True Crime (16 page)

By five minutes after nine, the rest of the agents had arrived. They parked their cars along North Lincoln Avenue and its side streets and took their positions. Melvin Purvis stood in the recessed area at the right of the box office, near a display case of stills from
Manhattan Melodrama.
Three more agents were staggered along the street, starting at the left of the box office and continuing on down by Biograph Billiards—though it seemed unlikely the Anna Sage party would head that direction upon exiting the theater, her apartment being the opposite way. Milling about the front of the theater were five men; a couple of them I figured to be East Chicago cops. A couple more agents hovered around the tavern that was next to the theater, a couple more in front of the grocery that was next to the tavern, on the corner by the alley; and seven men were stationed in the alley itself—including three who climbed a fire escape there, to get a bead on their man from above should he flee down the alley. And that did make sense, as the alley was a shortcut to Anna Sage’s.

Just on the other side of the alley, near where I’d parked my coupe, was a man I’d never met, but who was pointed out to me as Capt. Tim O’Neill of East Chicago. A dissipated-looking old copper with black-rimmed glasses and a pockmarked puss.

I viewed this from across the street, where Cowley held down a command post under a streetlamp; several other agents roamed Lincoln Avenue, on this side of the street, among them lady-killer Zarkovich, dressed tonight in a natty black suit and a straw hat, smoking an occasional cigarette in the black holder.

Cowley wasn’t pleased to see me.

“Stay on this side of the street,” he said, pointing a thick finger at me.

“That’s fine with me,” I said. I was the only one of these men not wearing his suitcoat. “I’m unarmed. I’m not interested in Wild West shows.”

Cowley slammed a fist into his hand. “This isn’t going to be any damn Wild West show! Understood?”

“Understood,” I said. “I just hope this cavalry you got riding circles around the fort understands, too.”

With quiet exasperation, Cowley made a motion with two hands like an umpire calling a guy “safe”—only that wasn’t Cowley’s meaning, in my case. He said, “Just stay out of the way. And stay out of this.”

“He isn’t armed, you know.”

“What?”

“I saw him go in. He doesn’t have a coat on. If he’s got a gun, it’s up his ass.”

“I don’t like that kind of talk. You’re crude, Mr. Heller.”

“It’s a rough old world, ain’t it.” I walked away and leaned up against the side of a building, by a barber pole.

Zarkovich, between smokes, wandered up to me; he was just tall enough to be able to look down on me, and I’m six foot. He said, “Warm night, Heller.”

“Getting warmer all the time.”

He had his hands in his pockets; his gold watch chain was showing. He smiled broadly but didn’t show any teeth. Rocked gently on his heels. Said, “I thought you were out of this.”

“Someday I’ll get you and your friends alone and demonstrate the superiority of a piece of lead pipe over a similar length of rubber hose.”

His smile drifted to one side of his face. “Whatever could you mean?”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t smiling.

He said, “I overheard Cowley giving you some advice. About staying back, and staying out. That’s good advice. Why not take it?”

“I probably will. I figure you’d like nothing more than for me to catch a stray bullet.”

“Oh, there’s a few things in this life I’d like more than that.” He nodded to himself, as if trying to list them mentally; it was a short list. “A few,” he added, then wandered down and sat in a car parked opposite where his buddy O’Neill was standing by the alley. Occasionally he smoked a cigarette in the black holder.

Across the way, standing by the glass case of movie stills, Purvis was fiddling with a cigar, but not lighting it. Lighting it was supposed to be his signal for recognizing Dillinger.

He claimed he’d recognized Lawrence as Dillinger immediately, when Lawrence walked by arm in arm with Anna and Polly. He’d said to me, and Agent Brown in the back seat, “That’s him. One glimpse tells me everything I need to know.”

“It does?” I asked him.

“It does,” he said, “I’ve studied every available picture of John Dillinger. You couldn’t miss it, if you’d studied that face as much as I have. Just looking at the back of his head I can tell it’s him….”

At this point Dillinger had been buying three tickets from the girl in the box-office window, while Anna and Polly chatted, waiting.

“How many pictures of the back of Dillinger’s head
are
there?” I asked Purvis, but he didn’t bother answering.

Shortly after Dillinger held the door open for his ladies and went in, so had Purvis. And so had I. He sent Brown to telephone Cowley, and asked me—actually asked
me
—to help him check out the theater. We’d bought tickets from the girl in the glass booth (no one at the theater had been alerted to the stakeout) and went on into the lobby, where the cool air and the smell of popcorn greeted us. There were a few people at the concession stand—Lawrence/Dillinger not among them, nor either of his ladies. We went into the auditorium, one of us on either aisle, and I began to wish I had brought my gun. The air in here was cooler than the lobby, almost cold. It was very dark. The heads of theater patrons were craned up looking at the silver screen where Mickey Mouse danced with some farm animals and spoke in a squeaky voice that reminded me a little of Purvis.

Virtually every seat in the house was taken.

We met in the lobby.

“Did you spot ’em?” he asked me.

“No. You?”

He shook his head. “I’d hoped to find them,
and
three empty seats behind ’em.”

“You know what people in hell want.”

He nodded. “I wouldn’t mind some, either,” he said, and he went to a drinking fountain and gulped several mouthfuls. When he was done I did the same. Then we headed back out to the hot street, and waited for the reinforcements to arrive.

That was the last active role I’d been asked to play here thus far, and would likely remain so.

Now the street seemed filled with men in hats and suitcoats, when before the majority of pedestrians and motorists were in shirt sleeves and, if any hat, caps. The agents stood out like a battalion of sore thumbs. I watched the girl in the box-office window, a pretty little blonde barely out of her teens. She looked scared.

I ambled up to Cowley.

Without looking at me, he said, “What do you want?”

I said, “The girl in the box office is getting spooked. Why don’t you let her in on it?”

“Mind your own business, Heller.”

“She thinks you’re a bunch of hoods, probably. And where the East Chicago boys are concerned, she’s not far wrong. Anyway, she probably thinks she’s about to be robbed. Several theaters have been robbed, these past few months, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know. That isn’t a federal offense.”

“Nice to know you guys stay so on top of things. Best of luck in all your future endeavors, Cowley.” I faded back to my spot by the barber pole.

In a few minutes I saw the girl in her glass booth furtively talking to a man in a white shirt and a bow tie and a mustache: the manager, no doubt. He was nodding, and then rushed off. None of the feds picked up on it.

Within five minutes a blue sedan with
CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT
in white letters on the sides pulled up; there were two cops inside. Neither had their blue coats on—because of the scorching heat, the cops had been allowed to work out of uniform this week, just wearing their caps and blue pants with blue blouses with badges pinned to their chests. These boys, obviously from the nearby Sheffield Avenue Station, looked tough and suspicious, and one of them hopped out, clutching a shotgun.

Zarkovich ran up to him before the cop had reached the sidewalk.

“This is a federal stakeout, mac,” Zarkovich said. “On your way.”

The Chicago cop didn’t take kindly to that, but a more diplomatic Cowley interceded, showed the cop his ID, and affirmed that this was a federal stakeout.

“We’d appreciate it if you’d remove yourself from the vicinity,” Cowley said, “before you blow our cover.”

The cop made a face. “Yeah, right. They’ll never spot you guys in those suits. Oh, brother!”

And he got in the squad car and they rolled away.

I went up to Cowley and said, “You might’ve told them it was Dillinger.”

Cowley said, “Chief Purvis is insistent on no Chicago cops. Anna Sage is deathly afraid some insider with the police will tip Dillinger off.”

“At this stage, how, exactly? Mental telepathy?”

Cowley glared at me, and I went over and leaned against the building by the barber pole. I was tempted to go across and get in my coupe and drive away. I was helpless to do anything about this situation; I could only hope my presence would be a reminder, a nagging one, to both Cowley and Purvis, of their responsibilities. That both of them would rein in on the East Chicago cops more, if I were around; that they’d both work a little harder at keeping their prisoner alive. I had told Cowley I wasn’t his “conscience.” Now I found myself somehow hoping I was.

The night wore on; I wasn’t sweating much, but I didn’t have a coat on like the rest of these jokers. Most of them looked drenched. Across the street sweat beads hung on Purvis’ face like the tears of a bawling baby. He wiped his face now and then, with that monogrammed hanky, but the sweat popped right back. Every now and then he’d take his revolver out and see if it was loaded; every time, it was.

Then a little after ten-thirty, by my watch, people started to come out of the theater. They didn’t stream out: Nobody was anxious to trade the cool interior of the Biograph for the sweltering Chicago night.

And through the milling crowd I could see Jimmy Lawrence emerge, with a woman on either arm. Polly and Anna. And he was hemmed in by the crowd, men, women and children. He seemed to be rather near Purvis and the display of movie stills. He seemed to glance at Purvis, and then glance away. I wondered if Melvin’s shorts were dry, after that.

Then the crowd, getting reluctantly used to the heat again, began to disperse, some of them getting into autos parked along Lincoln Avenue, others crossing the street toward me (and Cowley and crew), some turning left, others turning right, down the sidewalk.

These people allowed the feds in their suitcoats to blend in better, simply because there was something to blend in with. But since Lawrence/Dillinger was back in the recessed area between the box office and the display case of movie stills, few of the agents had spotted him, and those of us across the street, with a relatively good vantage point, couldn’t see all the agents, now. I did notice several who were giving some good-looking girls in the crowd the eye. They’d apparently had Biology, these college-boy feds.

Gradually the field cleared a bit and Jimmy Lawrence, arm in arm with his ladies, one of whom wore a dress that glowed red in the bath of marquee lighting, stepped out onto the sidewalk.

And a nervous Melvin Purvis tried three times to light his cigar with a match, by way of signal, and on the fourth succeeded.

From my vantage point I saw it all go down.

The agents closed in on him, like flies swarming on a single drop of honey. He didn’t see them. He walked slowly, as if strolling on a Sunday afternoon (and this was Sunday, although later than that, particularly for him), past the tavern, past the grocery store, and just at the alley Zarkovich, who’d jumped from his parked car and run across the street, where traffic was at the moment nil, shoved Lawrence or Dillinger or whoever the hell he was face-first to the pavement, flinging him out of the grasp of the two women, who fell away immediately, or at least Anna did, pulling Polly back by the arm as Zarkovich fired and someone else, O’Neill I think, fired from the other side of the prone man, fired down into the man while he, whoever he was, lay half in the alley, headfirst in the alley, rest of him on the sidewalk, and took the shots in the back and in the back of the neck, his body jerking, flopping, like a fish on the beach.

I ran across the street; several cars screeched to a stop, not to avoid hitting me, but because they’d heard gunfire and screams.

The screams hadn’t come from Lawrence, but from two women; in a bizarre piece of slapstick, both of them were holding their dresses up over their legs, where blood streamed from ricochet wounds. One of them collapsed near my coupe, by the time I crossed the street. A man bent to help her.

The body of the man who’d been shot was surrounded, too, by the agents and East Chicago cops; when they broke their circle, they had turned the body over and it held a .38 automatic in its slack dead hand. I pushed my way through the already building crowd (“Dillinger has been killed! They got John Dillinger!”). Got a closer look.

His face was gouged by two slashing bullet wounds; his eyes were open and empty. His shattered eyeglasses hung cockeyed across the bridge of his nose; his straw hat was still on his head, the brim bent back with a bullet hole angled through it. I leaned over him and touched the face, looked into the face.

A hand on my shoulder pulled me back. It belonged to Zarkovich.

“Get away from there, Heller!”

Another hand from behind me yanked me into the alley. People were coming down the alley toward the body; their feet clomped, echoing on the cobblestones.

But two others were running down that alley, away from the scene, hand in hand, like schoolgirls.

Anna and Polly.

I walked back toward the gathering crowd.
This was Dillinger
, they said;
they got Dillinger.
Women were kneeling, dipping their hankies and even the hems of their skirts into the pool of the man’s blood. Souvenir hunters.

Then Purvis was in their midst; he was angry.

“Get away!” he said. “Get away!”

They scrambled away, like rats in dresses, clutching their bloody booty. Purvis had frightened them, because he had a gun in his hand, and his coat was open, the buttons torn away when he reached for the revolver, going after Dillinger. But he hadn’t fired the gun.