Public Enemies (27 page)

An hour passed. A tap had been placed on Mathias’s phone, and at 7:30 an agent heard her call Bobbie Moore downstairs.

“Miss Moore?” Mathias asked.

“Speaking.”

“Verne wants you to put the Auburn [the car] away,” Mathias said, then hung up. It appeared Miller and Mathias were staying in for the night.

The call prompted a sharp debate among the agents assembled in Apartment 211. John Madala urged Guinane to immediately storm Mathias’s apartment. Guinane said no. They had to be certain it was Miller.

Dawn broke. On the streets outside, a new rotation of agents and policemen replaced the men who had kept watch through the chill night. In Apartment 211 agents took turns grabbing naps in the bedroom. At midmorning, when there was still no sign of Miller, Agent Edward Notesteen arrived from St. Paul.
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He, too, had known Miller in South Dakota. Guinane posted him in the kitchenette, taking shifts with Doris Rogers.

Hours passed. By noon no one had seen the suspects. At midafternoon Guinane called the Bankers Building to ask what to do. A call was placed to Hoover in Washington; Hoover ordered them to stay put until Miller was firmly identified. The afternoon stretched on. Finally, at 8:15 that night, Mathias called Bobbie Moore and asked her to bring a car around to the building’s side entrance.

Inside Apartment 211, the tension level rose sharply. Agent Notesteen, who had been napping and was clad only in socks and shorts, returned to his position in the kitchenette. A half-dozen agents and Chicago cops stood nervously at the apartment door, waiting to pounce. Outside, two agents in a parked car watched Bobbie Moore retrieve an Auburn car from a parking garage and pull up beside the Sherone’s side entrance. She began honking its horn.

Just then a man and a woman stepped out of Mathias’s apartment. Agent Notesteen and Doris Rogers saw them. The woman, in green silk pajamas, was Mathias. The man had a snap-brimmed fedora pulled low over his forehead.

“That’s Miller,” Rogers whispered. “I know that’s Miller.”

“You can’t tell from this distance,” Notesteen said.

The couple strode briskly down the hall. There were three overhead lights in the hallway. As Miller passed beneath the first, Notesteen still couldn’t make out his face.

“That’s Miller!” Mrs. Rogers urged. “It’s Miller!”

The man was heading straight for Notesteen’s hiding place behind the ventilation shutter. As he passed beneath the second light, Notesteen still wasn’t certain. “It’s him!” Miss Rogers blurted.

At the door, agents stood ready. Johnny Madala, the office boy, opened the door a few inches.

“It’s Miller!”
Madala mouthed.
“It’s Miller!”

Just then the man passed beneath the third light, not twelve feet in front of Notesteen. In an instant Notesteen glimpsed the familiar face, the strong jaw, the flattened cheekbones.

It was Verne Miller.

Notesteen gave the signal, making the chopping motion with his hand. But Agent Guinane had stepped into the living room and didn’t see it. At that instant Miller paused, sensing something. Suddenly he broke into a run, darting around the corner toward the elevators.

Agent Notesteen yelled, “It’s him! It’s him!”

“There he is!” Madala shouted, flinging open the apartment door. There was a split-second logjam as everyone scrambled into the hallway. First through the door was a beefy Chicago police sergeant, Frank Freemuth, followed by a group of agents. They raced toward the corner, intending to confront Miller at the elevators. But as the group turned the corner, they encountered a rude surprise.

Miller was gone.

“The staircase!” someone yelled.

Sergeant Freemuth rammed through the stairway door. Bounding down the stairs, he burst into the lobby, where he spotted a man in a brown suit standing at the front desk.

“What’s your name?” Freemuth demanded.

An agent jammed his pistol into the man’s ribs. When the man turned, everyone could see it wasn’t Miller.

“He’s gone out to the car!” someone shouted.

Outside, Agents Allen Lockerman and Julius Rice were watching Bobbie Moore when they noticed the man in the fedora emerge from the side entrance.
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The man trotted toward the car, hands sunk into the pockets of his trench coat. “That looks like the man,” Lockerman said.

But, both agents thought, it couldn’t be Miller. There had been no signal from Guinane upstairs, no coat or shirt flapped in the apartment window; in the excitement Guinane had forgotten to give the signal. Just then, as the man stepped into the door of Bobbie Moore’s Auburn, several officers and agents tumbled out the side entrance.

As Miller slammed the car door, the big Auburn surged forward down Galt Street, heading east toward the lakefront. An agent named Lew Nichols ran alongside it, still uncertain the man in the passenger seat was really Verne Miller. “Stop that car!” he hollered.

Miller turned in his seat, a pistol in his hand, and fired two shots at Nichols, missing. Nichols fell to one knee and fired. Agent Lockerman sprang from his car and began firing as well. Everywhere, up and down the sidewalks, people dived for cover. As the car surged down Galt, a state trooper fired two bursts from his tommy gun. The Auburn’s rear window exploded. Bobbie Moore screamed but kept control of the car, swinging the steering wheel left, squealing north onto Sheridan Road. The agents ran after it, but it was already gone.
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Agent Guinane hustled to a drugstore to call downtown. A citywide alert for Miller’s car was broadcast, and twenty minutes later the Auburn was found abandoned in a cul-de-sac several blocks north of the Sherone. Eyewitnesses said a man had run from the car and leaped a fence into the backyard of an apartment building on Clarendon Avenue. (In a bizarre coincidence, this was the very building where John Dillinger was then living.) There were seven bullet holes in the car and traces of blood. All that night Chicago police raided underworld haunts and checked local hospitals, but there was no sign of Miller. Vi Mathias was taken into custody. Bobbie Moore surrendered a few days later. Both women told the FBI absolutely nothing.
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In the wake of the Dillinger gang’s raids at Peru, Auburn, and Greencastle, the state of Indiana descended into something approaching wartime hysteria. Criminals and escaped convicts were nothing new, but the Midwest had never seen anything like this, heavily armed desperadoes in automobiles raiding a state’s armories and banks at will. It was the kind of news people were accustomed to reading from Texas or Oklahoma, not Indiana. Scrambling to mount a defense, Governor Paul McNutt stationed seven hundred National Guardsmen at armories across the state. Guard officials announced they were prepared to deploy tanks, airplanes, and poison gas to fight the gang. Jumpy guardsmen threw up roadblocks across the state, so many that Matt Leach’s boss was obliged to warn Halloween partygoers against doing anything that might cause them to be confused with Dillinger. The Indiana American Legion volunteered to have thirty thousand of its members deputized to patrol the highways.

“Convict gang running wild,” the editor of the
Indianapolis News
telegraphed his paper’s owners in Washington. “Can you have Homer Cummings offer federal aid to Indiana[?] One sheriff dead, one kidnapped, two police stations robbed of arms, bank raided.”
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The attorney general passed the request to Hoover, whose reaction was cool. Even if he had jurisdiction, which was unclear, Hoover knew the Bureau’s limitations, and he preferred cases he could win; a manhunt like this, requiring a vast commitment of resources toward an uncertain outcome, was a clear loser. “I told [the attorney general’s assistant] we had offered assistance with reference to fingerprint matters,” Hoover wrote in a memo-to-file, “but in so far as helping to catch them is concerned, we were not [going to].”
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In the Bureau’s absence, responsibility for apprehending the gang fell to Matt Leach and the year-old Indiana State Police. They quickly became a laughingstock. The
Indianapolis News
ran a cartoon featuring an armed gunman chasing a group of troopers around the state; the caption read, HAPPY HUNTING GROUND. Leach pleaded for more weaponry, and Governor McNutt obliged, handing over $10,000 for bulletproof vests, machine guns, and ten new squad cars. To use them, however, Leach first had to find Dillinger. Without the first clue where the gang would strike next, he attempted to drive a psychological wedge between the gang’s members. A magnet for reporters, Leach gathered a group of Indianapolis journalists and asked for help.

“The real rascal we have to deal with is Pierpont,” Leach said. “He’s a super egotist. We’ll offend him deliberately and start jealousy in the gang. We’ll name it the Dillinger Gang. That will cook Pierpont. He’ll blow his top. After a lot of people have been killed and banks robbed, we’ll wind it up and Pierpont will get the works.”
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It was a harebrained ruse, one that drew chuckles from Pierpont and Dillinger as they settled into their new quarters and read the papers. The happiest days of Dillinger’s life, in fact, were probably those first weeks in Chicago, when his profile was low enough that he could still live in the open. He had money, he had reliable partners, and for the first time since leaving prison, he had a girlfriend.

Her name was Evelyn Frechette, but everyone called her “Billie.” Fivefoot-twoand 120 pounds, with jet-black hair she wore in a bob, the twenty-six-year-old Frechette had tranquil brown eyes and high cheekbones she covered with Max Factor pancake powder to mask acne scars. Like most of the women who found their way into the beds of criminals like Dillinger, she was a refugee from hard times, forced from poor rural upbringings to an uncertain life in the big city.

Frechette was half American Indian, raised on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, the daughter of French Canadian half-breeds. She graduated from a Catholic-run Indian school in 1924 and eventually drifted to Chicago. By early 1932, she was a quiet young woman with a taste for cheap whiskey working as a hatcheck girl in a Chicago nightclub with her best friend, a zaftig thirty-year-old chorus-line dancer named Patricia Cherrington. Brassy and melodramatic, the redheaded Cherrington fancied herself a bed-hopping party girl; she, too, was a refugee, a Texas-raised high school dropout at thirteen, a bride at fifteen, a divorced mother by her early twenties. She and Frechette worked in a series of nudie nightclubs and were drawn to the scarred men who frequented them. In June 1932 they were arrested with their boyfriends, a pair of stickup men named Welton Spark and Arthur Cherrington. The women were released. Spark and Cherrington were remanded to Leavenworth for mugging a mailman. On the eve of their departure, the women impulsively married them.

In the summer of 1933, Frechette and Cherrington, never to be reunited with their husbands, were drifting through life, dating the wrong men, living in fetid hotels. A gallbladder infection had ended Cherrington’s dancing days, and she was rooming with her younger sister Opal Long, a chunky redhead with thick eyeglasses and a derriere so bounteous she earned the nickname “Mack Truck.” No one knows precisely how the three women were drawn into Dillinger’s orbit. Much later, Frechette insisted she met Dillinger in a nightclub that November. In fact, it’s likely she met him earlier, probably in August, when Dillinger first took an apartment in Chicago. It was then that his partner, Harry Copeland, met Cherrington, who at a cabaret one night introduced Dillinger to Frechette as “Jack Harris.”

Billie would claim she never forgot Dillinger’s first words. He was standing beside her at the table, looking down with that lopsided grin. “Hey Baby,” he said. “Where have you been all my life?” They danced. Dillinger was polite, which was enough for Frechette. If she needed further motivation, it came from the large roll of bills in his pocket. “I didn’t ask any questions,” she wrote months later. “Why should I? From the very first night I met him there was nobody else in my life, and I didn’t want anybody else. He treated me like a lady.”
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In Chicago, Dillinger and Pete Pierpont decided to live together with Frechette and Mary Kinder, renting a four-room apartment at 4310 Clarendon Avenue on the North Side. The bellman would recall that the two couples’ luggage was extremely heavy. Most mornings everyone slept late, rolling out of bed at ten or eleven. Dillinger kept the guns in a locked closet and handled the cleaning chores, wrapping a towel around his waist as he scrubbed the dishes and ran a dust mop over the floors. Hands on hips, Billie and Mary would watch in awe; Dillinger explained that cleaning was a habit he learned in prison. They had a phone but never bothered to hook it up. Delivery boys rang the bell at all hours, arms brimming with covered dishes from neighborhood restaurants and the downstairs delicatessen. When they came, Dillinger hid.

Most afternoons the two couples went out driving, stopping at shops up and down State Street to buy new clothes. Dillinger bought several new blue suits and a brown one, and admonished the others not to buy anything too flashy, although he did spend $149 to buy Billie a new winter coat. Like generations of striving farm boys before him, Dillinger was a bit of a clothes horse, keeping his suits pressed and his hats blocked; Mary Kinder was impressed that he changed his underwear every day. When they weren’t shopping, the four could usually be found at a dentist’s office on Washington Avenue, enduring a numbing series of cappings and fillings. By Kinder’s count, at least one of them sat in a dentist chair every day for two weeks.

Nights were for fun. Their first stop was usually a movie theater. Dillinger, who had entered prison before the advent of talking pictures, was a movie fanatic, pushing the group to go three and four nights a week; soon they had seen every picture on the North Side. Afterward they would hit a restaurant and then a nightclub, usually the College Inn or the Terrace Garden. All refrained from hard liquor, mostly drinking beer, and Dillinger drank less than the others. He couldn’t really dance but reluctantly allowed Billie to show him a step or two. Pierpont laughed from their table, absolutely refusing to step on the dance floor. Sitting beside him, Kinder watched how kind Billie was with Dillinger. Both had lived such scarred and disappointing lives. She could see they were falling in love.