True Crime

42

When I got to her suite, she was standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb in white lounging pajamas, a cigarette in one too-casual hand. Her light brown hair was marcelled, her mouth startlingly red, her eyes startlingly blue under those long, long lashes.

“Hi, stranger,” Sally said.

“Hello, Helen,” I said sheepishly.

“I was beginning to think you’d never call.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d want me to.”

She unstruck her pose and gestured with a red-nailed hand. “Come in and set a spell.”

“Thanks.” I took off my hat and went in, still feeling sheepish somehow. She closed the door behind me.

We sat on the sofa in her white living room; she kept her distance, but reached over and put her hand on my hand. I sat there looking ahead blankly. I couldn’t remember how to talk to her. I couldn’t remember how to talk to anybody.

“You look lousy,” she said.

“I feel lousy.”

“There could be a connection.”

I tried to smile; my lips couldn’t quite make it.

She said, “When’s the last time you slept?”

“I been sleeping a lot, really.”

“You mean you been passing out a lot.”

I swallowed. My mouth was dry, my tongue thick and furry. “You been talking to Barney?”

She nodded. “He’s got a fight to train for. You shouldn’t be distracting him like this.”

“Nobody asked him to.”

“To what? Sit with you while you drink yourself into a stupor? Carry you up the stairs and toss you in bed? Why’d you call me, Nate?”

Now I could find the smile; just barely, but it was there. “Barney talked me into it.”

She shook her head, smiled wryly. “You don’t deserve friends like us.”

“I know I don’t,” I said, and started to weep.

She had an arm around me. I was hunched forward cupping my hands over my face. She was offering me a handkerchief that she’d had in her hand, at the ready; she’d been talking to Barney, all right.

“Ain’t very dignified for a tough copper,” I said, swallowing snot. “I been on this crying jag for so long my goddamn eyes burn.”

“Is that why you’re drinking, Nate? Does the flow of booze stop the flow of tears?”

I grunted something like a laugh. “You don’t drink much, do you, Helen? Getting drunk is the one socially pardonable way a man can cry in public. Nobody blames a drunk for crying in his beer.”

“I hear you’ve been hitting something a little stronger.”

“Yeah. But not today. Today I’m stone-cold sober. And it scares hell out of me.”

She looped her arm in mine, moving closer. “Let’s go to bed.”

I shook my head, violently. “No! No. That won’t solve anything... that won’t solve anything.”

“We don’t have to do anything, Nate. We’ll just get under the sheets and be together. What do you say?”

“I’m so goddamn tired I’d fall asleep in a second.”

“That’s okay. What else is Sunday afternoon good for?”

The satin sheets felt good; for a moment it was like I’d never left this room. Like I’d been here with Sally forever. For a moment I felt like myself again.

For a moment.

“Did you love her, Nate?”

She really had talked to Barney; I’d spilled my guts to the little palooka, and he’d spilled his to her. Damn him. Bless him.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was too rushed. She wasn’t... she wasn’t like you, Sally. She was just this dumb little farm girl.”

“I’m just an intelligent little farm girl, Nate.”

I found myself almost managing to smile again. “She was like you, a little. She could’ve been like you, if she’d had a break or two in her goddamn life. She wasn’t as smart as you, Helen. She wasn’t stupid, but she didn’t have your brains, your drive, your luck. You both found a way out, a way off of the farm. You just found a better way.”

“Did you love her, Nate?”

“I don’t know. It hadn’t got that far, really.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

I wondered how much Barney had told her.

“No,” I said.

She smiled like a wicked madonna. “You don’t lie worth a damn, Heller.”

Somebody laughed. Me?

I said, “It probably wouldn’t’ve lasted. But that isn’t the point. She was this sweet naïve thing who had a father who beat her and a husband who beat her some more. And then she fell in with... a bad crowd, and I came along, and she trusted me, and I killed her. I fucking killed her.”

She stroked my arm. “You didn’t kill anybody.”

“As good as. I took her right to the son of a bitch who did. For a thousand dollars.”

It had come in an envelope, with a bunch of stamps stuck on it, the Monday after. A fat envelope full of twenties. I’d hurled it against the wall, and the money spilled out like green confetti. Later, in one of my rare recent sober moments, I’d picked it up and stacked it and put it in a new envelope. It was in my bank deposit box, now. Money was money; it didn’t know where it came from. And even though I did know, I kept it. Out of perversity in a way. Because I had earned that money. Brother had I earned it.

“Why demand the impossible of yourself, Nate?” Sally asked. “There was no way you could have known that man wasn’t really her father.”

“I should have checked up on him. That’s twice lately somebody’s come in off the street and told me a story and I swallowed hook, line and sinker. I’m supposed to be a guy with some street savvy. Stick around — some guy’ll sell me the Wrigley Building, before the summer’s out.”

Smiling, she said, “You’re starting to sound like Nate Heller again, whether you like it or not.”

I sighed. “It’d be all right with me to come out of this. And I will. Being here’s a good sign.”

“I think you’re right.”

“I’m getting off the rum, that much I promise you. I seen too many guys sitting in doorways in rags sucking a bottle in a bag. I’ll eat my piece before I go that route.”

“You’re no suicide, Heller. You’re not the type.”

“My father was.”

“Maybe that’s why you aren’t.”

Seth Pearson had been. Louise’s husband. I’d sat in the De Kalb County Sheriff’s Office that Saturday afternoon, for hours, giving a statement, and gathered that everybody in town knew Seth was crazy with jealousy, rage and sorrow over his runaway wife, though the sheriff’s people, at least, were surprised it had gone this far. I didn’t tell them anything about retrieving Louise from the outlaw life; just that Pearson, posing as Joshua Petersen, had come to me so I’d find his “daughter.” The real Joshua Petersen, I was told, had died several months ago.

The story got little play in the Chicago papers, just an item buried on the inside — any crime of passion in the state was bound to get at least that much ink. Louise’s outlaw past did not catch up with her, or it’d have got more, much more.

“She almost told me,” I said, shaking my head. “She was surprised that the photo I had of her came from her father — it was a picture of her and the husband, you see. But I didn’t pick up on it. I was too thick, too eager to make that grand.”

“You got to quit punishing yourself! That girl was a lost cause before you met her. Her fate, as we say in the theater, was sealed. You couldn’t have prevented it. Some things you can’t prevent, Nate. Some things you can’t control, or stop. You’re just a man.”

“I’m a cop. A detective.”

“Yes, right, and that’s why you are a detective — you want to put this messy world in some kind of recognizable order. And that’s of course impossible. But you do seem to manage to tidy up an occassional corner, now and again, you know. Give yourself a little credit. You saved J. Edgar Hoover’s life, didn’t you? Or at least his dignity.”

“Barney told you about that, too, did he?”

“Yeah. You managed that one pretty well, wouldn’t you say, Heller?”

“Ten of Hoover isn’t worth one of her.”

“Well, it doesn’t work that way, that isn’t the way life plays, is it?” She got out of bed and went over to the window and pointed. “Before you know it, winter’ll be here, and those rich Gold Coast bastards’ll wear mink coats while a couple blocks away people’ll be freezing to death in the street. Is that fair?”

“No. But wouldn’t you like to change it?”

“Sure. In my small way, I try. But I’m not going to fling myself out the window. I’m not going to throw my mink coat out, either, or give it to a peddler. Or cry in my beer.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Survive. Best I can. Do my job. Best I can. Remember telling me that?”

I was smiling. Just a little; but it didn’t feel unnatural, anyway.

She came back and got in bed, sitting up. “Why don’t you quit depressing yourself with the what-ifs and the why-didn’t-Is. Why don’t you tell me about meeting Dillinger.”

Barney really did tell her everything.

“I swore that little SOB to secrecy!”

“You’re keeping secrets from me, Heller? Don’t even bother trying.

So I told her about meeting Dillinger.

And I told her about how Cowley pretended to think the man named Sullivan I’d met was only bullshitting about being Dillinger — since Dillinger was obviously dead. The headlines had made Dillinger’s death at the Biograph true. What was really going on in Cowley’s mind, and Purvis’, and even Hoover’s, was then and is now beyond me. They had to know, or strongly suspect, that I was right. That Dillinger was alive. But they stuck to the party line. Hoping Dillinger would stay underground and dead; or, if he went back on the outlaw trail, turn up dead with a new face and end up in some potter’s field unidentified. Underground or under the ground — either way was fine.

Their odds weren’t bad, actually. Dillinger struck me as cagey enough to stay dead. If he survived that tommy-gun burst in front of the Banker’s Building, he’d be careful as hell before sticking his neck out again — attached as it was to that new face of his.

Cowley also agreed to keep my name out of it; the press never heard about my role in the action, and the kidnapping aspect was quashed, as well. The way it was given to the press (and they bought it) had Hoover, Purvis and Cowley stumbling onto the Continental Bank being cased for a heist. Rumors of the heavyweight public enemies involved did make the papers, but the Division of Investigation wouldn’t confirm them. Losing a catch that included Nelson, the Barkers, Floyd and Karpis would’ve made the division guys look like saps, so they withheld the names. The “gang” members were unidentified, the official release went.

The papers ate the story up (G-MEN IN LOOP GUN BATTLE) and Hoover was portrayed as the hero of the piece.

I didn’t care. My concern was keeping out of the papers, so Dillinger/Sullivan, if he had survived, wouldn’t think I betrayed him; he might strongly suspect, but he wouldn’t know. Nobody had seen me there, despite my having leaned out the door to fire a few shots over Nelson’s head, late in the fray. All Dillinger could know for sure was what the rest of them knew: that I skipped with the girl. The only difference was he knew why.

And to Nelson and the others, of course, I wasn’t Nate Heller: I was Jimmy Lawrence.

And Jimmy Lawrence was, effectively, dead. Frank Nitti had assured me of that. He had sent for me Monday afternoon, to ask me what really went down at the Banker’s Building. When I told him I’d defused that situation, he was pleased with me, and furious with everybody else.

“Kidnap Hoover! Crazy bastards. The heat that’d bring down woulda made this summer look like the North Pole. I owe you one, Heller.”

“No, Frank — you don’t owe me anything. No more debts either way, between you and me.”

“What d’you mean, kid?”

“I mean, I asked for a favor, and you did me one — but at the same time you used me to finger Doc Moran. I was there when he was killed, Frank. I was part of it — just like when Cermak’s boys tried to gun you down. Remember?”

“Only when I breathe. Look, Moran was already dead. He was walking around, but he was long dead. You had nothin’ to do with it.”

“Sure. Fine. Just I don’t owe you anything, and you don’t owe me anything. Clean slate. Okay?”

“Sure, kid. Except for one last favor I’m gonna do you.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m gonna spread the word Jimmy Lawrence went swimming in cement shoes. Just to keep those crazy bastards from comin’ lookin’ for you.”

“That I would appreciate, Frank.”

“My pleasure. And you don’t owe me nothin’. And, Heller?”

“Yeah?”

“Get a shave. Take a bath — you smell like a brewery.”

Sound advice, touching as it did on two of Nitti’s fields of endeavor.

And today, almost a week later, I’d taken it. Bathed. Shaved. Stopped the sauce. And come to see Sally.

“It’ll pass, Heller.”

“I keep seeing her eyes, Helen. In my dreams. That’s why I kept drinking; when I was passed out, I didn’t dream. Not that I can remember, anyway. But if I sleep, I see her eyes. The dead way.”

“Shhh. Shhh.”

“Helen.”

“Yes?”

“Why don’t you hold me.”

“Why don’t I.”

She held me, and I slept. No dreams.

No Sally, after November.

She left soon after the fair closed; it had disturbed her, what happened then. It was our last night together — that is, the last night of our long summer together. She’d looked out the window at the Gold Coast and said, “Today they completely demolished the Century of Progress. They tore down flags, they tore down streetlights, they tore down walls. It started out being souvenir hunters, but it turned into mass vandalism. It was terribly frightening, Nate... Nate? Nate, this time why don’t you hold me?”

I had, that one last time. It disturbed Sally, and I think it disturbed Chicago, to realize the fair was finally over. The illusion of a streamlined future was just so much scrap lumber now, in this city mired in a dreary present.

We never got back together, Sally and me, after our summer. We remained friends over the years, but she married (several times) and she wasn’t the kind to fool around. She was a very moral girl, Sally Rand.

But she stayed in show business. She never made it in the movies, really, but she kept on fan-and-bubble dancing throughout her life. That wasn’t all, of course — through the thirties she lectured on intellectual and political topics, speaking out for republican forces in the Spanish Civil War; she even went to college, earned a degree. Shortly before she died in 1979, I spoke with her on the phone; I asked her why she was still doing her fan dance after all these years.

“Don’t be so up-tight, Heller!” she’d said. “I do it because I still like doing it. Better than doing needlepoint on the patio.”

I sent a wreath that said, “Good-bye, Helen.” I didn’t go the funeral; it was in California, and I was in Florida, and try to avoid funerals, particularly my own, which at my age is a good trick.

As for the rest of them, well, I kept track of some; others just faded into a well-deserved obscurity.

Still others found a place in history, at least the sort of history “true crime” buffs thrive on.

I remember feeling strangely numb, reading the write-up in the paper, when Inspector Sam Cowley and Baby Face Nelson met for the second time.

November 1934. Cowley and another agent stumbled onto Nelson, his wife and John Paul Chase, their car stalled, spouting steam from a bullet caught in a wild gunfight with several other feds down the road. Helen dove for cover, as Cowley, in a ditch, traded tommy-gun fire with Nelson, who strode slowly, inexorably toward Cowley, machine gun spraying slugs. Cowley hit Nelson several times, but Nelson came on, his tommy gun blazing, sweeping the gun in flaming arcs across the ditch, bullets tearing across Cowley, killing him. A nearby construction worker said later, “It was just like Jimmy Cagney.”

Soon Lester Gillis got in the car and asked his wife to drive. “I’ve been hit,” he said. He had seventeen bullets in him. Helen and Chase abandoned his naked corpse in a drainage ditch.

Helen testified against Chase and got a reduced sentence; Chase went to Alcatraz, mellowed, and painted oils.

Doc Barker was captured in Chicago in January 1935; he was living in the Pine Grove apartment at the time, out having an evening stroll when Purvis captured him; Doc was unarmed, and when Purvis asked him where his gun was, he said, “Home — and ain’t that a hell of a place for it!”

Ma and Fred had taken a two-story white cottage on Lake Weir in Florida when the feds surrounded the place and demanded their surrender. Someone within the house opened fire, and the agents riddled the cottage with slugs. Fred was found with eleven bullets in him; Ma with three. Both were dead.

Nobody had ever heard of Ma Barker, at this point; but the Division of Investigation had a dead old lady on their hands. So J. Edgar’s publicity boys turned her into the brains of the gang and created the legend of the “bloody mama,” avoiding the public embarrassment of having murdered a little-old-lady nonentity — at the same time, giving the newly rechristened Federal Bureau of Investigation that much further glory. Ma was never on a public enemies’ list, nor was she ever charged with a crime, let alone indicted. She was just an Ozark ma who loved her boys, if not wisely.

In June 1939 Doc attempted to escape from Alcatraz and was hastily assembling a raft when the rifles from the guard towers cut him down.

George Barker, Ma’s long-deserted husband, buried his boys and his wife in an open field near his small-town filling station in Oklahoma, in front of which he would sit in a chair leaned up against the building, listening to hillbilly music on the radio.

In October 1934, Pretty Boy Floyd, fleeing across an open field in Ohio, was cut down by Purvis and a squad of special agents in a hail of rifle and machine-gun fire. Purvis leaned over the dying man and asked him if he was Pretty Boy Floyd.

“I’m Charles Arthur Floyd,” he said. Then he denied being part of the Kansas City Massacre, cursed Purvis, and, finally, got across the river.

I don’t know what became of the “molls”: Helen Nelson (Gillis), Fred’s girl Paula, Karpis’ girl Dolores. She had his kid, I heard, a boy.

Karpis himself became a special target of Hoover’s. Hoover held Karpis responsible for the attempted kidnap in front of the Banker’s Building, and — sensitive to criticism that he had no real police background, that he’d never been on a real case, made a real arrest — Hoover arranged to be present at Karpis’ bloodless capture in New Orleans, in May 1936. Dozens of agents swooped down on Karpis, and once he was secured, Hoover was brought in to slap on the cuffs. But nobody had remembered to bring any, and an agent took off his tie and that was used instead. Karpis went to Alcatraz, was a docile prisoner, and upon his release was deported to Canada; he died in 1979.

As for the cops, Captain Stege retired and passed away a few years later. O’Neill the same. Zarkovich, however, became chief of detectives in East Chicago and then chief of police, surviving various grand jury investigations and reform administrations, working till his death in 1969. He never bragged about his role in the Dillinger shooting; he would only modestly say, “I just did my job.”

Polly Hamilton dropped out of sight for several years, but she turned up in Chicago in the forties, working at the Ambassador East Hotel in room service. Rumor had it she was doing more than providing late-night snacks and club soda, as she had a fancy Gold Coast apartment at the time. She was living in Old Town, married, still working for a hotel, when she died in 1969 of cancer of the tongue.

Anna Sage, despite Purvis’ pledge, was deported. In 1938 an angry Anna got on a train at LaSalle Street Station, destination Ellis Island; Hal Davis told me he saw a man see her off, and give her a package, whispering to her, calming her down. The man was Zarkovich. But before she sailed, she told reporters, “I will one day reveal startling new facts about the Dillinger slaying! They cannot keep me from coming back — I’ll be back someday!” She never did. After running a nightclub in Romania for some years, she began talking about going onstage to tell the “real story” of the Dillinger shooting. She was found dead along a Romanian roadside in April 1947. Cause of death remains a mystery.

Louis Piquett finally was disbarred, and went to Leavenworth in 1936, for a two-year sentence. He returned to bartending in 1938, but did a lot of legal work on the side, and still had friends in high places: President Truman, in January 1951, gave him a full pardon, and his reinstatement to the Illinois bar was imminent when he died that December.

The publicity the Biograph shooting brought to Melvin Purvis made him, and the G-man in general, a public hero. He resigned the division in 1935, after an apparently jealous Hoover crossed him, failing to back Purvis’ promise to Anna Sage of nondeportation, and (worse yet) pressuring Attorney General Cummings into denying permission for a Hollywood movie about Purvis’ adventures. Little Mel, “the most famous operative of the most famous law-enforcement agency in the United States,” hired on as spokesman for the Post Toasties Junior G-man Corps, appearing in comic-strip ads in the Sunday funnies. He worked on radio, as an announcer for FBI-oriented programs, and as a screenwriter; he even practiced law occasionally. During World War II he was a colonel and worked out of the War Crimes Office. But he ended up back home in South Carolina, running a radio station.

Then in 1959 one of Purvis’ most famous cases belatedly, publicly, unraveled. A judge released Roger Touhy, saying the kidnapping charges Purvis had brought years before were a fabrication devised by organized crime; twenty-three days after his release, Touhy was murdered by mob hit men.

Melvin Purvis, it was later said, read with morbid interest every newspaper and magazine piece he could assemble on the incident. At the same time he was suffering from mental depression, for which he took electroshock therapy. On February 29, 1960, he shot himself in the head with a .45 automatic.

Some reporters were quick to say this was the gun Purvis had carried the night he “shot” Dillinger. Of course, Melvin hadn’t fired a shot that night; nor did he or anyone else kill Dillinger.

No, gun buff that he was, Purvis selected something from his vast collection, specifically a chrome-plated .45, that he knew would do what he wanted it to: kill him.

I noted Purvis’ passing with interest and a little sadness. I didn’t dislike Purvis, really. He was no coward, certainly — he’d gone head-to-head with Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Volney Davis, Doc Barker and others, and come out on top. He’d even done some good investigative work, in the year following the Biograph. But he’d been used by the Outfit, unwittingly, and seeing one of his most famous cases come publicly undone, as it had with Touhy, must’ve been the straw.

Or one of them.

In October 1959, a letter arrived at A-1 Detective Agency addressed to Jimmy Lawrence, care of Nathan Heller.

It said: “Sleep easy. I’m not much for grudges — decided not to even the score. Wish you were here.”

It was signed “JD,” and had no address; just a California postmark.

Later I learned a longer letter had been sent to the Indianapolis Star, with a picture of a white-haired man who might be “Dillinger, twenty-five years later”; and yet another letter with picture to Emil Wanatka, the owner of the Little Bohemia Lodge, for the Dillinger Museum there. Both letters included information about Anna Sage, Jimmy Lawrence and Dillinger that was not common public knowledge.

I don’t know if my letter came from the same old guy who sent letters to the Star and Wanatka. But maybe Melvin Purvis received a similar letter, in early 1960.

And maybe J. Edgar did, as well. It makes me smile to think so, anyway. By the time such a letter might have arrived, the director’s famous displays of ghoulish memorabilia were not just to be found in the FBI Museum, but in the very anteroom where visitors waited for admission to Hoover’s office. Hoover would pass each day glass-cased enshrined mementos of that triumphant night at the Biograph: a straw hat, Polly Hamilton’s picture, gold-rimmed glasses, a cellophane-wrapped La Corona-Belvedere cigar. And of course facsimiles of the famous death mask.

The mask those student morticians made back at the Cook County Morgue.