American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ______________________

  SULLIVAN WAS BRYCE!

  The man who had bought the dynamite used in the explosion in Los Angeles was camping in the Wisconsin woods with the man directly tied to the Peoria train yard bombing. At last, Billy rejoiced, the members of the bombing conspiracy were being exposed and identified. The case was finally moving forward.

  But who was Bryce/Sullivan? Was he the man giving the orders? From what Billy had read in his operatives’ reports, he seemed too skittish, too out of control to be the mastermind of an operation that the detective now knew to be a carefully coordinated and well-financed countrywide terrorist conspiracy. The man in the photograph, Billy had little doubt, was a soldier, not a general. But how could he discover who was in charge, choosing the targets, funding the operation? These were very careful people; they worked hard to cover their tracks. Yet Billy also understood the urgency. Every day he failed to solve the case, the potential danger increased. The last bomb had taken twenty-one lives. How many would die in the next blast?

  Anxieties and troubling questions gnawed at Billy. He felt as if he were racing against a ticking clock, only he did not know when the alarm would go off and the next inevitable explosion would erupt. At least, he consoled himself, he knew where the bombers were and he had them under surveillance. As long as they remained holed up deep in the Wisconsin woods, he could be certain they weren’t on a mission to plant a new bomb.

  Then Billy received a telegram from Deane: “Machinery moving today.” The two subjects had broken camp and were leaving Wisconsin.

  What Billy lived, D.W. imagined.

  From the early one-reelers, detectives had been characters in movies. An investigator solving a case, putting himself in jeopardy to bring an evildoer to justice, was a familiar cinematic story. Twirled mustaches, menacing snarls, and shocked screams filled the screens. These signals were a visual rhetoric of terror and suspense, and audiences quickly learned to comprehend them.

  D.W. did something new. He was able to translate emotions and thoughts into powerful pictures. His audiences didn’t merely watch, they felt. They empathized with the detective’s predicament. No longer did audiences sit in their seats passively observing the fear or terror on an actor’s face. D.W. scared them, too. His audiences experienced the story. It was as if they had stepped into the tale: The danger facing the actor on the screen had become their own. This revolutionary advance in storytelling, this movie magic, was the foundation of D.W.’s powerful genius. And it was the artistry that made everything else that was to come—stars, large stories, big budgets, astounding revenues, an industry—possible.

  In The Fatal Hour it was as if D.W. had grasped Billy’s internalized fear of a ringing alarm clock’s detonating another deadly bomb and brought it fully realized to the screen. The plot: A detective trailing white slavers is captured and tied to a chair. The barrel of a revolver points into the detective’s face. The gun is rigged to go off in twenty minutes, when the clock strikes twelve. Back and forth, D.W. cuts between the terrorized detective, the police rushing to the rescue, and the relentless progress of the hands of the clock. The situation is excruciating. The detective’s fear becomes the audience’s.

  With a leap of his imagination, D.W. had intuited Billy’s ruthless world, the depths of the detective’s private fears as he raced against time to build his case. And with another imaginative stroke, D.W. had created a galvanizing screen image that conveyed the tense uncertainty and danger in the detective’s life.

  Full of canny mischief, D.W. added one further twist to the reality. He made his detective a woman. His camera was attentive to her bondage and the defiance in her struggle. His intent in this casting, the director explained, was to capture the audience’s attention and pull even more aggressively at their sympathies. But perhaps his choice was also more personal. In D.W.’s films young pretty women often found themselves in jeopardy, victims of the grotesque.

  From Conover, Wisconsin, the two men went their separate ways. McManigal returned to his house on Sangamon Street in Chicago, while Sullivan went on to Indianapolis. The watchers stayed with both of them, but this surveillance brought Billy no comfort. Sullivan, he quickly understood, was up to something.

  As soon as he arrived in Indianapolis, Sullivan acted like a man trying to lose a tail. Did he suspect he was being followed? Was this his normal, guarded way? Or—Billy’s greatest fear—was this the jumpy behavior of a man preparing to plant a bomb?

  Leaving the train, Sullivan had found a streetcar. Then he abruptly switched to another one going in a different direction, up Pennsylvania Avenue. He got off at Market Street and entered the Dennison Hotel. Instead of registering, he hurried out a side entrance and went on foot to the Plaza Hotel. He checked in to room 179 and remained inside for the night.

  Early the next morning Sullivan took a train to Cincinnati. He checked his bag at the station and walked to a nearby drugstore. He ordered a cup of coffee and looked at the clock. He finished the coffee and ordered another cup. From time to time, he left the drugstore and returned to the station and studied the schedule. Then he’d go back to the drugstore.

  Was Sullivan waiting for a train?

  Was he waiting to meet someone?

  Every half hour Billy received a telephone report from one of his operatives. If Sullivan made a move, he would know it. In the meantime, he would focus on the weak link in the chain of conspirators. He’d go to work on McManigal.

  Now it was Billy’s turn to write a script and direct a scene. Raymond had reported that McManigal’s wife often went to a local fortune-teller, Madame Q. It was a time when unscrupulous Gypsies were standard movie characters—they were the villains in D.W.’s Adventures of Dollie—and perhaps that’s what gave Billy the idea to offer Madame Q a bribe. Without preamble, he pulled a fifty-dollar bill from his pocket and asked the fortune-teller if she would cooperate with him. She took the money without either hesitation or questions.

  What does Mrs. McManigal want to know? the detective asked.

  She’s worried about her husband, the fortune-teller said. She has dreams. She dreamed the police were after him. They had him surrounded, and he drew his pistol. In her dream, her husband shot himself.

  “She wants me to look into the future and tell her what is going to happen to her husband,” Madame Q explained.

  Billy considered. In his mind a script was taking shape, but it was not quite there. “Let me devote some thought to this,” he decided. “In the meantime, don’t tell her anything definite. Just say you’re looking into the ball and will let her know when you see something.”

  “Then there’ll be more to this?” Madame Q wondered.

  “Yes. And more money for you.”

  As Billy continued to ponder this scenario, he went to work on another. A surveillance report had revealed that McManigal was as superstitious as his wife. He’d go to the corner saloon and have the barkeep read his fortune from a deck of cards. This information inspired Billy. He had found a way to keep McManigal on edge. An anxious man, after all, was a pliant man.

  The detective cast the barkeep as his star, told the man how to play his part, and gave him a new deck—with fifty-two aces of spades. The production began when the unwitting McManigal asked, as he usually did after a few drinks, to have his fortune told.

  As Billy had directed, the barkeep shuffled the deck. He handed it to McManigal to cut. And then he matter-of-factly drew the top card.

  It was the ace of spades. The dead man’s card.

  “Maybe your luck will change, Ortie,” the bartender suggested, reading from the detective’s script. “Take another card.”

  Once more the deck was shuffled and cut, and McManigal was handed the top card.

  It was an ace of spades.

  McManigal was reeling. In an instant, all his self-confidence vanished. He felt as if he were doomed. He had never felt as vulnerable. Which was precisely the emotion that Billy,
a master director in his own right, had wanted.

  In Cincinnati, Sullivan finally paid his check and left the drugstore. He bought a ticket to Northside, a suburb of the city, and waited. At 1:35 the train from Indianapolis pulled in. A big, cheery-faced handsome man, a shock of gunmetal gray hair tumbling over his forehead, got off and gave Sullivan a hug. Two old friends, they went to catch the train to the suburbs.

  Malcolm MacLaren had been trailing Sullivan all day. Mac had been brought in from Los Angeles; Billy wanted fresh faces on the surveillance teams. He watched the two men take their seats, and then he found a place in an adjoining car. It wasn’t until Mac was seated that he saw someone staring at him. It was Raymond Burns.

  What are you doing here? MacLaren asked, genuinely perplexed.

  Tailing my man, Raymond explained. I’ve been on J.J. McNamara since he left Indianapolis.

  It was a short ride to Cumminsville, a neighborhood near the city limits. The two operatives were now a team as they descended from the train to follow the two subjects. It was almost rural, hilly country, and the detectives were worried about losing the two men. But they stayed with them. On Quarry Street, Sullivan and McNamara entered a block of four homes. They went to number 4306, a two-story frame house set off from the street by a waist-high iron fence.

  By noon the next day, the two men had still not emerged, and Billy was growing concerned. He had tied Sullivan, the man who as Bryce had purchased the dynamite on the West Coast, to J.J. McNamara. But now he wondered if he had lost them. Had they slipped out a back door? He instructed Raymond to find out what was going on.

  Raymond played a door-to-door salesman. When he knocked, a sweet-faced old lady, her hair pinned in a neat gray bun, answered. There was a brogue to her voice, and Raymond, his father’s son, affected one, too.

  No, she said kindly, I don’t be needing any new pans. And if you’ll be excusing me, young man, I’d like to get back inside.

  Raymond smiled at her, full of apology.

  But before closing the door she explained: Both my two sons came home yesterday.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ______________________

  THERE COMES A time in every investigation, Billy knew from long experience, when a crucial decision must be made: Should you order an arrest, or should you wait, gather more evidence, and build a tighter, more conclusive case? To his great surprise, Billy had established that Subject 2 was neither Bryce nor Sullivan. He was Jim McNamara, the younger brother of the secretary-treasurer of the Structural Iron Workers union. With that discovery, so many questions had immediately been answered in his mind, so many doubts had turned into certainties.

  However, Billy also understood that precisely because of J.J.’s prominence as a labor official, the evidence against him would have to be irrefutable. The explosion in Los Angeles had been a national trauma. Twenty-one bodies had been buried, and months later the country was still in mourning. And with grief and anger, suspicions and conspiracies had flourished. Billy felt it was his responsibility to bring comfort to the nation by resolving this case beyond any doubt. Only the unimpeachable truth would put an end to the nation’s anxiety. He would expose the “terrorist conspiracy,” “the masked war” against “the established form of government in this country.” And with the mystery solved and justice swiftly delivered by the courts, America could race forward unencumbered into the new century.

  They were large ambitions, Billy knew. But he saw himself as more than a detective. He was, he said, “writing history.” And when he looked at the investigation from that lofty perspective, he realized the problems he faced. “We could,” he knew, “put the nippers” on Ortie McManigal and James McNamara. The cases against them, their roles in the dynamite attacks, had been established. But “we had no real convincing evidence against J.J. McNamara who was directing all the explosions. Nor had we enough evidence to warrant successful prosecution against . . . other labor ‘leaders.’ ”

  So Billy decided to wait. His hope was “to catch J.J. McNamara in the act of participating in some of the dynamiting schemes.” Perhaps there’d be a break and either Caplan or Schmitty would be found. Perhaps they’d implicate the men who gave the orders. Patience, he wanted to believe, would bring rewards. He told himself that his decision to delay the arrests until the case against J.J. could be established was not simply a personal mission, the quest for another front-page headline. He tried not to think about the possibility of another bomb’s going off because he had chosen to let the conspirators walk the streets. But it was very difficult.

  While he waited, he kept his three subjects under twenty-four-hour surveillance. His men rented an apartment in Chicago across from McManigal’s home; and there was always an attentive operative perched on a stool in the corner saloon, McManigal’s home away from home. An observation post was established on a hilltop overlooking Mrs. McNamara’s Quarry Street home in Cincinnati; operatives had a bird’s-eye view, although hunters rambling through the thick brush were a danger. And Raymond had made a long-term deal to lease the window space he had found in the building across from the union headquarters in Indianapolis. The teams watched, and they waited.

  Then on April 11 Billy received an excited report from the Chicago team. McManigal had kissed his wife and children goodbye and, suitcase in hand, had gone to the La Salle train depot. He boarded the Lake Shore train.

  Billy was pondering the significance of this sudden movement when he received another message. This one was from Cincinnati. Jim McNamara had headed to the train station, too.

  This was Billy’s worst fear. Both men on the move, heading out across the country. Were they preparing to plant another bomb? Should he grab them now and order their arrests? Or should he wait and see where the subjects would lead him? He was uncertain, his mind leaping between imagined consequences, between success and total failure. “Whatever happens, don’t lose them,” he instructed his men.

  But as soon as he gave the order, Billy worried that waiting was a mistake. Sitting in his office, his uneasy mind transformed every stray noise into an explosion—a disaster caused by his negligence and egotism. What if McManigal and McNamara gave his men the slip?

  But the watchers were vigilant. They were right on McManigal when his train arrived in Toledo, Ohio, at 7:40, and they followed him into the station waiting room. Jim was already there. The two subjects sat on a bench, and McManigal unfolded a map. He had a lead pencil in his hand and aimed it like a pointer at the sheet.

  Was he indicating a target? the watchers wondered. If only they could get close enough to hear what the two subjects were saying, but that was impossible. If the Burns men were spotted, the chance of catching the conspirators in the act, of dragging down the men in charge, would be lost.

  After the map was folded up, the two men left the depot and went up the street to the Meyerhof Hotel. They registered under aliases. That night they left the hotel and went to a movie.

  The Burns men, usually so meticulous, kept no record of the film McManigal and McNamara watched. But nevertheless it is significant that on that tense night in Toledo, they decided to go to a movie. The two men were furtively crossing the country, hiding behind aliases, quite possibly intent on planting another bomb, yet they made time to go to see a film.

  In the first decade of the century, movies had become integrated into American life, a natural part of the national consciousness. They were “the academy of the working man,” a writer observed in 1911. Films offered escape, entertainment, and education. By 1920 half the country’s population would be going to movie shows at least once a week.

  At that moment, as the two men sat in a Toledo theater, D.W. was working in Los Angeles. He had a new studio on a two-and-a-half-acre lot on Georgia Street and Pico Boulevard. He was earning a remarkable $3,000 a week, an artist proud of his material success and his growing recognition. But even D.W. hadn’t yet realized the power in the shadowy mix of beauty and intellect that he had tapped into, and how it would cha
nge the way Americans looked at and lived in the world.

  Just before five the next morning in Toledo, Raymond arrived to take charge. On his father’s instructions, he was accompanied by two Chicago police detective sergeants. The Chicago cops had often worked with the agency in the past; they provided muscle and would, Billy knew from experience, follow Raymond’s orders. And while the plan was to avoid arrests, if it became necessary the presence of the officers would make it official.

  Raymond had all the exits of the Meyerhof covered, and from a third-floor room in an adjacent hotel his men had a perfect view into the lobby. It would be impossible for the subjects to leave unobserved. He had made that promise to his father, and he was determined to honor it.

  At 8:45 that morning the two men wandered down from their rooms and found rockers in the lobby. They sat and talked, their chairs rocking back and forth in a leisurely rhythm. From his post across the street, Raymond studied the two men and felt that his father had exaggerated the danger. McManigal and McNamara acted as if they did not have a single pressing concern. Raymond could imagine the two friends sitting in their rockers, chatting the day away aimlessly. But by ten o’clock they were once again on the move.

  They took a train from the Union Depot. McManigal, the watchers noted, had his suitcase. And now McNamara had a valise, too; apparently he had checked it the day before at the station. They arrived in Detroit at 12:52 and registered at the Oxford Hotel, this time using the aliases of Foster and Caldwell.

  They did not go immediately up to their rooms. Instead, they left their suitcases with the bellman.

  At that moment Raymond knew: They did not want the cases in their rooms, close to them. Because the suitcases contained bombs.

  His father’s instructions were to avoid arrests if possible. The plan was to let the plotters move forward and implicate themselves more deeply. But Raymond was convinced that two suitcases packed with dynamite were now stored in the lobby of a crowded downtown Detroit hotel. If they exploded—whether by accident or design, the cause did not matter—the destruction would be enormous. And if McManigal and McNamara escaped in the confusion, they might never be caught.