Sutton

by J. R. Moehringer

  And I’ve heard the stories. From my grandmother. And my mother. Family legend.

  Legend.

  A heaviness comes over Sutton, a disappointment so crushing that he wants to lie down on the ice-caked sidewalk.

  I’m sorry to bother you, young lady. It was a long shot. I just thought.

  How in the world did you find this address?

  I have a friend. He has friends. Department of Motor Vehicles. Voter registration. Newspaper subscription records. They can find anyone these days. Was this your grandmother’s house?

  She bought it years ago. With her second husband.

  Second.

  We were just having Christmas dinner.

  I feel terrible for intruding. I would’ve called first. I couldn’t find a pay phone.

  You’re not intruding. Would you care to come in? Have a glass of wine?

  No. Thank you. I couldn’t impose.

  You wouldn’t be imposing. My name’s Kate, by the way.

  Kate. I’m—well you know who I am.

  Yes. It’s a pleasure. Kind of a trip, actually.

  Trip. Yeah. That seems to be the word of the day.

  Sutton takes a halting step toward her. More like a lunge. I’ve come so far, he says.

  He scolds himself—what a foolish thing to say. That sinks me. His leg nearly buckles. He grabs it. The pain is suffocating. That shit Photographer gave him made the pain disappear, for a while, but now it’s back. Worse is the fatigue. All those years lying on a cot, in a cell, doing nothing, he should be rested. Instead he feels the exhaustion of the laborer, the athlete, the soldier. He remembers: he’s going to die today. Maybe the moment is now.

  I’m sorry kid, he says. I didn’t mean to be so dramatic. It’s just that there’s so much I wanted to say. So many things I never got to say, things I dreamed of saying, and now it’s too late. If only someone had told me back when I was your age that you need to say what’s in your heart, right away, because once the moment is gone—well, kid, it’s gone.

  She smiles uncertainly. Her eyes are blue, yes, they are, but this damn street is so dark, it’s impossible to see if—He wishes he could get closer, have a better look, but he doesn’t want to scare her. She’s the picture of youth, of innocence, and he’s an ancient bank robber roaming the city on Christmas. He almost scares himself.

  You know what kid? I’m babbling. I’m an old fool. Thank you for being so kind.

  He flips up the fur collar of Reporter’s trench coat, waves, starts to walk off.

  She calls after him. But—wait.

  He stops, turns, sees her coming quickly down the steps.

  If there’s something you wanted to say, Mr. Sutton. Maybe you can still.

  What? Oh. I don’t think.

  But why not?

  No. I just couldn’t. No.

  She walks toward him, stops thirty feet away. It seems a shame to come so far and then leave without saying what you wanted to say. Like you said. When something is in your heart. And of course I’m curious.

  Well. But I don’t.

  I loved my grandmother very much, Mr. Sutton. And she told me everything. Everything. We had no secrets between us. She always said I was the best listener in the family. And I do love the old stories. I’m sort of the keeper of the family history.

  Keeper.

  She moves closer. Twenty feet away. She stops. The sidewalk between them glistens, as if paved with crushed diamonds. Besides, she adds, it’s Christmas and I just have this funny feeling that my grandmother would want me to—I don’t know. Lend an ear? Stand in for her?

  You have a voice like hers kid.

  I do?

  Takes me back.

  It does?

  Come into the garden, Maud.

  Pardon?

  Your grandmother had the most beautiful voice I ever heard. Especially when she read one of her favorite poems aloud.

  She did, Mr. Sutton, it’s true. I hear her in my head all the time. When I’m scared, when I’m in trouble: Take a chance, Kate. Try it, Kate, what have you got to lose? She was so—fearless.

  Fearless. That she was. I can still see her, a snowy day in 1919, half of New York City looking for us—she wasn’t the least bit afraid. She had more guts than me and Happy combined.

  Oh she loved to tell that story.

  Did she?

  Happy, I gather, was a handsome devil.

  Sutton stands up straighter. He heaves a sigh. The thing is, he says. I just wanted.

  Yes?

  To say.

  Uh-huh?

  His eyes fill with tears. It’s just that I never. What I mean is, I can’t. Ah Bess. Bess. Bess. I just miss you so much.

  Silence. He waits. In the distance an ambulance wails. Then it passes and silence descends again. He can’t see anything through his tears, but he knows he’s miscalculated, misread the situation. Ashamed, he bows his head, slumps forward.

  Then: I miss you too, Willie.

  He stops breathing. He takes a half step, sideways, like a stagger.

  Bess, he says. Ah Christ. I know I’ve lived a sorry life. But not for the reasons people think. The crimes, the prison time, all that stuff isn’t what I regret. My deepest regret is that you and I—that we never.

  I told my granddaughter so many times that I hoped you’d—move on.

  You certainly did. You got married.

  Yes.

  I died that day.

  I know.

  Watching you walk down that aisle.

  I was so—startled—to see you there. That’s another story I told my granddaughter many times.

  If only we’d gotten married right away, Bess. Like we planned.

  Like we. If only we’d gotten married? I’m not sure I understand.

  Being with you, those few days, on the run, that was the high point of my life, Bess.

  But, I’m sorry, I’m just not following. I was going to—that is, my grandmother, she was going to marry Happy. She was eloping with Happy.

  Everything would be different if that sheriff hadn’t barged in.

  Okay, now, I heard about the sheriff, but I know my grandmother said he barged in while she and Happy—

  No one would have gotten hurt.

  Who got hurt?

  That guard from Eastern State. All that blood running down his face.

  Oh dear.

  And Eddie. And Margaret.

  Who?

  And Arnie Schuster.

  Schuster. Yes. They were just talking about him on the—

  I admit I thought he was a Judas. But you know who’s the real Judas? The lover who spurns you. Judas was a lover after all. Before ratting out Jesus, what did he do? He gave Jesus a kiss. That’s why you’re the real Judas, Bess, and that’s why you’re to blame for everything.

  Maybe this was a bad idea.

  I BLAME YOU, BESS.

  Sutton’s voice chokes. He puts his hands on his knees, leans over, sobbing.

  Bad idea, she says. Definitely.

  I’m sorry, Bess. I didn’t mean that. It’s just been—a really really long day. I love you, Bess. And I always will. It’s cost me everything, absolutely everything, but maybe it’s not love if it doesn’t cost us everything. I love you, and I always will, and that—that is what I came here to say.

  He straightens, puts a trembling hand over his eyes.

  Um. Okay. Gosh, Mr. Sut—

  Sutton drops his hand, looks at her, pleading.

  Right, she says—Willie. I told my granddaughter, many times, that you were very special to me. Very dear. Those were my exact words. Very. Dear. I’ll always be grateful to you for coming to see me on Coney Island when I was in trouble with my first husband—remember?

  Sutton nods.

  I told my granddaughter: You were always so sweet, Willie. So devoted. So loyal. The way you’d look at me, saucer-eyed, it was touching. But I was with Happy. I was in love with Happy, desperately in love. I wanted to marry him. My father wouldn’t allow it,
of course, because Happy was so poor and we were both so young, and then one night, at Finn McCool’s, Happy got the idea that we should elope. Happy asked you to help us break into my father’s office, because you and Eddie had been doing things like that for a while. Remember? Of course I knew it was hard on you, being a third wheel. I knew you’d give anything to trade places with Happy. You told me as much several times. But I told you that we just weren’t meant to be. Didn’t I? For so many reasons, Willie, we just weren’t meant to be. Surely you remember me telling you that, Willie.

  Sutton looks up the street. He doesn’t answer.

  Willie?

  People tell us all kinds of things in this life, Bess.

  He reaches into his breast pocket. He doesn’t know what for. The envelope? A cigarette? A gun? Force of habit? There’s nothing there.

  If I could just hear you say it once more I could move on.

  It?

  What I wouldn’t give.

  I don’t.

  Oh Willie.

  Excuse me?

  The thing you always said. Oh Willie. No one ever said it like you. I thought if I could hear it one more time, I could stop running. I could maybe—I don’t know. Find some happiness of my own. Before the end. But. Like you said. It wasn’t meant to be.

  He waves, turns, walks a few steps. His head is swimming, he feels faint. He might hit the sidewalk face-first. He surely won’t make it to the Polara. But then he hears something. He stops, looks back. Oh, she says, as if starting to sing the national anthem. Oh—Willie.

  Oh Willie.Oh.

  He tugs his earlobe. Shakes his head. Cracks a half smile.

  It’s not exactly like your grandmother, he says. But it’ll do. It will do, Kate. Godspeed kid.

  Merry Christmas, Mr. Sutton.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The clerk at the front desk gives him a goofy smile. What brings you down to Florida?

  I’m a reporter. Writing about Willie Sutton.

  Oh right. I heard. Sad.

  The clerk hands Reporter the room key and explains about the free breakfast.

  Reporter finds his room, just off the pool, throws his suitcase and briefcase on the bed. He turns up the AC, closes the drapes, clicks open the briefcase. The old files spill out. Nothing brings back that Christmas Day eleven years ago like the old files. Somehow they still smell of Chesterfields.

  Sutton’s memoirs fall out too, both of them. Highlighted, underlined, filled with Reporter’s Post-its. The first, Smooth and Deadly, was published in 1953. Reporter didn’t even know of its existence until 1976, when the second one appeared. Where the Money Was. Sutton decided to write that one after publishers rejected the novel he wrote in prison.

  Reporter teased Sutton often about the title. Mr. Sutton, he said—that’s a total sellout.

  Sutton chuckled. Kid I’m now going to say something to you I’ve never said before in my life. Guilty.

  Reporter sits on the hotel bed. He thinks about the front desk clerk. Oh right. I heard. Sad. Yes, sad, except that Sutton lived eleven years longer than anyone expected, eleven years longer than he led doctors and reporters and the parole board—and himself—to think he had left. Sutton’s final elusiveness, his crowning trickery—to live and live and live. In fact his will to live was one of the primary reasons that, despite everything, despite professional instincts and personal wariness, Reporter became fond of Sutton through the years.

  Before they could become friends, Reporter had to forgive Sutton for stealing the newspaper’s Polara that first Christmas. Upon filing his story, dictating it from a coffee shop near Schuster’s house, Reporter tracked Sutton and the Polara back to the Plaza. Sutton, sitting at the hotel bar, nursing a Jameson, apologized profusely, telling Reporter that he just couldn’t face his guilt over Schuster. Reporter accepted this explanation and they shook hands.

  How’s Bad Cop doing? Sutton asked.

  I won’t lie to you, Mr. Sutton. You shouldn’t expect a Christmas card next year.

  They both had a laugh about that.

  In the eleven years that followed, Reporter and Sutton spoke every now and then on the phone, and they always got together for dinner when Sutton came through Manhattan. After dinner they would retire to P. J. Clarke’s for a nightcap. Reporter enjoyed installing Sutton, America’s most prolific bank robber, among the bankers and Wall Streeters along the bar at Clarke’s. It was there, one autumn night in 1970, that Sutton, full of Jameson, loudly mused: I think America is the way it is, kid, because it’s the only country ever founded over a beef about money. It strikes Reporter now, cranking up the AC, that Sutton at the end was a walking embodiment of America. Underneath all the delusion, all the bluster, all the wrongdoing, admitted and denied, there was something intractably good. Eternally salvageable.

  And resolutely optimistic. Though filled with regret, Sutton always emphasized the positive, always expressed a touching gratitude that he was living out his final years in freedom and peace. Still, Reporter now recalls one dark phone conversation. September 1971, the night of the bloody riots at Attica. Sutton knew many of the forty-three people killed, and he claimed to have known the riots were coming. I saw it kid, he kept saying, I knew it was going to happen. And if fuckin Rockefeller hadn’t let me out when he did, I’d have died with those men, facedown in D Yard. I just know it.

  How do you know it?

  The way I always know things. In my gut.

  After they hung up Reporter couldn’t sleep. There was something odd in Sutton’s voice. He wasn’t merely shaken by his close brush with death, or sad for the men who died in D Yard. He was also deeply troubled to owe a debt of gratitude to a Rockefeller.

  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.