Sutton (49 page)

Two years before Sutton died, Reporter met him at a midtown TV studio, where he was taping a segment of
The Dick Cavett Show
. Sutton wore a beautiful gray suit with a red tie knotted in a full Windsor. Standing behind him in the dressing room, watching the makeup artist powder his nose, Reporter noted how relaxed Sutton seemed, as if he’d done this all his life. Reporter then stood backstage and watched the interview. Sutton was witty, eloquent, remarkably cool. More than once Reporter thought: he’s dressed like a banker, but he’s every bit the actor.

After the show Reporter and Sutton got on the elevator with Zsa Zsa Gabor, who’d also been a guest. Gabor wore a necklace of chestnut-size diamonds. She made a point of nervously covering the necklace with her hands and darting glances at Sutton. When the elevator reached the lobby Sutton held the door for Gabor. Ever the gentleman. But as she walked past he said, Honey you can take your hands off your jewels. I’m retired.

As Sutton’s celebrity grew, so did his audacity. Reporter thinks about the first time he saw Sutton’s face materialize on the TV screen during a Yankees game. A commercial for, of all things, the New Britain Bank and Trust Company of New Britain, Connecticut. It was funny, of course, but also strangely disillusioning to see Sutton endorsing a new kind of charge card, with the cardholder’s photo embossed on the front. A new weapon against identity theft.

Cut to Sutton smiling for the camera.

Now, when I say I’m Willie Sutton, people believe me!

Cue announcer urging folks to bring their money down to the bank.

Tell them Willie Sutton sent you
.

The commercial made Reporter almost angry. Not that Reporter wanted to see Sutton robbing banks again. But he hated like hell to see Sutton shilling for them.

Sutton insisted to Reporter that he had no compunction about shooting that commercial. Willie’s got expenses kid—you know what a pack of Chesterfields costs these days? He wouldn’t even admit to feeling the slightest pang of guilt in 1979 when the housing market collapsed and the stock market crashed and the Fed warned about bank failures. Thousands of people wiped out by unchecked greed. Again.
That’s where the money was—
the apocryphal Suttonism is now invoked every day by some journalist or economist, professor or politician, not to explain the motive of a Depression-era bank robber, but to explain generic human avarice. People do things, all kinds of things, because that’s where the money is.

The financial crisis is the only reason Reporter’s editor agreed to send him to Florida now, late December 1980, seven weeks after Sutton died from emphysema. Reporter’s editor is several years younger than Reporter, and he doesn’t remember Willie Sutton. But the economy is on everyone’s mind and he liked Reporter’s pitch. An old bank robber who once spent Christmas with our paper?

It’s kitschy, the editor said. Give me two thousand words.

Reporter eats dinner at a steak house in the little town where Sutton spent his last days, Spring Hill, a pleasant nowhere nestled in a notch along Florida’s west coast. The waitress is blond, sun-burnished, squeezed into skintight bell-bottoms. Reporter is no longer with the woman he was dating when he met Sutton. Or the woman who came after her, or the woman who came after her. When the waitress brings his salmon Reporter asks if Willie Sutton used to come here.

Willie? Sure. He was a regular. Sweet old dude. Always ordered the porterhouse. With a glass of milk—always.

Reporter is about to ask if Sutton was a big tipper, if any tips ever went missing. He can’t get the words out before the waitress is called away.

He phones Sutton’s sister, hoping to see a copy of Sutton’s letters or journals. Or the novel. It was called
The Statue in the Park
, Sutton once said. The hero was a banker whose life is a lie. Reporter asked to see a copy, many times, but Sutton always demurred. Now the sister won’t return Reporter’s calls. And he can’t locate Sutton’s daughter. Elusiveness—it runs in the family.

After two days in Florida, two days visiting the local libraries and the local banks and the local bars, Reporter is due to leave tomorrow. But he’s not ready. He can’t shake the sense that he’s missed something, that he’s failed to find the thing he came down here to find, though he can’t say exactly what that thing is. Some clue, some sign. Surely a man who escaped three maximum-security prisons would be unable to resist the challenge of sending word from the Other Side. A kind of hello. A posthumous wink.

Reporter admits to himself, driving from the steak house back to the hotel, that it’s a ridiculous hope. But no more ridiculous than being fond of a hardened, unrepentant felon. Then he corrects himself. He wasn’t fond in the usual sense of the word. He wouldn’t want to live in a world full of Willie Suttons. He’s simply not sure that he’d want to live in a world with
no
Willie Suttons.

Reporter lies on the hotel bed, rereads a few pages of Sutton’s second memoir. He laughs. Sutton must be the only person ever in the history of literature to write two memoirs that directly contradict each other, even on basic biographical facts. In one memoir, for instance, Sutton says that before breaking out of Sing Sing with Egan, he’d arranged to have an empty getaway car waiting outside the prison. In the other memoir Sutton says the mother of his daughter drove the getaway car. And yet Reporter can still hear Sutton, more than once, describing the way Bess looked at the wheel as he and Egan came running up the hill.

In one memoir Sutton meticulously describes robbing the Manufacturers Trust of Queens. In the other memoir he swears he didn’t do it. And so on.

How many of the contradictions in Sutton’s memoirs, or in his mind, were willful, and how many were dementia, Reporter doesn’t know. His current theory is that Sutton lived three separate lives. The one he remembered, the one he told people about, the one that really happened. Where those lives overlapped, no one can say, and God help anyone who tries. More than likely, Sutton himself didn’t know.

Reporter has looked everywhere for Bess Endner, but she’s vanished. He’s searched high and low for Margaret—again, no trace. He’s obtained hundreds of documents from the FBI, pored through scores of old newspapers and magazines and court transcripts, rooted through long-lost police files on Arnold Schuster, files he found rotting in the attic of a retired police sergeant. It all leads nowhere. FBI files contradict newspaper clips, newspaper clips contradict police files, and Sutton’s two self-negating memoirs refute everything. The more Reporter digs, the less he knows, until it seems that he spent Christmas eleven years ago with a shadow of a phantom.

Among the hundreds of FBI documents is one headed: Interesting Narrative. A summary of Sutton’s psyche, it was written by an agent in 1950, when Sutton was the nation’s most wanted fugitive:

RELIGION: Sutton was a Roman Catholic but his belief was destroyed through reading
.

LEISURE HABITS: Spent most of his time reading, attended movies once in two weeks, dramas once in six months, attended football games, took long auto rides for pleasure, and smoked. Read classics
.

PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT: Introverted temperament, chronic but benign; depression with occasional suicidal moods; emotional instability with suggestion of sensory petit mal; tendency to worry and anxiety; general neurotic failure to achieve happiness
.

Except for the business about reading, and smoking, Reporter doesn’t recognize in this Interesting Narrative the Sutton he knew. Which doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate. All we can have of Sutton, of each other, is Interesting Narratives.

Last week Reporter visited the Farm Colony, and Attica, and Sing Sing, and Eastern State, where he suffered an attack of claustrophobia in a cell exactly like Sutton’s. Eastern State is now a national historic landmark, and though the curator didn’t know exactly which cell was Willie’s, they were all alike, all equally squalid and inhuman. Reporter left with a new appreciation of Sutton’s grit, and more questions than ever about why Sutton wasn’t able to put his good qualities to better use.

Reporter didn’t set out to become such a hard-core Suttonologist. He doesn’t know why he feels compelled to accumulate all this information, enough for fifty articles. Last night on the phone his editor, losing patience, called it jerk-offery. Reporter answered coolly, in a tone Sutton would have commended, that at least it wasn’t clusterfuckery.

Reporter tells himself that he wants to know all he can about Sutton because he’s a reporter, driven by curiosity, and because he’s an American, titillated by crime. But mainly he wants to know because of Bess. She’s only part of Sutton’s story, but for Reporter she’s the central part. It doesn’t matter if the old clips seem to suggest that Sutton’s love for her was delusional. All love is delusional. What matters is that the love endured. Near the end of Sutton’s life he was still talking about Bess, still describing her to his ghostwriter. There were other women in Sutton’s past—he married at least twice—but he wrote about them with detachment, in contrast to the delicacy and melancholy with which he recalled Bess. Whether or not Bess returned Sutton’s love, in any portion, she’s the key to Sutton’s identity. And maybe to Reporter’s. As a writer, as a man, Reporter has spent much of his life in two vaguely related quests—storytelling and love. Sutton never gave up on either. Through all his confinements and wanderings, he was a storyteller and a lover to the end. Reporter finds this inspiring. He finds it sad. Maybe Reporter is only projecting his psyche onto a dead bank robber, but so what? Storytelling, like love, requires some degree of projection. And if someone, someday, wants to project their psyche onto Reporter, so be it.

Closing Sutton’s memoir, Reporter clicks on the TV. The news. A story about John Lennon’s murder two weeks ago in New York. A story about President-elect Ronald Reagan promising to deregulate banks. A story about rising unemployment, and another about global population nearing five billion. A confusion of people. Finally, a feature about Christmas celebrations at a local roadside park, the oldest roadside park in Florida, called Weeki Wachee. A bizarre little rabbit hole, it’s a glass dome built on an underwater spring, with pretty girls in mermaid costumes performing underwater acrobatics.

It sits just five miles down the road from where Sutton died.

Reporter jumps off the bed.

In the morning he heads south on Fort Dade Avenue, turns right on Cortez, left on U.S. 19, follows the signs until he sees plastic flags along a wall. Then a tall turquoise statue of a mermaid. It looks like the Statue of Liberty. Reporter never realized how much the Statue of Liberty looks like a mermaid.

Reporter buys a ticket and a program, which says one hundred million gallons of water bubble up daily from vast underground caverns beneath the park. Just fifty feet down the water surges up so violently, it will rip the face mask off a diver. Which is why no one knows just how far down the caverns go. No one, the program says, has ever gotten to the bottom of it.

Reporter enters a small theater. Instead of a stage there’s an enormous glass wall. Music starts up, a sheer curtain rises, revealing an enormous canyon of blue-purple water. Suddenly on the other side of the glass are two mermaids. They wave at Reporter, and he forgets that they’re pretending to be mermaids. They’re too beautiful to be pretending. They swim backwards, sideways, upside down, their long blond hair twirling in their wake. They twist, tumble, waggle their fins, exult in the absence of gravity. Every few minutes they swim to the side of the tank and take a long suck on an air hose. The only break in the vivid dream.

After the show Reporter runs backstage, finds the dressing room. A sign on the door reads: Mermaids Only. He approaches the first mermaid who emerges. He introduces himself, says he’s a reporter writing about Willie Sutton. The mermaid, now wearing her walking-around fin, made of shimmering aquamarine skintight fabric, like a pencil skirt that goes a foot past her feet, gives him a blank look.

You know, Reporter says, Willie Sutton? The bank robber? He died last month?

Blank.

Anyway, Reporter says, I just have this hunch that Sutton might have spent a lot of time here—at the end. That he might have stopped by this dressing room. Maybe spoke to you or one of the other mermaids?

She runs her fingers through her long wet hair, trying to untangle it. Guys come back here all the time, she says.

Right, Reporter says. But this guy would have referred to himself in the third person. Willie thinks you’re beautiful. Willie thinks you look like a girl he knew in Poughkeepsie. That kind of thing.

The mermaid adjusts the waistband of her fin. I don’t know what to tell you, mister. The name doesn’t ring a bell.

Maybe you could ask some of your fellow mermaids?

She takes a deep breath, as if sucking on the air hose. Hold on.

She pivots—not easy in her fabric fin—and waddles back into the dressing room.

Reporter leans against the wall. A minute passes. Two. He’s never smoked in his life, but he has the strangest craving for a Chesterfield.

The dressing room door opens. A different mermaid emerges. She’s not quite as pretty as the other mermaid. But—blond hair, blue eyes—her beauty seems more wholesome. More old-fashioned. Willie’s type, Reporter thinks.

She too is wearing a fabric fin. Skin-tight. Gold-specked. She sashays toward Reporter, smiling.

Reporter knows, he sees it in her blue eyes, she’s got an envelope containing a letter from Willie. Or else the manuscript of
The Statue in the Park
. She’ll say Reporter’s name, and Reporter will ask how she knows his name, and she’ll say: Willie—he had a hunch you’d be stopping by. Then she and Reporter will go for coffee, and discover a thousand things in common, and eventually fall in love, and get married, and have babies, and their life together will be Willie’s everlasting gift to Reporter. He can see it all. He reaches out his hand, starts to speak, but the mermaid sidles around him, past him, into the arms of a young man just behind him.