He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a compensator in a wadding of material, and tossed it to Rawley, who caught it deftly.
“You just screw it on, right at the muzzle. Completes the outfit,” he said.
“Thankin’ you kindly,” said Braxton, and the two were off.
—
NOW BOB AND NICK drove in silence. The Ouachitas were soft green humps thirty miles distant in the rearview. Meanwhile, the remaining weapons were in the trunk and would be delivered to the FBI field office in Little Rock, there to be shipped to D.C. for the collection.
The tires hummed against the pavement, the radio was off, roadside retail slipped by on either side of the road, and it seemed a little numb. The manuscript lay in the backseat.
To nail it shut, Nick had called a friend at the Bureau, and an intern had run a check on Chicago unsolveds from 1934. Indeed, as Chase had claimed, on November 29, a Mob guy named Philip J. D’Abruzzio had been shot to death in a steam bath on the West Side. A Tony Accardo—“Joe Batters,” by trade name—took his place, eventually becoming the head of the Chicago outfit in the ’fifties.
Helen served a year for harboring—really, for being Mrs. Baby Face Nelson—then lived out her life in Chicago, raising her kids. She never gave any interviews or wrote any accounts. She loved Les hard and full until the end. Purvis quit the Bureau in 1935. Clegg became an assistant director.
“But what about Charles?” asked Nick. “How did it end for him? I don’t think you ever told me.”
“In 1942, he was found behind a general store in Mount Ida, halfway between Hot Springs and Blue Eye, bled out from a small-caliber bullet,” Bob explained. “They say he’d been at one of those prayer meetings at Caddo Gap. We never found out why he turned so religious.”
“I hope it helped him,” said Nick.
“I do too,” said Bob. “Anyhow, they think he saw something, stopped to investigate, and caught a .32 in the chest.”
“Such a shame.”
“I don’t buy that last one for a second. Rumors put him tight with Hot Springs people, particularly since the big train robbery in 1940. That was almost the same day his youngest son, Bobbie Lee, hung himself in the barn. So Charles lost everyone he tried to save, Sam and Ed and his youngest son. He’d already lost his oldest son, my father, Earl. I think by ’42, he had become so dissolute that he was unreliable, and the Mob had to get rid of him. If my father knew, he never said, and any knowledge died with him in 1955. But Charles was a drunk by 1942, so he made it easy on his killers.”
“It’s such a shame,” said Nick. “And they went unpunished.”
“Not sure on that one. My father Earl came back from the war in 1946 and somehow he got involved in an anti-Mob campaign in Hot Springs. It was a lot bloodier than the history books say. I have a feeling my father closed out some overdue accounts. He was that kind of man.”
“Good for him. Are you going to write that book about Charles? He deserves it. Nobody braver, nobody tougher, nobody better. I don’t know how you could sit on it. The man who shot Baby Face Nelson, he was the bravest of them all,” said Nick. “It would get the old bastard his due. Finally.”
“Charles Swagger never cared about ‘due,’” said Bob. Then he added, “He was naturally reticent, as if he was hiding some deeper secret. So, no, I don’t think so. In fact, I know exactly what I’m going to do.”
He pulled over, into the lot of a convenience store. Grabbing up the manuscript, he went into the place and came out with a cheap butane lighter.
He walked to a barrel trash receptacle in the parking lot and dumped the pages in. Bending over, he put the lighter beneath the rim to shield it from the light wind. He flicked it to life and pulled some of the pages out, put the flame to them, and stepped back.
In a minute, the manuscript, dry and crackled like old skin, was consumed in a rampage of incandescence, a white, pure burn without tremor or waver. It looked like a welder’s torch.
“He didn’t want it known, and we’ll leave it as he wished. The record will stand. Sam Cowley killed Baby Face Nelson at the cost of his own life. He was a hero, along with Ed Hollis. Charles Swagger never existed except as the drunken, corrupt sheriff of a no’count small town in West Arkansas.”
“Talk about a death wish,” said Nick.
“He had some problems. But when it counted, he stood there and did what had to be done and took the consequences. What did Grumley call it? Hillbilly honor.”
The ashes rose, whirled about in the funnel of heat, and were gone on the wind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have wanted to write a Baby Face book for decades, but, as usual, the impetus that turned ambition to labor was ire, a big motive for cranky old men. The object of my anger was Michael Mann’s movie desecration of 1934 in his idiotic version of Bryan Burrough’s majestic Public Enemies—and I’m not even talking about Depp as Dillinger! Why buy a nonfiction book if you’re going to make it up and don’t move the story one iota beyond John Milius’s el cheapo Dillinger of 1973? What’s annoying particularly is that the Mann disgrace will probably be the last big-budget 1934 re-creation.
So my ambition was to write a 1934 book in which Dillinger and Purvis were cameos and the real action centered on the far deadlier Les and the far more heroic Sam, a great, powerful, and tragic American story, ending in one of the most hellacious gunfights on record and the only time in history when the head man hunter and the man huntee end up facing each other over Tommy guns. Who but an idiot tells a story that ends at the Biograph instead of Barrington and tells the love story of Dillinger and one of his (many) hookers, not the one—twisted, unexplainable, but somehow, I hope, moving—between Les and Helen?
But it’s a novel, so I get to fictionalize, even if I try my hardest to keep chronology, personality, action, weapons, technology, and geography as close to the real thing as possible. Obviously, my access to the year was via the completely fictional Charles F. Swagger, though those familiar with the Bureau’s history will understand that he’s a version of the great agent Charles Winstead—who did bring down Dillinger. I added some psychological twists from my own father, Charles F. Hunter, to get them out of my system.
Otherwise, I’ve tried to discipline myself in my alterations to history. One factual alteration was to make a bigger deal of the Baby Face Monitor than should be made, while at the same time eliminating the semi-automatic, Lebman-doctored Winchester Model 1907 that Les probably did use that last day. The reason was simply taste, as the Monitor has to be the coolest full-auto in use in 1934! Then too I streamlined the Northwest Highway car chase, eliminating an earlier run-in between Les and two FBI agents.
I should also mention that much of the imagery of Charles’s Great War nightmares is drawn from the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon.
On to thanks. Once again, old friend Lenne P. Miller was number one researcher and mastered the data and the sources in a way I never could. Besides Burrough, Lenne made great use of Steven Nickel and William J. Helmer’s Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy. They got Baby Face in a way nobody else has. (Still the best account of Barrington is probably my friend Massad Ayoob’s article in the July/August 2007 American Handgunner.) Gary Goldberg, another great friend, helped on all manner of technical and electronic matters, like the Grumleys’ StingRay. Alan Doelp pitched in when Gary was out of town. Thanks to good buddy Ed De Carlo, ex-Top and ’Nam vet, of On Target shooting range, for loaning me the use of his persona in Chapter 6. As well, I pretty much counted on the same inner circle of readers for thoughts as I progressed. Thanks to Mike Hill, Bill Smart, and Barrett Tillman, for suggestions and, perhaps more important, encouragement. The great Jim Grady pitched in with enthusiasm and introduced me to serial-murder expert Mark Olshaker. Dan Shea, editor of the Small Arms Review in Henderson, Nevada, helped me plumb the mysteries of the Monitor, as did old friend John Bainbridge. Dr. Joh
n Fox, senior historian at the FBI, and Rebecca Bronson, also with the Bureau, got me some material on the Chase interrogations and trial preparation that are the only source of information on Barrington. Phil Scheirer, of the NRA, gave me insights into the values of ’30s gangster weapons. Bill Vanderpool, retired from the FBI, got me to Larry Wack, another retired agent, who is an authority on early Bureau personnel, though I should say that my workup of Chicago Field Office culture and personality is completely out of my own head and probably has more to do with the Baltimore Sunday Sun in 1976 than anything else. My sister, Julie Hunter, and her husband, Keith Johnson, put up with me in Madison, Wisconsin, on my trip up to Little Bohemia. My mother-in-law, Erlinda Marbella, put up with me on my trip to the Biograph and other Chicago-area sites.
In the publishing world, my agent, Esther Newberg, supervised the transfer between publishers and reunited me with old friend David Rosenthal, who originally bought Dirty White Boys all those years back and is now the major figure at Blue Rider.
And of course my indefatigable wife, Jean Marbella, supplied the coffee that has more to do with this book being finished than any will of my own. She provided other comforts as well.
To all of them, my thanks. And of course all mistakes, willed or accidental, are fully my own responsibility.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Hunter is the author of twenty novels and the retired chief film critic of The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. His novels include The Third Bullet, Sniper’s Honor, I, Sniper, I, Ripper, and Point of Impact, which was adapted for film and television as Shooter. Hunter lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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