Public Enemies (46 page)

None of the FBI agents and St. Paul police who descended on the neighborhood had any idea who was doing the shooting. One agent telephoned Washington to say the suspects didn’t match the descriptions of anyone in the Barker Gang. Not until two hours later, when agents finally stormed Apartment 303, did the FBI realize who it had found. Inside, amid an arsenal of pistols and submachine guns and drawerfuls of men’s suits and ladies undergarments, they found three photos. One showed a baby boy, another a teenager. The third was a Navy sailor with a crewcut and a familiar crooked grin. It was Dillinger. Fingerprints taken from a Listerine bottle confirmed it. And from the drops of blood agents found in the hallway outside, they guessed he had been hit.

In the getaway car blood reddened Dillinger’s pant leg. He had been hit by a ricochet, one of his own bullets. It struck high on his left calf, a “through and through” just below his knee. As sirens sounded over St. Paul, Dillinger told Billie to head to the apartment of Eddie Green, the redheaded jug marker. He needed a doctor.

Green directed them to an office building in downtown Minneapolis, and a doctor named Clayton May. May was a forty-six-year-old general practitioner whose practice included fifty-dollar abortions and treating the venereal diseases rampant in St. Paul’s underworld. When Green said he had a friend injured in the explosion of an illegal still, May followed him outside. Dillinger was sitting in the backseat with Billie. They drove to an apartment complex on the south side, where the doctor treated his shadier clients. Billie threw an arm around Dillinger and helped him limp into a first-floor apartment.

Dr. May later insisted that Dillinger had threatened his life, but in fact the roll of cash the outlaw was carrying was all the persuasion Dr. May needed. The wound wasn’t serious. They bandaged it and applied a mercury solution to clean it. Dr. May told Dillinger to rest; he would need several days to heal. He gave him a tetanus shot and left. In time Dillinger drifted to sleep.

As the FBI scrambled to find Dillinger that morning, Bonnie Parker sat stroking a white rabbit beside a car parked north of the Dallas city limits, on an unpaved stretch of road overlooking Texas State Highway 114. The rabbit was a gift for her mother. Clyde was stretched out across the backseat, trying to take a nap. Henry Methvin was pacing. After an extended visit with Methvin’s family in Louisiana, they had picked up the ulcer-plagued Joe Palmer in Joplin and sent Palmer into Dallas to alert their families to their arrival.

At about three-thirty, Bonnie glanced up and saw a trio of motorcycle policemen passing north on the highway below them. They were state troopers. As Bonnie watched, two of the men, spotting the Ford parked alone on the hillside, slowed, then turned around, heading toward the entrance to the dirt road where Bonnie and Clyde waited.

According to the version of events Clyde told his family, Bonnie walked back to the car and roused him. He stepped out with a sawed-off shotgun. Methvin was already standing by the car, cradling a Browning automatic rifle. As Clyde told the story, he said to Methvin, “Let’s take ’em.”
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Clyde claimed he meant to take the officers hostage, just as he had a half-dozen times before.

Methvin misunderstood. The two patrolmen, E. B. Wheeler, twenty-six, and a twenty-two-year-old rookie named H. D. Murphy, who was on his first day of duty, were just coasting up to the parked Ford, their sidearms still holstered, when Methvin raised his rifle and fired a burst of bullets directly into Wheeler’s chest, killing him. Murphy stopped his motorcycle and began to grab for a sawed-off shotgun. When Clyde saw him go for the gun, he fired three shots, killing Murphy as well. A passing motorist watched as the three then leaped into the Ford and drove off.

The Dallas County sheriff, Smoot Schmid, immediately announced that Clyde had done the killing. “He’s not a man,” Schmid said. “He’s an animal.” Governor Ferguson announced $500 rewards for the arrest of Clyde and his unidentified co-assassin.

Frank Hamer arrived in Dallas the next morning.

 

 

As initial reports of the St. Paul gunfight crossed his desk that Sunday, Hoover was apoplectic. Nothing about this made sense: Why had two men conducted a raid, and why was one of them a member of the notoriously corrupt St. Paul police? Why were his men armed with pistols instead of machine guns? Why wasn’t he told of the raid beforehand? And why, above all, had his men let Dillinger get away?
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In a phone call with Purvis, Hoover condemned the St. Paul office for “their atrocious bungling of the raid yesterday.” From now on, Hoover said, all information on Dillinger—no matter how trivial—was to be relayed to headquarters. And, as Hoover repeated to agents in St. Paul, police were never to join FBI raids again, unless agents “were short of equipment, like machine guns or gas guns.”
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The St. Paul shoot-out had a galvanizing effect on Hoover. From the tone of his memoranda, he seemed amazed that Dillinger had the temerity to actually fire on his men. Then and there, Hoover decided to make Dillinger’s apprehension the Bureau’s highest priority. That Tuesday he ordered all offices to give Dillinger precedence “over all other pending cases.” New agents poured into St. Paul. Cots were arranged in the FBI office and at the post office, where the men grabbed catnaps between calls.

Monday night they got their first break. The Lincoln Park’s manager, Mrs. Coffey, telephoned the St. Paul office with a tip. Her husband had found the address of one of Dillinger’s visitors, the man who had exchanged shots with Agent Coulter; he rented an apartment at 2214 Marshall Avenue. Agents had the building surrounded within an hour. By daylight there was no sign of Dillinger or any other suspects, but the manager identified a man who matched the description of Coulter’s assailant. He lived in Apartment 106. The unit had been rented two weeks earlier by another man, who gave his name as D. Stevens. The manager hadn’t seen either man for days.

The apartment’s windows were closed; from the outside it looked vacant. Betting their suspect was too smart to return, agents had the manager unlock the apartment at 7:30. Inside they found what was clearly a bank robber’s lair: a Thompson submachine gun stock, a two-foot dynamite fuse, road maps and airline schedules, license plates, three notebooks filled with getaway maps, and bullets—lots and lots of bullets. After dusting for fingerprints and collecting stray receipts and laundry tags, everyone but two junior agents returned downtown.

A few hours later, just before noon, the two agents were pacing the apartment, submachine guns in their hands, when they heard a key enter the front latch. The agents leaped to the door just as a startled “negress”—as an FBI report termed her—stepped into the apartment and found herself facing the muzzle of a Thompson gun. She said her name was Lucy Jackson. She was a maid. She said her sister had asked her to clean the apartment. The sister, whose name was Leona Goodman, was sitting in a car outside. The two agents brought her in.

The story Leona Goodman told the FBI would prove as important as any the Bureau heard all year. She said she worked for a man she knew as “Mr. Stevens”; as agents were to learn later, “Mr. Stevens” had arranged for Mrs. Goodman to clean the homes of a series of major criminals, from Van Meter to Frank Nash to Harry Sawyer. Just that morning, Mrs. Goodman said, Mr. Stevens had visited her home, handed her a key, and asked her to clean out this apartment. She was feeling sickly, so she had asked her sister to do it. She had promised to pack some clothes into a tan suitcase and bring it to her house. Mr. Stevens had promised to come for the bag later that day.

The agents took Mrs. Goodman downtown, where the tan suitcase was emptied and refilled with stacks of Wanted posters. Inspector Rorer approached Ed Notesteen, the agent who had manned the infamous kitchenette viewing post during Verne Miller’s Halloween escape in Chicago, and told him to take Mrs. Goodman, the bag, and two agents back to Mrs. Goodman’s home to await the arrival of the mysterious “Mr. Stevens.” As he left, Notesteen asked Inspector Rorer what to do if he appeared. According to Agent Notesteen’s memorandum on the day’s events, Rorer’s reply struck him as unusual: “Shoot him.”

By early afternoon, Notesteen and the other two agents had taken up positions in Mrs. Goodman’s faded clapboard house, located on a quiet street in a black neighborhood. From the tone of his memos, it’s clear that Notesteen wasn’t comfortable with the setting or his orders. Agent George Gross, who sat in a window with a submachine gun across his lap, noticed several suspicious cars driving by.
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Notesteen called Inspector Rorer and asked for reinforcements; a little later he was relieved to see several agents driving nearby streets. While on the phone, Notesteen pointedly asked Rorer to restate his orders. It all depended on Mrs. Goodman’s identification of “Mr. Stevens,” Rorer said. “If she says that’s the man,” he said, “kill him.”
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As the afternoon wore on, Notesteen paced from room to room. This wasn’t right. They didn’t have the first clue who “Mr. Stevens” was. He could be a real estate agent. He could be anyone. And Notesteen had orders to shoot him on sight. Notesteen repeatedly asked Mrs. Goodman, who sat in the kitchen, whether she could be certain if she saw Mr. Stevens. “I’ll know him,” she assured him.

Three hours passed. Then, about five-thirty, Agent Gross saw a green Terraplane sedan coasting to a stop outside. “There’s a car,” he said. “It’s stopping across the street.”

A man in an overcoat jumped out of the car and in three or four long strides was at the kitchen door. Mrs. Goodman saw him coming. She opened the door, shoved the suitcase outside, and slammed the door in her visitor’s face without a word.

As the door closed, Agent Notesteen scrambled into the kitchen. “Is that the man?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Goodman. “That’s the man who came by this morning, and that’s the man from the apartment.”

“Let him have it!” Notesteen shouted to Agent Gross.

There was a burst of machine-gun fire and the sound of shattering glass. A moment later, Notesteen stepped to the window. Lying on the sidewalk outside was a man with a suitcase. To Notesteen’s surprise, a woman was leaning over his fallen body, sobbing. “Are you positive that was the right man?” Notesteen asked Mrs. Goodman, who had begun crying hysterically. “Oh yes,” she managed to say. “It was.”

Notesteen telephoned Inspector Rorer and told him what happened. Then he ran outside, where he saw agents jogging toward the fallen man, who had been shot in the head and appeared to be dead or dying. No one knew who the wounded man was. The crying woman wouldn’t say. It wasn’t Dillinger, they could see that. A driver’s license identified him as Clarence Leo Coulter. It was a fake. The next day the FBI would identify him as Eddie Green. The crying woman was his wife, Beth.

Both knew where Dillinger was hiding.

 

 

Eddie Green was still alive when attendants wheeled him into St. Paul’s Ancker Hospital. In fact, he was raving. Lapsing in and out of consciousness, thrashing and babbling incoherently, Green was tucked into a hospital bed. A bullet had entered the back of his head through the brim of his fedora, traced a half-circle around his skull, and come to rest above his right eye. Doctors said he couldn’t live long. A pair of agents took positions by his bed, jotting down everything he said.

All night Green hollered for someone named Jim, who agents later learned was one of his brothers. He asked for a Fred, then a George and a Lucy, then asked: “Honey, back the car to the door.” As daylight approached, the agents began peppering Green with questions about Dillinger. Much of what he said was unintelligible. At one point, agents heard him say, “I’ve got the keys, he wants them.”

“Whose keys are those?” an agent asked.

“John’s.”

“John who?”

“Dillinger.”

Green made no meaningful responses when agents pressed where Dillinger could be found. At one point, however, he mentioned a doctor he had paid. Agents asked if anyone had been shot at the Lincoln Court Apartments. Green said “Jack . . . In the leg.” They pressed for the doctor’s address and Green said, “Wabasha Street.”

Where on Wabasha Street? “980, I guess.” The agents checked; there was no 980 Wabasha Street.

When the sun rose Green remained alive. In fact, he was stabilizing. But his pronouncements remained gibberish. By nightfall on Wednesday, April 4, Green was still talking. A new set of agents arrived. In an effort to focus Green’s rambling soliloquies, they decided to question him while posing as doctors and gang members. To their surprise, their tragicomic masquerade began to work. At one point, Agent Roy Noonan, posing as a doctor, asked Green if he knew the man who drove the green Ford and fired on Agent Coulter.
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“Doc, you sure are a nosey fella,” Green said. “Give me a shot so I can sleep.”

“I will if you tell me who drove the green Ford,” Noonan said.

“You know as well as I do.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“What do you want to know that for?”

“Well, I just want to know. Did Jack drive it?”

“Yes.”

“Jack who?”

“You know without asking me.”

“No, I don’t know. Who was he?”

“Dillinger,” Green said. “Doc, will you give me that shot?”

And so it went. Bit by bit, agents coaxed more information from the dying man. A breakthrough came around eleven that night when an agent tricked Green into naming an address in Minneapolis where he said Dillinger was hiding: 635 Park Avenue. Down at the FBI office, adrenaline surged through the ranks. Agents scrambled to Park Avenue, but found no 635. An agent at Green’s bedside telephoned a few minutes later. Green was now saying the correct address was 1835 Park Avenue, Apartment 4. This address they found. It was a two-story rooming house in a run-down area where, FBI agents would later learn, a doctor named Clayton May kept a hideaway office to perform abortions.