“Plausibility is not evidence.”
“Your granddad’s possession of a Colt .45 automatic, known to be assigned to the Division, from the Postal Department. The way it was worked over to increase speed shooting, as in arrests, again knowledge of a higher form probably appropriate to a gunfighter like Charles.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not convincing.”
“The badge.”
“Could have been picked up in a pawnshop.”
“But it’s been there since 1934. They would have been much harder to come by in 1934. Next, verified absence from Blue Eye and Polk County from June through December 1934.”
“He could have been on an epic drunk and off whoring in New Orleans.”
“A good Presbyterian like Charles?”
“Especially a good Presbyterian like Charles.”
“The fact that you think you’re being followed suggestive of . . . well, of exterior interest, shall we say, suggesting further there’s some mystery here we haven’t yet figured on.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“The fact that he started his heavy drinking in late 1934, as per Mrs. Tisdale. It just gets worse and worse, until he’s finally going to the Baptists for help. Drink to forget? Drink to ease guilt? To make the blues go away? Whatever . . . Drinking.”
“Not evidentiary.”
“Finally the other contents in the strongbox and the map. This goofy thing. I had Jake send it.”
He pulled a tissue-wrapped object from his pocket and unrolled it—the cylinder of some mechanical provenance, sleek, bulbous, blued, slotted, produced by highly refined machinework, all angles square and sharp, all dimensions symmetrical, about twelve ounces of pure mystery.
“I guess I gotta go into the gun books on this one. Ugh. Or the car books or the airplane books or . . .”
The hopelessness of identifying a piece of oddly shaped metal out of the world’s inventory of oddly shaped metal across all applications daunted him.
“You haven’t gotten anywhere on the map, have you?”
“Nope, and that includes looking at every 1934-or-earlier house in Blue Eye for a similar configuration as what I take to be a wall. I suppose I could start on outlying homes and structures.”
“That’s an act of desperation.”
“I am desperate. Come on, you’re a detective. Detect something.”
“I detect that I need a drink.”
“Excellent. Wish I could join you.”
Nick rose, went to the bar in his study, poured himself a finger of Maker’s. It was twilight, midweek, moderate out, the sun through the window leaving streaks in the clouds. Nick disappeared, came back, having prepped the tumbler with a very large ice cube.
“Cheers,” said Nick, taking a sip. Then he asked, “Coke, soda, coffee, tea, dancing girls?”
“I’m fine. Oh, wait.”
Something was buzzing at his chest, either his heart announcing that it was about to quit or his iPhone signaling the arrival of an email. It was the latter, and he pulled out the iPhone to examine: it was from Jen.
“Just checking,” she wrote. “Remember you have that speech for Bill Tillotson next Tuesday. Thought you might forget.”
Ach. Bill Tillotson—Dr. Bill Tillotson—was head of the Idaho Veterinarians’ Association and a former marine officer, and he’d been after Bob for years to address a joint meet of the Vets’ group and the Marine Corps League. Finally, Bob had relented when it was so far in the future he didn’t have to think of it. Now it was on him and couldn’t be gotten out of. It meant he had to fly to Boise, though he’d given what he thought of as The Speech enough times, it was no difficulty and low-anxiety. It irked him, but maybe the removal from his quest for Charles might clear up his thinking.
“Trouble?” asked Nick.
“Nah. I just have to go home for a few days next week, that’s all.”
He was putting the phone back in his jacket pocket when it buzzed again.
“Ain’t I the popular one,” he remarked as he called up his emails on the device.
It was from Jake Vincent, at his law firm in Little Rock.
“Call me,” it said.
He dialed the number.
Jake answered right away.
“Great. How’s it going?” Jake asked.
“Out of leads,” said Bob.
“Well, something just came in. Sort of nuts, may scramble things more, but kind of interesting.”
“Please, shoot.”
“You remember the thousand-dollar bill, unissued and still wrapped, we found in the strongbox?”
“Yeah. We were just talking about it.”
“We returned it to Treasury and they tracked it for us—finally.”
“Please, tell me it was taken at South Bend, June seventeenth, 1934.”
“Wish I could,” said Jake. “But it was taken in a robbery, all right. On July twenty-fifth, 1934. A small town called Mavis, Arkansas, on the Texas–Arkansas border. Six thousand nine hundred fifty-five dollars was taken in loose cash . . . and a specially ordered money pack of five thousand, in five thousand-dollar bills, from the San Francisco Mint, ordered for a peculiar landowner who didn’t trust checks and paid in cash.”
Bob thought perhaps Charles had been dispatched to the small town to investigate, see if there was any connection to the big-boy robbers. Maybe he tracked the robbers down, disposed of them, and plucked the dough from their cold, dead hands and reported it as an unsolved case. He spent the other money, just had the one crisp thousand left and dumped it in the ground. But still, that wasn’t squaring with the Charles he was uncovering, not really. And he didn’t want to believe it.
“Any suspects?”
“Oh, of course. They were widely identified. It was in the papers.”
“Baby Face Nelson?” he said with a burst of hope.
“This is where it goes screwball. No, not Baby Face Nelson. Bonnie and Clyde.”
28
MAVIS, ARKANSAS
July 24–25, 1934
“I’VE SEEN BIGGER,” said Les.
“It sure ain’t no Sioux City or South Bend,” said J.P.
They sat in the Hudson parked across from the First National Bank of Mavis, on the shady, single street that Mavis offered, and amid its few retail outlets, a mom-and-pop grocery, and, farther back, a nest of dwellings, hazy in the shadows of the trees.
The bank sat on the northwest corner of Main and Southern streets, a single-story chunk of masonry, with a double-doored entrance set at an oblique to the right angle of the corner, the Southern Street façade displaying a double window, the longer façade on Main three single widows. It was all-white brick, as plain as a Dutchman’s dream, distinguished only by the towering tree that stood above it, shielding it somewhat from the hot Texarkana sun.
“The money inside is probably as green as anybody’s,” said Helen.
“You do have a point, sweetie,” said Les. With that, he put the car into gear, eased back into the sparse traffic, and headed out of town. He didn’t want to risk suspicions of a stranger staring at the bank from a stranger’s car for too long. In towns where nobody noticed a thing, everybody noticed strangers. In a few miles, he came to a bend in Highway 45, where it crooked south and plunged across a stout wooden bridge over the Red River into Texas. Other than which side of the river they occupied, there appeared to be no difference between the two states, each offering the same rolling prairie, broken here and there by stands of timber, with lots of fallow fields, lots of rotting but a few healthy farmhouses, old barns painted with chew advertising, fences fencing nothing in and nothing out, just Dust Bowl Americana at its dustiest.
“So this is where we got to git,” said Les. “Get across this bridge and no Arkansas lawman will follow. He’s not going to get shot in Texas. The Texans probably don�
��t give a damn about crimes committed in Arkansas because they consider themselves so superior to the slobs in Arkansas.”
“I don’t see it as a problem,” said J.P. “There can’t be much in the way of guards or local law enforcement. It doesn’t seem a bird has landed in that town in thirty years. They probably haven’t heard of radio, much less electricity. Any town with nothing but outhouses isn’t in modern times yet.”
“But I bet their guns go bang just like yours,” said Helen.
“That’s why I go in hard with machino,” said Les. “They see that big gangster gun and they start thinking Saint Valentine’s Day, and seven men on the floor, and it tends to discourage heroism. I hate heroism. The last thing I want to run into is a hero. I’ve had my fill of heroes.”
“Helen, honey,” said J.P., “I love you like you were mine, but Les has the right idea.”
“Sure, I don’t like it,” said Les. “There’s guns in there, and there’s heroes everywhere down here—ask the Indians—but I don’t see we have no choice as we could use a refill in the purse tank, sweetie. Don’t you see?”
“I see,” said Helen. “Of course I see.”
Then she said, “That gas station over there, in Texas? Let’s cross and get a nice cold cola.”
“I thought you were an orange gal,” said J.P.
“I wonder if Orange Crush has reached Texas yet?” said Helen.
Les took the Hudson over the bridge and pulled in next to the station. J.P. went in for the drinks and Helen and Les walked to a picnic table set in a glade of trees. In a bit, J.P. came out with two Coca-Colas and an Orange Crush.
“See how sophisticated they are in Texas, Helen?” he said, holding up the Orange Crush, and they all laughed. Helen sat on the table’s bench while J.P. and Les sat on the tabletop. They enjoyed the cold jolt of the beverages, and the shade of the willow trees so close to the great brown rush of the river.
“Now, I don’t know a thing about your business,” she said, “but it seems to me that if you go in with that big gangster machine gun and shoot holes in the ceiling and blow out windows all up and down Main Street, the first thing that’s going to happen is that everybody is going to say, ‘Why, what’s Baby Face Nelson doing in a little Arkansas town?’ The second thing is, every Texas Ranger between here and Tijuana is going to head up to this very spot. And the third thing is, every Division boy in Chicago takes the Ford Tri-Motor to Dallas and joins the Rangers at the roadblocks. And you remember what happened to Bonnie and Clyde at the roadblock?”
“Wasn’t a roadblock, as I heard the story,” said Les. “And it was only one Ranger and a bunch of cowboys and sheriffs.”
“The point remains the same: anything that draws attention to the great Mr. Baby Face out of his Midwest stomping ground is big news. It’s what they call man bites dog; it’s so different, it makes itself noticed. It makes things hard. So if you and J.P. go blasting into that bank, you alert them all. ‘Come get Baby Face,’ you say, ‘and get famous fast.’”
“Helen has a point,” said J.P.
“Sure she does,” said Les, “but can you take the bank all by your lonesome? That’s the real point. You alone? Good a criminal as you are, it’s no easy thing, you’re looking one way and the farmer pulls the .47 caliber Dragoon revolver out of his pants and blasts you. Banks are, minimum, two-man jobs. This gas station, that would work for one man. But, what, maybe seven dollars and change?”
“I am not saying he does it alone,” said Helen.
“What are you saying?” said Les.
“I am saying, you wait here in the trees, three miles away, drinking a Coca-Cola,” said Helen, “and J.P. and I will rob the bank.”
After they were done laughing, it occurred to both Les and J.P. that Helen hadn’t told a joke, she had laid out a possibility.
“Honey, it’s very dangerous work. I can’t risk you for a few dollars.”
“I’m risking me, sweetie, you aren’t. And if it’s the difference between another tourist cabin, with J.P. snoring on the couch, and separate rooms in a first-class hotel, plus fine meals among the gentry in the dining room and a bath every single day, for two minutes of danger I can do it.”
“Les, she’s not far off, if at all,” said J.P. “Two people aren’t twice as good as one for a bank, they’re twenty times as good.”
“Here’s another thing,” said Helen.
“You have thought hard on this,” said Les.
“I have indeed.”
“So this one will be rich, I bet,” he said.
“Very rich indeed, Mr. Gillis. I will get a cheroot and clench it in my teeth. I will wear a bucket hat. I will put on some black hose. I will call J.P. Clyde and he will call me Bonnie.”
“Bonnie and that dumb buckra Clyde are dead, sweetie. As you mentioned, they ran into a Ranger with a Browning rifle and that was that.”
“Dead in body but not in spirit. To these folks, they were heroes. They still talk and dream about them. So if they think it’s Bonnie and Clyde, that’s all they’ll talk about, and no matter how the Division detectives hammer on them, it’ll always be Bonnie and Clyde. It’s like spreading a fog over it all, so much Bonnie and Clyde stuff, there won’t be a soul who connects it with the great and famous Chicago gangster Baby Face Nelson.”
“She has a point there, Les,” said J.P.
And even Les had to admit, she has a point there.
“Besides,” said Helen, “this’ll be fun.”
—
AS IT TURNED OUT, Les, who was very brave in a gunfight, was not very good sitting in a grove of trees while his wife robbed a bank. It was the next day. They had stayed the night in Texas, sleeping in the car, driven back across the bridge, and J.P. and Helen had each moseyed into the bank, saw it had a standard layout, with two tellers’ cages, a small administrative area, a corner office for Mr. Big, and a vault in the rear, opened sharply at 10 a.m. and closed at 4 p.m. The money in the tellers’ cages did in fact appear to be quite green, even if there wasn’t much of it, and the few customers were sad old farmers, mostly coming in to pay off loans or explain why they couldn’t.
“It’ll be easy,” Helen trilled on the ride back.
“It should be easy,” said Les glumly. “This sort of thing can go haywire on the tiniest screwup. A customer walks in at the wrong time. An old lady screams. The cop decides to take his coffee break an hour early. It can’t be predicted. That’s why you got to be ready to improvise on a moment’s notice and hope you can do it right. Why, I remember—”
“Okay, honey, we will be on our toes, won’t we, John Paul?”
“Yes, ma’am, Miss Bonnie Parker,” said J.P., and they both laughed. But Les didn’t.
They figured mid-afternoon, guessing the sheriff’s deputies would mostly be out in the country on patrol, while the old man himself snoozed off too much lunch in his corner office, and if there was a sheriff around, he’d most likely be snoozing too, in one of his own cells.
They dropped Les at the station at 2 and he went in and bought a chicken salad sandwich the owner’s wife sold, wrapped in waxed paper, a nice cold Coca-Cola out of a machine that suspended various soft drinks in a tub of very cold water, and a newspaper, the Dallas Times Herald, and sat at the picnic table as his wife and friend disappeared.
The time dragged. He forced himself to eat slow, to make the sandwich last, but no matter how long he dragged it out, it was gone, as was the Coca-Cola, by 2:30. Agh, now what? How many times can you read a sports page? How much further can the Cubs fall behind? How many more stupid picture shows can come in? How long can the Division crow about getting Dillinger? All these dramas were revisited in the pages of the Dallas newspaper, and after he’d read all the stories he wanted to, and all that he sort of wanted to, and even a few that he didn’t want to read at all, there was no sign of anybody. But, at the same time, it w
asn’t as if Texas cops had raced to the bridge to seal it off, knowing a robbery had taken place.
He checked his watch and saw that it was now well after 3, getting on to 3:30, and now and then a car, more likely a truck, once even a tractor, ambled along and crossed over into the Lone Star State. He could feel his stomach knotting up, clouds of heartburn gas rising through his gorge, inflaming that which they touched, and his mouth and nose were dry, so that the air felt raw and harsh as it went into or out of these orifices.
Where were they?
What the hell was happening?
He bought another drink, but because of the stern architecture of the soda-pop bin, couldn’t get a Coca-Cola out, as other brands blocked them in the racks. He had to settle for a cherry pop, which was way too acidic and only made his various pipes burn more fiercely. He’d sweated through his collar and his Panama hat band, and it occurred to him to loosen his tie, but there were some things he just could not do. Meanwhile, the .45 lolling in leather under his sweaty armpit seemed to grow heavier and heavier.
The geezer who owned the station came out and they chatted a bit, Les claiming to be a haberdashery salesman breaking in a new man on his route before moving himself to a bigger route, and the old fellow listened with no interest in his old gray eyes. His name was McIvens, he was from downstate, his people had always been cow people, but up here you hardly ever saw a cow, it mostly being just small-plot farming. Without the highway here, the whole county would dry up and blow away. Everybody had a story, the story was always sad, but it was the Depression.
Then Les caught a flash of motion as another car emerged from the woods and headed at a brisk pace to the bridge.
In another second, it revealed itself to be a State Police car.
—
THE FIRST PROBLEM was the sheriff. He decided not to take his nap in a cell but to park across from the bank, enjoy a pipeful, and perhaps think of better days. Like most country folk, he was content to just be. He sat there motionless, not particularly observant but not asleep either.
“He sure isn’t waiting for a robbery,” said J.P. “He’d have his shotgun out and there’d be boys all up and down the street. It’s just this one old fella waiting for the clock to move but in no particular rush.”
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