True Crime (6 page)

I drove over to Pine Grove Avenue and parked just across and down from the ritzy digs where Polly Hamilton’s boyfriend lived. Since she had called in sick today, Polly might well be in there with Jimmy Lawrence right now; bedridden, probably. I hoped the poor girl got to feeling better….

I sat in my shirt sleeves on the rider’s side with the windows rolled down; I could actually feel something passing for a lake breeze. In front of me was this morning’s
Herald and Examiner
: “a paper for people who think,” according to Mr. Hearst. Well, maybe he was right—I wasn’t reading, but I was thinking.

Thinking about Anna Sage, and her contention that Polly Hamilton’s male companion Jimmy Lawrence was really one John H. Dillinger.

“Didn’t you notice the resemblance?” she’d asked.

No, I’d said; but, yeah, I guessed he looked a little like Dillinger.

So did a lot of people. Every few days, these last months, there’d be another story about a “Dillinger double” who’d been picked up by the police, somewhere in the Midwest. One poor guy in St. Paul had been arrested five times and was on his way to the local police station to try to work out this mistaken-identity problem for good when he was arrested again; he wasn’t sprung till they’d taken his fingerprints and compared them with Dillinger’s.

Less than a month ago, another unwitting Dillinger double had strolled out of the lobby of the Uptown Theater—where Polly and her beau and yours truly had seen
Viva Villa
last night—and faced six riot squads of Chicago cops, who advised him not to move or they’d blow his head off.

And just this past Sunday an insurance salesman in Columbus, Ohio, had got off a plane from a business trip to Indianapolis only to be greeted by a dozen shotgun-bearing cops who had received “positive identification” of his being Dillinger from the manager of the hotel where he’d stayed the night before. Whether the guy sold life insurance or not, the papers hadn’t said.

A sort of Dillinger fever gripped the country, and had ever since the bandit’s year-long spree of bank robberies came to a bloody head a few months ago, at the Little Bohemia Lodge in upper Wisconsin, when the feds’d had Dillinger trapped and managed only to kill a civilian or two, and capture a few of the gang’s molls, while Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson and crew slipped out the back door.

How this “public enemy” (a phrase borrowed by the feds from Chicago, where the Crime Commission had coined it for Al Capone) became a household word in one short year had more to do with the style the outlaw brought to his robberies than the robberies themselves. The outline of his legend was already known to every man, woman and child in the country—including this kid.

Given a twenty-year sentence by a hanging judge for his first, relatively minor offense, twenty-year-old Johnny Dillinger had gone from his father’s farm to the reformatory and on to jail, spending nine years going to school under the tutelage of the likes of Harry Pierpont, Homer Van Meter and John Hamilton—experienced, hardened criminals all, skilled in the art of robbing banks.

When Johnny was paroled, following a petition seeking his release to help work on his father’s farm (signed by the man Dillinger had robbed as well as the now-repentant judge), he immediately began robbing banks and stores to raise money to finance a jailbreak, to get Pierpont, Van Meter, Hamilton and six other of his buddies out of the state prison at Michigan City. He smuggled several guns into the prison in a barrel of thread sent to the prison’s shirt factory; the nine Dillinger pals escaped just in time to bust John himself out of the jail at Lima, Ohio. Seems he’d been captured while visiting pretty Mary Longnaker, one of his numerous girls. The press loved Johnny and his pretty girls.

They loved Johnny, period. Because when he robbed his banks, he leapt over bank railings, flirted with the ladies and was courteous to the men. When somebody got shot, Johnny never was the one to do the shooting; and he regretted such violence—such as when Pierpont shot the sheriff during the Lima crash-out, and Johnny paused to kneel by the dying man, whom he’d grown fond of during his incarceration, saying sadly to Pierpont, “Did you have to do that?”

The public loved that; they loved it when he allowed the depositers unlucky enough to be in the bank being robbed to hold onto their dough—he wanted only the “bank’s money.” And when he busted out of the Crown Point, Indiana, jail using a wooden gun he’d carved and then darkened with shoe polish (so the story went), the common man said, “Nice going, Johnny—you showed ’em, Johnny!”

The common man liked identifying with John Dillinger, and why not? He had the common man’s face. Oh, perhaps a shade on the handsome side, at least for a bank robber; and his photos often showed him with a wry smile worthy of a picture-show heavy. But he had the kind of face you passed in the street and didn’t think twice about.

Unless a sort of national hysteria was under way, as in these past three or four months, when “positive identifications” of Dillinger would be reported in, say, Massachusetts and Ohio—on the same day.

So when Anna saw a Dillinger resemblance in Polly’s dapper Dan, I was momentarily caught off guard, but not bowled over. Dillinger was on everybody’s mind, in every paper’s headlines; like this one I was pretending to read—
DILLINGER SEEN IN FLORIDA
—and the one Jimmy Lawrence had been reading a few nights ago in Anna’s flat. So she said.

It had gone like this: Anna had prepared a Romanian specialty for Lawrence, Polly, Anna’s out-of-work son Steve and his girl, whose name Anna didn’t mention. They’d eaten in the kitchen, next to several open windows, which helped with the heat. After dinner, the women cleared the table and began doing the dishes; there was talk of playing pinochle later. Conversation lagged—too damn hot for chatter. Still, despite the heat, Lawrence lit up a cigar—a big, fat expensive one. And he began to read the paper.

After a while he said, “Well—they’ve got me in St. Paul today,” and laughed.

Then he got up and went out on the back stairs to smoke some more, and get some air. Anna stopped polishing a dish long enough to look at the front page of the paper Lawrence had been reading; the face of John Dillinger stared at her, from a photo.

I had said to her, on hearing this tale, “How can he be Dillinger? He looks a
little
like Dillinger. Sure. But not just like Dillinger.”

Hadn’t I heard about plastic surgery? Gangsters go underground and get plastic surgery these days, she said. Like she was talking about the latest dance step.

Still, it was hard to dismiss Anna’s opinion. This was not the hysterical reaction of a harried housewife in Duluth, on her way to the bank with this week’s hard-earned deposit in hand, who spotted a man who looked like that John Dillinger and ran immediately to the station house. No. Anna had been around; she’d been dealing with crooks and crooked cops since I was in knee pants. If she thought this guy might be Dillinger, well…this guy might be Dillinger.

And if he was, maybe I’d do something about it. After all, the reward money was hovering at around twenty thousand dollars, half of it federal, half of it from half a dozen states in the “crime corridor” of the Midwest, where Dillinger had been harvesting banks for over a year now.

Only I couldn’t go to the cops. I was persona non grata with too many of the boys in blue for that. And the head of the special Dillinger Squad—forty officers strong—was none other than Capt. John Stege (rhymes with “leggy”), who would rather shoot me than give me the time of day.

Stege was a rarity in Chicago—an honest cop; he was one of half a dozen individuals credited with being “the guy that got Capone” (my friend Eliot Ness was another) and, in a way, Stege was as worthy of that credit as the next guy (Eliot included). Stege had fought Capone’s Outfit all through the twenties and it was his raid on Capone’s Cicero joints that brought forth the ledgers that allowed the feds to put together the income tax evasion rap that finally sent the Big Fellow to Atlanta.

But Stege’d had his share of bad press, too. He’d lost his job as chief of the Detective Bureau over the Jake Lingle case; he’d looked dirty, guilty by association, because he was thick with the police commissioner, who in turn had been thick with reporter Lingle, who’d been thick with Capone and company. This all came out after Lingle was murdered in the subway tunnel under Michigan Avenue.

I’d been involved in that case; specifically, I’d been a traffic cop on Michigan Avenue, and had pursued, and failed to catch, the fleeing killer. I’d been a star witness at the trial. I’d lied, of course, to help put away the scapegoat the Outfit had given the D.A.’s office to satisfy the public and the press. And had gone on to be a plainclothes cop, as part of my good-conduct reward.

It was then that my father, an idealistic old union man who hated the cops and hated me becoming one, blew his brains out with my gun. But that’s another story.

Stege, like my father, smelled a bad apple when young Nate Heller traded his uniform, and his integrity, in for plain clothes. He—and a lot of people on the force—pegged me as a kid on the make, willing to go along with just about anything. That led to my being pulled in by two real sweethearts named Lang and Miller—the late Mayor Cermak’s chief bagmen and bodyguards (this was before Cermak was late, of course)—on an attempt on Frank Nitti’s life.

That was when I left the force to go private; but eventually I had to testify about the Nitti hit, and—since Mayor Cermak had since been killed in Miami by a Sicilian assassin named Zangara—I felt under no obligation to lie. Maybe I was trying to make it up to my old man and his Bughouse Square idealism. Or maybe I was trying to make it up to me. But I told the truth on the stand—a novelty around these parts—and made Lang and Miller, and the late mayor, look very bad.

Stege, though a tough, straight cop by Chicago (or any) standards, had a blind spot: he didn’t like even a crooked cop getting a public bath. And I was an ex-cop who’d publicly bathed not only two Chicago police sergeants, but Mayor Cermak as well.

And Stege had been a Cermak crony. The story went that shortly after Cermak was elected, Stege had been transferred to the South Wabash station, in the heart of Bronzeville, to “raise hell with the Policy racket”—and in the process the captain put about two hundred colored prisoners in jail per day, in cells so crammed they couldn’t sit. The Negro politicians had bitched to Cermak, at first, then finally begged: What did Cermak want from them, to get Stege out of their district?

“Become Democrats,” Cermak said.

And they did.

Stege would’ve done anything for Anton J. Cermak, and I had dirtied His Honor’s posthumous honor. The last time I’d seen Stege—at City Hall, where I’d come to testify in one of the subsequent Lang-Miller proceedings—I’d nodded to the stocky, white-haired copper, saying, “Good afternoon, Captain.”

And Stege had said, “Go straight to hell, you lying son of a bitch, and don’t come back.”

Hal Davis of the
Daily News
had heard our exchange, and, cleaning it up a bit, added it as color in his coverage of the trial. Now whenever I talked to my few remaining friends on the force, the first thing I heard was, “Shall I say hello to Captain Stege for you, Heller?” Followed by smug laughter.

No, I wouldn’t be able to go to Captain Stege with this; of course, if Jimmy Lawrence
did
turn out to be Dillinger, and I gave him to Stege, maybe I’d be off the captain’s shit list.

But if Jimmy Lawrence turned out to be just another Dillinger double, I’d probably find myself tied up in a little room in the back of some station house somewhere doing the rubber-hose rhumba.

Around dusk a Yellow cab pulled up in front of the apartment house, but on my side of the street, facing south. I leaned back and dropped my hat down over my face—mostly—and made like I was snoozing. A few minutes later Jimmy Lawrence and Polly Hamilton, arm in arm, came out the front and got in the back of the cab. I waited thirty seconds, crawled over in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and pushed the starter and pulled out after them.

The Yellow cut over to Halsted and before I knew it the scenery was looking familiar.

The cab stopped in front of a big graystone three-flat and waited as Jimmy Lawrence got out to hold the door open for Anna Sage, who came out of her apartment building in a smart blue dress and a broad-brimmed white hat.

I followed them to the Marbro Theater on the West Side.

We all saw
You’re Telling Me
with W. C. Fields.

It was funny.

The next morning around ten I walked over to the Banker’s Building on the corner of Clark and Adams and took an elevator up to the nineteenth floor, where the feds kept house. The chief agent of the Chicago branch of the Division of Investigation was Melvin Purvis, but I hoped to speak to Sam Cowley.

Cowley I’d never met, but my friend Eliot Ness—who until about a year ago had been the top fed where crime-busting in Chicago was concerned—had spoken highly of him. Purvis, whom I’d met once or twice but didn’t really know, was another kettle of fish; Eliot had contempt for the man—though I had to keep in mind that Ness and Purvis were enough alike that a little professional jealousy on Eliot’s part was not to be ruled out.

After all, Purvis, a Justice Department special agent, entered the Chicago picture about the time Eliot, a Treasury Department man, was being phased out, his Prohibition Unit going gradually out of business when Repeal came along (beer was legal first, so the Prohibition Unit limped along well into 33). Purvis was the guy who’d get to go after the outlaws like Dillinger, while former gangbuster Ness was being shuffled offstage, being turned into a mere “reven-ooer.” Even now Eliot was chasing moonshiners around the hills of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

But from what I’d observed—admittedly from a distance, reading about him in the papers, listening to my pals on the pickpocket detail gossip—Purvis was a fuck-up. His biggest claim to fame was tackling the “terrible Touhys,” a gang of suburban bootleggers who’d been too minor for Eliot to mess with, though they’d somehow managed to keep Capone off their home turf of Des Plaines. Post-Repeal, the Touhys were
really
not worth messing with—but last year Purvis had charged Roger Touhy with the hundred grand kidnapping of William Hamm, the Hamm’s Beer baron. It didn’t make sense; Touhy was well fixed and moving into legit concerns. Maybe Touhy’s motive was supposed to be envy—since Hamm was back in the brewing business legally.

Purvis proudly told the press he had an “ironclad case,” an opinion the jury didn’t share. Even before Touhy was cleared, underworld word was the Karpis-Barker gang had pulled the Hamm snatch; if Purvis was any kind of investigator he’d have heard that too—
I
heard it, and I wasn’t anywhere near the case.

Almost immediately, Purvis hit Touhy with another kidnapping charge—that of Jake “The Barber” Factor, no less, a notorious if slick international con man with Capone ties. Everybody in town knew that Factor was just looking to avoid extradition to England, that he’d kidnapped himself (with a little help from his Capone connections) and framed Touhy.

Everybody but Purvis, apparently; he’d bought it—and managed to sell it to a jury, this time, because poor old Roger “The Terrible” was doing ninety-nine years at Joliet. And no sooner had the prison doors shut than Frank Nitti—at the helm of the Capone Outfit—waltzed into Des Plaines.

Purvis had come off looking good in the press, however, though the Little Bohemia episode, last April, had finally caught “Little Mel” with his pants down. (I heard Purvis didn’t like