The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  Nelly broke all six chalks in six steady shots, and Miss Antoinette McReady kissed him, and Frank Wanda had to get a new fellow for the pool hall when Nelly left town with the show after the last performance on Saturday night.

  It was six months later when I heard my father exclaim, while he was taking press dispatches over the out-of-town wire. He often did that when some news came through which particularly interested or excited him. I left my desk and went to look over his shoulder, while his fat old fingers pushed out the story on the typewriter.

  HAMPTON, COLORADO, April 2.—Two desperate trick-shot artists gave Hampton residents an unscheduled exhibition today. When the smoke had cleared away the Hampton County Savings Bank discovered it had paid more than $7,000 to watch the show.

  Shortly after the bank opened this morning, a young man and a young woman, identified by witnesses as "Cowboy" Nelson Tare and Miss Antoinette McReady, walked into the bank and commanded tellers and customers to lie down on the floor. They scooped up $7,150 in small bills, and were backing toward an exit, when Vice-President O. E. Simms tried to reach for a telephone.

  The trick-shot bandits promptly shot the telephone off the desk. They pulverized chandeliers, interior glass, and window lights in a rapid fusillade which covered their retreat to their car.

  Within a few minutes a posse was in hot pursuit, but lost the trail near Elwin, ten miles south of this place. A stolen car, identified as the one used by the bandits, was found abandoned this noon near Hastings City. State and county officers immediately spread a dragnet on surrounding highways.

  Nelson Tare and his female companion were easily recognized as stunt shooters with a traveling carnival which became stranded in Elwin a week ago. A full description of the hard-shooting pair has been broadcast to officials of five nearby states.

  All the time I was reading it, I kept thinking of Nelly Tare, half-pint size in a dirty red coat, asking me, "Dot any duns?"

  They were captured in Oklahoma that summer, after another robbery. Antoinette McReady, whose real name turned out to be Ruth Riley, was sent to a women's penal institution; Nelly Tare went to McAlester Prison. He managed his escape during the winter two years later, and started off on a long series of holdups which carried him south into Texas, over to Arkansas, and north into Missouri.

  Those were the days of frequent and daring bank robberies throughout that region. There were a lot of other bad boys around, and Nelly was only one of the herd. Still, he began to appear in the news dispatches with increasing regularity, and when some enterprising reporter called him Nice Nelly, the name stuck and spread. It was a good news name, like Baby Face or Pretty Boy.

  They recaptured him in Sedalia; the story of his escape from the Jefferson City Penitentiary in 1933 was front-page stuff all over the nation. It was always the same — he was always just as hard to catch up with. He was always just as able to puncture the tires of pursuing cars, to blast the headlights that tried to pick him out through the midnight dust.

  Federal men didn't enter the picture until the next January, when Nelly kidnapped a bank cashier in Hiawatha, Kansas, and carried him nearly to Lincoln, Nebraska. That little state line made all the difference in the world. The so-called Lindbergh Law had come into existence, and Nice Nelly Tare became a public enemy on an elaborate scale.

  It is not astonishing that some people of Elm City basked in this reflected notoriety.

  Reporters from big-city papers, photographers from national magazines, came poking around all the time. They interviewed Nelly's sister, poor Mrs. Ira Flagler, until she was black in the face—until she was afraid to let her children play in the yard.

  They took pictures of Frank Wanda's pool hall, and they would have taken pictures of Frank if he hadn't been dead. They managed to shake Miss Cora Petersen, late of Elm City's eighth grade, from asthmatic retirement. Her homely double-chinned face appeared in a fine-screen cut, in ugly halftones—a million different impressions of it. READ TEACHER'S STORY OF HOW NICE NELLY, BABY BANDIT, DREW HIS FIRST BEAD ON HER. OTHER PICTURES ON PAGE SEVEN.

  Clyde Boston and I used to talk about it, over in Clyde's office in the courthouse. Clyde Boston had been sheriff for two terms; he was just as apple-cheeked and good-natured as ever, though most of his hair was gone. He would shake his head when we talked about Nelly Tare, which we did often.

  "You know," he'd say, "a lot of people probably doubt those stories about Nelly's fancy shooting —people who haven't seen him shoot. But I still remember that time he had you throw a snowball for him to break with a rifle. He certainly is gun crazy."

  It was during the late summer of 1934—the bad drought year—when Nelly held up a bank at Northfield, Minnesota, and was promptly dubbed the Modern Jesse James.

  Officers picked up Nelly's trail in Sioux Falls, and that was a relief to us in Elm City, because people had always feared that Nelly might be struck with a desire to revisit his boyhood haunts and stage a little shooting right there in the lobby of the Farmers' National Bank. Nelly's trail was lost again, and for two weeks he slid out of the news.

  Then came the big story. Federal men very nearly recaptured him in Council Bluffs, though he got away from them even there. Then silence again.

  About two o'clock of the following Thursday afternoon, I went up to the courthouse on printing business. I had stopped in at Sheriff Clyde Boston's office and was chewing the rag with Clyde, when his telephone rang.

  Clyde picked up the phone. He said, "Yes ... Yes, Barney ... He did? ...Yes ... Glad you called me." He hung up the receiver and sat drumming his fingers against a desk blotter.

  "Funny thing" he said. "That was young Barney Meisner, down at the hardware store."

  "What did he have to say?"

  "He said that one of the Flagler kids was in there a while ago and bought two boxes of forty-five shells. Funny, isn't it?"

  We looked at each other. "Maybe Ira Flagler's decided to emulate his wife's folks," I said, "and take up trick shooting on the side."

  Clyde Boston squeezed out a smile. "Guess I'll ride up to their house and ask about it."

  So I went along with him, and when we got to the green-and-white Flagler house on West Water Street, we saw a coupe parked in the drive. Clyde breathed rapidly for a moment; I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel, until he could read the license number of the car. Clyde relaxed. It was a Vera Cruz County number; it was one of our own local cars; I remembered that I had seen Ira Flagler driving that car sometimes.

  Clyde parked across the street, although down a little way. He got out on the driver's side and I got out on the other side. When I walked around the rear of the car and looked up at the Flagler house, Nelly Tare was standing on the porch with a revolver in his hand.

  I guess neither Clyde nor I could have said anything if we had been paid. Clyde didn't have his own gun on; sheriffs didn't habitually carry guns in our county anymore. There was Nelly on the porch, covering us and looking just about the same as ever, except that his shoulders had sagged and his chin seemed to have receded a good deal more.

  He said, "Lay down on the ground. That's right—both of you. Lay down. That's right—keep your hands up."

  When we were on the ground, or rather on the asphalt pavement which formed the last block of Water Street, Nelly fired four shots. He put them all into the hood and engine of the car, and then we heard his feet running on the ground. I didn't look for a minute, but Clyde had more nerve than I, and got up on his haunches immediately.

  By that time Nelly was in the Flagler coupe. He drove it right across their vegetable garden, across Lou Miller's yard, and out onto the pavement of Prospect Street. Prospect Street connected with a wide gravel road that went south toward the Rivermouth country and the town of Liberty beyond. Nelly put his foot on the gas; dust went high.

  Those four bullets had made hash out of the motor. The starter was dead when Clyde got his foot on it; gas and water were leaking out un-derneath. Mrs. Ira Flagler stumbled out upon the
porch with one of her children; they were both crying hysterically.

  She said, "Oh, thank God he didn't shoot you, Mr. Boston!"

  Later she told her story. Nelly had showed up there via boxcar early that morning, but Ira was working on a hurry-up job at the garage and didn't know about it. Nelly had made his sister and the children stay in the house all day. Finally he persuaded the youngest boy that it would be great fun and a joke on everybody if he would go downtown and buy him two boxes of .45 shells.

  But all this revelation came later, for Clyde Boston was well occupied at the telephone. He called the courthouse and sent a carload of vigilantes after Nelly on Primary No. 37. He called the telephone office and had them notify authorities in Liberty, Prairie Flower, Mannville, and Fort Hood. Then he called the state capital and talked to federal authorities himself. Government men started arriving by auto and airplane within two hours.

  About suppertime Nelly showed up at a farmhouse owned by Larry Larsen, fourteen miles southwest of Elm City. He had been circling around all afternoon, trying to break through the cordon. They had heavy trucks across all the roads; late-summer cornfields don't make for good auto travel, even when there has been a drought.

  He took Larsen's sedan and made the farmer fill it with gas out of his tractor tank. Nelly had cut the telephone wires; he forced the farmer's family to tie one another up, and then he tied the last one himself. Nelly saw to it that the tying was well done; it was after eight o'clock before one of the kids got loose and they shouted forth their story over a neighbor's telephone.

  Things were wild enough down at the Chronicle office that evening. But I had a reliable staff, and at eight-thirty I thought it was safe to take a run up to the courthouse.

  "I kind of expected you'd be up, Dave," said Clyde Boston.

  I told him that I thought he'd be out on the road somewhere.

  "Been out for the last four hours." He took his feet down off the desk, and then put them up again. "If I can get loose from all these state and national efficiency experts, how'd you like to take a little drive with me in your car? Mine's kind of out of order."

  Well, I told him that I'd be glad to drive him anywhere he said, but I didn't want to come back with bullet holes in the cowling. So he got loose from the efficiency experts, and he made me strike out south of town and then east, on Primary No. 6.

  Clyde didn't talk. Usually it was his way to talk a lot, in a blissful, middle-aged, baldheaded fashion. We passed two gangs of guards and identified ourselves each time, and finally Clyde had me stop at a farm where some cousins of his lived. He borrowed a log chain—a good big one with heavy links. This rusty mass Clyde dumped down into my clean back seat, and then he directed me to drive south again.

  The katydids exclaimed in every grove.

  "You know," said Clyde, "I used to do a lot of rabbit hunting and prairie-chicken hunting down this way, when I was younger. And you used to do a lot of hiking around down here with the boys. Fact is, only boys who were raised in these parts would know this country completely. Isn't that a fact? Outside officers wouldn't know it."

  Well, I agreed that they wouldn't, and then Clyde began to talk about Nelly Tare. He said that Nelly's one chance to get out of those several hundred square miles that he was surrounded in was to ride out on a railroad train. He wouldn't be likely to try it on foot, not unless he was crazy, and Clyde Boston didn't think he was crazy. Except gun crazy, as always.

  "Now, the railroads all cross up here in this end of the county, up north of the river. Don't they?"

  "That's right."

  "So to get from where Nelly was at suppertime to where he'd like to be, he'd have to go diagonally from southwest to northeast. Now, the river timber runs diagonally from southwest to northeast—"

  I began to see a little light. "You're talking about the old Rivermouth road." And Clyde said that he was.

  He said that he had picnicked there with his family in recent years. The ancient timber road was still passable by car, if a driver proceeded slowly and cautiously enough. It meant fording several creeks; it couldn't be managed when the creeks were up.

  "It comes out on the prairie just below the old Bemis farm," said Clyde. "You go down between pastures on a branch-off lane, and then you're right in the woods. That's where I think maybe he'll come out."

  When he got to the Bemis place we turned off on the side lane and drove to the edge of the timber. The forest road emerged— a wandering sluice with yellow leaves carpeting it. We left my car parked at the road-side, and Clyde dragged the log chain down the timber road until he found a good place.

  Cottonwoods and thin saplings made a wall along either side, where the road twisted out of the gully. A driver couldn't tell that the road was blocked until he had climbed the last curve in low gear.

  Clyde wrapped the log chain around two cottonwoods. It sagged, stiff and heavy, across the path.

  I said, "He'll kill you, Clyde. Don't expect me to help you try to grab him and get killed at the same time."

  "There won't be any killing." Clyde settled himself in the darkness. "I'm going to take Nelly Tare back to Elm City. Alive."

  Old logs and gullies are thick in the Rivermouth country; hazel brush fairly blocks the forgotten road in a hundred places. It was long before Nelly's headlights came sneaking through the trees. The katydids spoke a welcome; the dull parking lights went in and out, twisting, exploring, poking through the brush; they came on, with the motor growling in low.

  Nelly made quite a spurt and went into second for a moment as the car swung up out of the gorge; sleek leaves flew from under his rear wheels; little rocks pattered back into the shrubbery.

  Then Nelly saw the log chain. He jammed his brakes and the car slewed around until it was broadside. Nelly turned off the motor and lights in half a second; the car door swung; he was out on the log-chain side, and he had a gun in his hand.

  "Don't shoot, Nelly," said Clyde Boston, stepping in front of the trees and turning on his flashlight.

  I didn't want to be killed, so I stood behind a tree and watched them. The flashlight thrust out a long, strong beam; Clyde stood fifteen feet away from the car's radiator, but the shaft of his lamp was like whitewash on Nelly Tare.

  "It's Clyde," the sheriff said. "Clyde Boston. You remember me? I was up at your sister's place today."

  Nelly cried, "Turn off that light!"

  "No," Clyde said. "And I'm warning you not to shoot the light out, because I'm holding it right in front of my stomach. My stomach's a big target. You wouldn't want to shoot my stomach, would you, Nelly?"

  Nelson Tare's hair was too long, and he needed a shave. He looked like some wild thing that had been dug out of the woods. "Clyde! I'm telling you for the last time! Turn it off!"

  Clyde's voice was a smooth rumble. "Remember one time when we went hunting rabbits?" He edged forward a little. "You and Dave and me. Remember? A big jack sat down, waiting for you to kill him. And you couldn't pull the trigger. You couldn't kill him."

  Nelly had his face screwed into a wad, and his teeth showed between his lips.

  "Never shot anything or anybody, did you, Nelly?" There was a snapping sound, and I jumped. It was only a stick breaking under Clyde's foot as he moved nearer to the car. "You never shot a soul. Not a jackrabbit or anything. You couldn't."

  He was only ten feet away from Nelly and Nelly's gun.

  "You just pretended you could. But the guards in Oklahoma and Missouri didn't know you the way I do. They hadn't ever gone hunting with you, had they?"

  He took another step forward. Another. Nelly was something out of a waxworks in a sideshow, watching him come. Then a vague suffusion of light began to show around them; a carload of deputies had spotted my car at the head of the lane; their headlamps came hurtling toward us.

  "You shot telephones off of desks," Clyde purred to Nelly, "and tires off of cars. You've been around and you've done a lot of shooting. But you never shot things that the blood ran out of ... Now, y
ou drop your gun, Nelly. Drop it on the ground. Gosh, I was crazy this afternoon. I shouldn't have laid down when you told me to. I should have just stood there."

  Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong, I don't know. The car stopped and I heard men yell, "Look out, Sheriff!" They were ready with their machine guns, trying to hustle themselves into some position where they could spatter the daylights out of Nelly Tare without shooting Clyde Boston too. Clyde didn't give them a chance to do it. He dove forward; he flung his arms around Nelly and crushed him to the ground.

  Nelly cried, and I don't like to think about it; sometimes I wake up in the night and think I hear him crying. My memory goes back to our haymow days and to the rats in the chicken pen—the rats that Nelly couldn't shoot—and I remember the bloody cottontails dangling from Clyde's belt.

  Nelly cried, but not solely because he was captured and would never be free again. He wept because the world realized something he had tried to keep hidden, even from himself. When he was taken back into prison, he wore an expression of tragic perplexity. It must have been hideous for him to know that he, who had loved guns his whole life long, should at last be betrayed by them.

  NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT

  1945: Day Keene

  DAY KEENE, the pseudonym of Gunard Hjertstedt (1904–1969), was born on the south side of Chicago. As a young man he became active as an actor and playwright in repertory theater with such friends as Melvyn Douglas and Barton MacLane. When they decided to go to Hollywood, Keene instead opted to become a full-time writer, mainly for radio soap operas. He was the head writer for the wildly successful Little Orphan Annie, which premiered on NBC's Blue Network on April 6, 1931, and ran for nearly thirteen years, as well as the mystery series Kitty Keene, Incorporated, about a beautiful female private eye with a showgirl past; it began on the NBC Red Network on September 13, 1937, and ran for four years. Keene then abandoned radio to write mostly crime and mystery stories for the pulps, then for the newly popular world of paperback originals, for which his dark, violent, and relentlessly fast-paced stories were perfectly suited, producing nearly fifty mysteries between 1949 and 1965. Among his best and most successful novels were his first, Framed in Guilt (1949), the recently reissued classic noir Home Is the Sailor (1952), Joy House (1954, filmed by MGM in 1964 and also released as The Love Cage, with Alain Delon, Jane Fonda, and Lola Albright), and Chautauqua (1960), written with Dwight Vincent, the pseudonym of mystery writer Dwight Babcock; it was filmed by MGM in 1969 and also released as The Trouble with Girls, starring Elvis Presley and Marlyn Mason.