If the world is bent on making a hierarchy of the century’s greatest crimes, one cannot forget the trick Al Capone and his thugs pulled on Saint Valentine’s Day a few years back. I enjoy a glass of spirits as much as the next bird, and prohibition was one hell of an idiotic time for an entire country in the middle of a depression and dust storms to try and collectively give up the drink. But mowing down six men with submachine guns in a goddamn warehouse over a bunch of cut-rate hooch? I’ve got the dipsomania something fierce, and the furthest I’d go for a cap of eyewater might be ransacking a gin mill.
Speaking of. It’s past ten on the Lord’s day, and it seems my tortured stomach will not be sending my morning pottage back up the pipe. So I make business pouring myself a whisker of purple. Quinine water on the side. I’m an old man with no docket and very little voltage left in my loins, and if I can’t have a breakfast brandy, then what else is there in life?
I have a washbasin for shaving and a slop jar for pissing and a window that will not open, painted shut around the trim.
The bedding is filled with ticking. The pillow, flat as straw.
The flophouse is run by a widowed Japanese woman who, with a little eyeshade, isn’t bad for looks. After I get some good morning grog in my belly, I knock on her door and ask if she might like a basting between the bedposts. She laughs in my face, standing with her kimono slightly open at the chest. It’s decorated in an overlay of plum blossoms.
I offer ten dollars to go along with it, and she slams the door shut.
“Well,” I say through the door. “Pardon me all to hell for asking.”
I put my ear to the wood. No footsteps. My landlady, the widow Baba, is still near.
I try again, softly. “I’m torn all to bits by loneliness,” I tell her. “I’m sure it doesn’t suit you any better than me to sleep in a cold bed every night.”
The door opens a crack. “You think I’m small-minded?”
“I think you’re too big-breasted to be small-minded.”
The door closes again. “Filthy lodger,” she says.
“I’m not a lodger. I’m a badger. A gunman. A desperado.”
“You’re drunk at eleven in the morning,” she says and locks the door in two places.
A deadbolt and a chain. And so it goes.
Yesterday’s snows have ceased but the mercury is nearly in the negatives. A grip of zero weather brought Omaha to a complete stop. The trolleys and streetcars have abandoned their routes. A winter so cold that the dipper I use for drinking froze in my water pail overnight. I have to put it over the fire of my fuel box to loosen it. Earlier this morning I discovered a mouse had made a straw nest in the door of my fuel box only to freeze to death. The poor little fellow. The smallest things break your heart the most. Its body was so stiff I lifted it out of the straw by its straightened tail.
Hoarfrost veins my window. Snow echoes sough music in the scratchy trees. When there isn’t peat for my fuel box, I heat my pottage over a can of jellied alcohol.
The remaining birds that haven’t flown south—and there are a good many of those little bastards—are yelling at each other atop the telegraph wire hung not more than five feet from my flophouse window. Across the hall some hussy is screaming banshee in the throes of what’s most probably some newfangled coital nonsense I will never have the pleasure of partaking. A child shrieks for milk at such a shrill pitch even the goddamn wallpaper is trying to hurry itself out of the building, and I think: God, in all your infinite mercy, please, take me now. Don’t toy with me. I’ve seen the things. Done more than most have fantasized about.
I fought with the rebels in the Second Boer War in South Africa.
I once ate a frog dinner with John Dillinger in Daytona Beach.
I’ve cut as many capers as the Jesse James and Cole Younger gangs combined and carried enough luck in my socks not to have had some lawman from Topeka or Red Oak gun me down in a cornfield. Enough is enough.
Yet I can’t help but wonder how I’ll be remembered. It’s only natural to ponder the contents of one’s own obituary, and mine is soon in the coming. Despite all my other escapades, despite five years of lawlessness enough to fill a whole series of blood and thunder novels, there remains only this: the kidnapping of Edward Cudahy Junior.
For a while they called that “The Crime of the Century.”
Of course that was ludicrously premature. The century was only a year into its stay on the night Billy Cavanaugh and I grabbed that young man off the sidewalk two houses down from his own. Then, four years ago, came the abduction of Little Lindy, the infant son of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. Not yet two years old and stolen from his crib out of his second-story bedroom window, carried down a makeshift ladder, and whisked away into the night never to be seen again on this side of the born. And to think that all the while his father was downstairs smoking his evening pipe and the housemaid was down the hall taking her bath and neither of them heard a sound. If only the child had hollered like the child in the room next to mine is hollering right now. If only that ladder had made a racket when hoisted up against the side of the house.
Anything at all.
Like I said. The smallest things break your heart the most.
In all truth, I’m glad to be shed of that sobriquet.
The Crime of the Century. The name bears such weight. Perhaps, in the end, my deed will merely retain status as The Crime of the Decade. Yes, we can call it that.
They say the man who perpetrated the Lindbergh abduction was inspired by my own evil three decades earlier. His name was Bruno Hauptmann, a thirty-two-year-old German immigrant and carpenter by trade. This was March of thirty-two. Seven years ago now. The first day of the month if memory serves. At the time, I was living in the Bronx and working as a night watchman at The Hut in Union Square. My life of crime long behind me.
Boy, what a racket that story made. When I discovered that my successful kidnapping and ransom of the Cudahy boy was a chief influence for Mr. Bruno’s daring piece of theatre, I booked train passage south to Hopewell, New Jersey, home of the Lindbergh family.
I thought: I must help somehow.
Surely I can be of some assistance to bring the child home safely. After all, there are thousands of police in New Jersey but only one man in the entire country who’d actually kidnapped a child before and gotten away with it.
So. Hopewell, New Jersey.
The child had been missing for a week by the time I arrived. A good warm rain fell in fat drops. Overworked drainpipes played wet music. A gutter bucket overflowed, gurgled like a slow boil. I made inquiries at the police headquarters and the newspapers, and visited two private detectives hoping to fill their coffers from the case—all before somebody involved with solving the kidnapping gave me the time of day. And it just so happened that somebody was Thomas Sisk, FBI agent. Very hoity-toity. He wore a knit necktie with a square end and kept his hair slicked back with scalp mayonnaise. Man looked like he combed himself with a fork.
“How the hell do you get your hair slicked back like that?” I asked him when finally admitted to his office. It wasn’t much of a place. A pair of wobbly chairs in front of a cluttered desk. A half-eaten apple cooked under a banker’s lamp. An electric fan blew streamers. Mr. Sisk ignored my comment about his hair and offered me coffee.
“Yes, coffee would be nice.”
“Well, Mr. Crowe, I only have a few minutes. But I suppose anything might be of service at this point. Now, what did you come all the way down to Hopewell to tell me?”
“I have a few ideas pertaining to the ransom exchange.”
“And those are?”
“Have you made contact with the perpetrator yet?”
“The perp—? Mr. Crowley, please. I appreciate your wanting to help, but unless you have something of substance I can use—”
I leaned back in my chair. “Listen
here, you little twit. You sewing machine detectives are all the same. You can’t think like a criminal because you’ve never even stolen a candy bar before. You’re just like all those fancy, whadyacallem, penologists? All them prison experts with their special degrees who think they know something about prison life but have never spent a day in jail in their born days. All you fancy badges, you’re all the same. You know nothing of criminals and their way of thinking, and yet it’s your charge to nab them.”
“I thank you for that,” Sisk said rudely. He gestured toward his door.
I asked, “Do you want to get Little Lindy back safe and sound?”
Sisk sighed. Stared at the wall behind me.
“First, if you want to catch this man, you must consider how you will deliver the ransom. When I got that Cudahy ransom it was delivered in bank valises. Every bank in America uses them. They cost twelve dollars a pair. A million of those bags all over, identical. It must be something unique.”
“And you suggest?”
“A custom-made wood box. Some sort of rare wood. Greenheart would do nicely. Comes all the way from South America. That way the box can be identified later.”
Mr. Sisk was no actor. He was bored as hell and could not hide the fact. He fumbled around with the papers on his desk like he had other pressing business. “Is that all?”
“No, sir. Next consider the money. Gold certificate bills are being phased out by the government. Withdrawn from circulation. So, use those. Much easier to track.”
“Uh-huh, all very enlightening. Now, if you please—”
“I’m not finished. Next, don’t mark the bills. The kidnapper spots that and you’ll never spot him again.”
Sisk laughed in my face. “Mark the bills? We’re not Scotland Yard.”
“Record the serial numbers, though. That’s how you track them.”
Sisk rose from his chair. “You don’t say? I thank you for your help, Mr. Crowley.”
“The name’s Crowe. Pat Crowe. Haven’t you been paying attention at all? Before this Bruno came along, I was the only other man in the history of this country to have kidnapped a child with any measure of success.”
“Yes. A reformed criminal. Glad to see a man come around and atone for his past. But I’ve got many other things and people that need attention. You can show yourself out.”
I fumed. The man was not listening. Or so I thought. I stormed around Hopewell for two more days, hoping to be of some service. I tried ringing the Lindbergh family. Of course they had no time for the likes of me. I returned to New York with the doldrums all about me, and a month later they found the body of poor Little Lindy on the side of the road: burnt, chewed, and skull smashed.
But. This world is never without surprise.
Not even for a lonely old codger like me.
Come September two years later they finally nabbed their man. Bruno Hauptmann. And to my great surprise he was picked up by the feds after trying to cash a rare gold certificate bill when paying for gas. Drove a blue Chevy sedan. The clerk, made suspicious by the rare note, jotted down his license plate number. When they arrested Bruno, they searched his home top to bottom and found in his garage a custom-made wood box containing fourteen thousand dollars of the ransom money.
A greenheart wood box. Hand carved.
Well, well. I guess Mr. Crowley wasn’t as worthless as he was assumed to be by that fancy FBI agent Mr. Sisk. No doubt he took credit for these things. He can have it.
All I want for these days is a good jug of brandy, one last bounce around every corner of a four-post bed in a two-story whorehouse, and to be buried in a suit that isn’t crumpled.
The last request, I will have little say over.
But the first two, I can do something about.
It may be as cold as the weather in outer space and my widowed landlady may have slammed her door in my face. But. There’s a yellow brick Victorian whorehouse with blue shutters just down the block, and I’ve got a little coin in my pocket for a tryst.
I garb myself in a heavy coat and brave the cold. The whorehouse is nearly empty. Only a few other heavy drinkers occupy the counter at that early hour. They glare at me suspiciously. I ease myself on a stool and place my hat on the counter like a dinner plate. My shirt collar dark with sweat despite the temperature.
A bartender approaches.
“You have any good brandy?” I ask.
“Sixty cents per inhalation.”
“Well, suppose I could have me a peg.”
The bartender sloppily pours a short glass, spilling some. I wipe the counter and lick the spilt brandy off my fingers. I down the glass before the barkeep can pick up the coinage.
“Will there be anything else?”
“You have any La Flor de Vergunas?”
“Speak English.”
“Good cigars?”
“Nothing as fancy as you.”
“Well, set the boys up here a box of your best,” I say, gesturing at the other patrons and touch my empty glass. “And I believe I’ll have me another.”
One hour and four rounds later, I pay the tab and present myself to a cluster of whores loitering around the staircase that leads up to the bedrooms.
All but one frowns at me. Even hired gals want nothing to do with an old man.
Still, there is one willing to do her duty. She’s no beauty queen, but neither am I.
Together we ascend the stairs and enter the last boudoir at the end of a frescoed hallway. A gigantic oval bed with a brass frame takes up the center of the room. I remove my boots and socks and unbuckle my belt. The whore sits up against the slats of the headboard and lifts her poplin skirt over her knees. I finish undressing all the way down to my union suit, tossing my trousers and shirt onto a rocking chair by the window.
After the transaction is complete, I put my pants back on and cinch my suspenders over my shoulders. I fish out a wad of money from my trouser band and flatten out three greenbacks and hand them over to the whore.
“The going rate is five dollars, cowboy,” the whore says.
I walk shirtless into the adjoining bathroom. Unbutton my trouser fly and scrub myself below with a new cake of soap. I toss a block of ice into the sink and stab at it with a pick until it’s in chunks and run the tap after plugging the drain with a rubber stopper. I submerge my head three times. The ice water renews my senses. I return to the bedroom drying out the inside of my ears with a towel and pay the whore the additional two dollars she requested.
Lying in bed again, I spark my pipe and consider the fish swimming in the globe on the whore’s hope chest. It’s red and white with a long flowing tail.
“What kind of fish is that?” I ask.
“How should I know?”
“Fish don’t usually get into a place like that on their own accord.”
“You can buy it if you want. Lord knows you bought everything else in this place. Which makes me wonder, where do you get all your money?”
“From the bank.”
“I mean, what’s your line of your work, cowboy?”
“I’m not a cowboy.”
“I could call you sweetheart.”
“Or you could just lie there quietly,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose to subdue an instant headache.
A silent moment passes. It isn’t to last.
The whore says, “It’s not every day you see an old man dressed up like a cowboy and pulling out pocketsful of coin.”
“Are you damaged? I said I ain’t no cowpoke.”
The whore fusses, kicking off the bed sheets. “Where do you get your money?”
I think about gagging her but don’t have the energy. “I invented a machine for buttering bread,” I say.
The whore takes the bait. She sits up eagerly. “Oh yeah? What’s it called?”
“A knife.”
“You’re some kind of asshole.”
“Closer to that than a cowboy.”
“You wear spurs and a hat.”
“Fellers who sell Cottolene door-to-door wear spurs and hats.”
“Who are you? Really?”
I stand and size myself up in a tall mirror. Not at all pleased with my reflection. My stomach sags, and wild gray hairs poke about everywhere. I run my thumbs down the length of my suspenders, still shirtless.
“Name’s Pat Crowe,” I say. “I rob banks. Banks and trains.”
“An old man like you?”
She cannot picture me any other way.
“Well, I used to, anyhow,” I say. “For a while I was the most wanted man in America.”
The whore giggles. “Now you’re really fooling me,” she says.
I shrug. She can believe what she wants.
So can the rest of the world.
BOOK TWO
The Thrill of the Nation
I
FIVE YEARS AFTER the kidnapping of the Cudahy child, I was flopping at a dime mission in Butte, Montana. The chimney of the mission was broken off at the roof. Most of the windows were smashed, covered with sheeting and flaps of loose iron. The silver valley housed the entire city in a cratered pocket as if it were dropped from a universe above. I panhandled with a dented cup and dressed in rags so worn they would tear apart like paper if I got them wet.
I babbled to myself on the streets. I stopped shaving, and my matted beard, nearly a foot long and grown over my lips completely, was almost always full of crumbs and dried spit. My brittle fingernails were as long as a woman’s. This is not a flattering light in which to paint oneself, but I was a man without. There’s no other way to illustrate my condition than to color it with its own bleak but true cast. When I didn’t have a dime to pay for a night at the Mission of Mercy, I slept in dead nettle weeds and prickly lettuce. On a few occasions, I wandered drunk into a pigsty and slept with hogs to keep warm.
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