True Crime (7 page)

M
ELVIN
P
URVIS

being called Little Mel to his face, but that’s how everybody referred to him behind his back.)

Purvis had had a tip that Dillinger and his gang were holed up in the Little Bohemia Lodge way at the top of Wisconsin. He and a couple handfuls of other agents piled into three little planes and flew to Rhinelander, where they connected with Division of Investigation agents from St. Paul. The hastily assembled task force commandeered some local cars and drove another near-fifty miles over snow-covered secondary roads. Two of the four cars broke down along the way, and by the time the sixteen agents reached Little Bohemia, half of them were riding the running boards, chattering with cold.

They approached the lodge on foot, moving through the pines, flashlights in hand. As the agents reached the lodge, which was brightly lit, three men exited the front door and went quickly to a coupe in the nearby parking area, and Purvis ordered his men to open fire. One of the three men was killed instantly; the other two were wounded.

Purvis and his agents had just killed a Civilian Conservation Corps worker and wounded a CCC cook and a gas-station attendant. Meanwhile, John Dillinger, among others, having seen the flashlights, had gone out the back way. Baby Face Nelson stopped long enough to shoot up some feds. And hours later Purvis collared some of the gang’s molls, who’d been huddling in the basement with the lodge’s staff, while the feds had pummeled the place with machine-gun fire.

This time the press had Purvis for supper. There were demands for his resignation aplenty, but his boss J. Edgar Hoover had made a show of standing behind his boy—at the same time bringing reliable, methodical Sam Cowley in to take charge of the Dillinger case….

There was no secretary or receptionist in an outer office, at the Chicago field office of the Division of Investigation. There was no outer office. It was just a big open room full of desks, without any partitions. Agents were scurrying around with papers in hands, going from desk to desk conferring with their brethren, and the typewriters clicking and phones ringing and electric fans whirring mixed with street sounds coming from open windows, making a cacophony that had to be talked over.

One of the agents, seated at a desk near the door, looked up from a typewriter with irritation; apparently being close to the door got him stuck with receptionist-type duties.

“Can I help you?” he said sharply. He had a smooth rosy-cheeked face and light blond hair and, like everybody in the room, had his coat off but his tie snugged at his collar. He looked like he didn’t shave yet.

“I’d like to see Sam Cowley,” I said.

“If you’re with the press, you should know by now that all reporters are barred till further notice from this office.”

“I’m not from the press. I’d like to see Sam Cowley.”

“The inspector’s out of the office,” he said, crisp as dark toast. All these guys looked like college kids. Which they were—attorneys and accountants who, in better times, might be earning some real dough in private practice.

“When will he back?”

The rosy-cheeked agent had already looked away from me and back at what he was typing.

“Tomorrow,” he said, not looking at me. Typing.

I put my hand on the typewriter, on the platen, and kept it from turning; he looked up at me with round outraged eyes.

“I pay your salary, junior,” I said. “Let’s have a little service, here. And some respect while you’re at it.”

He sighed and smiled, just a little. “You’re right. My apologies. It’s hot.”

“Yeah. Ever since Little Bohemia.”

His smile faded momentarily, then returned; just a ghost of a smile, but it was there.

“You’ll have to speak to Chief Purvis, if this can’t wait till tomorrow. If it’s about John Dillinger, that is.”

“How did you know it was about Dillinger?”

“You asked for Cowley. Dillinger’s his only case. And the only other guy that works on Dillinger is Chief Purvis.”

“Every crank call you get, every little tip—”

“Goes straight to Cowley and Purvis. Separate copies to each desk.”

“Interesting. Could you tell me where Chief Purvis’ office is?”

“This is the only office we have, mister. And that’s Chief Purvis back by the window, in the corner.”

I should’ve spotted him before, but he was so small he was blocked. He was the only man in the room wearing his suitcoat, a smartly tailored light gray. The only difference between his desk and anybody else’s was that it was slightly bigger and glass-topped. And by an open window, where something approaching air was wafting in, along with street noise.

I walked down a path between the desks and Purvis looked up from his work and in a rather high-pitched Southern drawl said, “You’re Nathan Heller, aren’t you? Sit down.”

I had to admit (to myself) I was impressed; we’d only met once—Eliot had tersely introduced us and we shook hands—and had nodded at each other another time in the Federal Building, in a manner that didn’t necessarily mean we were acquainted and/or recognized one another.

Like the guy Polly Hamilton was dating, Melvin Purvis was a dapper little man. He was only a couple years older than me, but still the oldest man in the room. He pushed aside a report he was reading, closing the file folder and smiling at me. His hair was brown with a stray lock dangling onto his forehead, his face heart-shaped with pointed, chiseled features, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The eyes in that wooden face, however, were sharp and dark.

“I’m surprised you remember me,” I said.

“Ness introduced us. He doesn’t think much of me. That’s all right. I don’t think much of him. No offense meant.”

“None taken.”

“I just find your friend Ness, well—I find his penchant for press agentry a little much.”

I resisted the urge to tell Little Mel that the thing he and Eliot had most in common was that particular penchant.

Instead, I said, “Some positive press wouldn’t hurt
you
, right now, would it?”

He smiled on one side of his face; it made a dimple bigger than Shirley Temple’s.

“I can’t blame you for that crack,” he said. The Southern accent seemed soothing on this hot day. I wondered if Purvis being from the South had given him the ability to take heat like this in stride, sitting there in his coat like that.

“You’re undoubtedly a busy man, Mr. Heller,” he said, without sarcasm. He seemed to have some of that Southern politeness, too; he seemed honestly to be a gentleman. “Why are you here?”

“I may have seen Dillinger.”

He arched an eyebrow. “I hear that from a lot of people—most of them aren’t trained detectives, however. You wouldn’t make a statement like that lightly, now, would you, Mr. Heller?”

“No I wouldn’t. I’d like to ask you something, though.”

“What is it?”

“After the affair at Little Bohemia, I heard Will Rogers say on the radio that he figured the feds would eventually shoot John Dillinger—if he could manage to get himself in the middle of some innocent bystanders.”

To his credit, Purvis only smiled. And on both sides of his face, this time. “I heard him say that, too. What’s your point?”

“It’s just that I read in the papers that the Justice Department has admitted it’d prefer its agents shoot Dillinger on sight rather than risk another gun battle. That both your boss Hoover and his boss the attorney general have said, ‘Shoot to kill, then count to ten,’ where Dillinger’s concerned.”

Purvis was leaning on his elbows, his hands clasped together prayerlike; he smiled impishly and shrugged.

“That’s what I figured,” I said. I stood up.

“Where are you off to, Mr. Heller?”

“I don’t feel confident enough that this individual is Dillinger to give you specifics of where you might find him. There’ve been too many people who look like Dillinger lately almost get their heads shot off by overeager lawmen. I don’t think I want to be part of that.”

“And you think I’m capable of that?”

“I think you want a dead Dillinger awful bad.”

“Sit down, Mr. Heller.”

I just stood there.

“Please,” he said. He gestured with an open hand. “Sit down.”

I did.

“Your concern is noted,” he said. “Perhaps justified. The Little Bohemia debacle has served to make yours truly look a little trigger-happy. That I admit. But consider this: if I shoot the wrong man, if I shoot an innocent bystander, I’ll find myself the next day back in South Carolina mowin’ my daddy’s yard.”

“I doubt that,” I said, charmed a little in spite of myself. “You’re a lawyer, and that daddy you mentioned is rich, I hear.”

“You hear right. That just means he has a bigger yard for me to mow. Times are a little hard to be hangin’ out a shingle. I need this job, Mr. Heller. Can I call you Nathan?”

“Nate.”

“Call me Melvin, if you would. I need this job. I don’t need to mess it up—not any further. Little Bohemia was the last mistake I can afford to make.”

“So if I give you this information, you won’t fuck it up.”

He didn’t flinch at the harshness of that; he just shrugged again. “I’ll try not. Who can say? Public enemies don’t tell you when or where they’re going to be, or what they’re going to do. A crystal ball is not part of a special agent’s government issue.”

“Who said it was?”

“You did, Nate. You asked me, in effect, to guarantee that if you give me some information, I won’t…foul up. Correct? How can I guarantee you anything, other than I’ll give it my best shot?”

The guy was sincere—he had a touch of Southern bullshit, and a streak of pomposity—but he was for real.

“I don’t know,” I said, glancing around the room at the young agents scurrying about, going no place. “I don’t know if these college boys can cut the mustard.”

“Nate,” Purvis said, leaning forward, looking like a puppet come to life. “The division has found it infinitely more sensible to teach intelligent men to be manhunters than to try teaching manhunters to be intelligent.”

“Don’t make me sick.”

“I notice you didn’t go to the police with this—”

“No, I didn’t go to the cops. The head of their Dillinger detail isn’t fond of me.”

“Ah. Captain Stege. Seems to me I heard that you and he weren’t close. But even without Stege, I wonder if you’d go to Chicago’s finest—a corrupt, lazy, unskilled bunch of louts, as we both know. My people, however, have gone to school. For which you deride them, but they’ve gone to school, and not just college. They’ve learned to photograph fingerprints and where to look for them. They’ve learned how to use a microscope. They’ve learned the science of ballistics. They learned how to shoot every weapon, from a pistol to a machine gun. Nate, the criminal mind is clever—but the scientific mind is
always
its superior.”

“Let me ask you something.”

“Of course.”

“Tell me the inside story on the Kansas City Massacre.”

At Union Station in Kansas City, federal and local officers ushered gangster Frank “Jelly” Nash from a train to a car that would take him to Leavenworth. Just as they’d piled into the car at Union Station, a big man with a tommy gun showed up, quickly joined by two other gunmen, and all three sprayed the car with bullets, killing four lawmen, and Nash.

Purvis cocked his head back. “It’s one of the two events that gave the Justice Department the punitive power it has today. The other, naturally, being the Lindbergh kidnapping.”

“I see.”

“When I became a special agent, I was limited in the cases I could investigate. My duties were largely…inquisitorial. I couldn’t even make an arrest. When I ran down my man, I was compelled by law to call in a local policeman or a U.S. marshal to snap on the bracelets.”

“And the Kansas City Massacre changed all that.”

“Yes. It, and the Lindbergh tragedy. The public revulsion that followed the Kansas City Massacre, particularly, got us more money, more men and better backing—and better laws. The heavy artillery we needed to meet the hoodlums on their own battleground and take ’em for a cleanin’.” He stopped, realizing he was lecturing, falling into one of his standard spiels for the press, probably; he seemed a little chagrined, but also seemed to catch that I was leading him on. “But why am I telling you all this? You’re on the fringes of law enforcement yourself—surely you already know it.”

“And have you nabbed those responsible for the Kansas City Massacre?”

Purvis shifted in his seat; his confidence was suddenly undercut by an apparent nervousness. “One of the men, Verne Miller, was found dead in a ditch.”

“A Syndicate hit.”

“Apparently.”

“Why, do you suppose?”

“For botching the job. For killing the man they were there to rescue.”

“Nash, you mean.”

“Certainly. And for killing police officers and federal agents. For bringing the heat down on the lawless.”

“That last I can buy.”

“What
don’t
you buy?”

“Nash was the target. Because he knew too much. Surely you know that.”