on the coffee table before him, “here’s an address. It’s an apartment house. You’ll go see this old hillbilly woman who lives on the ground floor. Her name’s Kate Barker.”

“Kate Barker. Is she related to the Barker boys?”

Nitti nodded curtly. “She’s their ma.”

No mention of an old woman being connected to the Barker-Karpis gang had been in any of the newspaper write-ups.

I said, “Is she aware of her boys’ business?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Does she approve of it?”

“They can do no wrong in her eyes. She goes on the road with ’em sometimes, I’m told. But sometimes she tires of that kind of life and goes and lives in an apartment in the ‘big city.’ She’ll know where they are. Just tell her you want to connect up with her boys and Walker; she won’t care why, she’ll just do it. If she has any doubts about who you are, you have her check with one of my people, whose name I’m gonna give you.”

He tore the sheet with the address on it off the pad; handed it to me.

I glanced at the address.

3967 Pine Grove.

“Jesus — Frank, this is the apartment building where Jimmy Lawrence lived...”

“I know,” Nitti nodded. “I own it. Or one of my companies owns it.”

I was finding out more about Frank Nitti and his business than I wanted to; I could see me, dead in an alley.

“She’s living in Lawrence’s apartment, by the way,” Nitti said.

“Jesus,” I said, just staring at the white piece of paper, the address starting to blur.

“That’s only because the previous tenant vacated,” Nitti said, smiling like a priest. “She never met Lawrence.”

“She — she never met Lawrence?”

“No,” Nitti said. “And that’s to your benefit. Because that’s who you’re posing as.”

“Jimmy Lawrence?” I said.

“Pleased to meet you,” Nitti said, still smiling.

27

The next afternoon, Tuesday, I parked across from the big brick three-story on Pine Grove and just sat there for a while, collecting my thoughts.

In my billfold, where my Illinois state driver’s license should be, was an Illinois state driver’s license in the name of James L. Lawrence. I was wearing my white suit and a straw boater and gold-rim glasses with window glass in them. I felt faintly ridiculous. I probably was faintly ridiculous.

I was calling on the mother of the Barker boys.

Frank Nitti had spent another half hour with me, in his Bismarck suite yesterday, filling me in on Lawrence’s background.

He — or I — had been born in Canada, moved with his — or my (our?) — parents to New York as a boy; the parents were both dead — the mother in childbirth, the father in a factory accident — and I’d been raised by my uncle and aunt. My uncle had worked in the garment district in the West Thirties, and I’d ended up a union slugger there, for Lepke — as Lucky Luciano’s chief lieutenant Louis Buchalter was inexplicably called — and eventually became one of Lepke’s top aides in the protection racket. But I had a New York murder rap hanging over me, now, and had been shipped out by the New York boys to their friends in Chicago about a year ago, who put me to work, after some plastic surgery.

That much I’d learned yesterday afternoon. This morning around ten Campagna had dropped off the driver’s license and suggested I call a certain phone number, before noon. I did, and Nitti himself answered.

“I got just the ticket,” Nitti said.

We’d discussed the need, yesterday, for me to have a cover story, in addition to the Lawrence name and background — that is, a reason for getting in touch with Candy Walker and the Barkers apart from my real reason for being there, specifically, to spirit Walker’s moll away, which of course was nothing I dared advertise.

“There’s a guy named Doc Moran,” Nitti said. “Ever hear of him?”

“Yeah — isn’t he a pin artist?”

“Abortions ain’t all he does, Heller, but yeah, I suppose that’s his specialty. He’s got a practice over on Irving Park Boulevard, and he’s done good work for us over the years. Lots of union work.”

Underworld doctors like Moran came in handy, not just for providing abortions to Syndicate whores, but for dealing with the aftermath of union-busting activities, and any incidental gunplay Outfit troops might get involved in — the latter having declined since the rise of Frank Nitti, under whom less and less overt Syndicate violence was taking place.

I said, “Would I be wrong in supposing Moran’s clientele the last year or so has been primarily of the outlaw variety?”

“You’d be on the money, kid. Matter of fact, right as we speak, he’s in the Barker-Karpis camp... makin’ an extended house call.”

So now I was crossing the street and walking up to the relatively ritzy apartment house where the real Jimmy Lawrence had lived, not so long ago. I’d been his shadow, then; now I was his ghost.

In the entryway there were mailboxes with name cards; one of the ground-floor flats was occupied by the woman going under the name Alice Hunter. I knocked on her door.

A voice from behind the door, a melodious if quavering voice, feminine with a hint of a drawl, said, “Who is it, please?”

“Jimmy Lawrence,” I heard myself saying. “I’m a friend of your landlord’s.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” the door said, sincerely. “Why’d you drop by, Mr. Lawrence?”

“I need to contact Doc Moran. Can you help?”

“Why, I certainly would like to,” the door said. “Would you mind waitin’ out there a mite, while I make a telephone call?”

“Not at all, ma’am.”

I stood facing the door, straw hat in one hand.

A few minutes later the door cracked open and two bright, dark eyes peered out at me from behind gold-rim glasses, in the midst of a fleshy face highlighted by a witchlike pointed nose and chin, and a forehead where little ringlets dropped out of a skullcap mass of curly hair borrowed from Shirley Temple.

She was the oddest old lady I’d ever seen, and all I could see was her face, sideways, as she peeked around the door.

She smiled; her teeth were false, but the smile wasn’t. “You’re a right handsome young feller. Where’d you get that suit?”

“New York,” I said.

“That’s one place I never been.” She was still just peering around the door. “Would you mind holding open your coat?”

“Not at all,” I said, and did.

She smiled some more, as she noted my lack of hardware. Then the face momentarily disappeared as she opened the door wide and gestured sweepingly with a plump hand on the end of a plump, stubby arm.

I stepped inside. Just beyond the entryway where we were standing was a large living room, where a pastel-green mohair sofa with floral cushions shared the central space with several pastel-green lounge chairs, on a parquet floor somewhat covered by a fringed rug with a pastel-green-and-orange geometric design. Against one wall was a fireplace with a mirror with ivory-and-orange flowers superimposed on it. The apartment must’ve come furnished; this plump Ozark granny hadn’t decorated it. The place must’ve looked about the same when Jimmy Lawrence lived here.

There were touches of the current tenant, however. In front of the straighter backed of the two lounge chairs was a card table on which a jigsaw puzzle was perhaps two-thirds completed: a country church on a fall afternoon, orange and red leaves, blue sky with fluffy clouds — a bunch of the sky was yet to be filled in. In front of the sofa was a round glass-top coffee table with a fat scrapbook on it; clippings stuck out of it like clothes from a hastily shut suitcase. Against one wall in a standing cabinet was a combination radio and phonograph, the cabinet lid propped up and open; the radio was on and a hillbilly song was blaring out.

The fat little woman — she couldn’t have been over five feet two but must’ve tipped the scales at 170 — moved gracelessly across the room and turned the hillbilly music down, but not off. She turned and smiled apologetically, girlishly. She took off her gold-rim glasses and tucked them away in a pocket. Her dress was a floral tent but she had what appeared to be a string of real pearls about her neck. Her stomach protruded enough to make the hem of her dress ride up and reveal the rolled tops of her stockings. She was a cross between an old flapper and a new tank.

She gestured for me to sit on the couch and I sat. She sat next to me. She had lipstick on and smelled of lilac water and too much face powder. The oddest thing about her was, despite the false teeth and the jowly face and pointed features and absurd Shirley Temple curls, how nice a smile she had.

“Can I get you some coffee?” she asked. The place was air-conditioned, so the request didn’t seem absurd, despite the August heat outside.

“That’s generous of you, Mrs. Hunter, but no thanks.”

She waved at the air and turned her head coquettishly. “That name’s just for outsiders.”

“We’ll make it ‘Mrs. Barker,’ then.”

She was looking off absently. “Though I do like the name Alice... wish my folks had called me that instead of Arizona.”

“Pardon?”

She touched her massive bosom with a splayed hand; her fingernails, though short (possibly through biting), were painted red as her lipsticked mouth. “Isn’t that the most awful name? Arizona? Who can picture callin’ a little girl that!”

In the background somebody — Gene Autry? — was singing plaintively about his horse.

“I like ‘Kate’ better,” I said.

“So do I. But you can call me Ma. All the boys call me Ma.”

I suppose I should’ve been honored or at least flattered at being admitted to the club so easily, so rapidly; but all I felt was a little queasy.

I said, “You’re too kind... Ma. And why don’t you call me Jimmy?”

“Jimmy. That’s a good name. I like it.”

“I’m glad.”

“Well, Jimmy. How can ol’ Ma be of help?” One of her plump arms was brushing against me.

“I wonder if you could put me in touch with Doc Moran — a mutual friend of ours has requested I find him, and bring him back.”

She pursed her lips in what was meant to be a facial shrug but came off more like a grimace. She said, “Might be I could take a message for you.”

“Are you going to be seeing the doctor?”

“Might be. If I can find me a ride.”

“A ride?”

“The doctor’s with my boys Freddie and Arthur right now. They’re with that nice boy Alvin Karpis. Do you know Alvin?”

“Never had the pleasure.”

“He’s a right nice boy. Anyway, I got to get to ’em, soon as I can.” Her fleshy face tightened. “They need me.”

“You’re in regular touch with them?”

She shrugged again, with her shoulders this time; the earth moved. “They don’t have a phone where they’s stayin’. But they call from in town now and then.”

That sounded like they were in the country somewhere.

“And you’re planning to join them, soon?” I asked.

She nodded, said, “But I don’t drive. I have to find me a driver.”

You never know when opportunity’s going to knock; it might even knock in the form of a fat little old lady from the Ozarks... Gene Autry, if that’s who that was, was suddenly singing something more upbeat, about the prairie.

“I could drive you,” I said. Not too eagerly, I hoped. “My instructions are to see the doctor personally. No go-betweens.”

She nodded sagely. “You gotta bring him back yourself. That’s your orders.”

“Right.”

“And orders is orders.”

“Yes they are.”

She put her hand on mine; it was cold, clammy — hers, I mean. Hell, mine too.

She said, “Well, why don’t you drive me there, then. But I gotta warn you. Somethin’ big’s in the wind.”

“Oh?”

“Felt I should warn you. You might get caught up in it.”

“In what?”

“Somethin’ big.”

“Well. Would that be bad?”

She smiled enigmatically. Still a nice smile, despite the otherwise physically grotesque person it belonged to. “Not if you like money.”

“I like money.”

“Well, wherever my boys go, there’s money to be had. I got good boys who work hard, Jimmy. You looking to make an extra dollar?”

“Sure.”

She winked at me. “You’ll do no better than to stick with my boys.”

“You seem proud of them.”

“Couldn’t be prouder. So — do I have me a chauffeur?” She said it like ‘show fer.’

“It’d be my honor. I even have a car...”

“What kind?”

That stopped me.

“Chevy coupe,” I said.

She shook her head. “Won’t do, won’t do.” She got up and clomped over to a chest of drawers against one wall. She pulled open a drawer and it was brimming with cash. She counted out a stack and trundled over and handed it to me.

“There’s six hundred,” she said. “See if you can’t get a nice used twelve-cylinder Auburn. With a radio. I’m partial to twelve-cylinder Auburns with radios.”

I put the fat wad of cash in my suitcoat pocket as she went back and closed the drawer.

I said, “When would you like to leave?”

“Tomorrow afternoon soon enough? Like to pack my bags, and take in a movie s’evenin’ — I just love the movies, and when I’m out on the road with my boys I sometimes go weeks without a movie. Or bingo, or anything civilized. But a mother’s got to make sacrifices for her boys, don’t you know?”

I said I knew, and told her I’d pick her up the next day at one.

She walked me to the door, her arm linked in mine; gave me a pat on the cheek. Her fingers were cold and soft.

“You seem like a nice boy,” she said. “You gone always to be good to your ol’ Ma, now, ain’t you?”

I said I’d do my best.

Then I went out and bought a used twelve-cylinder Auburn. With a radio.

28

The next afternoon I was tooling up Highway 19 through McHenry County — its green rolling hills interspersed with rich farmland, lakes and the occasional gravel pit — behind the wheel of the nicest automobile I ever sat in. Though only a ’32, the Auburn had quite a few miles on her, which had helped me land the sporty two-seater (we were keeping the top up today) at a reasonable price. It was just the kind of automobile every man dreams of owning, to impress the girl riding next to him. Unfortunately the “girl” next to me had more miles on her than the Auburn.

She was wearing a hat that fit snugly on her skull, like something an aviator might wear, only floral. Her baggy dress was an off-white with light purple flowers that clashed with the hat and the snow-white seat cushions. Of course, she was sitting on a cushion of her own, an air cushion that boosted her up so she could peer out the windows; even with the air cushion, she was so squat she barely rose above the dash. Right now she was leaning forward, turning the tuning dial of the Motorola radio built under the dash, the needle on its little round face spinning like a hand on an out-of-control clock, as she desperately searched for hillbilly music.

“The music this radio gets is just plain lousy,” she said, turning off Bing Crosby singing “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” There was an accusatory note in Kate Barker’s voice, as if had I been more careful in picking out this particular vehicle, I might have been able to get one that played “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine” continuously.

But we’d been through all that when I picked her up, around 1:00 P.M., at the Pine Grove apartment. She’d taken a look at the Auburn coupe I’d arrived in and made a face like a displeased five-year-old.

“You bought a two-seater!” she said, standing on the sidewalk, a bag in either hand, romance and movie magazines stuffed under one arm, oversize purse under the other. “I wanted a touring sedan!”

I was standing alongside the car, leaning against the fender; it was as supple as a pretty girl’s hip. Shrugging, I said, “You said a twelve-cylinder Auburn. With a radio, which this has. I had to call all over town to find a used one, and had to pitch an extra hundred bucks in at that.”

She frowned at me, then frowned at the Auburn. “We got a big family. We need more than two seats.”

“You also need more than one car. Look, I was just trying to get what you asked me to get, Ma.”

She shook her head vigorously. “And I like black. That’s blue.”

She was right: it was as blue as Sally Rand’s eyes.

I said, “I can’t take it back — it’s a used car: ‘All Sales Final.’”

“Well... it is an Auburn V-Twelve. I do like my Auburn V-Twelves.”

“With a radio, don’t forget. I was lucky to find one that way.”

“Well, all right.”

I put her suitcases in the trunk. “Could I have that extra hundred I had to give?”

“You’ll get it,” she snapped, and went around to the rider’s side and waited for me to open the door for her. I did.

Once we’d got outside of Chicago a ways, into the farm country, her spirits perked up, even if she couldn’t find any hillbilly music on the radio.

“Goodie goodie!” she said, clapping her fat little hands together, a romance magazine open on her lap.

“What?” I said. I was concentrating on my driving; despite being a two-seater, the Auburn was a big car, much bigger than my Chevy coupe, and it drove a little like a barge. On the other hand, it was fast. I had to work to keep it down at fifty. My Chevy shimmied like your sister Kate when I went a mile over fifty.

She was saying, “He had the ring...”

“What?”

“He had the flat...”

“Huh?”

“But she felt his chin...”

“You okay?”

“And that was that!” She turned her face toward me and that ungodly flabby pan split in a smile. “Burma Shave!”

“Oh,” I said, and went back to my driving.

From then on she was on the lookout. There must’ve been an industrious Burma Shave advance man working this territory, because the little signs, spaced a hundred feet or so apart, seemed to pop up every few miles, like wooden weeds.

And it kept Ma busy.

“Your beauty boys... is just skin deep... what skin you got... you ought to keep. Haw haw! Burma Shave!”

She did have a faint mustache on her upper lip; maybe she was a potential customer...

I was still wearing the window-glass wire-rim spectacles and straw hat, but today I had on a brown suit, as well as my automatic in a shoulder holster. I hadn’t carried the gun in a while, and it felt heavy under my arm; made me uncomfortable. For one thing, if I got stopped by a state cop for speeding (and with this Auburn under me, with a mind of its own toward how fast it wanted to go, that was possible) I would have some embarrassing questions to answer — like why I was carrying a driver’s license under James Lawrence’s name, when this gun was registered to somebody called Nathan Heller. And for another thing, I just plain didn’t like carrying guns.

Barney had noticed the gun this morning; I hadn’t been wearing the straw hat and eyeglasses, but I was in the brown suit and the gun in the shoulder sling bulged a little. Like Little New York said, I couldn’t afford a tailor as good as his.

“Is that what I think it is?” he said, frowning, nodding toward my left arm. He was waiting for his turn, shooting pool with a couple of his sparring partners. I’d gone looking for Barney in the small gym in the traveler’s lounge at the Morrison Hotel, and when I hadn’t found him, had gone next door to Mussey’s, and had.

Mussey’s was a pool, billards and bowling hall next door to the Morrison and was a major meeting place for the sporting fraternity. Theatrical celebrities mingled with those of the boxing, baseball and racing world, as well as a certain number of con men and racketeers. The second floor was where billiards and pool ruled the day, and that was where I’d found Barney.

I admitted to him that I was heeled.

He shook his head, taking his turn; missed his shot. His sparring partners chuckled — they had to grab the occasional victory over Barney here, because in the ring they didn’t have a prayer.

“I don’t like it when you pack that thing,” he said, uneasily, nodding toward the bulge under my arm. “Pallbearin’ ain’t my idea of a good time, you know.”

“If you feel that way about it,” I said, smiling gently, “don’t come to my goddamn funeral.”

“Jesus, Nate, can’t you find a better business to get in?”

“I hate it when Jews say ‘Jesus.’ It confuses me.”

“Nobody likes a wise guy,” he said, grinning in spite of himself, and took his turn. Made the first shot, missed the second. One of the sparring partners elbowed the other one and they traded sideways grins.

“Seriously,” he said, “why don’t you find some other business? I could probably use you on my staff—”

“Christ, you and Sally! Nobody likes my trade, everybody wants to put me to work as their fuckin’ maid or something.”

Barney put an arm around me. “I hate it when half-Jews say ‘Christ.’ It confuses me. But you can say ‘fuck’ all you want. That don’t confuse me in the least.”

“Is that what I am, half a Jew?”

“Yeah, and half a Mick, and full of shit. That’s Nate Heller. Now, get outa here while I try to catch up with these guys.”

“Before you blow your next shot, let me tell you why I looked you up this morning.”

“Tell.”

“I’m going to be out of town awhile, and you’re going to have to cover for me, where my night watchman duty’s concerned. Okay?”

“Sure,” he nodded. “How long you be gone?”

“Not sure,” I said.

“What’s up, exactly?”

“Looking for a girl,” I said.

One of the sparring partners said, “Who ain’t?”

Barney said, “Don’t get killed or anything, okay, shmuck?”

“Okay, pal. Don’t you have a fight in a few weeks?”

“More like a month,” he said, bending to shoot.

“That’s a unique way of training you got there,” I said, and he missed his shot.

“The game laws ought... to let you shoot... the bird that hands you... a substitute! Haw haw!” Ma Barker grinned at me. “Burma Shave!”

There wasn’t much to say to that; I just kept driving. We were well into the afternoon, now, and Wisconsin. Taking Highway 89, which had just turned from nice spanking-new pavement into gravel. I kept the Auburn at forty-five. Somehow, even though this wasn’t my car (except for a hundred bucks’ worth of it, anyway), I hated to think of those shapely blue fenders getting nicked by those wicked little rocks.

I hadn’t done much cross-country driving, and, on these two-lane highways, each oncoming car we encountered made for a nerve-racking experience. The Auburn was wide enough, and the roads narrow enough, to make meeting the occasional road hog border on meeting your Maker. This was heightened by Kate Barker’s humming hymns, something she did whenever she couldn’t find hillbilly music on the radio or a Burma Shave sign to read.

“On a hill far away,” she bellowed suddenly, “stood an old rugged cross...”

“Burma Shave,” I said.

She glared at me; we weren’t getting along as well today as yesterday. “That’s disreligious,” she said.

“I suppose it is.”

“What church do you go to?”

“None to speak of, Ma.”

She tsk-tsked. “That’s very sad. Very sad.”

“I suppose it is, Ma.”

“You’re sure to fry in eternal hell, you know.”

“I’ll have company.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. Look up ahead.”

“Oooooh!” she squealed. “The bearded lady... tried a jar... she’s now a famous... movie star! Burma Shave! Haw haw!”

Sally hadn’t been crazy about my leaving on this little jaunt. In fact, she’d been downright angry.

“You really disappoint me, Nate. Really disappoint me!”

We were sitting at her breakfast table having coffee.

“Why is that, Helen?”

“I just thought you were smarter than — than to behave in such a suicidal fashion!”

“Suicidal.”

“Going out among those... crazy maniacs!”

“Most maniacs are a little crazy.”

“Right — like you!”

I’d made a big mistake: with the exception of Frank Nitti’s role and the Jimmy Lawrence cover, I’d told Sally the whole story — the farmer’s daughter in the clutches of the Barker gang, and how I was going undercover to bring her back alive, as Frank Buck would say.

“Don’t you see what you’re doing?”

“Yeah, I think so. A job.”

“You’re trying to... redeem yourself, in some childish way. You’ve been feeling so goddamn sorry for yourself, for the way you were used in the Dillinger shooting, that you’re looking for some way to build your self-respect back up. So you take on this ridiculous case! You go out among killers and thieves and risk your life for a few dollars, just to play knight and save the fair damsel-in-distress! Shit, you’ve gone simple on me.”

“Helen, it’s not just a few dollars. It’s the first real money I’ve seen all year, outside of that reward money.”

“I don’t see you denying you’ve gone simple.”

“I’ve always been just a simple soul. That’s what’s so adorable about me.”

“Don’t butter me up, you louse. Damn, this makes me mad! You ought to go running back to that — that little actress of yours in Hollywood — this is just her style... this is just the sort of romantic bullshit she’d fall for. Why don’t you call her on the phone, Heller — my treat! Long distance, person to person, Hollywood. My treat — my pleasure!”

I didn’t say anything.

Sally sighed; stirred her coffee absently. Then she looked up with wet eyes. “I’m sorry I said that.”

I sipped my coffee.

“I shouldn’t have mentioned her, should I?”

I shook my head no.

“It still hurts you, doesn’t it? Losing her.”

“Ever talk to an amputee?”

That startled her.

She said, “Not really.”

“Well, they say the worst thing about losing an arm, a leg, is that sometimes you can still feel it there. Even though it’s been cut off. In the night, for example, it itches sometimes. The limb that’s been cut off.”

“You are a sentimental dope, aren’t you, Heller?”

“Takes one to know one, Helen.”

A tear was gliding down her smooth, round right cheek. “Well, then, you sentimental dope, why don’t you mount your white horse and go riding off after your damn damsel. Shit! Why don’t you mount the nearest damsel instead... let’s go back to bed...”

“Let’s,” I said.

Later, she touched my shoulder and said, “I don’t know if I want to see you, when you get back.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe I want to let go of you now, so that... if something happens to you, it won’t hurt so bad.”

“It’s up to you, Sally.”

She looked hurt. “You called me Sally.”

“So I did. I’ll call you Helen again, if you let me back in, when this is over.”

She wept as I held her; when I left, later that morning, she was mad again. Not speaking.

“Beneath this stone... lies Elmer Gush... tickled to death... by a shavin’ brush! Haw haw! Burma Shave.”

“Beaver Falls,” I said.

“Huh?” Kate Barker said.

“That’s Beaver Falls, up ahead.”

We were on U.S. Highway 151, now, and it entered the little town along a shady street where two-story clapboard houses with front porches with pillars and swings, wide windows and pointed roofs, sat on big lawns, looking prosperous unless you noticed how many of them needed painting. We glided through the downtown, where the trees disappeared in favor of electric posts, and two-story brick buildings stared each other down on either side of Front Street — hardware store, boot shop, floral shop, tavern, J. C. Penney, movie house.

Ma turned around in her seat, as we passed, straining to look back. “What’s playin’? What’s playin’?”

“Huh?”

“At the movie house!”

“Oh.” I looked back; winced when I saw what it was. “Manhattan Melodrama,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “I seen that. I like Clark Gable, but not when he dies at the end.”

About four miles outside of Beaver Falls was a farm, the mailbox prominently marked gillis. I slowed and turned in the gravel drive. Chickens scooted out of my way. Over to the right was the two-story farmhouse, pretty good size, a swing on the pillared front porch, wide curtained windows, pointed gabled roof, much like the houses in Beaver Falls, only no curling paint. At the left and curving back behind the house were several other structures, among them an unpainted tool shed, a pump with windmill tower, a faded red barn, a silo.

There were no other autos around; I got out of the Auburn, went around and opened the door for Kate Barker. The lawn and house were fenced in with unbarbed wire, and a few pine trees were spread about the lawn in an undiscernible pattern, providing shade. Up on the porch of the house, the door opened and a small man in a rumpled white shirt and equally rumpled brown pants came down the steps quickly and Ma moved toward him.

“Arthur, Arthur,” Ma said hugging him to her; he was sort of stocky himself, but she still seemed to smother him, slapping him on the back. His hands clung loosely to her back, but he was glad to see her, too, saying, “Ma, gee, Ma, it’s good to see you...”

I was getting her bags out of the back when another small figure, in a white shirt and a bow tie and a dark unbuttoned vest and gray baggy pants, came bolting down the steps, feet making a clapping sound. The chickens on the lawn scattered. He had a tommy gun slung over his arm and I swallowed as he approached and pointed it at me. I felt like joining the other chickens.

“Who the hell are you?” he said. He sounded like Jimmy Cagney and I wondered if it was on purpose, maybe to offset his boyish features.

“I’m Jimmy Lawrence,” I said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“Don’t you know?” He laughed, like I was the dumbest shit he ever saw. He pointed a thumb back at himself. “I’m Big George.”

“Big George?”

“Nelson!” he said.

Baby Face Nelson said.

29

Ma let loose of her boy Arthur long enough to call out to Nelson: “He’s from Chicago.”

Nelson manufactured a sneer, over which the faint beginnings of a mustache were more threat than promise. “So am I. So what?”

“I’m here on an errand,” I said, “for Frank Nitti.”

The sneer faded, and he blinked. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

“No,” I said.

Ma and Arthur wandered over. Arm in arm. She said, “I called and checked on him.”

Without taking his pale blue eyes off me, Nelson said to her, “Did you check with Nitti?”

“No. I called Slim.”

“Slim Gray?”

“Yeah, and he said this guy was jake.”

He thumped my chest three times with the side of the tommy-gun barrel. “I don’t care if he’s jake — I just want to know if he’s Jimmy whosis.”

“Lawrence,” I said, stopping the barrel of the tommy gun with my palm, before it could thump me a fourth time.

Nelson’s eyes flared. “Don’t touch my gun.”

“Then don’t poke me with it.”

“Yeah? Well, fuck you.”

“I got no beef with you, Nelson. But I’m not going to stand here and be bullied and just take it, understand?”

The tommy-gun nose lowered; chickens were making noise in the background. He said, “I got no beef with you, either, Lawrence — if you’re from Nitti. If you’re a goddamn fed, you’re fuckin’ dead.”

Arthur stepped forward and put a hand on Nelson’s arm; both men were about the same size, but Arthur “Doc” Barker had haunted brown eyes and rather sunken cheeks in a baby face of his own, black widow’s peaked hair starting high on his forehead, and my instinct was he was more dangerous than Nelson.

“Watch your language around my ma,” Doc Barker said, in a flat monotone that, unlike Nelson’s Cagney impression, was menacing without trying to be.

Nelson shook the hand off irritably, but said, “Yeah — okay. Okay.” I said, “You really think a fed would be smart enough to get this far?”

Nelson thought about that, while Doc grinned and said, “Hell no!”

Ma was trundling across the lawn toward the porch, stacks of movie and romance magazines under her flabby arms, leaving the bags for the boys to carry.

“Somebody want to help me with Ma’s things?” I asked.

They both did, Nelson still lugging his tommy gun; it was like an appendage.

Inside the front door we faced the second-floor stairs; a hallway alongside the stairs ended in a closed door. To our left was a sitting room, with a piano and a fireplace and some overstuffed furniture but no people. To our right an archway where floral drapes stood open and fluttered with the summer breeze coming in open windows in the living room beyond. Doc Barker nodded for me to set the bags by the stairs — “We’ll work out sleepin’ quarters later,” he said — and I followed him into the living room, which was larger than the sitting room and just as nicely furnished — but well-populated.

At the left, against the wall with a mirror hanging over it, was an overstuffed bristly cream-color mohair sofa on which sat three women, all of them rather attractive. On the near end of the sofa a cute brunette with wavy hair falling to her shoulders and bright dark perky eyes was smiling up at Nelson, who stood next to her, putting a possessive hand on her shoulder, letting me know this one was his. I could hardly blame him — even though she was sitting down, it was easy to see she had a nice little shape on her, under the thin beige frock, legs crossed under the pleated skirt. On the other end of the sofa was another brunette, with eyes the color of the dark liquid in the glass she held in one hand and a slightly puffy face that indicated the dark liquid wasn’t Dr. Pepper; still, look of the alky about her or not, this one was a looker too, with startling curves under the navy dress with its white polka dots and white collar and white trim.

Between them was a blonde. She wore a pink dress and a little pink beret and she was the best-looking dame of the bunch, her hair bobbed and her eyes big and brown and so far apart you almost had to look at them one at a time. She had beestung lips and rosy cheeks and a complexion like a glass of milk — pasteurized.

The whites of her big brown eyes, however, seemed at the moment to match the pink of her outfit, and she was clutching a hanky in a tight little fist. She’d been crying, and the other two women — the one with the drink in her hand especially — seemed to be giving her some support, some comfort.

The pretty blonde with the bobbed hair and the big brown eyes was Joshua Petersen’s Louise, incidentally. The girl I’d come to fetch.

While I was taking in these good-looking apparent molls, Ma Barker was hugging another of her boys, who’d been sitting on the window seat over by the open windows, but had jumped up upon his beloved mother’s entry.

“Freddie, Freddie,” she was saying, “my good little Freddie.”

“Aw, Ma,” he was saying. “Don’t embarrass me!”

But he clearly loved her attention, grinning with a mouthful of gold, his head on her shoulder as she pressed him to her.

He pushed his mother aside, however, when he caught a glimpse of me.

He was wearing a white shirt and brown pants, was in his early thirties, short, shorter even than Nelson, sandy-haired, shifty-eyed, sunken-cheeked. He looked a lot like his brother Doc, but not as stocky.

“Who’s this?” he said, nodding at me, his cheerfulness dropping away so completely it was hard to remember it’d ever been there.

Doc, standing beside me, pointed a thumb at me; we were just inside the doorway, the archway drapes whispering behind us. He said, “He drove Ma here from Chicago. She says he’s here to see Doc Moran, for the Boys.”

Fred frowned, said, “We don’t like tyin’ in with rackets guys.”

I said, “That’s not what they say in St. Paul.”

The frown eased into something approaching a faint smile. “We don’t like tyin’ in with Chicago rackets guys. How long you intend stayin’?”

“Overnight okay? I could stay in town—”

“No!” Nelson said. He was still standing by the wall, next to the sofa and the perky brunette. “You’ll stay right here till I say different.”

I decided not to push Nelson in front of his girl. I said, “I’m your guest, so it’d be bad manners to do it any other way than yours.”

Nelson smiled at that, smugly, and the little brunette beamed up at him; she was nuts about him. Maybe that perky look in her eyes meant she was a little nuts period.

Then Doc started introducing me around. “That’s Helen, Big George’s wife,” he said, indicating Nelson and his brunette, “and the little lady with the big drink is my brother Fred’s girl, Paula. That’s Fred of course.”

Fred nodded to me and I nodded back. Paula saluted me with her drink and gave me a sly, sexy smile and Fred frowned at her and she stuck her tongue out at him. I made like Buster Keaton.

I moved tentatively toward the sofa and Nelson lifted his head warily; but I wasn’t approaching his wife. I stood in front of Louise and asked, “Who might you be?”

The big brown eyes blinked; pink tongue flicked out nervously over red beestung lips. She looked to each side of her, at each of the two women, as if asking if she should answer. As if she needed permission.

“This is Lulu,” Doc answered for her. “Candy Walker’s girl.” He took me by the arm and pulled me gently away, buttonholed me. “She’s out of sorts at the moment,” he whispered, “’cause her boyfriend’s getting carved up in the kitchen.”

“Huh?”

He gestured to his face. “Plastic surgery. Her boyfriend’s Candy Walker, and Candy’s got pretty hot lately. Pictures in the paper, wanted circulars. You know. So he’s getting his face done over. And Lulu’s nervous about it. She don’t like docs. Except me, of course. And I don’t operate on anything but banks.”

“I hear you’re a regular surgeon,” I said.

He liked that; when he smiled his lip curled up, like he was smelling something unpleasant. “I open ’em up and remove the money,” he said. “Yeah. I’m a regular bank surgeon.”

Fred wasn’t listening to any of this, nor was Ma. She and her younger son were sitting on the window seat like a courting couple, Fred holding her hand and her looking moon-eyed at him, as they spoke in hushed tones.

Doc gestured to an overstuffed lounge chair opposite the sofa and bid me sit. I sat. He pulled a straight-back chair from someplace and sat near me.

“You been with the Boys long?”

“Just a year or so.”

“Oh, yeah? Where you from, originally?”

Piece by piece, I fed him the Jimmy Lawrence background story: born in Canada, raised in NYC, union slugger, Lepke’s boy, murder rap, plastic surgery, cooling off in Chicago.

From across the room, Nelson — sitting on the arm of the sofa next to his wife Helen — was sneering. He called out, “I’m checkin’ up on you, Lawrence. Understand? I used to work for the Boys, you know. I’m going to make some calls.”

I shrugged. “Fine.”

He hopped off the arm of the sofa. “Maybe I should do that right now. Maybe I should drive into town and make those calls...”

“Sure,” I said.

Nelson stood there for a moment, then sat back on the arm of the sofa, one hand on his tommy gun, other on his wife’s shoulder.

“This is a nice farmhouse,” I said to Doc Barker. The furniture was all relatively new, and the walls seemed to have been papered recently, a pleasant pink-and-yellow floral pattern; the carpet that pretty much covered the oak floor was oriental. It clashed, but it wasn’t cheap.

“It’s a nice farmhouse,” Doc agreed.

“Where are the owners?”

“Verle’s out farming, where else? His wife and the two little boys are off at the store. We sort of sent them out, for while Doc Moran operated on Candy.”

“I see. Why no phone? They can obviously afford one...”

“Party line,” he said. “The Gillises do a lot of business here at the farm.” By “business” he meant the place was used as a cooling-off joint, a hotel for outlaws on the run. He went on: “Can’t do that kind of business over the phone — not when half the county’s listening in.”

“I see.”

Suddenly, through the draped archway at left, emerged yet another attractive brunette, with a heart-shaped face, brown eyes and a generous figure filling out a stylish sand-color dress with a lace collar, her plump tummy pushing at the sheer fabric. The most distinctive thing about her right now, however, was her ashen face.

All eyes were on her.

Louise — Lulu — sat forward, but reared her head back, biting her knuckles; she was like a teenager watching a Dracula picture.

Doc stood. “Dolores — what is it? What’s wrong?”

She swallowed. Covered her mouth with one hand, lowering her head. Then she raised her eyes and said, softly, “The bastard’s killed him.”

Louise screamed.

Doc walked over to Dolores. “Candy’s...?”

“Dead,” she said.

Doc moved quickly through the archway.

I thought for a moment, then followed; nobody tried to stop me. Louise, however, was being held back by the two women beside her.

In the kitchen — a big country kitchen with enormous cabinet and sink with pump and old-fashioned stove and an oak icebox — spread out on the long kitchen table like an enormous Christmas turkey, was a man, naked to his waist; his face was rather handsome and very blue.

On the stove in the background a teakettle whistled, as if scolding somebody.

That somebody just might have been the tall, rather distinguished-looking man of about forty, dark hair streaked with gray, who stood near the corpse with forceps in a trembling hand. Eyes under shaggy, twisting eyebrows looked right at me — they were dark and rheumy — and, as if he’d known me all his life, he said to me, “Poor beggar swallowed his tongue. I pulled it up with these” — he meant the forceps — “and tried artificial respiration on him, but he died. He just died.”

“Shit,” Doc Barker said. “I tried to talk him out of this, you goddamn quack. Face-lift my ass. What good did you do Old Creepy and Freddie?”

Snootily, as if forgetting the dead man stretched out before him, Moran said, “They seem satisfied.”

“You’ll never put the knife to me, quack. Shit! You killed him.”

Moran put the forceps away, in the standard medical black bag which was on the table next to the corpse. “An unfortunate, an unavoidable... mishap.”

Then, behind me, a woman was in the doorway, screaming.

Louise.

“Candy!” She pushed past me and flung herself across the half-naked corpse. “My candyman... oh my candyman...” Tears streamed down her face.

“You bloody butcher!”

It was Nelson pushing past me this time, tommy gun still slung over one arm.

The little man grabbed the doctor by the shirtfront and lifted him off the floor and tossed him bodily into the icebox, with a clatter. Moran slid to the floor, sat there for a moment, then stood and brushed himself off, raised his head, dignity preserved.

“My good man,” he said to Nelson, “I did not even touch Mr. Walker. I merely adminstered the ether” — he pointed to a wadded towel on the table — “I did not begin cutting. You will notice not a single drop of blood in this room.”

“Not yet,” Nelson said.

“Your threats fail to concern me,” the doctor said. “My services to you — you people, in so many ways, are I should think invaluable. The occasional... slip-up, well. That can’t be helped.”

There was a back door, a kitchen door, and Dr. Joseph P. Moran walked to it rather grandly, and exited. Nelson looked out the window.

“He’s getting in his car,” he said.

Doc Barker said, “Going into town to drink and chase the skirts, no doubt.”

Fred Barker, who’d entered after Nelson, said, “He already smells like a brewery. I think he went into this operation soused.”

“I’m going after him.” Nelson patted the machine gun.

Doc thought about that, then nodded. “You can make those phone calls and check up on our friend Lawrence here, while you’re at it.”

Nelson glanced at me. “Good idea. Why don’t you ride along with me, Lawrence. Maybe we can get to know each other better.”

“Why not?” I said.

Dolores was moving Louise away from the corpse; Louise was sobbing, the little pink beret dangling at an odd angle, about to fall off any second. Fred Barker’s girl Paula came in with the sheet she’d got from somewhere and covered Candy Walker up.

“Who’s going to take care of me now?” Louise asked. “Who’s going to take care of Lulu now?”

She was looking right at me when she asked it, but I didn’t answer. Her little pink beret fell off and I bent and handed it to her.

Then Ma Barker was standing in the kitchen doorway, hands on her hips.

“Wrap him up and put him somewheres,” she said. “It’s after six and I want to start supper.”

Louise shrieked, but while Paula comforted her, Fred and Helen and Dolores, as detached as meat-packers, wrapped the blue-faced body in the sheet and carried him out of the house, into the barn.

Ma Barker was scrubbing the kitchen table down, humming a hymn, when I went out the back door to go into town with Baby Face Nelson.

30

Something odd happened on the four-mile drive into Beaver Falls.

Nelson acted civil toward me.

I have no explanation, other than possibly the lack of an audience, prompting him to abandon, at least temporarily, his Cagney pose. Or perhaps it was his having to leave the tommy-gun appendage behind, settling for a modest .45 Army Colt stuck in his waistband. But as we rode in the Auburn, with me at the wheel, top down, he smoked a cigar, leaned back, relaxed, and shared his insights into Doc Moran with me.

“You know,” he said, blowing smoke out easily, sun low in the sky and streaming through the cornfields as we whisked by, “Candy Walker was a fuckin’ chump to let that drunken sawbones near ’im in the first place.”

“Really?” I said. I took one hand off the wheel and pushed the window-glass wire-frames up on my nose.

“Sure. When you get back, get a load of Freddie Barker’s fingertips. The doc did a scraping on them last spring. You know how this genius surgeon goes about that?” He grinned, cigar atilt, gesturing with both hands, relishing the gore he was about to describe. “He loops rubber bands around their fingers, at the first joint. Then he sticks a hypo of morphine in each fingertip — how’s that for laughs? Then starts scraping. With a scalpel, like he’s sharpening a pencil.” Nelson laughed, a high-pitched giggle like a kid. “Really carves the ol’ meat off. Ha ha ha!”

“Did the operation take?”

Nelson smirked, the wispy beginnings of his mustache riffling in the breeze like fringe on a curtain. “A couple of Freddie’s fingers got infected — one thumb swelled up like a blimp. They took him to a vet and got ’im some medicine, but he was burning up with fever for about a week.”

“But did the operation take?”

Nelson laughed again, same high-pitched giggle, blew out cigar smoke in a fat circle. “Take a look at his fingertips when we get back. You’ll see.”

I knew what I’d see. I’d never seen a fingerprint job that had taken; in every case I knew of, the telltale whorls stubbornly returned, forming patterns still discernible, if streaked with scar tissue.

“He’s got a big mouth, too, the doc. Comes in town and boozes and chases the local gash. Of course he knows better than to even look at one of our women.” He gave me a sideways glance that let me know that was a warning partially directed at me. “But Verle and Mildred got a nice thing going, usin’ the farmhouse as a cooling-off joint and all, so we got to be careful around the locals. Don’t need no drunken sawbones spillin’ his guts to every hunk of quiff he meets.”

“Why do the Barkers put up with him?”

The wind blowing as we sped along put Nelson’s cigar out; he relit it, shrugging. “Like the old bastard himself said, he’s useful. He did do some face-lifts that turned out, well... okay. Like on O.C.”

“O.C.?”

“Old Creepy. Karpis. Oh, yeah, you ain’t met him yet. He went to town with Mildred and her boys. Dolores is his broad. Hell of a guy. He’s from Chicago, too, from the back o’ the yards, like me. Hell, you’re from Chicago. Maybe you met him?”

“I only been in Chicago a year or so.”

“Oh yeah — you’re from out East.”

Was he trying to be cute, fishing like that? Or just making conversation? Maybe Nelson was more complex — and more intelligent — than I’d first given him credit for.

I said, “So Moran gave Karpis a face-lift?”

“Yeah — a pretty good one. O.C. didn’t have no earlobes, and that’s the kind of thing that sticks out on a wanted circular. And Moran did manage to fix him up with something that’s more or less like lobes. And O.C. had a busted nose since he was a kid and Moran straightened that. And tightened his face up. But his face is real scarred along his cheek by his ear. Both cheeks, I mean.”

“But it served its purpose, the face-lift.”

Nelson shrugged again. “I guess. I think O.C.’s changed his looks more from combing his hair straight back and wearing glasses than from what Moran done, but he seems satisfied. Enough that Walker wanted a face-lift, too. Big sacrifice for a ladies’ man like Walker to let that doc carve on his puss.” He laughed again, one short guttural laugh, but still high-pitched. “Well, he’s a ladies’ man in hell, now.”

We were coming up on Beaver Falls, now. Maple trees and two-story clapboards.

“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Why does Moran act like he’s so invaluable? There’s plenty of underworld docs around, doing first-rate face-lifts.” I took a hand off the wheel to gesture alongside my right ear. “See any scars on my face?”

“No,” Nelson admitted. “But Moran’s been valuable to the Barkers and Karpis in a lot of ways. I shouldn’t have to tell you he’s connected to the Chicago Boys, which can come in handy. And other ways.”

“Such as?”

Another shrug, another cocky puff of the cigar. “He was fencing hot money for ’em. He handled the Bremer ransom.”

“I thought that was Boss McLaughlin’s piece of work.”

“Him and Moran.”

“But the feds got McLaughlin, didn’t they?”

Like that other hot-money fence, James Probasco, ward-heeler McLaughlin had been hung by his heels from the Banker’s Building by the feds, seeking a third-degree confession; he hadn’t talked, but he was facing five years in Leavenworth anyway. He was still better off than Probasco, who as you may recall when similarly dangled did a dive into the cement court of the Rookery Building nineteen stories below.

Nelson continued. “The feds got McLaughlin, yeah — but he didn’t talk. And Moran still has fencing connections. Plus, like he’s always remindin’ us — he knows where the bodies are buried.”

“I see.”

“Pull in there,” Nelson said, motioning to a parking place in front of a store called Hubbell’s.

We left the Auburn at the curb and Nelson, his coat buttoned over his waistband, where the .45 was tucked, smiled and tipped his hat at a fat farm housewife with a faded brownish-blond marcel and a pretty little girl with corn-yellow hair in tow. The fat farm housewife and the little girl both smiled and the housewife said, “You’re Verle’s relation, aren’t you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“We could all use some rain for the corn.”

“We surely could, ma’am.”

The mother and daughter walked on by, and we went into Hubbell’s, whose store window was a display of fishing rods, and the narrow, yellow-painted interior proved to be a hardware store of sorts in front — hammers and nails, fishing rods, a wall display of jackknives — and a bar in back, with three side booths.

“This is where Verle picks up his messages,” Nelson said, sotto voce, behind a hand.

“Interesting place.”

Nelson smirked. “Half hardware store, half bar. Ever seen the like?”

“Nothing better, if you’re in the mood for a claw hammer and a shot of whiskey.”

Moran was down at the far end of the bar, bending over a bottle of bourbon and a tall glass, giving what was left of his attention, after the bourbon got done with it, to a busty corn-fed barmaid of twenty-five or so with short curly strawberry-blond hair, wearing a white apron over a red-and-white checked house-dress, looking very homey, wiping the bar with a rag while she smiled and listened to Moran’s smoothest line of bull. He was selling her a shopworn matinee-idol smile, gesturing with the hand that wasn’t wrapped around the tall glass. If this was a movie, John Barrymore would play him and Joan Blondell her.

A man of about fifty was working the counter in the front, hardware half of the store; he had thinning blond hair and a shovel jaw and a disgusted look.

“Can’t you keep your friend away from my daughter?” he asked Nelson.

Nelson said, “Sorry, Kurt. You shouldn’t oughta let her tend bar, if you don’t want her meetin’ men.”

With tight anger, Kurt said, “Just because she’s divorced don’t mean she’s loose.”

“Did I say that? Anything for Verle?”

“Nothin’.”

“Can I use the phone?”

Still disgusted, Kurt nodded, and Nelson went behind the counter; he nodded to me, then toward Moran. I got the picture.

I went down and sat by Moran.

He turned and cast his rheumy gaze upon me. He was wearing a dark suit with a dark tie and a dark vest; it wasn’t as hot a day as we’d been having, and there were fans going in here, so he wasn’t sweating, and looked very professional, very proper. If a little tanked.

“Do I know you, young man?”

“I’m staying out at the Gillises. I walked in on the last act of your latest operation.”

He lifted an eyebrow, placing me, then nodded gravely, but I could tell Candy Walker’s death didn’t mean a damn to him; he’d seen too many outlaw and gangster patients die to be too concerned. And, in his defense, they were lucky to have him, often working under unsanitary conditions in cellars and hotel rooms, patching up hoodlums who could go nowhere else but to a “right croaker” like him for the tending of a bullet wound that would not get reported to the police, or to bring him a knocked-up moll or prostie so he could “pull a rabbit,” or to fix a too-familiar face, or what-have-you. The underworld needed its Doc Morans.

He offered his hand. “Joseph P. Moran. Doctor.”

“I know. I’m Jimmy Lawrence.”

He had a strong grip, but his hand was trembling. Whether from drink, fear or palsy, I couldn’t tell you.

The strawberry-blond strudel behind the counter started moving down the bar with the rag, and Moran called out to her, “Don’t leave, my dear! We’ve so much else to discuss.”

She smiled at him, a pixie smile in a prettily plump face, and said, “There’s always later, Doctor.”

“A misnomer, my dear. As my former patient, Candy Walker, may now realize... ‘later’ is a commodity that can prove rare indeed.”

She didn’t understand that, so she giggled at it, and moved on down the bar, where a scruffy, apparently unemployed gentleman in coveralls had found a quarter to spend.

I suggested we move to a booth, and Dr. Moran agreed, taking glass and bottle along.

“Why are you here, young man?” he asked, pouring himself some bourbon, though his tall glass was already half full. “Getting hot for you elsewhere? Perhaps you’ve heard of my services. Not cheap, but well worth the price, I assure you. Now, don’t be put off by that unfortunate mishap with Mr. Walker. A one-in-a-thousand occurrence, a freak happenstance, a medical misfortune of the rarest order.”

“No. No thanks...”

“What you need,” he said, narrowing his eyes, holding his thumb up to his eye like an artist measuring distance, “is a good surgeon. I, myself, was an honor student, a young physician with a distinguished career ahead of me, when I ran afoul of fate. But that’s my story, and what we’re concerned with here is yours. Afraid of the authorities, are you? Well, you can go anywhere without worrying, after I’ve done a lift job on that face of yours. I’ll alter that nose — some Jewish blood in the line? Not to worry — change the shape of it entirely. And lift those cheeks, pull ’em up tight, even in a young fella like you it makes a difference...”

“Doctor...”

“I can change the expression of your eyes. I can raise those eyebrows...”

They were already raised.

“...take the sag out of your mouth. Your family, your best friends? They’ll never know you. And let’s see those hands — I can get rid of those bothersome fingerprints with the easiest, nearly painless little operation...”

“I already had a lift, Doctor.”

He drew his head back; reached in an inside coat pocket and took out some wire-rim glasses and looked at me close. “I say. Outstanding job. Who did it?”

“None of your business.”

He smiled, looking as sophisticated as a John Held, Jr., drawing. “Quite the proper answer, in your line of work. I have no difficulty with that answer whatsoever. Say! You have nothing to drink — we’ll remedy that — my dear! I prescribe alcohol for this young gentleman!”

The nicely chubby strawberry blonde walked over like an advertisement for making babies. I ordered a beer.

“Healthy lass,” he said, watching her go, almost licking his lips. “Good bone structure, beneath that well-placed beef. Ah — farm country. A rest in the country is just what I’ve needed, of late. By the way, what does bring you into the company of such notables as our friend Baby Face Nelson? An appellation, I might add, one might best refrain from using to the little weasel’s face.”

“Actually, Doctor,” I said, “I’m here to see you.”

“Me? Why, I’m honored, Mr. Lawrence. What brings you here to see me?”

“Frank Nitti.”

He swallowed, and he didn’t have a mouthful of liquor, either. The blood drained out of his face.

“He’d like you to come back to Chicago,” I said.

“Young man, I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m in the process of... relocating.”

“I heard you were well-connected.”

“Perhaps you’re aware of my dealings with one ‘Boss’ McLaughlin?”

“Just vaguely.”

“He suggested I dispose of certain funds — certain warm funds — by doling it out, a few dollars at time, to some of my patrons... if you follow me.”

“You mean, some of Nitti’s people were passed hot money?”

“Indelicately put, but true. In small amounts, Mr. McLaughlin thought the bills would cause little trouble. For his efforts he’s facing a penitentiary term. As for me, well... an emissary from Mr. Nitti passed me an envelope, shortly before I left the city. Do you know what was in that envelope, Mr. Lawrence?”

I said I didn’t.

“Nothing much,” he said, sipping his tall glass of bourbon. “Simply a single unfired round. A bullet. Do you understand that? Do you derive a meaning from that?”

It was a death sentence.

I said, “Perhaps Nitti would like to work it out with you.”

“Did he say as much?”

“Not really. He just said to tell you that he wanted you to come back to Chicago. He had work for you.”

“I see. Then I hardly understand why he bothered sending you — he’d know I wouldn’t return with so little assurance of my safety.” He looked at me as if he hadn’t looked at me before. “Unless, of course, you’re here to... but you don’t look like a gunman. Then looks at times deceive. Take, for example, the childlike countenance of the gentleman approaching...”

I turned and saw Nelson swaggering toward us, a big grin riding his face. He scooted in on my side of the booth.

“I made a couple calls,” he said to me. “You’re okay, Lawrence.” He put his hand out. “No hard feelins for the hard time I give you at the house?”

I shook the hand, said, “None.”

“Good.” He looked across at Moran. “I talked to some of your pals in Chicago. I talked to Slim Gray, for one.”

“Alias Russell Gibson. I know him well. And how is Slim?”

“He says Frank Nitti wants you back in Chicago.”

“People in hell want ice water,” Moran said, and gulped the bourbon.

“Maybe you can serve it to ’em,” Nelson said.

“You don’t scare me, little man.”

Nelson smiled at him; the muscle on his jaw was jumping. “That’s fine. Finish your drink — time to go home.”

“I’ll return in my own good time. I have my own transportation.”

“Fine. Drive your own car. But finish your drink, and do it now.”

The blood flowed back into Moran’s face till it was crimson. He half-stood in the booth, leaned forward and waved the glass, the bourbon sloshing around in it, all but shouting as he said, “Don’t threaten me, Baby Face. Who do you think you’re crowding? Think I’m afraid of you — or any of that mob?” He stretched his free hand out and held it palm open, cupped. “I have you — all of your crowd — in the hollow of my hand. Right here! In the hollow of my hand.”

Back behind the bar, the plump strawberry blonde looked scared; her father, Kurt, was standing near her, expressionless, but looking our way.

Moran sat back down. “One word from me, Baby Face — and your goose is cooked. Understand? Cooked.”

Nelson, jaw muscle throbbing, leaned forward and patted Moran on the arm, soothingly, while the doctor stared into the blackness of the bourbon.

“There, there, Doc,” Nelson said, “don’t talk that way about your pals. We’re on your side. Aren’t we, Jimmy?”

I nodded.

“You’re a great guy, Doc. Just a little tight right now. Now, can you drive back yourself? Or would you like one of us to drive you?”

“I can drive myself.”

“Okay. When you’re ready, come on back to the farmhouse.”

“Well. I’m ready, now.”

“Good. Come along, then.”

“I’ll drive myself.”

“Fine.”

The doctor stood, moved slowly away from the booth. We followed him out onto the street. It was dusk, now.

Nelson smiled at him as we went toward the Auburn. From the sidewalk he called out to us.

“Don’t forget!” Moran said, walking unsteadily, pointing a shaky finger at us. “I know where the bodies are buried. I know where the bodies are buried...”

31

When we got back just after sundown, everybody (almost) was eating at the kitchen table. The table was covered with an oilcloth, and the oilcloth was covered with bowls of food. Fried chicken. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. Corn on the cob. Cottage cheese. Freshly chopped cabbage. Stacks of white bread. Pitchers of milk; slabs of butter. Biscuits the size of saucers. The smells in the room were warm and good. Around the table sat various public enemies and their molls, chowing down.

“Find a chair!” Ma said to us as we came in. In a calico apron that was too small for her, stocky Ma was milling around, refilling the bowls of food, keeping the chicken frying over at the stove, running the whole damn show. “Get it while it’s hot!” She sounded like a newsie.

Nelson, Moran and I took three of the four empty places at the long table. The remaining place was for Louise, or Lulu as they called her here; she was, I thought, understandably absent.

No one bothered to make introductions, though there were several people at the table I hadn’t seen before. Despite the fact that I’d seen a blue-faced corpse on this table an hour and a half ago or so, I found myself digging right in. I was hungry, the food smelled good, tasted better, and what can I say? Ma Barker was a hell of a cook.

As the meal wore on, I began finding out who the various people were. Quite obviously the lanky man of about forty in coveralls was Verle Gillis, owner of the place, pale blue eyes set in his weathered face like stones; and next to him, a few years younger, a heavyset woman with a sweet face and dark hair in a bun and sad dark eyes was his wife Mildred. Next to Mildred were two boys, one about eight, the other ten or eleven. But for the years between them, they could’ve been twins and had the father’s lanky build and the mother’s almost angelic face — without the sad eyes. The boys were well-behaved; the only talking they did was some whispering back and forth.

“I appreciate your hospitality, Mr. Gillis,” I offered, after a while. I was working on a breast of chicken.

“Our pleasure, Mr. Lawrence. There’ll be no charge for your stay, by the by.”

“Well, that’s very kind.”

“Just remember us to Chicago.”

“Well, uh, sure. Glad to.”

Verle leaned toward his wife and whispered; she nodded, then said, “Mrs. Barker — I want to thank you kindly for preparing dinner.”

“I enjoyed it,” Ma said. She was finally sitting down and eating, starting her first plate when most of us were on our second or third. Doc Moran, however, seemed morose and was picking at his first.

Ma went on: “I apologize for taking over your kitchen like I done while you was gone. I just figured it was gettin’ late and I should start ’er up.”

Mildred said she was “happy” Ma had taken over; but I didn’t think Mildred meant it.

Ma did, however, saying, “Well, I hope you’ll let me pitch in again while I’m here. I just love cookin’ for my boys.”

Fred, sitting to one side of her (she was at the head of the table, of course), spoke through a mouthful of potatoes; what he seemed to say was, “Nice to have your good home cookin’ again, Ma.” Or something.

One by one everybody complimented Ma, and meant it — hurting Mildred’s feelings, I thought — though Fred’s girl Paula seemed to like the glass of liquor she had brought to the table more than the meal.

In the brightly lit kitchen I noticed for the first time just how hard the faces of the women were. These women — all of them naturally attractive, and well-groomed, if occasionally overly made up — were in their early twenties; but they had a hard, worn look that made them seem ten years older. But it was an oldness age didn’t have anything to do with. A sixteen-year-old prostitute is old that way.

With the exception of Helen Nelson: She had a smooth, young face. Worry seemed never to have crossed her consciousness.

She and her husband flirted, giggling with each other, throughout the meal. It was as though they were newlyweds. Later I learned they had two kids and had been married for years.

Down at the other end of the table, opposite Ma, was a slight man in glasses with his hair combed back, with a tight mouth and gray, dead eyes. I’d been in the room fifteen minutes before he introduced himself, suddenly.

“I’m Karpis,” he said.

I’d guessed that.

“The folks around here call me Old Creepy,” he said. “I don’t know why.” And he smiled. It was a ghostly, ghastly smile. It was a smile a mean kid wore when pulling the wings off a bug. He was pulling part of the wing of a chicken off, at the moment.

“Or O.C.,” Nelson corrected.

“Or O.C.,” Karpis allowed. “I’ll answer to that.”

I nodded to him. “Glad to meet you, Karpis.”

He held up a greasy hand. “We can shake hands later. I understand your name is Lawrence.”

“That’s right.”

“From Chicago.”

“As of now.”

“And connected.”

“Well, yeah.”

“I’ve had dealings with the Chicago Boys before.”

“Really.”

“I’m not crazy about Chicago. A plain Kansas boy like me, I prefer the wide-open spaces. I like to be able to make a getaway through a field or a farmyard, down a dirt road, across a dry creek bed. In Chicago, the city — it’s all asphalt and traffic and big buildings. Who needs it.”

I swallowed a bite of mashed potatoes and gravy. “It’s nice out here. I could be a convert to this country life.”

Karpis nodded; the glasses and slicked-back hair made him look like a math teacher. But that smile would give Lon Chaney the willies.

He said, “You’ll find the company better, too, I think. We work for a living, unlike your hoodlum pals.”

He returned to eating his chicken. I didn’t understand what he meant, but I didn’t feel like following up on it.

Ma said, “Somebody ought to go up and drag that girl down here. She needs to eat.”

She meant Louise.

Dolores, sitting next to her man Karpis, said, “I don’t think so, Ma. She’s had quite a shock. She’s crying her fool head off. I don’t think she could keep anything down.”

Ma shook her head, looking at the remaining food on the table. “It’d be criminal to waste this good food,” she said. “The poor little thing ought to come down and eat.”

Paula smiled as some whiskey went smoothly down, then said, “Maybe I could take a plate up to her.”

Ma was adamant. “She should get right back in the swing of things. Best thing in the world for her.”

I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Ma, don’t you think it’s asking a little much of her to sit down and eat at the table she just saw her boyfriend stretched out dead on?”

That should have killed a few appetites, but everybody’s appetite was alive and well at this table — except for Moran, who was looking at Paula’s glass with glum envy.

Ma didn’t get my point. She said, “It’s just a table.”

Doc Barker, who’d been silently (and dedicatedly) eating, lowered his ear of corn and smiled messily and said, “Ma, sometimes you’re a riot.”

“Don’t sass!”

Across the table from his brother, Fred grinned his mostly gold grin, and said, “You’re a cold-blooded old Ozark gal, Ma, no gettin’ around it!”

“Well,” Ma said, her feelings a little hurt, “there’s apple pie for them that wants it.”

Everybody wanted it except Moran, who sat at the table, slumped. Paula finally took pity on him and went out in the other room to get her pint; she filled a water glass half full for Moran, and freshened her own glass, too.

But he drank it quickly down, and most of us were hardly started on our pie when he stood and announced, “And so to bed.”

Ma said, “So early, Doctor?”

He touched a hand to his chest with mock-drama. “I’ve had a long, tiring and quite difficult day, madam. I lost a patient, in this very room, mere hours ago. There are times when I seek refuge in a bottle; but there are times when sleep can serve that function just as well.”

The two farm boys nudged each other with elbows and laughed. The old doc talked funny.

“Sit down, Doc,” Nelson said, quietly, cutting a small bite of pie with his fork.

“Are you addressing me... Baby Face?”

A pall fell over the room.

Nelson smiled as he forked the bite of pie; lifted fork to lips, ate. “Yes. Sit down.”

“I’m tired. And I will take no orders from—”

“Sit down.”

There’d been no menace in Nelson’s voice.

But Moran thought it best to sit down.

Saying, “Why is my presence required here?”

Nelson said, “Ain’t good manners not to clean up after yourself.”

Moran seemed puzzled, glanced at the area near his plate where he’d been sitting, which was rather tidy actually.

Like a stage magician, Nelson made a sweeping gesture with one hand that summoned to my mind’s eye, and I’d wager to that of anyone else who’d been in this room not long ago, the blue-faced corpse that had been stretched out on this very table.

Finally my appetite deserted me. I pushed the plate of pie away and suddenly the food in my stomach was churning.

“He’s still in the barn,” Nelson said. He looked at Fred. “Right? You haven’t moved him?”

The youngest farm boy whispered to his mother, “Who?” and she shushed him.

Fred said, “He’s out there. Not going anywhere.”

“Well,” Nelson said, rising, wiping his hands with a napkin, “it’s time he did.”

Moran was wide-eyed, indignant, but a little afraid. “This is preposterous.”

Doc Barker rose. “I agree. You botched the operation, Doc. Least you can do is help dispose of the remains. Besides — like you always like to tell us — you know where the bodies are buried. Why should this time be any different?”

Soon five of us were moving through the darkness. Six, counting the sheet-wrapped body of Candy Walker. Doc and Fred Barker carried him, one at either end of him, and he sagged in the middle. Nelson, who knew his way around the farm (I was beginning to gather that he really was related to Verle and Mildred), led the way, with a flashlight in hand. The flashlight was hardly necessary: it was a clear night, stars scattered across the sky like diamonds across a dark tapestry (stolen diamonds, in this company) and part of the moon was up there, working for us, too. The night air was almost cool and the smell of grass and wheat and such was strange and strangely soothing to these city nostrils. I had the shovels over my shoulder, three of them. Moran, muttering to himself, was carrying a heavy bag of quicklime.

We moved past a shocked field, then down into a hollow. We stopped near a clump of trees. Near the trees, but not so near as for the roots to be a problem, we began to dig.

Everybody had a turn, even Nelson, but first up was me and Moran. The body, for the moment, had been rested beneath the nearby trees, out of the way of the dirt.

With everybody having a turn, it didn’t take long, despite being six feet deep. Two people going at it at a time made for a hole larger than need be, but we got the job done. For some reason the physical labor felt good to me. The night had a clarity that made the event seem very real, and yet completely dreamlike.

The two Barker brothers, having hauled the body here and apparently feeling it therefore their province to do so, carried the body of Candy Walker over and rolled it out of the sheet into the hole. They stood looking down in there dumbly, the empty sheet in their hands, like a husk.

Nelson stood there, no tommy gun, but vest open and .45 sticking threateningly up out of his waistband, hands on hips, and ordered Moran: “Get down in there — you’re gonna dump some lye on his hands and face.”

“I will not!”

“Do it,” Nelson said.

Moran, quite sober now, the outburst at the hardware store/saloon well behind him, said, “If you’re considering killing me, keep this in mind: my attorney has an envelope in which much that I know has been recorded. Upon my death, that envelope will—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nelson said. “Get in there and use the lye. Hands and face. It’ll be the best plastic surgery job you ever did.”

Moran snorted at that, but he climbed down into the hole. Doc Barker handed him down a can of lye, already opened; the strong odor rose up out of the grave like a chemical ghost.

“It’s done,” Moran said hollowly, looking up out of the hole. Wondering if he’d be allowed to emerge.

Nobody said or did anything for the next few seconds, so I reached my hand down to him and pulled him up and out.

Then Nelson said to him, “Now dump some quicklime on him. Half a bag will do. You can do that from up here.”

Moran sighed, irritated but still apprehensive, and took the bag of quicklime from Doc Barker, ripped it open; Freddie stood casually nearby, shovel over his shoulder.

The doctor poured the lime down into the hole, over the body, like he was planting seed; then he set the half-empty bag on the ground near the hole and, standing at one end, looked across the hole where Nelson was and said, “Now what?” and Fred Barker hit him in the back of the head with the shovel.

The sound was something I’ll never forget, yet I can’t describe it. Two sounds, actually, all the result of Fred Barker’s roundhouse swing: metallic at first, almost a clang, echoing across the night; followed by a smack, a sickening smack, like a melon hitting the pavement from a high building. That’s as close as I can come to the sound. But I can hear it to this day.

Dr. Joseph Moran wasn’t hearing anything. He fell facedown into the hole, sprawled on top of dead Candy Walker; the back of Moran’s head was caved in and his brains showed. Doc Barker, without climbing in, poured lye down on the doc’s hands, not bothering with getting in to do his face, then poured the rest of the quicklime over him. And dropped the sheet into the hole; it fluttered in like a wounded bird.

“Come on, come on,” Nelson said to me. “Grab a shovel and start filling in that hole!”

Fred, Doc and I filled in the hole; Fred used the same shovel he’d used on Moran.

We headed back, each of us but Nelson with a shovel over his shoulder, like Snow White’s dwarfs, our footsteps on the grassy ground the only sound in the clear, dead night. Not a cricket nor a farm animal had a thing to say in the immediate aftermath of Doc Moran’s murder.

Nearing the lights of the house, I somehow managed to ask Nelson about that envelope Moran had claimed his attorney had.

“That’s where you fit in,” Nelson grinned.

“What do you mean?”

“Those phone calls I made. One of ’em, I checked with Nitti. Nitti himself.”

“And?”

“They got to Moran’s lawyer.”

“Killed him?”

“No! Bought him. Chicago, remember?”

“So Nitti told you Moran could be killed without any worry of...”

“Right. And Nitti wanted him dead.”

“Because he passed hot money...?”

“That, and Nitti was just as nervous about how the doc’s drinking was going to his mouth as we was.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t you know that’s why you was here? To hand Doc Moran his passport to the next life? D’you really think Nitti wanted him back in Chicago just to pull a rabbit outa some bimbo or something?”

That was one little thing Nitti hadn’t told me, in generously providing me with Jimmy Lawrence’s identity and the accompanying cover story: that I’d been sent here to set Doc Moran up.

And now here I was, right in the middle of a nest of public enemies and who could say I wasn’t one of them?

I was an accomplice, now. In my way, I’d helped kill Moran. I hadn’t seen it coming. I couldn’t have stopped it. But I was there; here. I filled in the hole.

I knew where the bodies were buried.

32

By eight o’clock that evening, the farmhouse was humming with leisure activity: Dolores and Helen were sitting on the sofa listening to Burns and Allen on the radio (Gracie was still looking for that missing brother of hers) and Ma had found a little table to work one of her jigsaw puzzles on, sitting on the window seat as she did, feet not touching the floor; Mildred Gillis was doing needlepoint in the sitting room with the piano, her boys spread-eagled in the middle of the floor, playing a board game, getting loud occasionally and getting shushed accordingly; a penny-ante poker game was going on in the kitchen, the players crowded down at one end of the banquetlike table — Fred and Doc Barker, Verle Gillis and Baby Face Nelson were playing. Despite the stakes, everybody seemed to be taking the game quite seriously, especially Nelson, whose displeasure and glee seemed disproportionate to the nickels and dimes he was alternately losing and raking in. I played a few hands myself, stopped when I was thirty cents ahead — and Nelson glared at me like I was leaving with everybody’s money.

You would never have guessed two men died tonight. Certainly not one of them on this card-and-change-strewn table. And cheerful Fred Barker, with his ready-to-smile mouthful of gold teeth, did not seem like somebody who’d killed a man with a shovel recently.

I, on the other hand, felt exactly like a man who’d help dig — and fill — a grave.

I went out into the almost cool night, walking around the farmyard, getting a feeling of where the buildings were. This was made easy by several electric lights on tall posts. Some of the cars were parked out back, but others (I surmised) must’ve been in the barn. The hayloft door stood open. Crickets were chirping and there was manure in the air. I found Karpis sitting on the porch, in the swing, gently rocking. The porch light wasn’t on, but I could see him fine. He looked small, slight. Which he was.

He smiled at me and nodded; the smile was meant to be friendly but it was just unsettling.

I leaned against one of the porch pillars.

“It was bound to happen,” Karpis said matter-of-factly.

“What’s that?”

“Doc Moran.” He lifted his shoulders, set them back down. “Just a matter of time.”

“I guess.”

“You look like killing don’t agree with you.”

“It’s not my favorite thing.”

“Me either. Oh, I don’t mind putting a little muscle into a stickup, waving a gun around. Don’t even mind winging a guy. But I don’t look to killing for my fun.”

From the living room, laughter came from the radio; Gracie had said something funny again.

“Now, you take Freddie,” Karpis said, amused, smiling his ghastly smile, “he’s a born killer. Sometimes it shocks me a little to see how free and easy he is with a gun. He don’t mind gunning down somebody that gets in his way — cop or hood or ordinary joe, it’s all the same to him.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

Karpis went on: “Maybe it’s being raised in the Ozarks; maybe all those hillbillies are like that. I don’t know. Could be it runs in the family — their older brother Herman died shooting it out with the cops, and Doc, hell, he’s got quite the itchy trigger finger himself.”

“Ma seems harmless enough.”

The swing made a creaking sound as he rocked; it seemed louder than the crickets and other night sounds, and the muffled radio from within the house.

“Yeah, Ma’s harmless all right. She’s quite a character, though.”

“She doesn’t seem to mind what her boys do for a living.”

Karpis smiled some more and moved his head side to side. “Anything her boys do is okeydoke with Ma. They can do no wrong.”

“They seem to feel the same about her.”

“Well, look how she sticks by them. Sometimes she travels with us, and Freddie and Doc and me are just three brothers taking care of our widowed momma, should anybody ask. Foolproof cover. What could look more innocent?”

The swing creaked; laughter from the radio.

I said, “I didn’t know Nelson ran with your gang.”

“Usually don’t, but I’ve known him for years and he’s sharp and loyal and there’s nobody braver. We’re hooking up for something big.” He gave me a long sideways appraising look. “You strictly a rackets guy, or do you ever work for a living?”

I sat in the swing next to him; Karpis stopped rocking, but it rocked on a little anyway, on its own steam.

I said, “I don’t get you. You said something like that at supper, and I didn’t get you then, either.”

He sighed, and started gently rocking again; I joined in.

“Now look,” he said, as if explaining the obvious to a small child, “we’re strictly heist guys. We done some branching out into kidnapping, but that’s just another kind of stealing. Plus, our gang’s on the fluid side...”

“Fluid?”

“Yeah — people come and go. Me and the Barker boys have been together a long time, but we worked with dozens of guys, from time to time. Not tight and organized like you rackets guys.”

“What’ve you got against rackets guys?”

He made a face. “They’re too picky about what they’ll let you steal. They don’t like the kind of stealing that gets the heat turned on ’em; they’re in more public-service-type business.”

“Public service?”

“Yeah — pussy, drugs, bookmaking. That ain’t crime. That’s business. True crime’s you when get out and work for a living, like robbing a bank, or breaking into a place, or kidnapping somebody. Really give some effort to it. The rackets guys aren’t up for that. Yet at the same time, when those guys get mad at you, well, Jesus... anything can happen.”

“Yeah. Ask Doc Moran.”

Karpis raised a lecturing finger; he looked even more like a math teacher, now. “Okay, so maybe Chicago did okay Moran’s exit — maybe even requested it — but they didn’t pay for it. Killing people for money don’t appeal to me, or anybody connected with me. I’ll leave that to the rackets guys.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you’re no Chicago hoodlum.”

The Auburn keys were in my pocket.

“I’m not?”

I edged my hand near the gun under my arm.

“No,” Karpis smiled, “you’re from out East. You’re a fish out of water, in Chicago. You looking for some honest work?”

I sighed relief. To myself, that is.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Something real big’s coming up, soon.”

“How soon?”

“Friday.”

“This Friday?”

“This Friday.”

“Day after tomorrow, you mean?”

“Right.”

“What is it?”

“A snatch.”

Fine. Now I was mixed up in a kidnapping; I could see myself, being strapped into the chair, telling the reporters in the gallery how I was a private detective gone undercover to retrieve a farm girl.

“Interested?” Karpis asked.

“I might be,” I said.

“Decide by tomorrow. We’ll be driving back to Illinois, to a tourist court near Aurora. We’re meeting some people there, to go over the plans.”

“I appreciate the offer.”

“We can use you. We were counting on having Candy Walker, you know. And we don’t really have time to go pull somebody else in.”

“How could Walker have helped you, if he was recovering from plastic surgery?”

Karpis shifted his smile to one side of his face; it didn’t look any better there. “We just need someone to stick by the women. While we pull the snatch, and for a time, after. Easy work. Candy could’ve cut it, even with bandages on his puss.”

“I see. Well...”

“You’d only get half a cut — half of which goes to Candy. Or to Lulu, that is. We look after our own.”

“That’s only right.”

“Still, it should run five grand. What do you say?”

Five grand!

“I’ll, uh, sleep on it.”

“Good. Maybe you can get to know Lulu while you’re at it.”

“You got to be kidding... she just lost her man...”

“She’s going to need comforting. She needs somebody to look after her.”

“Well, uh...”

He put a fatherly hand on my shoulder; he was younger than me, and I owned suits that weighed more than he did — but his words carried weight just the same.

He said, “Guys like us got to pick our girls from the circles we move in. My first real girl was Herman Barker’s widow. Took up with her before Herman’s body was cool. It’s nothing to be ashamed of — just the facts of life in this game.”

“I do feel sorry for the kid,” I said, referring to Louise. This was perfect, actually: Karpis was trying to fix me up with the girl I’d come here after.

He slipped his arm around my shoulder. “Don’t feel like you’re getting sloppy seconds, Jimmy. Mind if I call you Jimmy? For example. I took up with a lot of whores in my time, but I never had any complaints about their personalities or their morals or brains or what-have-you. You can always trust a whore.”

That might make a nice needlepoint for Mildred Gillis to hang on her farmhouse wall.

“Now, Dolores, she was the sister-in-law of a guy I used to do jobs with; she’s been with me since she was sixteen. Don’t get the idea she’s fat, either — she’s just knocked up. Second time. We decided to have this one — what the hell.”

“Uh, congratulations, Karpis.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.”

I noticed a small figure walking across the farmyard toward the barn; he had a bottle of liquor in one hand, tommy gun slung over one arm.

Nelson.

“What’s he up to?” I asked.

“Oh — just taking his friend Chase some refreshment.”

“His friend who?”

“Chase. John Paul Chase. Guy worships Nelson; adores him.” He let out a nasty snicker that went well with his smile. “If Helen weren’t around, I think they’d be an item.”

“What’s Chase doing in the barn?”

“Staying there.”

“What do you mean?”

Karpis shrugged. “Staying there. He sits up in the loft with a rifle and keeps watch out that little window or door or whatever it is. See?”

I looked over toward the barn, and saw the open loft door, but nothing else.

I said, “Doesn’t anybody take turns with him?”

“No,” Karpis said. “Nelson told him to take that post, and he didn’t even blink. Just does whatever Nelson says. Sits up there and reads Western pulp magazines and keeps watch. Three days, now. Sleeps there, too — but I never knew a man to sleep lighter. Nice to have him around.”

“Hell, he didn’t even have supper with us.”

“Nelson took some out to him. He treats Chase fine — like a faithful dog.”

“Is there anybody else here I haven’t met yet?”

Karpis flashed that awful smile. “Not that I can think of, offhand.”

He went inside and I followed him; he joined the poker game, taking Nelson’s empty chair. I watched for a few moments, then went into the living room, where Burns and Allen were just getting over. When George had said “say good night, Gracie,” I asked Karpis’ girl Dolores about sleeping arrangements.

“You could take Doc Moran’s bed,” she suggested. “It’s free.”

“No kidding.”

“There’s a lot of bedrooms in this house, but they’re all taken. The Nelsons sleep upstairs, and Alvin and me have an upstairs bedroom, and so do Paula and Fred, and Candy and Lulu too, or anyway they did.”

“Where did Moran sleep?”

She pointed behind her. “There’s a sewing room back by the kitchen, and the two Docs each had beds back there. Cots, actually.”

“Where do the farmer and his wife sleep?”

“There’s a Murphy bed in the sitting room.”

This was turning into home away from home.

“The boys sleep in there, too,” she continued, “in pallets.”

“Sounds like a full house.”

“Sure is. Could be a topsy-turvy one tonight, though. Last I knew Paula was upstairs in her and Fred’s bedroom nursin’ Lulu.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, and Lulu don’t want to sleep in her and Candy’s bed tonight. She wants to sleep with Paula.”

“Think Fred’ll go along with that?”

She grinned; she had a much better smile than her boyfriend Karpis. “He would if he was included. But he’ll have to go sleep alone in that other bedroom, I guess.”

I decided to go up and see how Louise was doing. I found brunette Paula standing out in the hall, smoking, ever-present glass of whiskey in one hand.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said. Smiling. Sultry.

“How’s the kid?”

“Lulu? Busted up about it.”

“It’s a tough one.”

“She’s asleep, now. Poor thing.”

“Best thing for her.”

Paula brightened. “You want to do me a favor?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“Go in and look after her for me. Keep her company.”

“She doesn’t even know me...”

Paula swatted the air with her cigarette in hand. “She won’t wake up till September. But if she does, somebody should be with her.”

“I guess I could sit in there awhile.”

“That’s not what I mean. You need a place to sleep, right? Bunk in with her.”

“Don’t be foolish.”

She crooked her finger, like she was summoning a child. I complied. She leaned in with me in the doorway, where I could see Lulu, curled up in a fetal ball, pink dress way up over pretty white legs. She was sleeping deeply on one of two twin beds that were pushed close together. The bedroom was regularly the boys’ room, obviously. There was a balsa wood model plane hanging from the slanted ceiling, which was papered in dark blue with silver stars, a child’s idea of the nighttime sky.

Standing away from the open doorway, now, Paula said, “Freddie’ll be tickled to death to get the bed Lulu and Candy been sleeping in — we ain’t had a double bed in a week. You’d be doing us a favor, and she isn’t going to mind, you in your separate bed and all. She shouldn’t be left alone, you know.”

I thought about that.

Paula put a hand on my shoulder; her breath was whiskey-scented, but she was sexy just the same. She said, “Let me tell you something. My husband Charlie was knocked off on a bank score, a year ago spring. Freddie picked me up on the rebound, within the week. It’s not that I’m such a floozie, understand. It’s just I needed a strong shoulder. And Freddie didn’t come out so bad on the deal, d’you think?” She smiled wryly and gestured to her navy dress with the white polka dots and the curves.

I smiled back at her. “I think he did just fine.”

She patted my cheek, sipped her glass. “You could get lucky, too, friend. Lulu’s a hell of a girl. What’s your name again?”

“Jimmy.”

“Nice name. Nice guy. Maybe Lulu’s the one who might strike it lucky. Who knows?”

Soon I’d moved myself into the little bedroom — all I had was one small overnight bag with a change of underwear and socks, and some toilet articles (the toilet was out back, incidentally — like the Auburn, a two-seater); but I decided it best to sleep in my pants and my undershirt on top of the covers. There was an open window by a small desk on which some Big Little Books were confined by horsehead bookends twice their size. On one wall were some shelves with a baseball glove or two and some toy guns and such. Despite the trappings being male, I couldn’t help but feel this child’s room was appropriate for the slip of a thing next to me, the farmer’s daughter who slept so deeply beside me.

I lay on my back, staring at the slanted ceiling, its starry sky visible above me; light from outside — not just the moon, but that well-lit farmyard — made that possible. The girl beside me seemed bathed in blue ivory.

I thought about waiting till everyone was asleep and spiriting her out to the Auburn. But how could I do that and get past this fellow Chase, in the barn? And surely somebody in the house kept a sort of guard; I hadn’t heard the details, but that seemed a safe assumption to make. And how was I to take this girl with me, without her making a fuss? Her emotions were on edge already, let alone a stranger grab her and try making off with her.

My thoughts careened from dead Dr. Moran to the pending kidnapping that I hoped to avoid being drawn into — though I knew I already was. Maybe if it had been a bank they were planning to rob, I could’ve let it pass. But kidnapping? No. Like every other red-blooded bozo in this country, the Lindbergh tragedy had got to me, and made the idea of kidnapping seem something abhorrent. It had me thinking in terms of children, too, which was ridiculous, because the Karpis-Barker specialty was a rich banker or brewer. Still, stealing money was one thing — stealing a person was quite another...

I should have been frightened, and I suppose I was, but too much was going on, too much was whirling through my brain, for me to feel the full impact of what I was caught up in.

More than anything, I missed Sally. Missed her and her silk sheets — how I wished this dinky kids’ bedroom was her white bedroom at the Drake — and I regretted our parting angry.

Angry. That was something else working at me: anger. Anger and my old friend frustration were knocking around with everything else in my head, vying for attention. I’d been suckered, I’d been used — Frank Nitti had made me pay for my trip to Outlaw Land with the Moran setup. And what could I do about it? Being angry with Nitti was like getting pissed off at God. You could do it, but it wouldn’t get you anywhere. Except hell maybe.

My fault — my own damn fault for dealing with Nitti, and expecting a fair shake. From his point of view this no doubt was a fair shake: tit for tat. He’d done a lot for me — he gave me a name and cover and backed it up, and now here I was, the girl I’d come to find lying right beside me.

I just had no idea how to get her the hell out of here.

That was the thought Louise — Lulu, if you will — interrupted when she woke up and saw me and screamed.

33

I placed a hand over her mouth as gently as I could; she continued to scream into it, but I’d stifled her enough for her to be able to hear me.

“Please,” I said. “Please don’t. I’m just here to keep you company.”

Her wide, wide-set brown eyes seemed to consider that, and beneath my palm she stopped screaming.

I took it away. That had been one hell of a piercing cry she’d let out, worthy of Fay Wray, but I didn’t hear footsteps rushing up the steps or down the hall — no one was hollering out, wondering what was wrong. Maybe women screaming in the night was standard stuff around these parts.

She looked at me, mouth open, lips trembling, eyes still wide, nostrils flared, like the distressed damsel on a pulp-magazine cover.

“Who... who are you?” she finally managed.

“You met me before,” I said. “Jimmy Lawrence. I drove Ma here from Chicago.”

The eyes narrowed a bit. “Oh.”

“They didn’t have a bed for me, and your friend Paula asked me to sleep in here, so somebody’d be with you through the night.”

The door cracked open and Paula, cigarette dangling from her red lips, said, “That’s right, sugar. Didn’t want you to be alone in your hour of need.”

Somebody’d heard the scream, after all.

I said to Louise, “I’ll leave if you like.”

She looked toward Paula. “Can’t you stay with me? You’re my friend.”

“I’m your pal,” Paula said. “But I’m Freddie’s girl, and he wants the pleasure of my company, tonight. You understand, sugar. You going to be all right?”

I got off the bed, stood. “I’ll leave.”

Louise looked at me; she was a small thing, but she had eyes you could dive into and swim around in for a lifetime or two.

Paula said, “Why don’t you let him keep you company? You don’t want to be alone tonight.”

Louise thought about that for a moment, shook her head no, meaning she didn’t want to be alone, and Paula smiled and said, “That’s a good girl,” and shut the door on us.

I stood there looking down at the girl, in the blue-ivory semi-light. She looked up at me. She looked pretty pitiful.

I said, “Is it all right if I lay back down, there?”

She swallowed. Nodded. Then quickly added, “But keep your pants on.”

I smiled at her. “I don’t do anything in a hurry.”

Despite herself, despite her situation, she found a tiny smile for me. Said, “Well, keep ’em on, anyway.”

“I can pull these beds apart a ways, if you like.”

“No. No, that’s okay.”

I lay back down.

She turned her back to me.

A few minutes ticked by, and then I heard her sobbing. I thought about touching her shoulder, but let it go.

Then she turned to me and, a hanky clenched in her fist, face slick with tears, said, “This is all wet.” She meant the hanky. “You wouldn’t happen to...?”

“Sure,” I said, and dug out a handkerchief for her.

She patted her face dry; no new tears seemed on the way, at least not immediately. She said, “I must look a mess.”

“You look fine. But you got a right to feel that way.”

She shook her head despairingly. “He was alive one minute, and the next...” Her chin crinkled in anger; she looked like a little girl about to throw a tantrum. “I’d like to kill that damn doctor!”

“It’s been taken care of.”

That shocked her. The angry look turned blank and she said, rather hollowly, “They... killed him?”

I nodded.

“Good,” she said. But I didn’t quite buy it.

“You don’t have to pretend for me,” I said.

“What?”

“That you like it. The cheap way life and death is traded in around here.”

She swallowed again. “I didn’t really mean I wanted Doc Moran dead. He’s a... he was a lush and always crowing about himself. But...”

“But he didn’t deserve to die for it. That what you’re saying?”

She shrugged a little; leaned on her elbow and looked at me. Those eyes. Those goddamn eyes.

“He didn’t mean to kill Candy,” she said. “I hate him for not being a better doctor. But I’m not glad they killed him.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Just don’t expect me to cry for him,” she said, with an edge of bitterness. “I don’t have any tears left for that damn old drunk.”

I nodded.

“You’re nice to stay in here with me, Mr. Lawrence.”

“Call me Jimmy. Should I call you Lulu?”

“If you like... Jimmy.”

“What’s Lulu short for?”

“Louise. Nobody around here calls me that.”

“Would it be okay if I call you that?”

That surprised her; but she nodded, three little nods.

“Why don’t you get some sleep, Louise.”

“All right,” she said.

She turned on her stomach, facing away from me.

I lay looking up at the stars in the ceiling-paper sky.

After a while she said, “Jimmy?”

“Yes, Louise?”

“Would you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Slide over onto my bed, with me.”

“Well...”

“Not for that. I need... held. You won’t try anything. You don’t have that sort of face. I can trust you. Can’t I?”

“You can trust me, Louise.” Taking into consideration I was pretending to be somebody I wasn’t, I figured she could do worse than trust me, among this company.

“I’m going to turn on my side,” she said.

She did.

“Now could you cuddle up to me? Maybe slip your arm around my waist?”

I did.

“That’s... that’s how Candy and me slept. Like spoons.”

“I got a girl back in Chicago,” I said. “We sleep like this sometimes.”

“It’s nice, isn’t it? Kinda... comforting.”

“It is nice.”

I was right up against her; she was soft and smelled like perfume. Dime-store perfume maybe, but I liked it anyway. I felt a stirring in me and had to pull back away from her rounded little rump; but she pushed back against me and said, ingenuously, “Candy was so sweet.”

Soon she began sobbing quietly; into my hanky. My erection receded. I kept my arm around her waist and hugged her to me.

“What am I going to do without him? What am going to do?”

I stroked her head, said, “There, there.”

And pretty soon she fell asleep.

So did I, and then I heard an unearthly sound, a screech out of a nightmare, and bolted upright in bed.

“What the hell was that?” I said.

Louise was sitting over at the child’s desk, combing her bobbed blond hair out with a brush; she was wearing that same pink dress I’d seen her in yesterday — like me, she’d slept in her clothes. She smiled over at me. She had no makeup on and looked about thirteen years old. The kind of thirteen-year-old that makes boys reconsider how they feel about girls, however.

She made a crinkly smile. “A rooster, silly. Haven’t you ever been on a farm before?”

I rubbed my face with a hand; I needed a shave. Sun was beginning to find its way in the open window next to her, but it still seemed pretty dark out to me.

“No,” I said. “This is a first for me.”

Still brushing her hair, she said, “I was raised on a farm. My daddy’s a farmer.”

“Do you miss your daddy?”

She looked sad, kept brushing. “Sometimes. I don’t imagine he misses me, though.”

“Why’s that?”

“He thinks I’m a bad girl. A sinner.”

“He’s a religious man, your daddy?”

“Too religious. He used to beat me with a belt because I wasn’t devout enough.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “At least when he beat me I knew he cared.”

“Pardon?”

She put the brush down and came and sat on the side of the bed next to me. “Sometimes that’s how people show you they care about you.”

“Hitting you?”

She nodded. “I don’t say it’s the best way. I wouldn’t ever hit anybody myself. And Candy — he hardly ever hit me. I guess that’s why I loved him so much.”

She seemed better this morning, seemed already to have accepted the finality of Candy’s death. Maybe in this fast crowd she ran with, fast death was commonplace. I asked her.

“You ever see anybody die before?” I said.

“Sure. Two times.”

“Guys working with Candy, you mean?”

She nodded. “They got shot on jobs.”

“I see.”

“And Candy killed some people. I never went on any jobs with him, so I never saw it. And I don’t like to think of it. But it’s true.”

“What kind of people?”

“Did he kill? A bank guard and a sheriff’s deputy. It bothered Candy.”

“It did?”

“Yes — he was afraid of the electric chair.”

I said nothing.

“He doesn’t have to be afraid anymore,” she said, and then tears gushed forth, and she was burying her face in my chest.

I held her for a while; by the time she came up for air, the sun was pouring through the windows like fresh buttermilk.

I wiped her tears with the bedspread. She smiled at me bravely. I got lost in her eyes, brown, brown eyes.

She said, “You didn’t take advantage of me last night.”

I swallowed.

“Most men would’ve.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You could’ve. I was helpless.”

“You look like you’ve got some spunk left. You let out a pretty good scream when you saw me, for example.”

She shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. You could’ve taken me. A man can have a woman if he wants her.”

“You mean he can rape her.”

She nodded.

“Where I come from,” I said, “that’s not an acceptable way of getting to know a girl.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Back East.”

“Is that why you’re such a gentleman?”

I smiled. “That’s another first for me — being called a gentleman.”

“I think that’s what I’ll call you. Gentleman Jim. A real gentleman in a lousy world.”

“Let’s just leave it at ‘Jimmy.’”

“No — I like ‘Gentleman Jim’ better.” She beamed at me; she was trying a little too hard to be cheerful, but I was glad she was making the effort.

“Whatever you say,” I said.

She grabbed me by the hand and yanked me off the bed.

“Come on, Gentleman Jim... this old farm girl’s going to show you around a farm. You got some learning to do.”

I told her I had to go the bathroom, but she said that would be no problem.

I could stop at the outhouse on our way.

34

When we cut across the backyard, a dozen chickens were dancing around, scrounging for food. One with yellow legs and another with bluish-green legs were dancing in place, pecking at something that looked like an old beat-up leather glove.

Louise caught my curious expression and said, “That’s a rat skin. That’s about all the cat leaves behind, when she’s done with it.”

“Hens aren’t real particular about their breakfast, are they?”

Deadpan, she said, “Those aren’t hens. Not yet. They don’t start laying eggs till they’re seven months.”

She led me by the hand beyond the barn and silo, down a dew-wet path, at the end of which half a dozen cows, black, brown, stood gazing at us with bored expressions. Then we cut over by a shocked field, each shock looking like a small rustic wigwam.

“Velvet barley,” Louise explained. She pulled a stalk out of one of the shocks, crushed the head against her palm, lifted her palm to her lips and blew away the chaff. She held out her palm for me to see the seeds there. “You like beer?”

“Sure.”

“That’s the malting barley.” She dropped the seeds to the earth and moved on. “Mr. Gillis has fifteen acres of barley. They plant this stuff quick, soon as the ground’s fit.”

“How many acres does Gillis have here?”

“Eighty.”

“Is that big?”

“Not really. Not small, though.”

Birds were singing. I wasn’t used to seeing this much sky; in Chicago, in the Loop, you have to raise your head to see any sky. And the last bird I heard sing in the city was Anna Sage’s parakeet.

I asked, “Can he make a living at it?”

“He could if the prices were right. The livestock’ll get that barley. He can’t afford to sell it for what it’s going.”

“You ought to be able to make a living with land like this. Crops like these.”

She shrugged, walking ahead of me now. Not holding my hand — leading the way.

“Mr. Gillis does all right with his sideline,” she said.

“You mean taking in house guests.”

She nodded.

“You ever stay here before?” I asked her.

She nodded again. “A few times.”

We were at the edge of the barley field, now. Some stones were scattered about, some of them nearly boulders, big cold seeds not worth planting. She pointed.

“That grass is Mr. Gillis’ hay. He’s got about six acres in grass. For the cows and horses.”

We walked along, skirting a patch given to more stones and nettles. “Always a patch or two a farmer can’t tame,” she explained. “There’s the corn.”

I walked behind her, like an Indian, down green rows of corn only a few feet high. Silo corn, she said; planted late to keep it green. It would go eight feet. Up ahead, she said, was some corn Gillis had planted around the end of May.

I followed her down these rows, too, but they were damn near as tall as I was. The air here smelled sweet; up ahead Louise was breathing it in, smiling. At home.

We passed a field of yellow sweet clover, on our way to a field of (she said) alfalfa. She picked off a few tiny purple flowers, saying, “Relish for the cows.” Gillis only had a couple acres of alfalfa, not enough by her way of thinking. We walked past another field (oats, she said) cut and shocked, which she dismissed as pig feed.

“Because of the price?” I asked.

“The price,” she nodded. “My daddy got two dollars for an eighty-pound tin of milk, few years back. Now it’s less than a dollar.”

“That’s rough.”

“It’s the banks. That’s why I don’t think it’s so bad, what Candy and the others do.”

“Rob banks, you mean.”

She glanced at me, brown eyes wide. “Sure. All the banks ever do is foreclose on farmers.”

We were to a big white-flowered field, riffling in the slight morning breeze. Buckwheat, she said.

“Just an acre,” she went on. “Used for chicken and hog feed. You know what he could get selling it? Penny a pound.” She shook her head. “Farmer’s life.”

“But you miss it, don’t you?”

She was looking at the ground, watching her feet as she walked. “Maybe. A little.”

I followed her down into a hollow and we sat under some trees. Another bird was singing. I asked her what kind it was.

“Robin,” she said. “He doesn’t know from the Depression.”

“Why don’t you go back home, Louise?”

“Home?”

“The farm.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why?”

She was sitting with her knees bunched up, clutching her legs with clasped arms; she had nice legs, by the way. White. Smooth.

“I was married. Still am, really.”

“I see.”

“He was bad to me. Worse than my daddy, even. He was a lot like my daddy, really. Maybe that’s why I took up with him.”

That seemed a pretty fair insight for a girl who was part farm girl, part moll. Louise was somebody who had the promise of being her own person, if she could just break away from the sordid world Candy Walker had introduced her to.

“Couldn’t you go back to your daddy?” I asked.

“Would he take me back?”

A rhetorical question, but I thought about answering it, anyway.

Before I could, she answered it herself: “He wouldn’t want me back. I’m a sinner. A fallen woman. And as for Seth, he’d probably shoot me. He said as much.”

“He did?”

She hugged her legs, as if chilled. And it wasn’t chilly.

“He said if I ever took up with another man, he’d see me dead.”

I thought about telling her what her father had told me — that her husband Seth had already taken up with another woman (or two), and could care less about getting her back, at this point; it had been a year, after all.

“And even if Seth wasn’t a problem, I don’t know if I’d want to go back to my daddy even if he’d have me. Go back to some stupid little farm after the life I’ve seen?”

I didn’t point out that we seemed to be on a stupid little farm at the moment, and that the life she’d seen with Candy Walker was a squalid nightmare.

But I did say, “Maybe you should start over. Just go to a big city and find a job.”

She released her legs and stretched them out in front of her; the pink dress was up around her knees. Nice calves, as we say down on the farm.

She said, “I did have some typing in school. I had almost two years of high school, you know.”

“You speak well. Express yourself well.”

She liked hearing that; she gave me a broad, toothy smile that was as refreshing as that sweet smell back in the corn rows. She said, “I read a lot, you know. I like the movies, too. I always thought I’d be... you’ll laugh.”

“No I won’t.”

“An actress. There, I said it, go ahead, laugh. Every dumb little farm girl wants to run off to the big city and be a star.”

“Sometimes it works out,” I said, thinking of Sally.

“Well, at least I ran off. I don’t suppose my life is so different from being in show business.”

“You’re sure on the road a lot.”

“But even a typist. A secretary. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? That’d be a step up, and in a big city. I can’t stay on with the Barkers and all. With Candy gone, I just don’t see why I’d stay.”

I touched her shoulder. “Why not go home, at least give your father a chance? Then you can go to the big city, if you like. I got friends in Chicago, for instance. Maybe I could help out.”

She touched my face with a hand that smelled nicely of grain; the hand she’d cracked the barley stalk with. She said, “You really are sweet, my Gentleman Jim.”

She really did read, didn’t she? The romance magazines, that is.

She was saying, “How can anybody be so good and honest as you?”

Since I was a liar trying to manipulate her into doing my client’s bidding, I couldn’t wholeheartedly agree with her.

So I just said, “I’m not, really. I just think a girl as pretty as you doesn’t need a life as shabby as this.”

I thought she might take offense, but she didn’t.

She raised her skirt. Lifted it slowly, up over her thighs. Up to a yellow fringe between her legs. No underthings.

She wasn’t bashful, this girl.

“I know Candy is fresh in his grave,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter. He’s gone, and you’re here — and I want you. I need you. You could make me feel better.”

This would go over real big with my client.

I said, “I don’t think I should, Louise.”

She reached behind her and was unbuttoning the dress; then she was easing it down to her waist and her breasts were round and her nipples were pink and I unbuttoned my trousers.

I was getting a Sheik out of my billfold when she said, “No. You don’t need that.”

“You want me to...?”

“Pull out when it’s time? No. Don’t worry. I can’t have kids.”

A more sensitive man might’ve had his ardor dampened by that remark; but I was still caught up in the sweet smell of corn and the fringe between her legs and pink nipples and I had her on the grass, under the trees, her bottom small and firm and yet soft in my hands, as I slid in and out of her, went round and round in her, as she moved beneath me with a yearning that went beyond the moment, and she moaned and groaned and cried out when she came, and so did I. Then she was sitting up and in my arms, a bundle of flesh and undone clothes and sobbing.

Pretty soon I put my pants on.

That’s when I noticed, not far from where we’d just got to know each other, biblically speaking, a patch of ground without any grass.

The grave where Candy Walker and Doc Moran lay entwined, much as Louise and I had been.

A wave of nausea hit me, as strong as the smell of ammonia. But there was nothing in my stomach, so nothing came up.

But Louise, standing now, hands behind her, buttoning, said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“We better get back for breakfast.”

“Okay.”

“Hmmm,” she said. Noting the patch of grassless ground. “Wonder what’s planted there.”

Nothing that’ll grow, I thought.

“Let’s get back,” I said.

Breakfast was under way, when we did, and Paula — having the alcoholic’s standard plate of hardly any food (but no glass of whiskey yet) — smiled wickedly at Louise, recognizing what I can best if rudely describe as the freshly fucked look on Louise’s face, and Louise blushed, and I frowned at Paula, but nobody else noticed anything. We sat and ate. Ma wasn’t cooking, this time, but Mrs. Gillis did a pretty fair job of it herself. Scrambled eggs and bacon and fried potatoes with gravy and glasses of milk all around.

Ma seemed a little blue about it, actually — especially since her boys Fred and Doc were bent over their plates, inhaling the stuff.

Karpis was sitting next to me, his girl Dolores next to him. “You can freshen up in our room,” he said. “Right across from yours.”

“Thanks.”

“Towels and a mirror and a basin. You’ll have to come downstairs and get some fresh water, though. If you want to shave, anyway.”

“Yeah, I guess I do look a little scruffy.”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “We don’t stand on ceremony, here.”

Nelson was eating a plate of food that would’ve fed a man twice his size; sitting right across from me, next to his cute little brunette wife, he said, “I hear you’re coming in with us. Taking Candy’s place.”

At the phrase “taking Candy’s place,” Paula laughed, and a few heads turned toward her with expressions that said they didn’t get it. But the moment quickly passed, thank God.

“Yeah,” I said. “And I’m pleased to be in such high-flying company.”

Nelson smiled; his mustache looked both wispy and fake, like he was a kid who pasted on each strand with glue, one at a time. “Good to have you aboard. Sorry about the ridin’ I give you yesterday. Chicago says you’re aces, so there’ll be no more complaints from me.”

“Thanks, Nelson.”

“You can call me B.G.”

For Big George.

“Sure, B.G.,” I said.

I was shaving in Karpis and Dolores’ room when Karpis came in, his creepy smile on display.

“You forgot these,” he said.

He was holding out my glasses. I had set them on a dresser last night before I went to bed, and had, frankly, forgot to put the damn things on this morning.

“Thanks,” I said, gliding the razor across my throat.

“I notice they’re window glass,” he said.

I wondered if I had the nerve to use a razor to kill a man.

“So are mine,” he said, tapping the side of his wire-frames.

“No kidding,” I said. Shaving.

“Got to change our looks as best we can, in this business. I try to wear ’em all the time. You get used to ’em after a while.”

I smiled at him in the mirror. “I still forget sometimes. The plastic surgery’s a help, but glasses add to the basic change of appearance. Don’t you agree?”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Karpis said. He put the glasses down next to me. “Now, we’ll be leaving today, throughout the morning and early afternoon. In several cars, at staggered times.”

I nodded. “Not a good idea to travel in a caravan.”

“Nothing that attracts attention is a good idea.”

This might work out. If I could just get Louise in the Auburn — the two-seater Auburn — I could drive away with her, and break off from this fun group before they were any the wiser.

I said, “I, uh... I’m getting attached to Louise.”

Karpis flashed his sick grin again. “You’re a fast worker.”

“She’s a nice kid.”

“And lonely. You must peddle a pretty slick line to the ladies, Lawrence.”

“I get by. You mind if she rides with me?”

“Not at all. I’ll give you directions to the tourist court, before you leave.”

“I’ll take the Auburn, if that’s okay.”

“Sure. Why not.”

Karpis nodded and went out.

I dried my face off, left the big bowl of soapy dirty water on the bureau and went across the hall to the farm boys’ bedroom. Louise wasn’t in there.

I found her in the room next door. A yellow-papered room with a big double bed with a bright yellow spread. She was packing.

She looked over her shoulder at me. “This was our room. Candy’s and mine.” She gave her attention back to packing.

“You okay, Louise?”

“I’m fine.” But she didn’t sound fine.

I went over to her, touched her shoulder. “What is it?”

“I’m an evil girl. Just like my daddy always said.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We did it. You and me. Fornicated. And Candy not even dead a day. How could I be so bad?”

“It was my fault. I made you do it.”

That wasn’t true, and we both knew it, but it made her feel better to hear it. She turned to me and put her arms around me and pressed the side of her head to my chest.

“Don’t think badly of me for it,” she said.

“I wouldn’t ever.”

“I just needed to be loved. And you were so nice. I wanted you. I had to have you.”

“You’re a beautiful girl, Louise, and I’ll never forget making love to you under the trees.”

She liked the sound of that; it was sappy and romantic, like the romance magazines she was packing with her clothes. Her and Ma Barker.

She smiled up at me and went back to her packing.

I said, “I’m going to drive you today.”

I’d decided not to spring my notion on her to flee our fellow outlaws and return her home to daddy. Not just yet.

She said, “We’re going to that tourist camp near Aurora, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“It’s kind of a nice place. Can we share a cabin there? I mean, do you want to?”

“I’d love to.”

“Hand me my scrapbook, please. Over on the dresser.”

I got it for her; it was a big fat book, bulging with clippings.

“What’s in this?” I asked her.

She laid it in the suitcase, on top of her clothes, but opened it up to show me. I saw a headline: BANK GUARD SHOT.

“It’s all Candy’s press notices,” she said, like she was talking about an actor. “I’m even in some of them.”

I leafed through it. Bank robberies, a gas station stickup, jewelry store, the Bremer kidnapping. I even found the duplicate of the clipping her father had shown me, in which she (an “unidentified moll”) was pictured, that is, sketched.

As I turned the pages, she was looking down at them with a fond, nostalgic little smile.

“Candy made his mark,” she said. “They can’t take that away from him. Or me.”

She closed the book, and closed the suitcase.

“Excuse me.” It was Karpis, peeking in.

“Change of plans,” he said. “You’re going to drive Ma. She says the Auburn’s hers, and you’re her driver, and that’s that. No use arguing with Ma.”

He smiled that smile and was gone.

“No use arguing with Ma,” Louise said, smiling a little herself, but meaning it.

“I guess I’ll see you later,” I said. “At the tourist camp.”

She put her arms around me and gave me a kiss. A long romance-magazine kiss.

And then I left.

Because there was no use arguing with Ma.

35

So Ma and I went back on the road, back pretty much the way we came — down Highway 19, turning onto 22, heading south toward Aurora. Ma couldn’t find any hillbilly music on the radio, but she did discover a fresh batch of Burma Shave signs along the way, and read them to me, haw-hawing. In between she’d hum her hymns.

I didn’t mind Ma. I was used to her. I wished she was Louise, so I could get the hell out of this, but I was used to her. I was getting used to this highway driving, too; passing slower moving traffic — the occasional slowpoke in a Model T, the farmer hauling a hayrack — with some confidence, now. The Auburn could overtake another vehicle with relative ease, despite these narrow two-lane highways.

Like Ma said: “Keep well to the right... of the oncoming car... get your close shaves... from the half-pound jar! Haw haw.”

Burma Shave.

It was late morning when we reached the tourist camp, several miles north of Aurora on a curve of the highway outlined by whitewashed stones that parted midway like the Red Sea; there a gravel drive led in to a court where against a backdrop of lush trees half-a-dozen two-room white frame cabins were arranged in a gentle arc, with a larger cottage in the middle. As you pulled in the drive, a neon sign, burning pointlessly in the sun, said FOX VALLEY COURTS, and NO VACANCY. In case you couldn’t make out that the sign was lit, a card in the window of the central, larger cabin repeated the NO VACANCY message in bold black letters. A lanky man in his forties in a Panama hat and a white shirt with sweat circles and tan baggy pants sat on a bench, one knee pointing north, the other pointing south; he was weathered and tan and licking an ice-cream cone.

I got out of the Auburn, leaving it running, and went over to him.

“No vacancy,” he said, looking at the cone, not at me.

“We got a reservation,” I said.

Now he looked at me. “Name?”

I glanced over at Ma. She leaned out the window and said, “Hunter.”

The man nodded; the cone dripped onto his lap. He didn’t care.

“Little woman’ll fix you up,” he said, and pointed behind him with a thumb to a screen door. I went in, and there was a check-in counter and a dreary little reception area — the only color in this narrow outer room was provided by a rack of postcards on the counter — but no little woman. There was a metal bell, however, which I dinged.

The little woman came through an archway behind the counter, to the left of the wall where a dozen room keys hung. The little woman weighed about 210 and stood five nine. She could’ve put Baby Face Nelson in her back pocket and sat on him — of course his tommy gun might’ve goosed her some. She had a blue-and-white floral house-dress on, very cheery, but she looked as depressed as the economy.

“I never seen you before,” she said, looking at me wearily, warily. She was in her thirties, I’d wager, but most people would’ve said forties — her hair in a graying bun that seemed about to unravel, several chins stacked on each other. A pretty face was buried in there somewhere. Green alert eyes.

“We never met, ma’am.”

“But you’re one of them.” Accusingly.

“I guess I am.”

Heavy sigh. “How many cabins you need?”

“Two.”

She got a pair of keys off the board behind her. Handed them to me. Looked at me slow and hard.

“Stay away from my Eddie and Clarice.”

“Pardon?”

“I got two young ones — Eddie seven, Clarice eight. They already think your friend Nelson’s the cat’s meow. I don’t want ’em shining up to any more of your kind.”

Even though I wasn’t an outlaw, really, I resented her attitude. “Our money’s good enough for you,” I pointed out.

“That’s my husband’s doing. If he hadn’t done time, he wouldn’t be so partial to you people.” She shook her head side to side; her lower lip trembled — like she was angry, or about to cry, or both. “You’ll be the death of him yet.”

Or maybe he’d just do some more time. He had to be a greedy type, her ice-cream-cone licker out on the bench; there were plenty of tourists, this time of year, to fill a tourist camp like this, in the heart of the Fox River valley. But they’d pay perhaps a buck and a half for a room for a night. The tourists about to descend on Fox Valley Courts would be paying twenty times that.

I drove Ma down to her cabin. Each white frame structure was divided into two numbered rooms. The half a cabin I’d be sharing with Louise was down a few doors. I began carrying Ma’s things in for her; she immediately stretched out on one of the twin beds and began to read a Photoplay magazine with Claudette Colbert on the cover. It took me two trips to cart her stuff in, by which time she was asleep, snoring, the magazine folded over her generous bosom, Claudette’s smiling face rising and falling.

I decided to have a nap myself. In my own room. There were twin beds here, too, several feet apart, and I hoped to keep it that way tonight. Your client’s daughter, I reminded myself. The stiffening in my trousers at just the thought of her, however, indicated my client’s best interests were probably not going to be served, in this little puce-papered room.

First order of business was to use the indoor plumbing each room seemed to have. As I stood there emptying my bladder I reflected on how nice it felt to be back in the twentieth century — even if there was a bug the size of your thumb in the bathtub at my right. I didn’t bother to kill it. Live and let live. Took off my pants and took my nap.

A knocking at the door awoke me. I checked my watch and it was a little before two o’clock. I took the automatic out from under my pillow and went to the open window, where sheer curtains fluttered in a slight summer breeze. I peered out through them.

A big man — barrel-chested, six foot two, ruddy, round-faced, dark-haired, early thirties — was standing there in his shirt sleeves and suspenders. The butt of a .45 peeked out of his waistband.

It took me a few seconds, but then I realized who it was. I’d seen his picture in the papers often enough.

Charles Arthur Floyd.

Pretty Boy.

He knocked again. “Lawrence? Jimmy Lawrence?”

I cracked the door, gun in hand out of view. “That’s right,” I said. Doing my best to keep recognition out of my voice and face. “Who wants to know?”

“My name’s Charlie Floyd,” he said, and smiled. He had a small, cupid mouth, but a big smile, because when he smiled, his whole round face lit up. Like Polly Hamilton, he had apple cheeks. “I been hearin’ some good things ’bout you from mutual acquaintances.”

“Such as?”

His smile continued, but some strain was starting to show. “Nelson, Karpis, so on. Open up. Let me in. You can see both my hands and my gun. You surely got a gun on me, so what’s the worry?”

I stood back, eased the door open, held the gun on him.

He came in, shut the door behind him. His hair was dark as an Indian’s and parted in the middle, slick with grease. He had tiny brown eyes and a large nose.

“Put the shootin’ iron away,” he said. Still friendly. Still smiling — but just barely.

“Nobody mentioned your name,” I said.

“Well, you know who I am.”

“You’re Pretty Boy Floyd.”

He flinched at the name. “Don’t believe that newspaper shit. Nobody calls me that. Nobody but dumb-ass feds.” He stuck out his hand; it looked like a flesh-colored catcher’s mitt. “My friend’s call me Chock. Short for Choctaw.”

“Choctaw?”

“That’s what they call my favorite home brew, back in the hills where I come from.” He drew back the hand to pat his generous belly. “I got a weakness for it, as you can plainly see.”

Then he stuck the hand back out, and I put the gun in my waistband and shook hands with him. He had a firm grip; he may have had some fat on him, but he had more muscle.

He sat on the edge of one of the twin beds. “I’m the one who should be suspicious, Jim. Care if I call you Jim?”

“Jim’s fine. Why should you be suspicious?”

He shrugged. “I never heard of you before Nelson called me this morning.”

I shrugged. “I got pulled in on this at the last minute.”

Floyd nodded, tsk-tsked. “Shame about Candy Walker. Worked with him a few times. Nice feller. Nice of you to fill in, though. I hear you’re tied in with the Chicago crowd.”

“Yeah. So to speak.”

He pointed a finger at me. Gently. “You don’t want to go calling any of your friends, now, ’tween now and tomorrow.”

“Oh?”

He shook his big head slowly side to side. “Frank Nitti wouldn’t approve of what we’re up to.” Then he grinned like a mischievous kid with a private joke, that little mouth turning up at the corners and sending his apple cheeks into high gear. “No, sir!”

“Why wouldn’t Nitti approve?”

“You don’t know the lay of the land yet, do you, Jim? Well, what the hell — you will soon enough. Plenty of time for that.” He glanced at a pocket watch. “We’ll be having our meet, ’fore too long. You et yet?”

“I didn’t have lunch. Slept through it.”

“We’re having barbecue tonight. The feller what runs the place stocked up on chickens and ol’ Ma’s gonna cook for us. I hear she’s a whale of a cook.”

“Ma Barker? Yes she is.”

“Hey, Jim — sit down. There’s a chair over there — use it. You’re makin’ me nervous.” He said this with good humor, and he didn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body; but, unlike certain smaller men who waved tommy guns around, this was a big bruiser of a man, who could hurt you slapping you on the back for luck.

So I sat down.

“Where you from?” he asked. “Before Chicago, I mean.”

I gave him the standard Jimmy Lawrence spiel, a piece at a time; we talked for fifteen minutes. He seemed nice — I liked him. But he was obviously pumping me for information, checking me out, getting a feel for whether he could trust me or not.

Pretty soon he slapped his thighs with two catcher’s mitt hands, stood. “I could use a Coke-Cola. How ’bout you? I’m buyin’.”

I said okay, and followed him outside. We walked up to the central cabin, where the man in the Panama hat was no longer licking an ice-cream cone, though its tracks were evident on his trousers, his legs still pointing north and south. Near his bench, just under the NO VACANCY sign in the window, was a low-slung icebox of Coca-Cola, into which Floyd pumped a couple of nickels and withdrew two small, icy bottles.

We sat on the bench with the guy in the Panama; Floyd talked about the weather — how the heat wave seemed to have let up some — and the guy nodded while I just listened. We drank our Cokes, slowly. The little woman glanced out angrily through the screen door now and then. She didn’t like Floyd any more than she liked me, apparently.

A big brown Buick touring sedan pulled in around three, and Baby Face Nelson got out; he was wearing an unbuttoned vest and a snap-brim hat but no gun. Staying in the car were his wife Helen, in front, and Fred Barker and Paula in back.

Nelson strutted over to Floyd. “How are you doing, Chock?”

“Can’t complain,” Floyd said.

Nelson nodded to me. “Lawrence.”

I nodded back to him.

The guy in the Panama hat jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, grinning the same way, and pumped Nelson’s hand.

“Good to see you, Georgie,” he said.

“You look good, Ben.”

Ben turned his head to grin proudly at the still-seated Floyd, pointed with a thumb at Nelson. “We was in Joliet together,” Ben said.

Nodding sagely, Floyd said, “It’s good to have friends.”

The screen door flew open and a boy and a girl came running out, pell-mell. The boy was towheaded and wearing a blue-and-red-striped shirt and denim pants; the girl was dark-haired and wore a blue-checked gingham dress. They both had the pretty face I’d suspected had once been their mother’s.

They ran to Nelson immediately, crowded around him, bouncing up and down, laughing.

He tried not to smile as he said, “What makes you think I got anything for you?”

“Oh, I know you do, Uncle George!” the boy said; the little girl was just squealing.

Nelson’s dark-haired wife hung out the car window with a goofy smile on her face, adoring her husband and his way with kids.

Holding his hands up like a traffic cop, Nelson said, “Okay, okay — maybe I did bring something for you. Maybe I did. You know how the game goes...”

He sat on the bench where his Joliet pal Ben had been sitting; Ben was standing by the screen door, now, wearing a big shit-eating grin, watching his kids being catered to by Baby Face Nelson.

The two kids stood and waited for the signal.

Nelson held his hands up in the air, like somebody had said, stick ’em up, and said, “Okay — search me!”

The kids, squealing, yelping, began to search, looking in his every pocket, and coming back with candy — Tootsie Rolls, mostly, but some jawbreakers and other hard colorful candy, too.

When the kids each had a fat handful of candy, Nelson stood and waved his hands, saying, “Okay, okay — you got me. Now promise you won’t eat any of that till you had your supper?” And he winked elaborately at them, and they squealed some more and ran off God knows where.

The little woman had been standing watching all this out the screen door. Nelson noticed her, smiled her way, said, “I stocked up on candy ’fore I left Beaver Falls. Didn’t want to disappoint the little rascals.”

She looked out at him coldly, then receded back into the house.

Nelson shrugged, asked Ben for some room keys. Ben dutifully went inside and came back out with them.

Before he got back in the car to drive to his cabin, Nelson said to Floyd, “We never worked together. Looking forward to it.”

“Likewise,” Floyd nodded, smiling.

But the men didn’t shake hands. There was mutual respect, here, but this was an uneasy truce, just the same. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig sizing each other up.

Nelson grinned at me, wolfishly; the mustache still looked fake. “You don’t even know what this is about yet, do you, Lawrence? Ha ha ha! You’re in for a surprise.”

Then he got in the Buick with his wife and the others and drove a few doors down.

“Let’s walk,” Floyd said.

Hands in our pockets, we strolled aimlessly around back, through the trees, down to the riverbank. Trees on both sides of the river reflected off it; the sun looked at itself on the peaceful shimmer of the water.

We sat on the sloping ground, looking down at the river; there wasn’t any beach to speak of, right here. Floyd plucked a weed and chewed on the end of it.

“Ever think about getting out of it?” Floyd asked.

“Out of what?”

He smiled; cheeks seemed about to burst, and they were a burning red. “This life of crime, friend. This ol’ life of crime.” He looked out toward the trees across the river. “Wouldn’t you like to cross over there, and just be done with it?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“You probably better off with those Chicago Boys.” He said “Boys” like “bow-ahs.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’s business men.”

“Well, aren’t you?”

He grunted a laugh. “We’s small fry. Kind gets gobbled up by the bigger fish.”

I knew what he meant. There would always be room for the Capones and the Nittis; like Karpis said, the Syndicate was in “public-service-type business.” The outlaws were a dying breed. And some of them seemed to know it.

“Take this ‘Pretty Boy’ shit. And ‘Baby Face.’ Those ain’t names nobody who knows us calls us. That’s newspaper shit. Only I don’t think it starts with the newspapers.”

“You don’t?”

“I think it’s Cummings and Hoover trying to make saps out of us.”

Cummings was the U.S. attorney general, the man who was spearheading FDR’s war on crime.

“Why?” I said.

“Why? They make us sound like mad dogs so they look like big heroes when they catch us.”

“They haven’t caught you yet.”

He shook his head. “Matter of time. Matter of time.”

“My experience with the feds is they’re pretty goddamn lame.”

Floyd nodded, chewing on the weed. “But they’s so many of ’em.”

“Yeah. And they got guns now. They can cross state lines, and they got guns now.”

“I got so little to show.”

“Huh?”

“I been at this since I was in my twenties. Just a kid. And I got so little stored away. This life is expensive, you know.”

“They say you gave a lot of your money away.”

He smiled, almost shyly this time. “I did some of that. I ain’t no Robin Hood, like some’d have you think. Took care of my friends, in the hills, is all. And they took care of me. And mine.”

He sat and stared at the river.

Then he said, “I got a boy, nine. Just a tad older than that boy of Ben’s. And I got a pretty wife.” He chewed the end of the weed; then turned eagerly and said, “Want to see?”

“Sure.”

Grinning, he dug his wallet out of his back pocket. He showed me a snapshot of his wife — a lovely dark-haired woman in a white dress and hat; standing near her, putting a supportive arm around her, was a beaming kid in a white shirt and slacks.

“Good-looking kid,” I said. “Honey of a wife, too.”

He smiled, looking at the picture; after a while the smile faded, but he kept looking.

Then he put it away in the wallet; stuffed the wallet in his pocket.

I said, “They were dressed nice — look healthy, well-fed.”

Floyd nodded. “I been providin’ for ’em. But in the long run, what? This life can’t last. I’m gettin’ too old for it. And the times is passin’ me by. It’s time to get across the river.”

I didn’t follow him. I said so.

He smiled. “Sometimes you got to do something that common sense says not.”

“Like what?”

“Like a impossible job. Like a score so big, you can make a new life.”

My mouth felt dry.

I said, “Is that the kind of job going down tomorrow?”

He nodded — just the trace of a smile on the cupid lips.

I said, “All I know is it’s a kidnapping.”

“Did you know it’s a big shot? A national figger, like the damn papers put it?”

I felt something cold at the base of my spine.

“No,” I said.

“Well, it is, Jim.” He rose.

He began to walk up the slope.

I followed.

“Who?” I asked.

“How much did they say you’d be getting?”

“My cut? Something like five gees.”

“It’ll be more. I promise you that.”

We were through the trees, now.

“Who, Chock?”

“I don’t want to tell you, unless I know you’re in. In all the way. In for sure.”

“I’m in. Who?”

“One of them that’s out to end us.”

“Who.”

“Not ‘who.’ Hoover. John Edgar Hoover. Attorney general’s right-hand man. Better hurry, Jim — it’s gettin’ time for Ma’s barbecue...”

36

Shortly after Floyd and I came back around the front of the tourist camp, a Ford sedan pulled in, driven by Doc Barker. Karpis rode in front with him, and Dolores and Louise were in back. The guy in the Panama hat, Ben, fetched their cabin keys. Louise saw me through her window, beamed and climbed out of the sedan and all but ran to my side. I’d known her less than twenty-four hours and there she was, clinging to my arm like life was a sinking ship and I was a piece of floating wood.

I walked her down to the room, carrying her bag.

“Twin beds,” she said. “Too bad.”

“Louise,” I said. “I’m not so sure what happened this morning is something we ought to repeat...”

She pretended to be hurt by that; the wide-set brown eyes looked comically woeful. God, she looked cute — the bobbed blond hair, the rosy cheeks, pouty lips, slight but rounded figure well displayed in a form-fitting pink-and-white-print cotton dress with a shoelace bow at the neck. She sat on the edge of one of the beds and hiked her skirt up to where the milk of her thighs said hello above her rolled stocking tops.

“You’re too much of a gentleman sometimes, Jimmy — don’t you think?”

Then there I was with my pants down around my legs and her skirt up and I never said I was perfect, did I?

She went into the bathroom for a while, came out looking fresh and sparkly, and we lay together, clothes more or less buttoned up and back in place, and she had a smoke. I hadn’t seen her smoke before.

“You want a drag?” she asked, offering the ciggie.

“No thanks. Never picked up the habit.”

“My daddy’d whip me sure, if he saw these lips touching tobacco. Candy got me started.”

She spoke Candy’s name with a sense of history; he’d retreated into the past. Dead a day.

It wasn’t that she was cold, or heartless; she was a warm little thing, in about every way you could imagine. She’d just learned the facts of life on the outlaw road.

She said, “Should be suppertime soon, shouldn’t it?”

“Real soon. Ma’s cooking out back.”

“She’s a good cook.” Puffed the cig. “This is a nice room.”

“No outhouse tonight.”

“Yeah, and a bath and everything. That’s ugly wallpaper, though. Is that purple or brown or what? It makes the room seem small — why would they pick something so dark?”

“To keep us from noticing the cockroaches.”

“Oh,” she said, nodding. She didn’t seem to be inhaling her smoke.

Bedsprings making their unmistakable music came through the thin wall.

She giggled. “Somebody else is being naughty.”

“Who’s next door?”

“I think it’s the Nelsons.”

“Well, then they’re not being naughty. They’re married, so it’s okay with God and everybody.”

She nodded; she had a disconcerting way of taking my wisecracks at face value.

From next door, a woman’s voice said, “Less... less... oh, less!”

I said, “Doesn’t she mean ‘more’?”

“She’s saying Les — the name, Les. Short for Lester? That’s Nelson’s real name. Lester Gillis.”

That was news to me.

“Louise, honey. Can I be serious for a second?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“You said this morning you couldn’t have kids. You’re a young woman. Are you sure about that? Have you checked with a doctor, or...?”

She tried to be nonchalant, puffed her cigarette. She definitely wasn’t inhaling. She said, “A doctor made me this way. Candy knocked me up one time, and the doc that took care of it didn’t do me right.”

Next door, Baby Face Nelson’s wife was moaning.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She shrugged facially. “A real doctor looked at me later. He told me I couldn’t have kids. It’s okay. I don’t think I want kids anyways. They’re just a bother.”

The bedsprings sang next door; Nelson’s wife said, “Les! Les!”

I hugged the girl to me. “Don’t you worry about anything,” I said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

She looked at me; the big brown eyes were wet. “Really?”

“I promise.”

She hugged me. Hard. Desperately hard.

Silence next door.

A few minutes later somebody knocked and hollered, “Soup’s on!”

Nelson.

“Time to chow down, lovebirds! Ha ha ha.”

Behind the central cabin, in which Ben and the little woman and their two kids lived, was a little brick patio, surrounded by a stone wall about waist-high. A slatted brown-stained picnic table, large enough for a dozen or so people, was in the middle. At the left was one of those white swings that looked like an inverted wooden V with the top squared off, in which two people could sit facing each other. At the moment Baby Face and his wife Helen were doing that very thing. To the right was a brick barbecue oven, the lower part as tall as a man and wide as his reach, with two openings, wood burning in the bottom, smaller one, and iron grids in the larger arched opening above that, at which point it narrowed into a chimney. Ma, wearing her calico apron over one of her familiar floral tents, was poking at various halfed chickens spread out on the lower of two grills, basting them occasionally from a bowl of thin red sauce; a pot of baked beans was biding its time on the upper grid.

The picnic table began to fill up, and soon the whole gang — if you’ll pardon the expression — was having at the platters of barbecue chicken and the several bowls of coleslaw and the pot of baked beans; beers, Cokes, glasses of milk were scattered about, as were plenty of paper napkins. Baby Face Nelson and Helen, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker brothers and Fred’s girl Paula, Old Creepy Karpis and Dolores, chowing down like this was a family picnic. Speaking of family, Ben, the little woman and their two kids were down at one end of the table. The little woman had, in fact, made the slaw, which was very good, and had got the fire going earlier in the afternoon that had made the chicken possible. But that was the extent of her being sociable, and she wasn’t eating much, just picking at her paper plate.

Her kids would look down the table toward Nelson, who would wink at them, and the kids would grin at him, and each other. I’d seen this at the farm, too — Nelson got along famously with Verle and Mildred’s two boys, as well — and wondered if somehow I was seeing the real George Nelson. Or anyway, Lester Gillis.

His wife Helen picked up on the byplay between him and the kids, and said to him, “I miss our two.”

Nelson looked momentarily sad — the only time I ever saw sadness touch his face — and said, “We got to find a way to get to Mom’s and see ’em. We just got to.”

Louise whispered to me, “That’s sweet,” without sarcasm. I don’t think she and sarcasm were acquainted, actually.

Next to Nelson was a dark-haired, dark-eyed man, eating quietly, holding the messy chicken in his hands almost daintly, like the dead barbecued bird was a teacup. He was handsome, a lady-killer type, but on the cadaverous side, with a little Ronald Colman mustache, and even sitting down you could see he was tall, much taller than Nelson. This was John Paul Chase, Nelson’s dog-loyal sidekick, who’d been posted in the barn back at the Gillises’. I hadn’t seen him arrive, so he’d apparently come later in a car of his own.

He said, “Pass the salt, please.”

It was the only thing I ever heard him say.

Nelson would speak to him occasionally, and Chase would just nod. Nelson called him J.P. Using initials for nicknames was a trend Nelson was trying to set in these circles, with no apparent success.

There was no talk of crime at the table. The subjects at hand were baseball (did the St. Louis Cardinals, a.k.a. the “Gashouse Gang,” have the pennant sewn up or not?) and boxing (would Ross take McLarnin in their rematch next month?) and how good Ma’s cooking was (better ’n Betty Crocker’s).

Doc Barker, who’d taken little part in the small talk, did at one point say, “Where’s your friend Sullivan?”

Floyd, hands red with barbecue sauce, glanced above the half-eaten half a chicken he was eating (his second) and said, “He don’t feel so good. We tied one on last night.”

Fred Barker paused mid-chicken to grin, gold teeth flashing. “Hung over, huh?”

Floyd smiled; he had sauce all over his lips and teeth. “Way over.”

Doc said, “Is he going to be up for it?”

“Sure,” Floyd said, matter-of-factly.

“I never worked with the guy.”

“I have,” Floyd said. Friendly but with a hard edge.

“I never even heard of him.”

Floyd put the chicken down. “I don’t work with just anybody, Doc.”

“I never said you did, Chock.”

Nelson, working on a bite of baked beans, said, “Yeah, why isn’t your pal Richetti in on this one? I thought he was your right-hand man.”

“He’s on the mend. Caught a bullet while back.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Nelson said. “Suppose he’s holed up in the Cookson Hills, huh?”

Floyd shook his head no. “We been havin’ to avoid the hills. Ever since the feds and the state militia did that sweep through there February last, we been stayin’ out.”

Karpis, who was sharing half a chicken with Dolores, said, “I heard they only nailed a dozen or so crooks, all of ’em small-timers, with that search party.” Small laugh. “A thousand men combing the hills for small change.”

Floyd nodded. “Still, with the governor willin’ to turn up the heat that high, we been keeping out of there. We been holing up ’round Toledo way.”

Doc said, “Licavoli mob’s helping you out, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Floyd said. “For a price.”

Doc sighed, nodded. “Yeah. This ol’ life ain’t cheap, is it?”

“Life’s cheap enough,” Floyd said. “It’s livin’ that gets expensive.”

Louise, who was an even daintier eater than John Paul Chase (she was the only one at the table cutting the meat off the chicken with her knife and fork, instead of just using her hands — her daddy must’ve beat some manners in her), had finished her meal and was starting to complain of getting eaten up by mosquitoes. The sun was going down and the bugs were coming out.

Floyd stood. “You nice gals can clear the table, if you would, and get in away from the skeeters. Us men got work to do.”

Karpis wiped his face and hands with a napkin and stood as well. “Yes we do. Let’s go down to my cabin.”

The men went down to his cabin.

37

Karpis’ cabin was identical to ours, except with the beds on the opposite side of the room. In addition he’d had some folding chairs brought in. Everybody found chairs or sat on the edge of one of the beds, which was where I ended up, over to the far left, by the wall, facing Karpis, who, looking more and more like a schoolteacher, stood by the facing wall where he’d tacked a big homemade grease-pencil map of the Chicago Loop.

Floyd was the last to come in, with his hungover partner Sullivan in tow, the little-man-who-wasn’t-there at dinner, an average-looking guy in a dark suit, wearing sunglasses and a fedora, despite being indoors. They took seats across the room, near the door, where I couldn’t quite see ’em.

It was a little warm, a little stuffy in the room, with all these men crowded in, most of them smoking; no cigars in the crowd, at least. There was a breeze tonight, coming in the half-open windows, and it was appreciated. Most of the men were in shirt sleeves; I wore the lightweight white suit, gun tucked under my arm. If I was going to play in the World Series of crime, I figured I ought to have my bat along.

Karpis, in a white shirt buttoned to the neck and baggy brown pants, stood with folded arms, slouching a little. He was, like me, wearing his window-glass wire-rims. “I guess everybody knows our objective.”

Nelson laughed, but bitterly. “We’re going to snatch the big fed. The loud-mouth son of a bitch who calls us yellow rats from behind a goddamn desk. We’re going to snatch him, haul in the big dough, and then fuckin’ kill him.”

“No,” Karpis said, pointing a finger at Nelson like a kid in his class. “We don’t kill him.”

“Why?” Nelson said. It was almost a whine.

“Because,” Karpis said, “he’s more trouble to us dead. Better we embarrass and disgrace and humiliate the bastard, and then cut him loose, than have him be a dead hero for the feds and press to rally ’round.”

From across the smoky room came Floyd’s voice. “I agree. The son of a bitch likes to call us ‘vile’ and ‘vicious’ and ‘mad dogs’ and that. Kill him and we make him look right.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Nelson said evenly.

Floyd said, “That’s just handin’ Hoover’s attorney general boss more ammunition against us. Then he just sticks another son of a bitch in Hoover’s chair, and what’s to gain? The days ahead is gonna be hot enough.”

Karpis took over. “George, listen. Sure, picking Hoover for our mark comes partly out of wanting to even scores with the son of a bitch. Make him look bad, make him look stupid, put him on the spot. Of course. But the real point of this, the main point, is to grab a public figure so important the government’ll cough up some real dough to get him back. The fact it also makes the feds look sick is just frosting on the cake.”

Doc Barker was sitting next to me; he seemed impatient as he said, “Quit chasing your tails, fellas. I ain’t convinced yet this is even gonna come off. I’m not in unless somebody can show me how this fool thing can really work.”

Fred Barker nodded, said, “Yeah. Yeah, me too!”

Karpis said, “That’s why we’re here, Doc.”

Doc said, “From what you told me before, I take it you’re planning to snatch Hoover right on the street, right in front of the feds’ own office building.”

Jesus.

“Last time we tried something in the Loop we damn near got our asses shot off,” Barker was saying.

“That’s not fair, Doc,” Karpis said. “If we hadn’t got in that accident, we’d been in the clear.”

“Bullshit. You got in a accident ’cause of traffic, and then them cops swarmed on us like flies on shit.”

“The basic plan was sound, Doc. We can make it work this time.”

“You’re going to use the same plan as for the post-office heist?”

Karpis smiled a mildly embarrassed version of his ghastly smile. “Well, yes, sort of, as a stepping-off point anyway — the Banker’s Building is right across from the post office, where we made the other hit. Direct across. We can build on that same plan, and learn from our mistakes.”

Doc was shaking his head. “Learn from our mistakes? What you should learn from that post-office flop is not to pull jobs in the Loop. City jobs are a bitch in general. Now, in the country, shit, you can hit a place, drive like hell, know your back roads and you’re home free. But in the city, fuck.”

Karpis was getting worried. “Come on, Doc, keep an open mind...”

“You got traffic to deal with, cops on every block, one call and the word’s out to hundreds of radio cars... shit. And a plan that went bust one other time. Creepy, I’m surprised at you.”

Nelson said, “Doc, you knew what this was about coming in — why bitch now?”

Doc said, “I’m all for snatching Hoover. Its a sweet way to get even and get rich. Understood? But why not snatch him at the track — he likes the ponies, you know — or at the train station, when he comes to town, or leaves.”

Karpis said, “Those are city jobs, too, Doc.”

“Yeah, sure, but they’re easier to deal with than the goddamn heart o’ the Loop. Don’t forget — I was there, on that post-office heist. I saw the fuckin’ bullets fly.”

“Doc,” Nelson said, an edge in his voice. “Why don’t you let Karpis lay it out for us?”

Karpis laid it out.

He pointed to the map as he spoke, using a grease pencil to trace various routes.

They had inside word that Hoover was coming in tomorrow morning to spend a day at the Division of Investigation’s Chicago bureau, giving the boys in the trenches pep talks and confabbing with Purvis and Cowley. Of more interest to Karpis, however, was Hoover’s evening dinner date with State Attorney Courtney and the Chicago police commissioner. This was a pass-the-peace-pipe powwow initiated by Hoover, seeking to build more cooperation between the feds and the local cops; my guess was the state attorney and the police commissioner were going along with the meeting in order to ask for Purvis’ ouster. The cops had covered the feds’ trail any number of times (the Probasco “suicide” fall, for one thing) and all they’d got in return was bad-mouthing in the press by self-aggrandizing Little Mel. So a meeting was in order.

None of this was anything Karpis went into; these were simply thoughts that flitted through my brain as he stated that Hoover was planning dinner with Courtney and the commissioner at seven o’clock at the Bismarck Hotel. Shortly before seven, a car from the state attorney’s office was to pick up Hoover at the Banker’s Building and escort him to the Bismarck.

“Where’d you get that kind of inside dope?” a smiling Nelson asked.

Karpis smiled his awful smile. “Friends in high places,” he said, and let it go at that.

My guess was attorney Louis Piquett had sniffed this piece of news out; he had plenty of lines into Courtney’s office.

Karpis’ basic plan was simple if cunning. The state attorney’s car was distinctively decorated: a black Hudson with one red and one green headlight, and a red star on the spotlight. Karpis had arranged with “our favorite underworld garage, in Cicero” to have another Hudson similarly decorated — and, in addition to police siren, equipped with such accessories as bulletproofing, shortwave radio and a sliding panel in the doors through which guns could be fired.

Karpis planned to have this car pick up Hoover.

The real state attorney’s car, in a city parking garage near City Hall, would have a convenient flat tire, delaying the Hoover pickup a few minutes — long enough for the ringer to make the pickup instead.

Karpis was drawing on the map, saying, “If the pickup goes smooth, our Hudson just continues on down Clark to Jackson and turns west — like we were heading back to the Bismarck. After that we switch cars.”

Nelson said, “We’ll have a extra car stashed? Where?”

“In a loading dock in this alley,” Karpis said, pointing to the map. “It’s after work; deserted. We stuff Hoover in the trunk of the second car, and drive away, nice and easy.”

Doc said, “Fine and dandy, if the snatch goes smooth. What if it’s queered at the scene? What if some fed recognizes somebody, or wants to look at ID, or they send a different car? What if the shit hits the fan, right there in front of the Banker’s Building?”

Karpis just smiled patiently through all this. He said, “We got all that covered. There’ll be a backup car with extra firepower parked across the way, in front of the Edison Building — on Adams, kiddy-corner from the Banker’s Building. If shooting starts, they cover the escape by opening fire from another direction. And if the snatch goes smooth, they cruise down Adams — dumping tacks behind ’em like bread crumbs, making flat tires and jamming traffic. At LaSalle, the backup car’ll head north, dropping more tacks, to throw the laws off the trail — and ditch their car and switch in an alley off Franklin and Monroe to a new car. And drive away.”

Doc was smirking, skeptical as hell. “All of this in the Loop. Creepy, you’re dreaming.”

Karpis said, “No, Doc — you’re sleeping. Think. Between six and seven, the LaSalle Street district is deader than a doornail. The market shuts down at three — everybody’ll be out by six, easy. On our way in, both the backup and the Hudson’ll take different routes — and if on the way in we see a lot of cops or anything else out of the ordinary, well fold it up. Either car’ll have the right to fold it — if the Hudson gets there and the backup isn’t in position, that means they chose to fold. If the Hudson wants to fold, they just drive on by the Banker’s Building, east on Adams, without stopping.”

Then Karpis went through the escape route — the one that would be taken should the job go sour. The Hudson would turn hard down Quincy, and take a very tight turn down the alley, Rookery Court. Then would pull west on Adams, and once there, if traffic’s heavy, use the siren, crossing LaSalle and Wells, going under the El. After another block on Adams, the Hudson would take a left and go south on Franklin Street. If the siren had been in use, it would be turned off here. Two short blocks later, the Hudson would cut across Jackson and dodge into a narrow, barely noticeable alley behind the fifteen-story building on the northeast corner. This alley led into a system of several alleys, the main, widest one of which was where the loading dock was, with the extra car.

“It’s a two-bay loading dock,” Karpis said, “nice and deep — a car can enter it and not stick out in the alley at all.”

Whether the snatch went smooth or soured, the Hudson would end up here, pulling into the bay next to the second car; everybody would tumble out, putting Hoover (gagged by now) in the trunk of the second car. Of the three men who picked up Hoover, two would be in Chicago police uniforms; they would quickly strip out of those with street clothes underneath — and drive out of the bay and onto Van Buren, going west.

Doc was starting to look less skeptical; but he still asked, “What about real cops? Two to a block, in the Loop, you know.”

Karpis shrugged like Jack Benny. “Supper hour, Doc. Streets are good and empty of uniforms ’tween six and seven.”

Doc nodded slowly. Then said, “Streetcars? Traffic?”

“Both’ll be slow at that hour, that part of the Loop.”

Nelson was nodding, too, saying, “And what traffic there is’ll mostly be people coming into the Loop, for dinner and an evening’s fun ‘n’ games — not going out, like we’d be doing.”

Doc said, “But State and Wabash and the streets around there will be hopping.”

Karpis shrugged again. “That’s in our favor. If an alarm is sounded, the cops’ll have to break through that traffic to get to us. By the time they reach the Banker’s Building at the southwest tip of the Loop, we’ll’ve switched cars.”

Doc thought about that.

Karpis went on. “The Hudson’ll only be on the street for about four blocks, remember. A few minutes at most.”

Karpis then went into the deployment of men: three in the fake state attorney’s car; two in the backup car; one at the loading dock waiting with the second car; another to disable the real state attorney’s car at the city garage near City Hall.

And me — I’d be baby-sitting the ladies, in Ma Barker’s apartment on Pine Grove Avenue. I might be there for weeks — as long as it took for Hoover to be ransomed, plus some cooling-off time. The men didn’t want to hook back up with their ladies till they were sure the Hoover grab was a success. Nobody wanted his girl serving time on this one.

Also, the guy who’d disable the state attorney’s car had a bigger job than just kicking the nail in the toe of his shoe into the tire on a Hudson. First he’d have to go up a fire escape to get into the garage (which was serviced by carhops); then he’d have to hang around on the street and watch the state attorney’s real delivery boys go after their car and, when it turned out they were delayed by a flat tire, try to delay whoever it was from calling the office.

“That’s your job, Chase,” Karpis told Nelson’s lapdog John Paul.

Chase nodded.

“Just sap him or something,” Nelson said, offhandedly. “Don’t kill him or nothin’.”

Karpis underscored that. “No killing — if you can help it. We’re going to be hot enough. If they don’t believe they’ll get him back alive, they won’t pay the freight. We leave a trail of bodies, they’ll figure us to kill him for sure. Got that?”

Heads nodded.

“Now, we got a problem in possibly being recognized,” Karpis said. “I don’t think it’s much of one, ’cause Hoover and his people aren’t going to be looking for the likes of us to be picking him up for supper. But it’s a problem. So me and Chock and Chock’s pal Sullivan will do the pickup in the Hudson.”

Doc said, “Chock’s picture’s been plastered to hell and gone.”

“I know — but he’ll be in a police uniform, driving; he’s a big guy — he’ll look like your typical well-fed Chicago cop — won’t you, Chock?”

“Damn tootin’,” Floyd laughed.

Karpis pointed to himself with a thumb. “My face-lift and glasses and such makes me a good candidate for not being made. And Chock’s friend Sullivan doesn’t have a famous puss like some of the rest of us; he’ll be the other cop, the one in back. I’ll be in a nice suit and look like a state attorney’s assistant. And then the three of us’ll give J. Edgar a ride.”

Nelson pointed toward the map and said, “I want the backup car, parked on Adams there.”

Karpis nodded. “My thoughts exactly. You and Freddie.”

Freddie grinned, goldly, and nodded. “I’ll be wheel man.”

“Doc,” Karpis said, “you got the dock. The loading dock. All you got to do is baby-sit the switch car.”

Doc didn’t seem thrilled about it, but he nodded.

Karpis said, “Chock and Sullivan and me’ll baby-sit Mr. Hoover, incidentally. We got a place waitin’. Nobody else in this room needs know where that place is. Just rest assured it’s safe. Once the ransom’s delivered, I’ll find everybody and distribute the wealth.”

As an outsider to the ways of the outlaw, I was surprised to find that no one objected to this arrangement; the thought of a double cross never arose. They trusted each other. Or at least they trusted Karpis.

Then Doc nodded toward me. “What about Lawrence?”

“He baby-sits the girls.”

There was some laughter.

“Nice work if you can get it!” Floyd hooted, still out of view.

Even Doc smiled. “Where do I sign up to get my harem?” he said.

Nelson didn’t find it funny. “You got a job to do, Lawrence — do it! And no funny business.”

Fred grinned and said, “Don’t you worry about your better half, George — Lawrence’s already got his hands full with Lulu.”

That wasn’t a particularly witty remark, but there was more laughter, nonetheless, some of it from Nelson this time. Nobody seemed to mind that I’d taken over for Candy Walker with “Lulu” so quickly; it was just part of their world.

Floyd’s voice said, “Seriously, fellers — I think we oughta talk money. Jim mentioned he’d been promised five grand — and that sounds kinda low to me, even if his job is on the soft side.”

Doc said, “I’m for that. Lawrence’ll fall just as far as the rest of us, if it all comes down around us. Kidnapping’s kidnapping.”

Nelson jumped up. “He don’t get a full share. No way he gets a full share.”

Fred said, “Some of his share’s got to go to Candy.”

“Candy’s got no kin,” Doc said. “So it goes to Lulu.”

Nelson laughed, sat back down. “So it goes to Lawrence after all.”

There was some more general good-natured laughter, and Karpis pushed the smoky air with his palms, the teacher quieting his class. “We come to money, then. Fine. You might as well know an extra cut comes off the top.”

“Fuck!” Nelson said. “What for?”

Karpis said, “There’s a silent partner.”

“Who?” Nelson demanded.

Karpis shook his head no. “No name. That’s why they call it ‘silent,’ B.G.”

There were some smiles at the use of the initials; Nelson didn’t pick up on it, but Karpis was gently deriding him.

Karpis went on. “Our silent partner is bankrolling the job, out of his share. If it queers, he takes the loss. Also, he provided the inside dope on Hoover’s activities.” He nodded toward the map. “And he helped me put together this whole shootin’ match.”

Floyd’s voice: “It’s fair, George. It’s only fair.”

Doc Barker was nodding, and Fred said, “It is fair.”

Nelson, disgruntled, said, “Yeah, yeah. Okay.”

Karpis smiled benignly. “We got a big pie to cut up, George. We are talking about five hundred thousand dollars.”

Five hundred thousand dollars!

Suddenly I heard myself talking.

“You really think the government is going to meet that?” I asked.

Karpis said, “Yeah, I think so. I can’t guarantee it. But I think they’ll meet the ransom demand, yeah.”

I didn’t, but held back further comment.

Nelson was putting his two cents in. “Uncle Sam can just print us up some money,” he said, “and if he don’t — then we will kill Hoover, and won’t that be sweet.”

Doc, not liking the sound of that particularly, said, “Then what?”

Nelson grinned; he was shifting into high-gear Cagney. “Then we grab Cummings or the president or somebody, and let’s see ’em fuck with us then.”

Nobody countered that. Just no arguing with logic, I guess.

Karpis said, “Here’s the way the money shakes down. We’re going to pay Lawrence twenty grand off the top, and give Lulu five, out of respect to Candy. Any argument?”

No argument.

“That gives each of us fifty grand and pocket change.”

The room was quiet as church, while everybody contemplated the new start that could mean. That could indeed get Chock Floyd “across the river,” in style.

“Get some rest, boys,” Karpis said. “Drink and be merry if you like — if you ain’t alone, show her a good time. And sleep till noon. But at one, meet back in this room, for a final run-through. Because tomorrow’s opening night, already.”

People stood up, started moving out.

That was when I got my first good look at Chock Floyd’s friend Sullivan, and he got his first good look at me.

We both recognized each other, and why not?

He was the man who’d called himself John Howard, when he came to my office last month — the traveling salesman who hired me to follow his “wife,” Polly Hamilton.

38

It was the longest few moments of my life, standing there in Karpis’ room near the door, about to go out, heart in my throat as I looked in the face of a man who knew I wasn’t Jimmy Lawrence.

Slowly he removed the dark glasses and there my name was, in his eyes: “Heller,” they said, narrowing. Hell, he was as shocked as I was.

And there we stood, blocking the way.

“Move along, gents,” Nelson said. “We baked in this oven long enough.”

I swallowed; said, “Sure.”

My onetime client swallowed, nodded, put the dark glasses back on, moved out the door and I followed him out into the breezily warm summer evening, my hand drifting toward the automatic under my jacket as I walked.

The men were milling about, out in front of Karpis’ cabin, some of them having further smokes. Nelson tapped Sullivan on the shoulder and Sullivan looked at him from behind the dark glasses, with a tight, blank expression.

Nelson said, “You sure we ain’t worked together before?”

Sullivan smiled politely, shook his head no.

Nelson looked confused, momentarily, said, “You seem familiar. Huh. Well, what the hell.”

And he walked over to Chase and began talking, smoking.

I smiled at Sullivan.

Because I knew.

I knew why he hadn’t given me away to the others. And I knew he’d had just as long and sweaty a last few minutes as I had.

He was lighting a cigarette; his hand was shaking — it was barely perceptible, but I caught it.

I stood close to him, put a comradely hand on his shoulder. Spoke so low he could barely hear me.

But he heard me.

I said, “Let’s talk, Johnny.”

And John Dillinger nodded, and we began to walk.

“I’m surprised to see you, John,” I told him.

“Let’s leave names aside, Heller, here on out, okay? Some people got big ears.”

“But neither one of us better have big mouths, right? We can’t afford to give each other away, can we?”

We stopped in front of the central cabin; Karpis and Dolores were sitting on the bench, having Cokes. I put a nickel in the low-riding icebox and opened the lid and slid a bottle out for myself. Dillinger stood and watched me through the dark circles of the glasses, fedora brim pulled down. He was smoking, looking relaxed, calm; but I could feel his nervousness in the air, like electricity crackling between us.

We strolled around back; found a tree to stand under. No one else was around. It was a clear, moonlit night; we could see each other fine. Not that he wanted to see me.

Dillinger didn’t like this at all. On the other hand, I was getting a perverse sort of charge out of it. I’d thought the house was coming down on my head, minutes ago; now I knew I was sitting on top.

“What are you doing here?” he asked me. Clipped words. He took off the dark glasses, slid them in his shirt pocket behind his pack of smokes. He didn’t have a gun.

I took a sip of the Coke. “Let’s start with you,” I said. “Who knows you here? Knows who you really are, I mean.”

He exhaled smoke. “Just Floyd.”

“Not Karpis?”

He shook his head no.

“But you’re the silent partner Karpis was talking about,” I said.

He nodded.

“And Karpis seems to’ve been in on the planning, all the way...”

He shrugged. “He is,” he said. “But he thinks I’m just some friend of Chock’s. I’m supposed to be a guy from Oklahoma wanted for murder, who had a face job.”

“That isn’t far wrong.”

He gave out a short, humorless laugh. “Anyway, I never worked with Karpis. I met him once or twice. But not so’s he could recognize me.”

“But Nelson and the others are a different story.”

He exhaled some more smoke; it made a sort of question mark in the air. “Yeah,” he said. “They might pick up on my voice, or my eyes. Plastic surgery don’t change you as one hundred percent as people think.”

“Yours ain’t bad,” I said.

He sighed heavily; a weight-of-the-world sigh. “It cost me. And it wasn’t just one operation. It was a whole series of ’em, out West. No hack like Doc Moran.”

“He’s dead, you know.”

“Lot of that going around.”

This time I was the one who laughed humorlessly. “Threatening me, John? Or referring to your own greatly exaggerated demise?”

He sneered. “What do you think?”

“I think you went to a hell of a lot of trouble to get officially dead. You should’ve dropped off the face of the earth by now. Why get back in the game again, so soon, or at all — when you went through so much trouble getting out?”

The sneer got nastier. “Guess.”

“I’ll take a wild one — money. Death is free, but only if you really die, right? Take Piquett — he wouldn’t come cheap, not for a scam this size. He’s risking disbarment, after all.”

Another laugh. “He risks that every day. But, no, he didn’t come cheap.”

“Or Zarkovich and O’Neill, either.”

“No.”

“Or Anna Sage.”

“Or Anna Sage,” he admitted.

The muffled sound of hillbilly music could be heard from the tourist camp, behind us; Ma had finally found her station.

“Does Polly Hamilton know?”

“That I’m alive? No. You’re part of a select group, Heller.”

“No names, remember? It does explain why you came to my office personally, to put me in motion where Polly Hamilton was concerned. I came to think you were just some con man Piquett hired. You did it yourself, though, to keep the circle nice and tight. A secret like this isn’t easily kept. Fewer conspirators the better.”

He said nothing.

I swigged the Coke; finished it. Tossed the bottle into the trees. “Yeah, it must’ve cost you, really cost you — or you wouldn’t be risking your new face out in the open like this... not to mention this lunatic plot to kidnap Hoover. Jesus! You really believe the government’ll pay you people off?”

“Yeah,” he said, testily. “I think they’ll pay. And I don’t think they’ll even tell the public it ever happened.”

That hadn’t occurred to me.

I said, “You figure they’ll put on a press blackout till they get Hoover back.”

“I do. And after. They got a lot of press and prestige tied up in that fat little bastard. He’s riding my ‘death’ like a rodeo pony.”

Ma’s hillbilly music in the background lent some color to his remark.

I grunted a laugh. “Must frustrate you — here you are ‘dead,’ and the fuck-ups you fooled, you used, are using you to make themselves look like Saturday afternoon heroes.”

“G-men,” he said, derisively. “They’re going to kill us all, you know. That’s why I went out my own way, on my own terms. The feds, they’re dopes, they’re fuck-ups, they’re boobs — but they got money and time on their side. It’s over. This whole damn game is over. Even a chowderhead like Nelson can see that.”

Male laughter came from up by the cabins; they were taking Karpis’ advice and making merry.

I said, “Well, Floyd sees the writing on the wall, all right. He said much the same thing as you, this afternoon. He said it was just a matter of time.”

“Well, it’s true, and this snatch is risky but it stands to stake every man one of us to a ticket out of this outlaw life.”

“Yeah, and you get a double share.”

He nodded, smiling; under the mustache, I could see the famous wry wise-guy Dillinger smile, pushing through the tight, new face. “Over a hundred grand. That ought to buy me a farm.”

“If this job doesn’t buy all of you the farm.”

He put a hand against my chest, flat; there was more menace in the gesture than in all of Nelson’s tommy-gun waving. “Why?” he asked. “You planning to pull the plug on us, Heller? You the undercover man in the woodpile?”

“No names, remember?” I said, suddenly a little scared. “I’m not here to pull anybody’s plug.”

“Why are you here? And why the hell are you calling yourself Jimmy Lawrence? When I heard that name kicked around, I had to wonder. It’s common enough, but...”

“Nitti gave it to me to use. I’m helping you, really. He figured it’d be good having somebody named Jimmy Lawrence wandering around, after the Biograph.”

Dillinger flicked the stub of his cigarette away, smiled mildly, said, “Nitti’s smart. Too fuckin’ smart for his own good. He’s gonna die of being smart someday.”

“He plays people like a hand of cards, I’ll give you that. As for why I’m here, it’s strictly a mission of mercy — and it’s with Nitti’s full okay.”

“Make me believe that.”

I told him, in enough detail to convince him, that I was here to retrieve Candy Walker’s moll Lulu for her ailing farmer father.

He seemed to buy it, farmer’s kid that he was himself; but he said, “I can check on this with a phone call.”

“I know you can. But do you really want Nitti to know you’re in the neighborhood? He’s not exactly going to be tickled pink about what you’re planning for tomorrow, you know.”

Dillinger got out a new cigarette, lit it up; in the orange glow of the flame, his mask of a face gave little away. “He’s not going to know I was involved — unless you tell him.”

“Why should I tell him?”

He didn’t answer me. Instead he said, reflectively, “I suppose you’d like to just take the girl and scram. Just hop in one of these cars and rescue the fair maiden, and not get caught up in tomorrow’s business.”

My answer to that flatly posed question would be crucial; I could see it in his face, hear it in his voice, if just barely — he was doing his best not to tip his hand.

But I could tell what he wanted to hear — and what he didn’t want to hear.

So I said, “Hell, no. I’m in.”

He studied me. “You’re in?”

“Hell, yes. Twenty-five gees worth, I am.”

“You’re supposed to be a stand-up guy, Heller. So honest you quit the force and all. Why all of a sudden are you willing to get in the kidnapping racket?”

I put on my best smirk; inside I wasn’t smiling. “Hoover’s nothing to me. The feds gave me nothing but grief, when you were staging that ballet at the Biograph. Make ’em look as stupid as you like, and squeeze as much dough out as you can.”

He studied me.

“Look, I can use twenty-five gees, friend. I had two clients in the last month and a half — and you were one of ’em.”

He drew on the cigarette.

I said, “But I’m not in for murder, understand. I want your word Hoover won’t be killed. Even if they don’t fork over the dough.”

He said nothing for a while. Fiddles were playing on Ma’s radio station.

Then he said, “You got my word,” and held his hand out for me to shake.

I shook it.

“Hell,” I said, “all I got to do is bunk in with some good-looking women for a few weeks. I had worse jobs.”

Dillinger laughed; a genuine laugh. “Yeah. There’s worse ways to score twenty-five grand. And when it’s over, you can take the skirt and blow.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“But Heller — if you’re stringing me along — if you fuck this up for me — you’re dead. Got that? Plain old dead.”

“Understood.”

He threw the latest cigarette away; it sizzled in the grass, and we walked back around front of the tourist cabins.

As we walked, I said, “You were some actor, back in my office that time. You really had me going.”

He smiled. “I always have had a smooth line of bull.”

Me, too, John. Me, too.

39

We were gathered much as the night before, in the same smoky room, only now sun was filtering through the sheer curtains, dust motes floating, as Doc Barker said, “Ever hear of a guy named Nate Heller?”

He was sitting right next to me when he said it; I felt myself starting to shake. The gun was under my arm, but my hand was on my knee, a world away.

They’d been talking about the possibility of the feds marking the bills. It had happened in the Bremer snatch, and the dough had been so hot no fence wanted to touch it at first, though they finally sold most of it at a ten percent discount. Karpis said in this case they’d insist on used, non-consecutive bills, and set up for a fast ransom exchange — too fast, Karpis hoped, for the feds to get serial numbers recorded.

Floyd had suggested they sit on the money awhile, but float a few bills out just to see what happened. Karpis suggested the way to do that was remove some bills from Hoover’s wallet and substitute ransom money.

“If the bills are hot,” Karpis had said, “then Hoover’ll be the first to pass ’em. The papers’ll report the bills turning up, in whatever city he passes ’em in — Washington, D.C., most likely — and we’ll know right away if we need to fence the cash.”

Nelson said, “Anybody know a good hot-money fence? I hear Doc Moran’s gone out of business.”

A few smiles greeted this slice of gallows humor, and then Doc Barker made his remark about Nate Heller.

I glanced across the room at Dillinger, playing Sullivan, in fedora and dark glasses; below the mustache there seemed to be a trace of a smile.

“Yeah, I know him,” Karpis said. “He runs the Parkview Hotel in Havana. That’s a good thought. Heller’s a good prospect for moving the cash, if it turns out the feds marked it.”

I let some air out, and Doc glanced at me. “You okay, Lawrence? You sound like some old geezer gaspin’ his last.”

I managed a grin. “You should’ve seen me before I gave up smokin’,” I said.

He smiled briefly, and with his sunken cheeks it was like a skull smiling; then he turned his attention back to Karpis, who was asking for the group’s permission to sit on the money till they’d determined whether the feds had marked it or not; and, if so, to go ahead and fence the dough before the split. There was a general agreement on the subject.

After the final briefing, we drifted outside. Dillinger, or Sullivan — take your pick — strolled up to me, unable to suppress his wry smile. He glanced around to see if anybody was within earshot, and then quietly said, “You went white as a ghost in there, pal. What’s wrong — d’you think you were the only Nate Heller in the world?”

“I guess if there can be two of you, there can be two of me.”

He shrugged. “Anything’s possible.”

We were about an hour from Chicago. Karpis, Floyd and “Sullivan” left around two o’clock in one car; at three, Nelson, Chase, and the Barker brothers took off in another. I was to leave at four, driving Ma in the Auburn, followed by the Ford sedan, driven by Dolores, with Louise and Paula and Nelson’s wife Helen riding.

Not long after the Nelson car had taken off, I found myself back in the puce-papered room, in bed with Louise. There were worse ways to kill an hour, but she was starting to wear me down. I don’t mean to make like she was a real hot tomato or something, a regular sex fiend — no. She seemed to enjoy the act, all right, only she liked the attention, more. She liked being held. She liked being close to me. And I liked being close to her.

Maybe having been with a woman as strong as Sally made me appreciate this more dependent girl. I liked being looked up to; leaned on. The role of protector was attractive to me, just as attractive as her big brown eyes and blond bobbed hair and pale skin and...

And now and then it occurred to me how short a time I’d known her. That in those two days or so, I’d had her half a dozen times. I felt funny about it, though I didn’t quite know why — I just knew it was more than some kind of guilt over sleeping with my client’s daughter.

Now we lay between the sheets, naked, my arm around her. She had her head nestled in the crook of my arm, cheek against my chest, a pink-nailed hand against my chest as well, playing with the hair there.

“How’d you like to be free of all this?” I asked her.

She cocked her head and the brown eyes blinked. “Free of all what?”

“This. This life — on the road. On the run. Living with crooks, Louise.”

She smiled, put her head back on my chest. “You’re no crook to me. You’re just my Gentleman Jim...”

“Remember what we talked about yesterday? The big city, and you finding a job?”

“Y — yes. But that was just talk.”

“It wasn’t just talk. You know, there’s nothing binding you to this life, anymore.”

“But I been with Candy ever since—”

“Candy’s dead.”

She still had her head against my chest, as if listening to my heart. “But I’m with you, now — aren’t I?”

“Right now you are, yes. But I’m not Candy Walker. I’m not an outlaw.”

“You aren’t?”

“No. I don’t live in tourist cabins and farmhouses and the back seats of cars. I live in Chicago, Louise.”

“That doesn’t make you not an outlaw.”

She had me there.

“Well,” I said, “I’m not.”

“What are you, then? A gangster?”

She’d apparently heard of Chicago.

“No. Louise, listen to what I’m saying. I’m saying I can help you go straight.”

She lifted her head again; the brown eyes narrowed — I’d hurt her feelings. “I’m not a criminal. I may’ve sinned, but I’m not a criminal.”

“I know you aren’t. But wouldn’t you like to have a fresh start? In Chicago, maybe?”

“Sure. But you make it sound so... easy.”

“It is easy. Besides, I’ll be there to help you.”

She lifted her head to smile at me, pursing the beestung lips. “Good, ’cause I’d need help.”

“Of course, the first thing I think you should do is go home.”

The smile faded. “Home?”

“To see your father.”

“Oh. Oh, I don’t know about that...”

“You ought to set things straight with him. You owe him that much. And you owe it to yourself.”

“I wouldn’t want to see him alone.”

“Who says you’d be alone?”

“You’d go with me?”

“Sure. Right there by your side.”

“Then I’ll think about it,” she said. Snuggling closer.

I was helping her; I knew I was helping her. But I still felt like a dyed-in-the-wool bastard. For all my soft soap about setting things straight with her father, I knew damn well she’d do just fine never seeing the old boy again; I just wanted to deliver her and collect that thousand bucks.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her the truth — but what if I did, only to have her take a powder? That would be that grand her father promised me, you’d see going out the door with her.

And/or she might spill to Ma Barker and Helen Nelson and the rest of the mamas, some of whom were pistol-packing, and that wouldn’t fit in with my plans.

So at four I was on the road with Ma Barker, one last time, for one final round of Burma Shave readings, hymn humming and the eternal quest to find hillbilly music on the Auburn’s radio.

Ma, with a freshly curled head of Shirley Temple hair, interrupted those three favorite pastimes of hers now and again for some actual conversation.

“Big responsibility,” she said, kidding me, “havin’ a whole houseful of women to look after...”

“I figure they can look after me, Ma,” I said, smiling at her.

She smiled back, that oddly attractive smile that found its occasional way out of her homely countenance, saying, “You’re gonna treat that little gal right, aren’t you?”

“Lulu, you mean? Sure.”

“Got a good little gal, there. Don’t let ’er get away.”

“I’ll try not, Ma.”

But conversation was the exception not the rule, as most of the time she devoted herself to her usual interests, and I was grateful. Because my mind was going faster than the Auburn. Racing ahead to things I had to do...

I parked the Auburn in an open space in front of the big brick three-story on Pine Grove, where the real Jimmy Lawrence once lived. Shortly after, Dolores pulled in half a block down. I glanced at my watch: five-fifteen. The Hoover pickup was set for ten till seven. Plenty of time.

I carried the girls’ bags in for them, and they all pitched in (except for Ma, of course) and it was around five-thirty when everybody’s things had been deposited in an appropriate bedroom.

The last of these was one Ma showed Louise and me into, a small room decorated in shades of blue; there was a double bed with a baby-blue spread. Sounds romantic, but there was also a picture of Jesus over a doily-strewn dresser.

“You kids can bunk in here,” she said.

Louise said, “Thanks, Ma — you’re a saint.”

I thanked Ma, too; I couldn’t quite go the rest of the way, Jesus picture or not.

Ma said, “Jimmy, I know you’re supposed to stick by us, ’specially this afternoon... but I need some things.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Come with me.”

I followed her, Louise in tow.

We ended up in a big white modern kitchen. Ma opened the Frigidaire for me to see mostly empty shelves.

Ma spread her arms like an angel its wings. “What am I going to cook for supper, if you don’t go to the store for me?”

What, indeed.

“If you make me out a list, Ma,” I said, “I’ll go shopping before the stores close.”

She sat and scribbled a list.

I’d been planning to make my own excuse to leave, saying I needed to go to my apartment to pick up a few things for the duration of my stay; but she was saving me the trouble. Karpis had asked that I stay close to the phone all afternoon and evening, just in case the need for some sort of backup developed. But now I had Ma, who this very moment was handing me her grocery list, to cover for me.

“Come on, Louise,” I said, holding my arm out to her, “keep me company.”

“Sure,” she said, taking the arm.

Ma wasn’t sure about that. “Now, Alvin and Arthur said the girls was to stay around home, today.”

“Maybe so,” I said, “but you wouldn’t want to send a man to the store alone, would you?”

That she gave some serious thought.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’ll get my hat and go with you, m’self.”

“I’ll take Louise,” I insisted. “You can’t leave here. If Alvin or Doc, uh, Arthur should call, they won’t want to talk to one of these silly girls. They’ll want to talk you, Ma.”

She nodded sagely.

Then she smiled her oddly nice smile and made two limp wrists and brushed the air with them, saying, “Shoo, then, you two, shoo!”

We walked through the living room on our way out. Paula was lounging on the green mohair sofa in Ma’s generous living room, ever-present drink in hand. She smiled and winked and lifted her glass in a one-sided toast, saying, “Ya make a damn cute couple, you two,” smug in her matchmaking abilities. Nearby, Helen Nelson seemed melancholy, sitting by a window, obviously worrying about her husband. Dolores was in her room, unpacking her things. Ma, with nothing to do in the kitchen, sat back down to her unfinished puzzle of the country church.

That was where I came in.

And soon Louise and I were in the Auburn, heading for the Loop.

“Just what store are you going to, anyway?” Louise asked, after a while.

We were tooling up Lake Shore Drive, the Gold Coast whizzing by on our right, the lake shimmering at our left. Up ahead the Drake stared me down, like a stern scolding face; sorry, Helen.

“No store,” I said.

“No store?”

“I’m just getting you away from that place.”

“You are?”

“I am.”

“But I–I left all my things back there! My clothes... my brush... my scrapbook...”

I looked at her. “You’re leaving everything behind, Louise. Understand? Everything.”

She didn’t understand, but she didn’t say anything.

It was almost six when I pulled the Auburn in the alley behind my building and squeezed it in the recessed space next to my Chevy coupe where Barney’s Hupmobile sometimes was but right now wasn’t. I took her by the hand like a child and moved right along and she had to work to keep up. Past the deli on the corner, the El a looming reminder we were back in the city, to the door between Barney’s Cocktail Lounge and the pawnshop, and up the stairs, four flights, her feet echoing mine as she followed me up.

I unlocked the office door.

“But this is a detective’s office,” she said, looking at the lettering on the door’s frosted glass.

“That’s right.”

I shut the door behind her. She stood clutching her purse to her, looking around.

“Isn’t that a Murphy bed?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. Back behind the desk, pulling the phone book out of a drawer.

“Gee. I saw furniture like this at the world’s fair.”

“Everybody did,” I said, looking for the number.

“Whose place is this?”

“A friend,” I said, dialing.

“Wonder if he needs a secretary.”

“Who knows,” I said, getting a busy signal.

I sat behind the desk. Yanked the window-glass wire-frames off and flung ’em in a drawer. So, the line was busy over at the Banker’s Building. It was just five after six. The pickup wasn’t to be made till six-fifty. Plenty of time.

She sat across from me in the chair her father had sat in not long ago.

“Why are we here?” she asked. Her eyes wide and brown and confused.

“It’s a safe place,” I said. Drumming my fingers on my desk.

“What about Ma, and Paula and everybody?”

“They’re in the past, sugar.”

“The past.”

“That’s right. And you’re leaving the past behind you, understand?”

“No. Not really...”

“Do you know what’s happening today? What’s set to happen in about forty-five minutes?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“A kidnapping. Do you want to be part of that?”

“No,” she said. But she didn’t seem sure, as if I was posing some abstract problem that went way over her head.

“Forget Ma and Paula and all of them. Got it?”

“Why?”

“Because those people are going to be in trouble. You don’t want to be in trouble, do you?”

Her face fell, her eyes got even wider. “Why... you’re not going to rat on them...”

“Never mind what I’m going to do,” I said, dialing again.

Busy signal.

“I don’t want you to rat on them,” she said. “Jim. Please don’t.”

“You’re with me, now, remember?”

“Jim...”

“Are you with me now?”

“Yes...”

“Then you’ve got to go along with me. You went along with Candy Walker, you can go along with me, for Christ’s sake.”

“Please don’t yell at me, Jim. Please don’t yell.”

I didn’t know I was.

“Sorry,” I said.

She stood; leaned her hands against the desk, and those big brown eyes I loved so much begged me. “Jim, if you call the police, leave Ma and Paula and Dolores and Helen out of it. Please. You got to promise.”

“Okay. I promise.” But I was thinking about the police she’d mentioned. Maybe I should call them. But I figured Cowley and Purvis would want to handle this themselves; it would mean the difference to them between a feather in the cap or a major embarrassment. Squelching the kidnapping themselves beat hell out of having the local cops pull their director’s butt off the burner.

And I could use Purvis and Cowley’s goodwill — I was involved in this just deep enough to need to explain myself, and better them than the Chicago cops, Christ! I was an accomplice in the murder of Dr. Joseph Moran, if you got right down to it. You could make a case — a convincing one — for me being part of the kidnap ring. But time was slipping away — if the snatch went down, I wouldn’t just be up shit creek, I’d be drowning in it. Maybe I should call the cops anyway; take my chances with Chicago’s finest — hell, I hadn’t been fed the goldfish in weeks.

The number at the Banker’s Building was still busy.

It was six-ten.

I got up and pulled the Murphy bed down.

“Jim! What are you doing?”

Now she thought I was a sex fiend.

“Are you sure this is all right with your friend...?”

“It’s fine with him. And it ain’t whoopee time, so relax. You’re just going to take a rest. I have to step out for a while.”

“Where are you going?”

“Just a few blocks over. I got an appointment.”

“But what if your friend comes back?”

“It’ll be okay.” I sat her on the edge of the bed. “Just catch a nap. Okay?”

“Jim, I’m so confused... what’s going on? What’s this about?” She had tears in her eyes.

Shit.

Without knowing it, without meaning to, I’d joined the club: joined the ranks of men who’d abused this girl, pushed her around, hurt her. Damnit. Fuck. Shit.

I sat down on the bed next to her. Slipped an arm around her. “I won’t be gone long. Just stay here and take it easy. Tomorrow, I’m going to take you to see your daddy.”

“Do you think that’s for the best?”

“I do.”

“But you said I should leave the past behind me, Jim.”

“Some things you simply got to face before you can put ’em behind you. Now, I’m going to be with you, all the way. Right at your side. And then we’re coming back to the big city and find you some honest work. In fact, my friend who runs this office just might be able to use a secretary, at that. Would that suit you?”

She smiled, but it was forced. “Sure, Jim. Any friend of yours...”

I kissed her cheek, and she grabbed me, clutched at me. Kissed me hard on the mouth. There was more desperation than passion in it, and I held her close to me, hugged her close, and whispered in her ear, “I’m not going to hurt you, Louise — nobody’s going to hurt you anymore.”

I tucked her under the covers and smiled at her and she smiled at me, a brave-little-soldier smile, and turned on her side and shut her eyes.

I locked the office behind me, and got the hell out of there. It was six-fifteen. I was only a few blocks away from the Banker’s Building; three or four minutes by foot, five tops.

All I had to do, I thought as I walked briskly by Binyon’s, was head over there and take the elevator up to the nineteenth floor and tell ‘em the tale. It was late enough that most, maybe all, their agents would be gone for the day — but at least the call to the cops could be placed by Purvis or Cowley — at least they could initiate and coordinate the effort to stop the kidnapping and nab the kidnappers. Somehow I didn’t think Hoover would grab a gun, though.

I was walking by the Federal Building, now; sidewalks were all but empty, this time of day, and I could move right along. It felt good to be home, where the buildings were taller than the corn, where the cattle was lined up in the stockyards where it belonged. It would be over soon — already, I was out of the outlaw’s world and back in my own; and the girl I’d come to get was tucked safely away in my office. I almost smiled.

But around the next corner there was one last street to cross.

Maybe the feds, maybe Cowley anyway, could keep this thing from turning into a bloodbath. Just as I couldn’t allow myself to be party to Hoover’s kidnapping — even for twenty-five goddamn grand — a massacre of Floyd and Nelson and the others was nothing I cared to be part of, either.

As I rounded the corner of Jackson, just before six-twenty, with half an hour to spare, moving to the crosswalk, I glanced down the street and there, in front of the Edison Building, was the backup car with Baby Face Nelson and Fred Barker sitting in it.

And if the backup car was in place, the Hudson — and Karpis and Floyd and Dillinger — wouldn’t be far behind.

40

I slowed my pace.

I couldn’t get lost in the crowd: there wasn’t one. The sidewalks weren’t empty, though — there were a few people around, so I didn’t stick out like a sore thumb, either. I pulled the brim of my hat down, lowered my head, waited for the light and crossed Clark Street and walked toward the Banker’s Building. The backup car in front of the Edison Building was almost a block away. Far enough that I’d had to look hard to recognize Fred Barker behind the wheel of the car, a black Ford roadster.

So maybe they wouldn’t notice me. They certainly wouldn’t be looking for me.

Then again, I hadn’t been looking for them and I spotted ’em, easy enough.

I glanced at my watch: six-twenty.

Hoover’s powwow with Courtney and the police commissioner had been moved up, obviously, and the same inside source who’d leaked the original information had passed the change of plans along to Karpis and company. It had been a seven o’clock dinner, with the pickup to be made at ten till; my guess was it’d been moved up to six-thirty, in which case the next pickup time was right now.

The Hudson should be making its appearance, any time.

I walked by the Clark Street edge of the Continental Illinois Bank Building, and strolled down Quincy. Once the Banker’s Building was blocking me from the parked backup car’s view, I ran to the side door and found my way to the bank of elevators and punched the up button.

I gave the uniformed operator, a tall red-haired guy of about twenty-five, a buck and said, “Nineteenth floor and step on it.”

He yanked the handle so hard the box lurched, but he earned his dollar: within a minute we were on the nineteenth floor. I gave him another buck and told him to wait for me; he questioned that with his eyes, and I gave him another buck hurriedly and said there’d be a sawbuck for him if he kept his end up.

Then I was off the elevator and running down the hall to the Division of Investigation field office.

The door was shut.

Locked.

I banged on it.

“Hey, in there! Come on — somebody!”

Seconds that seemed an eternity passed and the door opened, and there was Cowley, his moon face somber as ever, then he squinted at me, which was his way of registering surprise.

“Heller?” he said. Like he couldn’t believe I was standing there; I was something he thought he’d put behind him.

“Is Hoover in there?”

He sighed through his nose and his mouth made a tight line, barely opening to say, “Is that any concern of yours?”

I pushed him out of the way, pushed inside the room.

“Hey! What do you—”

The room was full of desks and no people.

“Where’s Hoover?” I demanded.

“What business is it of yours?” He was indignant and condescending at the same time.

I liked Cowley, far as it went, but it didn’t go that far. I grabbed him by his coat and vest with two hands and said, “Where the hell is he?”

Cowley was bigger than me, and probably tougher, and armed, and a fed; but he forgot all about that and sputtered, “He and Purvis... they just went down in the elevator.”

I let go of him. “Shit!”

“You must’ve been coming up as they were going down. Why? What’s this about, Heller?”

“Grab a tommy gun and come with me — I’ll explain in the elevator.”

“Are you serious?”

“Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd and the rest of your public enemies’ list are in two cars down on the street, waiting for your precious goddamn director. Get a gun!”

He went to a closet and unlocked it quickly and grabbed a tommy gun from a rack and an extra magazine and didn’t ask any more questions, just followed me out in the hall.

My red-haired elevator guy was waiting; he grinned when he saw me coming, then the grin faded as he saw Cowley bringing up the rear with the Thompson.

We got on, and went down.

I filled him in quick: “There’s a fake state attorney’s car in front, to pick Hoover up. It’s a snatch. Three men in the car, including Alvin Karpis and Pretty Boy Floyd — two of ’em dressed as cops. There’s a backup car parked across the way, in front of the Edison Building, with extra firepower. Baby Face Nelson and Fred Barker are in that.”

The elevator guy was glancing over at me, swallowing.

Cowley said, “How’d you happen onto this?”

“Time for that later. When did they move Hoover’s dinner party up?”

Cowley squinted again, wondering how the hell I was so on top of all this. “They called before noon,” he said. “Courtney and the commissioner wanted it earlier. So they could just go over after work and not have to wait around.”

I was getting my gun out from under my arm.

Cowley touched my arm. “You just stay back. I’ll appreciate having you covering my butt, but you stay the hell back, understand?”

I grinned at him. “I wish you wouldn’t swear like that. I hate to hear it, coming from a good Mormon.”

He smiled, nervously, and the elevator guy set ’er down and opened the cage and Cowley took the lead, his footsteps slapping the marble floor as he headed toward the front door.

Where a short, slightly stocky man in a dark suit had his back to us — Hoover — with another short man in a straw hat and white pants and blue coat — Purvis — just about to go out the inner doors into the vestibule and out onto the sidewalk.

“Stop!” Cowley called, running, tommy gun in one hand, pointing up.

But they were through the doors, now, and moving across the vestibule, and Cowley sprinted, and I was right behind him.

He must’ve gone through the inner doors just seconds after Hoover and Purvis; I caught up a second or so later, and heard Cowley yell, “Hit the deck!”

And saw Hoover, a dark little man whose eyes were as white in his face as a minstrel’s, look back, and Purvis, reacting faster, reach for one of his arms to pull him down.

In a cop’s uniform, Dillinger, a.k.a. Sullivan, was holding open the back door of the black Hudson with the red and green headlights, for Hoover to get in.

All this I took in in a split second, ’cause that’s all it took for Purvis to yank the startled Hoover by the arm and flatten him unceremoniously on the pavement while Cowley opened up with the chopper.

The burst of bullets put a row of puckers across the heavily plated Hudson, kissed little spider webs into its bulletproof glass, and Dillinger caught at least one of the slugs, as he reared back from the impact, with a yowl, but tumbled in the back of the Hudson and the rider in front, Karpis, reached back and pulled the door shut and the Hudson pulled away, while Cowley moved forward, spraying it with slugs.

Purvis was up and his revolver out and he took some pot-shots at the fleeing car; Hoover, on his belly, looked up with wide, wild eyes and then got on his knees and, keeping low, scrambled for the doors, and shouldered them open and he cowered against the wall. I was standing there with my gun out, keeping an eye on Cowley’s butt, like I’d been told to. I looked at the shaking, sweating director of the Division of Investigation and he glared at me, said, “What are you looking at?”

I looked back outside.

Traffic was light, but what few cars there were were slamming on brakes, and running up onto sidewalks. A Model A drove up on Cowley’s side of the street, on the walk, and Cowley had to let up fire. He moved out into the middle of the street, and started back in firing, as the Hudson narrowly missed some of the confused, frightened motorists who’d stumbled onto this.

The Hudson, despite its portholes in the doors for gunplay, hadn’t fired a shot. It had, according to plan, ducked down Quincy, which was just a glorified alley, down the mouth of which was where Cowley now stood with his machine gun spewing.

That was when I saw the backup, a roadster, come careening around onto Clark.

I pushed open the glass door and yelled, “Cowley! Your flank!”

Purvis, who was backing Cowley up, saw the car coming and hit the pavement.

Barker was driving and Baby Face Nelson was hanging out the rider’s side, half-standing on the running board, with a tommy gun of his own in his hand. He had a crazed look on his face. He loved his work.

“Sons of fucking bitches!” was his war cry, or one of them anyway — he said more, but you couldn’t hear it over his chopper.

I fired a few shots over the roadster — I couldn’t make myself fire at Nelson, and to this day I can’t tell you why — but it was enough of a distraction to make him pull the Thompson and fire into the street, and that gave Cowley the split second he needed. He dove in the alley, and ducked in a recessed doorway, and the roadster did a screeching U-turn on two wheels and raced back toward Adams, disappearing around the corner.

Then they were gone — both the Hudson and the backup.

And there was nothing left but some startled pedestrians and shaken-up motorists, and two special agents whose suits and faces were dirty and rumpled from rolling around on the pavement.

Cowley came around the corner; the tommy gun was pointing down now, but smoke was still curling out its barrel. He’d gone through both magazines. He looked tired, washed out. Purvis was just standing there, gun in hand, like a kid who just ran out of imaginary Indians to shoot.

I was still standing there holding the glass door open with one hand, the automatic in the other. Nelson and the others hadn’t got a look at me — at least not enough of one to recognize me, I didn’t think. That was a break.

Hoover was plastered against the wall, within the vestibule. Shaking. Eyes open wide. He really seemed terrified.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

He swallowed. “What?”

“Being afraid in a situation like this.”

His eyes flared; he stepped away from the wall. “What’s your name, mister?”

“My name’s Heller.”

“If you prize your job, you’d better watch your tongue.”

He thought I was one of theirs; a fed. That was a laugh.

“And I’ve never seen such pathetic shooting,” he said. “You seemed to aim deliberately high—”

“Mr. Hoover?”

“What?”

“Fuck you.”

I went out onto the street and joined Cowley.

Who said, “How’s the director doing?”

Purvis was over talking to a couple of the motorists whose cars were up on the sidewalk, calming them down. A crowd was gathering; not a large one.

“A change of diaper, and he’ll be a new man.”

Cowley ignored that. “What’s this about, Heller? How’d you happen onto this?”

“I didn’t. I been undercover looking for a runaway daughter. I fell in with a nest of thieves, you might say. I just shook loose from ’em this afternoon, and was on my way here to warn you, when I saw it was coming down early.”

Cowley brushed a comma of brown hair back in place, and gave me a tight, one-sided smile. “Thanks, Heller. I’m glad you were here.”

“It’s swell to be wanted.”

Two beat cops, pulled away from their supper at a nearby restaurant no doubt, came running up.

“What happened here?” one of them said.

“We’re not sure just yet, officer,” Cowley said. “Possibly a kidnap attempt. There was some shooting — no one hurt on this end. I winged one of them. One car cut down Quincy, here, a Hudson dressed up like a state attorney’s car; the other, a black roadster, headed west on Adams. Three men in the Hudson, two dressed as cops. Two in the roadster. Several are public enemies. My associate, Agent Purvis, has the license plate numbers. Could one of you call that in to your radio cars? And the other maybe help us see if any of these citizens were injured?”

The two cops nodded.

Hoover came out of the building; his shakes were gone. He moved like a little Napoleon.

He came up to me and demanded my resignation.

I laughed in his face, as Cowley said, “He doesn’t work for the division, sir. He’s a private detective who happened upon this situation while undercover. You may owe him your life, Mr. Hoover. At the very least he prevented your kidnapping.”

You might think that would’ve embarrassed him. Or that he’d be grateful. Or respond in some human manner.

But he just gave me a cold fish look and then said to Cowley, “Are we pursuing them?”

“We don’t have any men on hand, sir,” Cowley said. “Police radio cars have got it by now.”

“Damn,” Hoover said. “Who were they?”

Cowley let some air out. “Sir, just about everybody we’d like for breakfast. Pretty Boy Floyd and Creepy Karpis...”

Hoover’s dark pupils lit up in the yolks of his eyes. “Do you know what we could make of that? If we could score a grand slam like that?”

“I sure do,” Cowley said, wearily. “And wasn’t that Baby Face Nelson hanging out of the roadster?”

That last was posed to me; I nodded.

“And I think Fred Barker was driving,” Cowley continued. “I don’t know who the other one in the Hudson was... the one I winged. Do you, Heller?”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re going to love this, Cowley. Maybe we should get Purvis over here to have a piece of this.”

Cowley squinted again. “What are you talking about?”

“The guy you winged was a ghost. Ghost of a guy who got killed at the Biograph Theater not so long ago.”

Hoover sneered. “This man is a lunatic!”

Cowley wasn’t sure. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me.

I said, “This time he really does have a new face.”

Cowley’s mouth hung open; then he looked down at the pavement. He still had the tommy gun in his hand, but now it looked heavy.

Hoover was pacing, rubbing his chin, thinking.

Cowley looked up and, all business, said, “Keep that, uh... ghost to yourself for the time being, Heller. All right?”

“Sure,” I shrugged.

Hoover, not following any of that apparently, was giving me a long cold look.

“If you were undercover,” he said, biting off each word, pointing a stubby finger at me, “and knew in advance of this scheme, it follows that you must know the getaway route, as well.”

I glanced at my watch; they’d made their switch at the loading dock by now. They were probably heading down Van Buren. Not far from my office.

“I haven’t a clue,” I said to Hoover.

That was when the state attorney’s car pulled up and a confused-looking little man in a mustache and gray suit got out and said, “Sorry we’re late, Mr. Hoover. Uh, has there been some problem here?”

Sam Cowley hid his smile behind his hand.

I didn’t bother.

41

She was asleep when I got back to the office. She was still in her pink dress, on top of the covers. Sleeping on her side, knees up, dress too, milky underneath of thigh showing, hands clasped as if in prayer; her lips apart, looking soft, pliant, like a baby’s.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair; she stirred, smiling. Gradually she opened her eyes, just partway, but you could still get lost in ’em.

“What — what time is it?” she asked.

The office was dark but for the pulse of orange neon.

“A little after eight,” I said.

“Where have you been?”

“That’s not important.”

“What is?”

“Supper.”

That got a big smile out of her, a farm-girl smile those beestung lips seemed incapable of, only there she was doing it.

She sat up, wide awake. “I don’t have any clothes — just what I’ve had on all day. And slept in.”

“We’ll get you some things tomorrow. Smooth your dress out and bring your appetite.”

“Well,” she said, and shrugged, and smiled, “okay.”

She freshened up in my bathroom (the last girl in there was Polly Hamilton), and we walked downstairs, out into a cool summer night, the heat wave finally a memory, strolling hand in hand and around the corner to Binyon’s, where I bought her a T-bone steak with all the trimmings, which she gobbled down greedily. She hadn’t eaten in eight hours.

Nor had I, but I didn’t have much of an appetite. I ordered coffee and ate a roll or two, to keep my stomach at bay. We didn’t talk much at dinner; she was busy eating, and I was busy wondering what the hell to do about her.

Actually, I’d already done something about her, and that’s what was nagging me.

After I gave him a statement at the division field office, Cowley had let me use the phone. I’d reversed the charges to call Joshua Petersen in De Kalb, at the number he’d provided. To tell him I had found his daughter.

He’d shown no surprise, or joy; just relief, as he said, “That’s good news, Mr. Heller.”

“She isn’t with Candy Walker anymore. He’s dead.”

“Good,” he said.

His voice had a flat, dry sound, like his soul needed rain.

I said, “I’ve got her away from the ‘bad crowd’ she was running with, and she’s ready to make a new start. I just can’t guarantee you she’s going to be willing to do it your way.”

Silence.

“Mr. Petersen, I’m saying I’ll bring your daughter to you — I think she’ll be willing to meet with you at least. But whether she’ll come home to stay or not is going to be up to her.”

More silence; I waited, making him fill it.

Finally he did, stoically: “I understand.”

“She’s a big girl now, Mr. Petersen. She has a right to make her own way in the world. She needs to learn how, but that’s another story. Anyway, I’m going to be right there with her, and I don’t want you badgering her. I won’t abide any show of force on your part. If you can mend fences with her, fine. But if she doesn’t want to stay with you, she doesn’t stay. It’s that simple.”

“All right.”

“Okay. I just wanted that understood.”

“It’s understood.”

“And that bonus you promised me, I expect it whether she stays with you, or not.”

“The thousand dollars is yours, Mr. Heller.”

“I earned that money, Mr. Petersen. Like you said, I had to go among the wolves.”

“The money’s yours, no argument. I’m grateful to you.”

“Well, okay then,” I said. “Where shall we meet?”

And we’d agreed on a time and place, the next afternoon; but this was tonight, and the girl across from me eating Mr. Binyon’s cheesecake was still calling me Jim.

Somehow I just couldn’t seem to level with her. Somehow I couldn’t make myself risk seeing disappointment, perhaps even loathing, in those wide-set big brown eyes.

So by nine we were in my Murphy bed, just cuddling in the dark; I had pulled the shades so even the neon couldn’t get in.

That way I wouldn’t have to see her eyes when I told her.

“Sugar, remember when I told you I thought you ought to go home, and see your daddy?”

“Yes. Aren’t we going tomorrow?”

“I have to tell you something first. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about what was best for you, when I said that.”

“Who were you thinking of?”

“Me.”

I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t.

So I went on. “There’s no easy way to tell you this. I’m not Jimmy Lawrence.”

She still didn’t say anything; but she didn’t pull away from me, either. Stayed cuddled right up next to me. Her breathing easy, calm, regular.

I said, “I’m the guy whose name is on the door. I’m Nathan Heller.”

“I know,” she said.

“You know?”

“I may be from the farm, Jim. Sorry — Nathan? But I wasn’t born in a barn.”

“How...?”

“When you were gone, I looked through the drawers in your desk and your file. I found snapshots of you and a pretty girl at the fair. And some clippings about a trial with your picture and your name under it.”

“Hell. Why aren’t you mad?”

“I am mad.” She said this like, pass the salt.

“You don’t sound mad...”

“I forgive you, Jim. Nathan.”

“Nate, actually, but—”

“I asked you before... Nate. I’ll ask you again. I’m with you, now — aren’t I?”

“You’re with me. I’m right beside you, all the way.”

“Then what does it matter what your name is, or why you came looking for me?”

“You — you know I came looking for you? How did you figure that out?”

“You had my picture in your desk. Did my husband hire you to find me?”

“No, your father.”

“Daddy gave you that picture?”

“That’s right.”

“He really wants to see me again?”

“He does. He says his health is bad...”

“He’s a lunger. Since the war.”

“That’s what he told me. He says he’s got enough of a pension to get by on. He sold his farm, has a house in De Kalb — where you can stay if you want.”

“My father sold his farm? I thought he’d never do that.”

“Louise, he’s coming to the end of his road. He says all he wants in life at this stage is to have a second chance with you. Make it up to you, for how rough he treated you, growing up.”

“He used to beat me with a belt.”

“I know. And if you don’t want to go see him, you don’t have to.”

“I don’t think I want to live with him. No matter what.”

“You don’t have to. It’s like I told you before — we’ll get you set up in the city, here.”

“As your secretary?”

“If we can’t find you something better, why not? It wouldn’t pay much, but I hear the boss is a soft touch.”

She snuggled to me. “I love the boss.”

We made love.

And the next afternoon I was back on the road in the Auburn, gratefully free of Burma Shave signs and hymns and the threat of hillbilly music. This time the female next to me was perky and fresh and young and not wearing a floral tent: first thing this morning I’d taken her to Marshall Field’s, and bought her a yellow-and-white frock with lace trim on the short sleeves and a little white collar. She’d have a whole new wardrobe tomorrow, after I got that grand from her old man.

That was the only thing I’d kept from her: that I’d be getting a bonus today for delivering her. It probably wouldn’t have mattered to her, but who could tell? She wasn’t from Chicago.

We took Highway 30 west for about an hour and then a sign said,

WELCOME TO DE KALB — BARBED WIRE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. Every place is the capital of something, I suppose. We drove through the quiet little town, a brick oasis in the desert of corn we’d been driving through, and on the northern edge, there it was: Hopkins Park, lushly wooded, rolling. Saturday afternoon, and crowded: picnic benches packed with families chowing down, like Ma Barker and the boys, some having to settle for their picnic basket on a checkered cloth on the ground, ants and all; a swimming pool with a diving board and bathhouse brimming with people, particularly kids, darting about in their bright-colored bathing trunks, making up one big erratically waving flag of summer. This was August, after all, school looming up head. Desperate days. Time running out.

There was a band shell, and Louise and I walked around it; I slipped my hand in hers. If her father saw that, it might irritate him — the man he hired getting fresh with his daughter and so on. But she needed the support, and I gave it to her. Petersen was nothing to me except a thousand bucks, and a guy who used to beat his little girl.

We were a little early. I bought some popcorn from an old man at a stand; we shared a bag, she and I, sitting on benches before the band shell, an audience of two, as if waiting for some show to start. You could hear the kids splashing, yelling, in the pool, though we were well away from it. Over at the left, under a tree, a young mother sat on the grass reading a romance magazine and keeping one eye on her little boy who was tossing a stick for his little terrier to retrieve.

Louise said, “I hope I can make things right with my daddy, I’d like that. But I can tell you right now I want to go back to the city with you. I hope to make peace with my daddy — but I want you, Jim.”

I smiled at her. “I’m not Jim, remember.”

She smiled back. “You’re no gentleman, either.”

It was the closest I ever heard her come to making a joke.

Then she said, “You’ll always be Jim to me.”

We sat on the bench, not holding hands now, but sitting close enough to touch, just barely, enjoying the sounds of the kids splashing and families picnicking and a dog barking and I was just checking my watch when a voice from behind us said, “Louise! Louise.”

I glanced back and Petersen was standing there, in the grassy aisle, in the midst of all those empty benches; his eyes were sunken in his weathered face, red, from crying, and crazed, from... craziness?

“Jesus,” I said.

He was standing there in those same Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes he’d worn to my office, dark brown suit, light brown bow tie, shiny brown shoes, hands behind his back, leaning forward like a man about to fall on his face; the benches were on a gentle slope down to the band shell, which added to the effect. He had a whisper of a smile on his face. It made Karpis’ smile seem like the Mona Lisa.

And Louise was screaming.

Just like that night she woke up and saw me in bed next to her and screamed. Exactly like that.

I tried to touch her shoulder, to calm her, but she slid off the bench, cutting her scream short, and stepped out in the aisle and faced him. They were maybe ten feet apart, and she pointed up at him, as if pointing at an animal in a cage, and said, “What are you doing here? You stay away from me...”

“You shouldn’t have run off, Louise.” His voice as dry and cracked as parched earth.

I got up and stood in the aisle next to her. “Mr. Petersen, you promised me...”

She looked at me with her eyes so wide I could see the red lining them. “What did you call him?”

“Mr. Petersen. Louise, your father’s obviously upset, so maybe we should just—”

“My father! This isn’t my father!”

Petersen’s smile was a wound in his face that wouldn’t heal. “I love you, Louise. I still love you.”

“He’s my husband! That’s Seth!”

He said, “But you shouldn’t have been bad.”

“He lied to you! He knew I’d never come back if I knew it was him who hired you!”

“I’m getting you out of here,” I said, and took her by the hand, as Seth said, “I’ll always love you, Louise,” and a big black pistol came out from behind his back and blew a hole through her.

She swung in my arm like a rag doll, flung back by the impact. It pulled me down with her, my ears ringing from the gunshot; hit my head on the edge of a bench.

I wasn’t out long but when I looked up Seth hovered over me, and her; I didn’t have my gun, but I’m not sure I’d have had the presence of mind to use it if I had.

No matter. I looked up and Seth receded above me, his legs miles long, his head a tiny thing he was pointing the gun at, an old Army .45 revolver it must’ve been, and the muzzle flashed orange and my ears rang and his tiny head came apart in a red burst; then he fell like a tree, away from us, leaving a scarlet mist in the air where he’d stood.

I heard screaming. Not Louise’s. She had a blossom of red below the white collar of her new yellow dress, and lay silent, staring. It was the mother under the nearby tree doing the screaming, on her feet now, holding her little boy to her, shielding her little boy from the sight, but not able to keep her own eyes off it. The terrier was yapping.

I was just sitting there, spattered with their blood, the dead girl’s hand in mine.

Just sitting right there beside her for a long time, looking at her. Her eyes staring up at the sky. Her eyes. As big and brown as ever; so wide-set you almost had to look at them one at a time. But they weren’t beautiful anymore. I didn’t want to dive in there anymore. She was no longer in them.

So I closed them for her.