EQMM, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The tricky part was that slumbering kid. Jimmy was in a crib in the bedroom where I needed to poke around. So I did my quietest, most careful work, and I'd like to say I was able to pull off the find because I was a real professional, but a blind man could have pawed around and come up with the stuff.

  Under the bed, in a trio of clothing boxes, were lovely fashions, long-sleeved wool and rabbit's-hair numbers, stylish with Ascot ties and metal buttons and all the most fashionable current touches. Stege had said the Blonde Tigress had helped herself to pretty things on the robberies, and these brand-new, never-worn dresses certainly qualified.

  Most damning were two items dropped on top of the final box I opened, nestled on a long-sleeved rayon satin two-color frock with a bow at the neck: a blonde wig and a blackjack.

  Some things never go out of style.

  I thought about laying all this stuff out on the kitchen table, like a meal; but instead I just put the kaboodle away and went out and helped myself to another cup of coffee. Something about the setup made me think maybe I should have taken that bottle of warm milk out of that pan instead.

  They returned in just over twenty minutes, with their arms full of grocery sacks and Tina Minneci all smiles. She was saying, “I think I'll have the folks send Leo Junior, home for a few days. We can eat like a proper family again. How can I thank you, Tony?"

  Tony was all smiles, too, but his eyes kept flicking toward me expectantly. I pitched in with my hostess and her brother-in-law and helped unload the grocery sacks and turn the cupboard shelves from empty to full.

  Leaning back against the kitchen counter, looking happy and with a hint of how lovely she really could be, Tina Minneci said, “Any trouble with Jimmy?"

  "No,” I said. “Slept like a baby."

  That made her laugh. “Shall we sit down, and I'll try to answer the rest of your questions?"

  "I don't have any more questions, thanks. You've been very gracious, Mrs. Minneci. Tony, isn't it time we were going?"

  Tony nodded and we made our goodbyes and started down the steps. I waited until we were two-thirds of the way before I tripped him and sent him rattling down those stairs in a pile of arms and legs until he knocked up against the closed door.

  I stood over him in the little entryway and he gazed up at me, astounded. “What the hell did you do that for?"

  "That's the clumsiest frame I ever saw."

  He got to his feet, brushing off his white pants. He picked up his boater, which had cracked. “You busted my hat!"

  "I should bust more."

  His chin stuck out at me. “Listen, my brother is a boxer. He's taught me a thing or two. I can take a punch."

  "Can you take a slap?” I asked, and slapped him four times, twice per cheek, the sound ringing like gunshots in the stairwell.

  Then I grabbed him by the shirt front and slammed him into some little wall-mounted mailboxes, which probably hurt some. He was crying.

  "I've seen low,” I said. “But framing your own sister-in-law ... Did Eleanor put you up to it?"

  "I'm not talking to you!"

  "Question is, am I talking to the cops?"

  "You work for us!"

  "Shut up.” I shook my head. “Get the hell out of here. You make me sick."

  He and his busted boater scooted out. Under normal circumstances, he might have been able to give me worse than I'd just dished out to him. But I had righteous indignation on my side, which I admit was something new.

  * * * *

  The next morning, Eleanor Jarman and I sat in the same interrogation room as before. Her arms were folded, her eyes cold, her mouth a wide, tight line, straight as a ruler's edge.

  My arms were folded, too, but I was smiling. “Here's the deal. I keep the hundred. I intend to send thirty bucks of it to Minneci's wife, to help out on her rent. But I keep the rest—you're getting off cheap, because if I sold what I know to the papers, you'd really be sunk."

  I had just filled her in on a bunch of stuff, including that I knew Leo's brother was part of their little gang, possibly fencing boodle, certainly providing the car.

  She gave me a gray-eyed glare. “I ask my lawyer for the shiftiest private eye around, and you're what he comes up with? A goody twoshoes?"

  "This isn't about right or wrong. This is about me not being stupid. Scratch that—it's about me not liking being taken for stupid. You and George and Leo have been knocking over little shops since, when? April, May?"

  She just shrugged.

  "The clothes I found under Mrs. Minneci's bed were strictly fall and winter items."

  Her eyebrows went up. “If I wanted to frame her, and had a bunch of stolen summer frocks of my own, why didn't I just have that dope Tony stick some of those under that bitch's bed?"

  "Because you girls don't wear the same size. She's tall and skinny, you're short and curvy. You had to frame her with clothing that would fit her—and that dope Tony, as you accurately put it, went out and bought new things ... fall and winter items that just hit the stores."

  "You said you found a blonde wig and a blackjack."

  "Yeah. The wig was new, but the blackjack wasn't. You really did go around terrorizing small merchants with that thing, didn't you?"

  She sighed and her face softened. She unfolded her arms and put her hands on the scarred table and leaned forward. “Listen, Heller—dumbbell Tina wouldn't've served any time. That was just to muddy the waters and help get me off—when the cops looked into it, she'd probably have alibis for some of those robberies, maybe including the Hoeh thing."

  "Probably. Maybe."

  "And as for waving around that blackjack? That was just theater. I never slugged anybody, I never kicked anybody. These are hard times, as you may have noticed, and these hands...” She held them up; they were cracked and almost arthritic-looking, fifty-year-old hands on a woman not thirty. “...these hands had done all the laundry they could take."

  "But the cops wanted to make themselves look good, and the papers went along, turning you into a Tigress."

  She smiled. “Hey, fella, I was a tigress, but that was part of the show. Scare ‘em, rattle ‘em, and get them to give up their money. And we lived pretty darn good these last few months."

  "Until Gustav Hoeh didn't cooperate."

  Her smile faded. “I hate that. You can believe me or not believe me, I don't give a damn. But the truth is, I never wanted anybody hurt. This was just about some fast, easy cash."

  "That gun you hauled around in your bag for George—you never thought he'd use it?"

  "No. He's a coward at heart."

  "Hell, Eleanor. Don't you know? That's who uses guns."

  * * * *

  Some of the details I never got. I was only on the case for two days, so I never found out exactly what hold Eleanor Jarman had over Tony Minneci, and I have no idea what became of Tina and her two boys after I sent the thirty-bucks rent money.

  On the witness stand, Eleanor wore a pretty blue frock (where had she picked that up, I wondered?) and told her sad tale of being an orphan and waiting tables and doing laundry. She denied knowing that Hoeh's store was going to be robbed, while Dale had changed his story to put the blame on Minneci, who told a similar story with Dale cast as the heavy. Assistant State's Attorney Crowley went after the death sentence for all three, but only George Dale got the chair; his last act, in April of 1934, was to write Eleanor a love letter.

  As for Eleanor, she and Leo each got 199 years, a sentence designed to beat any reasonable chance of parole—and the longest stretch ever assigned a woman in Illinois.

  That should be the end of the story, but the Blonde Tigress had other ideas. For seven years Eleanor served her time at Joliet as (to quote the warden) “an industrious, obedient, and model prisoner in every respect.” Then, on the morning of August 8, 1940, she wore a guard's dress stolen from a locker and used a rope fashioned from sheets to go over the ten-foot wall.

  Supposedly she had heard her youngest son had threatened to ru
n away from home. The story goes that Eleanor Jarman returned to Sioux City, spent some time with her two boys, and then disappeared, not turning up till she met with family members briefly in 1975 before vanishing again.

  No one, except perhaps her blood relatives, knows how Eleanor spent the rest of her life or where. My take on it was that she was neither the Tigress of the press nor the victim she pretended to be. And maybe seven years was enough time for her to serve, though numerous attempts by her family to get her pardoned went nowhere.

  Anyway, the part I liked best was how she got out of prison.

  By stealing a dress.

  * * * *

  AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction based on an actual murder, and many real names are used; Nathan Heller is a fictional character, however, and “Tony Minneci” is a composite of Leo Minneci's real brother and several other peripheral figures in the case, none of whom were shown to have anything to do with the robberies or murder. I wish to acknowledge the help of my longtime research associate George Hagenauer, who wrote about the Blonde Tigress in The Big Book of Little Criminals (1996). Newspaper accounts, including retrospective ones, were consulted as well as several articles in vintage “true detective” magazines, notably “Smashing the Terror Reign of Chicago's Blonde Gun Girl” by Robert Faherty in Detective Tabloid, February 1935. Mark Gribben's internet article, “Eleanor Jarman Please Phone Home,” was also useful.

  (c) 2008 by Max Allan Collins

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: CLAY PILLOWS by James Powell

  "...the stories of Toronto-born [James] Powell ... might be likened to the tales of Saki or John Collier. Powell's carefully workedprose displays not only these masters’ mixture of horror and humour, in which a surprise ending is often illuminated by a flash of surreal fantasy, but also a Hitchcockian relish for the tongue-in-cheek laced with venom.” Books in Canada.

  The tiny church had four lancet windows and a crowded stations-of-the-cross. At the end of the funeral mass the priest left the altar to shake the smoking cen-ser and holy water over Uncle Clarence's coffin. Then he disappeared into the sacristy through a lancet-shaped doorway.

  Tom O'Malley, a balding, tired-faced man in his sixties, knelt to say a final prayer for his uncle and found himself saying another for Mr. Gregory, the man O'Malley had shot and killed so many years before. Had all the church ceremony brought Mr. Gregory and his bare-bones burial to mind? Uncle Clarence said he'd dug a hole in the ground in the woods behind the farmhouse and tumbled the body in. He would never show O'Malley where. “Don't dwell on it, Tommy. Self-defense, cut and dried."

  The farm was on the edge of town. O'Malley had recognized the man limping quickly up the dirt road from his uncle's description. When Mr. Gregory came bursting through the door waving a revolver, O'Malley, who'd never held a firearm before in all his eighteen years, had found the pistol and was holding it out at arm's length using both hands to keep it steady. The intruder fired first. O'Malley shot back. Mr. Gregory clutched his chest and fell to the floor with blood spilling from his mouth.

  In the next moment Uncle Clarence was standing in the doorway, breathing hard. He knelt down by the body. “Dead,” he said, shaking his head. “I saw him get off the bus. He didn't see me. Don't know how he found us. But he set off this way like a man who knew where he was going. I followed close as I could."

  Astonished by what he'd done, O'Malley stood frozen to the spot.

  "I'll take it from here, Tommy,” said Uncle Clarence, grabbing the body under the armpits and dragging it toward the door. Seeing the smear of blood on the linoleum, O'Malley went to be sick.

  * * * *

  O'Malley sat back, alone in the front pew reserved for family. Mike, his older brother by a year, wasn't there. Nor were any of his sisters, though Uncle Clarence had provided for them all and taken care of their mother, his older and favorite sister, until she died ten years ago.

  He turned in the pew. Beyond the opened doors of the church the undertaker's men were butting their cigarettes before coming inside to deal with the coffin. Now O'Malley examined the mourners. Half a van-load had come from St. Mary's Village, the retirement home where his uncle had lived since his recent stroke. The others were a few of Victory Public Relations’ older clients.

  In 1944, with the end of the war in sight, many Toronto businesses starting up were calling themselves Victory this or Victory that. As a young boy O'Malley didn't know what public relations was. But he suspected it had to do with the shady side of the street where his father did his walking.

  O'Malley followed the coffin out into the bright June day. The warm breeze promised summer, but still carried a chill edge to it. The retirement-home people couldn't go to the gravesite because their van had been scheduled for a trip to the shopping mall in Humber. But the other mourners got in their cars and fell in behind the hearse and limousine as the funeral procession set off at the measured pace of rented solemnity, passing through the old part of town where roots of the large trees shouldered the sidewalk pavement about and English daisies spotted the lawns.

  O'Malley rode in the limousine with the priest, now in white surplice and black stole, who mentioned visiting the deceased at St. Mary's and how he found him a kindred spirit. O'Malley gave the man a long glance before remembering his mother had said that after getting out of the army Uncle Clarence had given serious thought to going into the seminary. The priest went on to describe the stained-glass half-window the deceased had willed the church, a pelican feeding its young with its own blood, which would go between the last two stations of the cross.

  O'Malley's mind was elsewhere. He was remembering his great surprise when Uncle Clarence stepped in “to hold the fort,” as he put it, after O'Malley's father's second heart attack. There was nothing shady-side-of-the-street about his uncle. The man's upright air was helped along by the tailored three-piece navy-blue suit and gray fedora he'd bought with his army gratuity money. In fact, his decision to stay on after O'Malley's father got back on his feet made young O'Malley wonder if he'd been wrong about the family business.

  After O'Malley Senior died Uncle Clarence took over, closed down the office, and moved Victory Public Relations out of town. But he visited them every month, coming after nightfall. Answer the door and there he'd be with a prepared smile. He and O'Malley's mother would sit at the table in the dining alcove and he would go over the bills and write out the checks. Then they would talk in low voices for a while. On his way out Uncle Clarence always stopped to speak to O'Malley's brother Mike who, it was understood, would go into the family business when he got out of high school. Then Uncle Clarence would give the rest of them a quick look as if making sure they were all there.

  * * * *

  The cemetery was out past the fairgrounds. The slow drive through the countryside reminded O'Malley of the morning train out of Union Station, which they took each August to Duck Lake, one of the Muskoka region's archipelago of lakes. When they got off the train Uncle Clarence would be there to drive them to a rented cottage where they learned to swim and handle the rowboat. His uncle's only concession to summer was a Panama hat and, once or twice if the day was very hot, he would take off his shoes and socks and sit on the dock dangling white feet in the water.

  The summer at the cottage after Mike graduated from high school he and Uncle Clarence started taking long walks in the woods around the lake. That summer ended with Mike's sudden announcement that he would enter the seminary that fall. At the time, O'Malley thought that's what they'd been talking about on those walks, Mike's priestly vocation. Who, least of all Uncle Clarence, could object to having a priest in the family? Suddenly O'Malley became the one destined for Victory Public Relations.

  * * * *

  At Easter vacation the following year his uncle took O'Malley along on a business trip to Niagara Falls, using the drive to give a fuller explanation of what Victory Public Relations did. “Some people want to keep their names before the public eye,” he
said. “Say anything about them good or bad as long as you mention their name. That's the city side of things. Then there's our side, the small-town side, people who'd be just as happy if they didn't get talked about at all."

  And he explained how O'Malley's father got into the business. “He and a Mr. Gregory made a modest score in a penny mining-stock swindle. Your father was holding the money. On his way to divvy up, Mr. Gregory, a bit in his celebratory cups, drove into a tree. While his partner was in the hospital your father, whose bum ticker needed less strenuous work, decided to do the disappearing act with the ill-gotten gains. He used the money to buy out another gentleman, who proved to be the better swindler, grossly exaggerating the value of the dark secrets in his possession."

  "You're saying we're blackmailers?” asked the boy, more disappointed than surprised.

  Uncle Clarence, who seldom took his eyes off the road, looked over at him. “Tommy, we have to play the hand we're dealt. The money may be slow, but it's steady. Remember, we have your sisters and your mother to take care of. Thank the Lord for the small-town sense of shame."

  Niagara Falls was a place of mists, booming water, and rainbows. The high-end buyers used a large hotel downtown. Uncle Clarence stayed at a small, damp motel closer to the falls. The sellers who came there were peddling the bottom scrapings of their barrels. He heard them out and if he bought he paid them from small sums of money he'd hidden about the motel room.

  Not long after the Niagara trip O'Malley's brother Mike left the seminary and moved to Vancouver to look for work. The priesthood had been his way of avoiding the family business.

  When O'Malley made noises about finding another line of work, too, Uncle Clarence urged him to give things a chance. “I wasn't that happy at first myself,” he admitted. “Here's some advice your father gave me. Oh, he had a rather deep bag of tricks behind the Irish good looks, your father. ‘Tell them you're only the hired help,’ he said. ‘Make them believe a Mr. Gregory runs the operation.’ That's right, using the name of the partner he'd swindled was your father's idea of a joke. ‘Make Mr. Gregory a hard-hearted son-of-a-gun,’ he said. ‘Commis-erate with them. Say you're sorry but Mr. Gregory has to have more money.’ Well, he hit the nail on the head. It does make it easier.