Public Enemies (48 page)

“Big boy, lemme tell you something,” Dillinger said. “If you don’t know anything, you can’t tell anything, can you?”

“No.”

“Let that be a lesson to you,” Dillinger said. He was more forthcoming when Audrey took him aside. He described the Crown Point escape in detail, sketching her a map, then burning it with a match.

They ate the chicken while sitting on the ground outside the backdoor. It was a gorgeous spring day, with a high sun and few clouds. Afterward everyone walked across the fields into the woods. Dillinger held hands with his niece, Mary. “You believe what’s in the papers if you want to,” Dillinger told her, “but take it from me, I haven’t killed anyone and I never will.” He smiled. “Take about half a grain of salt, believe half of what’s left, and you’ve got it made.”

After a while they walked back up to the house and Dillinger posed for snapshots, clowning around with the submachine gun and the wooden gun from Crown Point. When a plane appeared overhead—the FBI later determined it was a stunt flyer—Dillinger returned inside the house. It was the first time the others saw him worried. The spell, the illusion of a carefree Sunday picnic, was broken.

Back inside, Dillinger seemed on edge. He kept stepping to the window to watch the plane. Hubert and Fred Hancock took the children outside to fly a kite. A little later, around three, Mary Hancock walked into the living room and said, “There’s a car out there with a couple of fellows and it looks suspicious.” With the mysterious plane still flying overhead and the cars streaming by outside, Dillinger announced that it was time to leave. He asked Hubert to take Fred Hancock and retrieve the Ford they bought the day before.

As Dillinger relaxed with his family, a stream of cars passed by the farm on the two-lane blacktop of Route 267. Many were curiosity seekers, Sunday drivers from Indianapolis craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the infamous Dillinger homestead.

According to FBI memoranda, one of these cars was manned by a pair of young agents. J. L. Geraghty and T. J. Donegan had just arrived in Indiana. Donegan had come from Cincinnati the night before. He had been given a whirlwind tour of the area at 2:00 A.M., but in the darkness his mind had registered little. He was working on barely two hours’ sleep and trying his best not to get lost. His partner, Geraghty, was even more out of his element; he had arrived in Mooresville from the streets of New York just that morning.

As they cruised past the Dillinger farm around three, the two agents noted three cars in the driveway: two sedans and a Chevy coupe that matched the description of Hubert’s car. This was good; their orders were to find Hubert and keep an eye on him. Two miles past the farm, they turned and headed back. When they passed a second time they glimpsed a number of children and two men outside the house.

Farther down the road Donegan and Geraghty turned around once more, trying in vain to find a spot to watch the driveway’s entrance. When the FBI agents passed the Dillinger farm a third time, they noticed Hubert’s car was gone. They set off to find it. Cruising through Mooresville they spotted the car, driving toward them, back toward the Dillinger farm. A black Ford cruised just ahead of it. A few blocks later, the agents turned and headed back toward the farm, taking their time to avoid arousing suspicion.

Hubert saw the agents’ car and assumed its occupants were FBI men. He returned to the farm, left the Lincoln, and told Dillinger they were being followed. He and Fred Hancock then drove off in Hubert’s Chevy, promising Dillinger they would see him later that night. By the time Donegan and Geraghty passed the farmhouse a fourth time, the two young men were already gone. When the agents saw Hubert’s car was missing again, they grew worried. They drove faster, hoping to overtake Hubert farther down Route 267. They proceeded as far as the town of Plainfield before giving up. Thinking Hubert might have turned off on a side road, they returned up the road toward the Dillinger farm.

By that point Dillinger had hatched a plan to evade anyone watching the farm. He had hoped to leave after nightfall, but between the airplane and the FBI agents, he needed to move fast. He arranged for everyone to leave in a three-car caravan. Audrey and her husband drove out first, turning left toward Mooresville. John Dillinger, Sr., drove the next car, turning right. Billie climbed behind the wheel of the third and final car, the new Lincoln, along with the two teenage girls. Dillinger slid down onto the rear floorboard, pulled a blanket over his head, and clutched his machine gun.

No one saw them leave. Billie turned right and drove a short ways toward Plainfield. When Dillinger thought it was safe, he told her to stop the car. Just as she did the two FBI agents, Donegan and Geraghty, approached from the south. They saw the shiny new Lincoln parked on the roadside and recognized it as the car they had seen earlier.

As they neared the Lincoln, the two agents saw three women and a man inside. Just as they passed, the man stepped out of the passenger door. He began to walk around the rear of the car. Both agents got a good look at him. He was about thirty-five, they guessed, not quite six feet tall, and well built, wearing a gray summer suit and a matching hat. It was Dillinger.

They didn’t recognize him.

Later, they would swear to their superiors it couldn’t have been him. But it was. Dillinger turned and watched over his left shoulder as they drove away. After a roadside meeting with friends that night, he and Billie headed for Chicago.

The following week, local newspapers confirmed rumors of Dillinger’s weekend visit. The story made national headlines. Confronted by reporters, Audrey spoke freely of their warm reunion. There was speculation FBI agents had been in the area, but the Bureau never said a word. Only now, after the release of FBI case files, is the extent of the Bureau’s foul-up clear: two FBI agents drove right by Dillinger on a bright spring day, and never even knew it was him.

The next morning, Dillinger and Billie slept late. Lying in bed they talked about the future. Dillinger was in a warm mood. He spoke about finding a quiet place, maybe somewhere in the country, where they could settle down, live like normal people. Billie said she would like that. Dillinger said he was thinking about cosmetic surgery on his face. Doctors nowadays could make a man almost unrecognizable, he said.

When they finally reached Chicago around noon, Dillinger telephoned Piquett’s investigator, Art O’Leary. He trusted O’Leary, who was to become his primary contact in coming weeks. They met at 3:00 at the corner of Sacramento and Augusta, then drove neighboring streets as Dillinger described what had happened at St. Paul and Mooresville. “By the way,” Dillinger asked at one point, “doesn’t Piquett know a doctor who does plastic surgery work?” He pronounced the lawyer’s name “Pikwatt,” as he sometimes did.

“Why?”

“I’d like to have him work on me. I want to live like other people. Billie and I would like to be married and settle down somewhere.”
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O’Leary promised to ask Piquett about a doctor. Afterward Dillinger drove downtown to the U Tavern on State Street, where Billie walked in and talked to one of Opal Long’s old boyfriends, a man named Larry Strong. She needed a place to stay. Strong said he would try to find something, and they agreed to meet at a bar called the Tumble Inn at eight. What Billie didn’t know was that Strong had already been questioned by the FBI. When she left, he—or someone he talked to—walked to a phone and telephoned Melvin Purvis.
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Purvis pushed through the front door of the dim, dingy tavern a few minutes past eight. He had dressed down for the occasion. Larry Strong was sitting at the bar, half-drunk, talking to a middle-age bartender. The only other people in the room were an elderly man and a boy. Purvis took a seat at the bar, making small talk with Strong and the bartender. Neither man recognized him. A few minutes later a musician wobbled in, and Strong asked him to play something on the piano. There was no piano. It was that kind of place.

Outside, a dozen agents lurked in the streets. About eight-thirty Dillinger slid his Ford down Austin Street and pulled to the curb beside the tavern. Standing down the block, Agent James J. Metcalfe saw the car pull up. A small, quiet man, born in Germany and raised in Texas, Metcalfe was one of the few members of the group of agents who would come to be known as the Dillinger Squad who would achieve prominence after his FBI career. He wrote poetry, and after leaving the Bureau he embarked on a career as a journalist and then a syndicated poet, his sentimental verse published in newspapers across the country.

Unfortunately, Metcalfe was a far better poet than FBI agent. Studying the car in the gathering darkness, he couldn’t see the features of the man behind the wheel. When he saw a woman step from the car, he realized he needed to get a better look. As Billie disappeared into the Tumble Inn, Metcalfe strolled down the sidewalk past the parked car. Dillinger sat behind the wheel, a Thompson gun in his lap. Metcalfe passed no more than five feet from him.

Inside, Purvis saw Billie when she walked in. She stepped to the bar, standing between him and the drunken Larry Strong. Purvis offered her a stool. She shook her head no, ordered a beer, and leaned toward Strong to talk. Purvis strained to hear the whispered conversation but he couldn’t. After a minute he stepped outside, saw one of his men and nodded. Agent Ralph Brown, pulling a submachine gun from beneath his coat, hustled inside, followed by the other agents. In seconds Billie and Strong were arrested.

Amazingly, no one said anything about the man in the car outside. Instead, for reasons he failed to mention in subsequent reports, Purvis took two agents and searched the tavern’s basement. Only after returning upstairs did it dawn on Purvis to ask how Billie had arrived. In a car, someone said. Several agents dashed outside, but for the second time in twenty-four hours, Dillinger was gone.

When Billie was arraigned several days later, she openly mocked the FBI to reporters, saying that Dillinger had been inside the Tumble Inn when she was arrested. “I have no comment to make on such a ridiculous statement,” Purvis replied. Dillinger hadn’t been in the bar, of course, but Purvis belatedly realized that he
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been the man in the car. His agents’ memoranda on the topic were small masterpieces of apologia. Two said they had seen the man and were certain it wasn’t Dillinger. Agent Metcalfe, who had walked within inches of the car, said he hadn’t gotten a clear look inside “due to the fact that the car stood beside a curb of unusual height, so it would have been necessary to stoop very low in order to look into the car from the sidewalk.”
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Art O’Leary was at his apartment that night when the phone rang. It was Dillinger. “The G’s just picked up Billie,” he said.

“How did it happen?”

“I was sitting in my car right around the corner. There were too many of them for me to take her away. It was that rat Larry Strong. Where’s Mr. Piquett? Is he still in Washington?”

“Yes,” O’Leary said.

“Well, phone him right away, and tell him to try and get a writ to get Billie out.”
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Frechette was taken in handcuffs to the Bankers Building, where agents pushed her onto a chair beneath a bright light in the conference room. All that night and into the next day they pelted her with questions. Frechette would say nothing about Dillinger. She begged them to let her sleep, but the agents refused. At one point, Purvis’s secretary, Doris Rogers, took her a sandwich and was appalled. Seventy years later Rogers still remembers what she did next. “After I left,” she recalls, “I came back and I told Melvin, ‘This is inhumane.’”

“What do you think we should do?” Purvis asked.

“Let her sleep.”

“Where?”

“I’ll take her to the ladies’ room.”

With Purvis’s consent, Rogers returned to the conference room and invited Frechette to the ladies’ room.

“I can’t,” Frechette said. “They won’t let me.”

“Come on,” Rogers said.

There was a leather sofa in the ladies’ room. Rogers poured Frechette a glass of water and told her to lie down. She fell asleep. An hour later Rogers woke her up. Frechette begged not to be returned to the conference room. She said she would tell Rogers everything. But Rogers had no choice. Frechette went back under the hot lights.

“These women were such pities,” Rogers remembers. “Everybody was broke, and they were running with these men because they couldn’t get a meal. They all had a baby or two, and they were treated like dirt. I tell you, the Depression was a terrible time in America.”

 

 

As FBI agents fanned out across central Indiana in pursuit of Dillinger, Assistant Director Hugh Clegg pulled up a chair in the Bureau’s St. Paul office and began to talk to Eddie Green’s wife, Beth. Newspapers in the Twin Cities were already alive with rumors of the mysterious red-headed woman the FBI had captured, but to Clegg’s consternation, Beth Green wasn’t saying a thing. Not at first, anyway.

They made an interesting pair. Clegg was thirty-five but seemed older, a pudgy, compact attorney from rural Mississippi who was near the beginning of a long, distinguished FBI career. He was trained as an agent, but his skills were those of a bureaucrat; Hoover circulated Clegg’s inspection reports throughout the Bureau as models. Clegg was the very model of the yes-men who came to surround Hoover in later years. He worshiped Hoover, calling him “my hero”; Hoover, in turn, prized Clegg for his unwavering loyalty and his easy Southern way with the Washington elite. He had been promoted to assistant director after Hoover received glowing letters from the vice president, whom Clegg had escorted on a West Coast trip the previous year.

Forty-five years later, Clegg would remember Beth Green as the only criminal he ever liked. The two had several long talks, but Green remained reluctant to discuss Dillinger. Then on Tuesday, April 10, Eddie Green lapsed into a final coma; he died the following afternoon, seven days after he was shot. When she heard the news, Beth Green began telling Clegg everything she knew.
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The names and places gushed out of her. It was from Green that the FBI first learned the names of Dillinger’s gang: Van Meter, Tommy Carroll, a man known as “Red”—she identified John Hamilton—and a vicious little twenty-four-year-old named George “Baby Face” Nelson, who Green said was “just a kid.”