Handsome Harry (29 page)

He gave me a poker-faced stare for a moment—then that crooked smile. Well now, brother, he said, that’s a true fact, isn’t it?

The next morning he read the newspaper report to me. Three of the Quarrys were found dead at the scene and the fourth died in the hospital three hours later without naming his killers. The paper called it a
gangland slaying
resulting from a
turf war
and said it was fitting that the death of Prohibition was marked by the deaths of men who’d prospered from it. The cops had identified the four as members of a family of St. Louis bootleggers who’d probably gotten on the wrong side of the Chicago mob.

It’s what they get, the cop in charge told reporters. Sooner or later it’s what every one of these mugs gets.

John put the paper down and ran a finger around his collar and made a big mock gulp—and then grinned his cocky grin.

A
few days later the Chicago P.D. announced a list of its ten most-wanted fugitives. All of us were on it, including Mary and Pearl.

Yikes, Mary said, when she saw the list, I’ve been promoted from a moll to a desperado like you boys.

John told her she wouldn’t think it was so damn funny if she got arrested as a desperado.

Ooooh,
Mary said, I’m
so
scared. She was trying for a laugh from us and she got it.

I didn’t know if Pearl was aware of the Chicago heat on her, so I phoned her at home in Kokomo. When she answered by saying Paulette Dewey residence, I knew she was aware, all right.

She didn’t know how the cops had connected her to us but figured it could’ve been anybody who’d ever seen her in our company. The world’s crawling with rats was her simple explanation. She wasn’t worried about the cops tracking her down, not under the Dewey name. As for the Side Pocket, the building was leased to Janet Cody, who didn’t exist, and Pearl had put Darla Bird in charge of the place.

T
he following day Cueball Lucas called to tell us he had finally repaired Red’s Auburn sedan and it was ready to be picked up. Red had forgotten about the car by then, he was so delighted with his fancy new Packard. When he heard the Auburn was fixed, he said he didn’t care, he didn’t want the car anymore, and he was going to tell Cueball he could have it for a hundred bucks. I said at that price I’d buy it myself. My brother Fred’s beat-up old Chevy was on its last legs and he was in bad need of a better car.

Sold
to Mr. Pierpont for a C-note, Red said.

The title to the sedan was in its glove box, and Cueball assured me he could have it put in Fred’s name with no problem. I thanked him and said I’d send the money for the repair work, then called Fred and told him he now owned a new Auburn and all he had to do was get Dad to drive him to Terre Haute to pick it up. Fred was tickled pink but said Dad was under the weather with a bad cold and Mom would take him to Terre Haute. My mother came on the line to say hello, and I told her I wanted to pay a visit. She said no, the cops were still watching the place, to wait till she gave me the all-clear.

Three days later Cueball telephoned to say that my mother and Fred were on their way back to Ohio with the Auburn, but not without running into a little trouble first. My mother had told Cueball not to say anything about the matter, but he didn’t want me to hear about it from somebody else and get mad at him for not having told me.

What happened was that in addition to Ohio cops, some of Matt Leach’s men had been keeping an eye on my parents’ house too.
When my mother and Fred drove off to go get the Auburn, the Leach men tailed them into Indiana and all the way to Terre Haute in the belief that they were being led to me. When everybody arrived at Cueball’s, the cops barged in and searched the place from top to bottom, then arrested Mom and Fred and Cueball and hauled them off to jail. A few hours later Leach himself showed up and released them and apologized to my mother, saying it had all been a bad misunderstanding. Cueball said my mother used some unladylike language on Leach and told him he deserved to get cancer for persecuting her son. Cueball wanted me to understand that my mom hadn’t been harmed.

I said he’d done the right thing to let me know and asked if he knew where Leach was.

He’d heard him say he was going back to his headquarters in Indianapolis.

Mary was sitting in a chair across from me, and my face probably showed what I was feeling because she looked alarmed and asked what was wrong. John and Billie had gone out for a late breakfast and hadn’t come home yet. I went in the bedroom and holstered the .45 under my arm and the .38 on my right hip and put on my coat. I took the .30–06 Enfield from the closet and strapped it into a suit bag and put a full five-round clip into the bag too. I told Mary I had to go to Indianapolis, and she said she was coming with me. I said no she wasn’t and she said to try and stop her. I was in no mood to argue so I let her suit herself.

I didn’t say anything during the three-and-a-half-hour drive. I think Mary talked every now and then but I wasn’t listening even a little bit and couldn’t have told you then or now a word of what she said. I wasn’t thinking of anything except Matt Leach having abused my mother and the pleasure it was going to give me to kill him.

We got to Indy at midafternoon. There was a hotel directly across the street from a municipal building annex that contained the headquarters of the Indiana State Police. I parked in the lot behind the
hotel and got the suit bag from the backseat and we went in and I booked us a room on the third floor, facing the annex.

The window gave me a clear view of the three doors to the state police offices. If Leach was in there, it was ten to one he’d come out through one of those doors. And if he wasn’t there, that was okay too—I’d wait in that room until he showed up the following day or the day after that or whenever he finally did.

I took the Enfield out of the suit bag and pulled the bolt open and set the clip in place and thumbed all five rounds into the magazine, then tossed the empty clip back into the suit bag and slid the bolt home to chamber a bullet. I positioned a chair near the window but far enough back from it so that the rifle muzzle could rest on the sill without jutting out into public view.

And then I waited for Leach to come out.

Maybe Mary had been talking all along, but like I said, I don’t remember. I didn’t really hear anything she said until I was watching for Leach. I kept my eyes on the office doors while she sat on the bed and spoke to me in a low voice, spoke low and with restraint and a little nervously, the way you might talk to a large growling dog, or to some guy standing on a window ledge twenty floors up.

She talked about how shooting him wasn’t a smart thing to do, how she understood why I wanted to kill him but he wasn’t worth it, how maybe we’d be able to get away before every state cop in that building came charging into the hotel but the odds were they’d kill us both before we made it halfway across the lobby. She talked about how everybody in the gang believed in me and even though nobody ever said it out loud the plain and simple truth was they all looked to me as the leader and trusted me never to put them in danger simply to settle some personal score and blah-blah-blah. She kept saying the same things over and over, phrasing them a little differently each time, but still the same things.

And all the while I was watching cops going in and out of the annex, waiting for Leach to show himself.

I don’t know how long we’d been there—twenty minutes? an hour and a half?—when one of the doors opened and out came two guys in suits and one of them was him.

I leaned forward and snugged the rifle butt into my shoulder and placed my cheek lightly against the stock and directly behind the humpback sight. He even did me the favor of stopping on the walkway to light a cigarette, making a still target of himself.

I laid the front sight directly over his heart and my finger tightened on the trigger.

That’s when Mary said: He’ll never know it was you.

Leach started walking again and I slowly swiveled the barrel on the sill to keep the sight blade on him.

What satisfaction could there be in killing somebody, Mary said, if he never knew what hit him or why.

I kept the sight on him as he came down to the sidewalk.

My mother would think it was a damn dumb way to get myself killed, Mary said.

Now Leach was at his car and he laughed at something the other guy said. I raised the sight to his grinning skull face.

Mary said she could be wrong but it didn’t seem a very self-respecting way to even the score.

He got into the car and I sighted on him through the windshield.

Then the car drove away and he was gone.

To this day he’s got no idea he came
this
close to getting his clock stopped.

Lucky b-b-bastard.

I worked the bolt to empty the magazine, and then picked up the rounds and put them in my pocket and set the Enfield against the wall. Then I looked at Mary for the first time since we’d come into the room.

She was wiping tears off her face and laughing her wonderful laugh.

Then we were out of our clothes and on the bed and having so much fun we were probably breaking a dozen laws.

W
e spent the night in the hotel and slept late. We had a room-service brunch and then took in a movie—
Duck Soup,
a new Marx Brothers that made us laugh so hard our stomachs hurt. When Groucho told a guy You’re fighting for this woman’s honor, which is more than she ever did, I thought of John and Billie for some reason.

We headed for home around midafternoon. In Lafayette we ate an early supper and lingered a while over coffee and cigarettes. Shortly before sundown, as we were going through Rensselaer, we heard a radio report that I’d killed a cop in a Chicago garage and made a clean getaway.

Holy Joe, Mary said, next they’ll be accusing you of shooting Abe Lincoln.

We were almost to Shytown when the news item was repeated, once again in the breathless, rat-a-tat, edge-of-your-seat style the radio guys love to use in reporting violent crime—but this time with a correction. The slayer of Police Detective Somebody-or-other was
not
Harry Pierpont, the fugitive Michigan City escapee, murderer, bank robber, and member of the Terror Gang. It was
another
member of the gang—John Hamilton, also known as Three-finger Jack Hamilton. The identity of the cop killer had been confirmed by Hamilton’s woman companion, one Mrs. Elaine DeKant, whom Hamilton deserted near the scene of the crime and who’d been arrested by police. Mrs. DeKant positively identified Hamilton’s photograph at police headquarters and confirmed that he was missing two fingers, which he’d told her he’d lost in the war. She claimed she knew him only as Orval Lewis, an independent investor. Mrs. DeKant led police to the apartment Hamilton had been renting under the name of Lewis and the landlord also identified his picture. Mrs.
DeKant was being held in the Cook County Jail on charges of accessory to murder and abetting a fugitive.

The report went on to say that citizens all across the country were outraged by the Terror Gang’s second killing of a police officer. Acting on information that the gang was in their city, Chicago police were on a rampage, pulling raids all over town and snaring dozens of crooks in the process.

A
s soon as Mary and I got home we called the gang together at our place. Opal came with Russell and Charley, but Tweet was working, and Patty had stayed at the apartment in case Red showed up there. Nobody’d heard a peep from him since the news of the shooting. We figured he might’ve skipped town, but even so, he’d get word to us as soon as he could. Russ and Charley said they’d never seen so many squad cars prowling the streets. It was no night to venture outside, so we stayed put, playing cards and keeping an ear to the radio for news about Red.

Around ten o’clock there was a knocking at the door—two slow raps, then three quick ones, our call sign. John opened up and there Red stood, smiling sort of hangdog and sporting a badly swollen eye that was shaping up into a world-class shiner. John tugged him inside and closed the door and we all gathered round and slapped him on the back, happy as hell to see him.

The girls ran up and gave him hugs. They’d been worried about him, of course, although they hadn’t been pleased to learn of Mrs. DeKant. According to Opal, Patty didn’t say anything about the woman when she heard the news, only that she hoped Red was safe, wherever he was. But it was obvious she was both hurt and furious.

Charley asked what happened, and Red said he’d tell us the whole story if somebody would get him a goddamn drink. I poured everybody one while Mary got a piece of steak from the icebox for him to hold on his eye, then we all settled ourselves in the living room.

Man gave me no choice, Red said. Which none of us had doubted for a minute.

He and the respectable Mrs. DeKant had taken the roadster he’d given her to a garage that morning to get the fender straightened out. The mechanic said the job wouldn’t be difficult and the car would be ready by one o’clock. They took a taxi to his secret apartment and cavorted for a time, then had a late lunch at a café and went to a movie. It wasn’t till after four that they got back to the garage.

There was no one around when they went in, but the roadster was in a garage bay, the fender nicely straightened. Red and Mrs. DeKant were admiring the fine job when two men came out of the office—one in overalls and obviously the night garage man, and the other one as obviously a plainclothes cop. Whatever tip he was acting on, the cop didn’t know Red by sight, that was obvious too, or he wouldn’t have come out of the office without a gun in his hand.

The guy flashed his badge and asked Red if the car was his. Red said no, it was his wife’s, and asked Mrs. DeKant to show the man the registration. She gave Red a look but dug the paper out of her purse, and as she handed it to the cop Red said he’d show him his driver’s license and reached into his coat.