True Crime

by Collins, Max Allan

  “I been looking for you,” he said.

  “Sit down, Davis, you’re making me nervous.”

  He sat. “You’re a hard man to find.”

  “You seem to’ve found me.”

  “Pretty wild carryings-on at the morgue last night.”

  “I saw the papers.”

  He told me about it anyway. “I don’t know how the word got out so fast, but there they were, before the body was even cold, swarming like flies. Couple thousand sweaty souls crow-din’ around the morgue like they were waiting for Sally Rand to go on.”

  He meant nothing personal by that; Sally and I hadn’t made the gossip columns yet.

  “And that son of a bitch Parker scooped us all,” he said, shaking his head with admiration.

  He meant Dr. Charles D. Parker, one of numerous assistants to the coroner’s pathologist, J. J. Kearns. Parker, however, also happened to be a stringer for the Trib, covering hospitals and the morgue for ’em. Somehow Parker had got tipped to the shooting early enough on to be able to beat the body to the morgue, where he wheeled a receiving cart up to the door and waited for John Dillinger to arrive.

  Soon the meat wagon delivered Dillinger—and exclusive Trib coverage of the morgue end of the story—to Parker.

  “Got to hand it to that bastard,” Davis conceded. “Hell of a piece of work.”

  I took a bite of bagel.

  Davis cleared his throat. “I hear you were at the Biograph last night.”

  “So were a lot of people.”

  “Garage mechanics sitting on their stoop and old ladies hanging out their windows ’cause of the heat. Not trained observers like you, Heller. Your version of the shooting could be a corker.”

  “Gee whiz, aw shucks. I’m real flattered, Davis. Now can I finish my bagel?”

  T

  HE BODY AT THE MORGUE

  “Hell, I’ll buy you another! How ’bout giving me your eyewitness account. For old times’ sake.”

  “What old times are those? When you dredged up the Lingle case in your coverage of my part in the Nitti hit? Get fucked, Davis.”

  He smiled. “A newsman knows he’s doing a good job when people resent him. You can’t hurt my feelings, Heller, don’t even bother trying.”

  “You’re short.”

  He stopped smiling. “You get fucked, Heller.”

  I gulped my milk. “Every rag in town this morning, including yours, had a dozen eyewitness accounts of the Biograph shooting. This is old news. Why bother?”

  Davis waved that off. “Dillinger dying’s gonna be front-page fodder for days, maybe weeks. Besides, the bozos we got eyewitness stories from came in after the show started; you were there for the whole picture, and the featured attractions to boot.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  He shrugged facially, “How ’bout a double sawbuck.”

  “I don’t think so, Davis.”

  “What do you want?”

  My curiosity got the better of me. “Were you at the inquest?”

  “Yeah,” he said, shrugging, with his body this time.

  “Anything interesting come out?”

  “What’s interesting is what didn’t come out. Excuse me.” He went up to the deli counter and got a cup of coffee, and came back and told me about the inquest.

  Coroner Walsh himself had presided, at the Cook County Morgue on Polk Street, and had gone first into the little formaldehyde-reeking basement room where the corpse was displayed on a tray draped with a towel, nude but for tags on his toes. The body, that is, not Walsh, who was a big man, sweating, beet-faced, posing stiffly with the stiff for press pictures. This was in the same room where, late last night, those thousands of “morbids” milling about the morgue had finally been allowed to file past their dead “hero.”

  Then Walsh moved to the inquest room where the noon sun blazed through the wire mesh on the windows and made checkerboard patterns on the spectators and witnesses and officials who baked their way through the perfunctory proceedings.

  “The odd thing,” Davis said, “is Melvin Purvis wasn’t there. By all accounts, it was his operation—some of the witnesses say he’s the one fired the shot—but instead his assistant Cowley takes the stand.”

  I didn’t correct any of that, just nodded interestedly.

  “And Cowley ducked the issue—when Walsh asked him who committed this ‘homicide,’ Cowley would only say that it was ‘a government agent, properly authorized.’ No names. And they never even broached the subject of who the informant was.”

  “Is that right.”

  “Do you know, Heller? Do you know who the ‘lady in red’ is? Or the other dame with Dillinger? What were you doing there, anyway?”

  I sipped my milk; it was getting warm. “Did they introduce fingerprints into evidence?”

  He shook his head. “Another government agent testified that the prints corresponded, is all. They didn’t enter comparisons of the prints or anything—this guy just said the prints compared. A botched acid job, I hear.”

  Davis meant the corpse’s fingertips had been dipped in acid, back when he was alive, in the usual (unsuccessful) underworld attempt to obliterate prints.

  “And,” he continued, “the pathologist, Kearns, read a summary of his autopsy. Four wounds, one of which caused death.” He got a notebook out of his back pocket and flipped through some pages; read aloud: “‘Medium developed white male, thirty-two years of age, five feet seven, one hundred and sixty pounds, eyes brown.’” He put the notebook away, shrugging again. “Pretty standard.”

  “I see.”

  He stirred his coffee absentmindedly. “Something else odd, though. The corpse only had seven dollars and eighty cents. Word was Dillinger always wore a money belt, with thousands of dollars. Think somebody stole it?”

  “Maybe that money belt’s just a myth.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But why would a guy like Dillinger, who might have to lam at any moment’s notice, go out with little more than movie and popcorn money?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “And another thing—why the hell’d he go out without a coat?”

  “It was hot.”

  “Very funny, Heller. It’s hot today, too. But where’d he tuck his gun, if he didn’t have a coat to hide it under?”

  “Good question.”

  “Did you see he had a gun at the scene?”

  “There was a gun in his hand, by the time he was dead.”

  He thought that over. “It wasn’t entered into the coroner’s docket at the inquest, this gun Dillinger supposedly drew on Purvis.”

  I smiled. “Since when is a gun turning up in a dead suspect’s hand news in Chicago?”

  He sat forward and pointed at me like Uncle Sam. “Look, if you really know some inside dope, I can get you some real money. If you know the lady in red’s name, for instance…”

  “I’ll give you my story for fifty bucks, but you got to mention my business by name and give the address.”

  “Done.”

  I sipped my milk. “That way Baby Face Nelson and Van Meter and the rest will know where to find me.”

  He grinned, then the grin faded. “You think Johnny’s buddies might really seek revenge?”

  “No. I think they got better things to do.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as read the writing on the wall. Such as rob a few more banks before going south. Things are closing in on them. The feds may be stupid, but they can cross state lines and carry guns. The Wild West show will be closing down soon—after one last bloody act.”

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  “Do, and I’ll crucify you in Marshall Field’s window. That sort of talk just might tempt the likes of Nelson into retaliating.”

  “I hear he’s a fruitcake.”

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  “Okay, okay. So what’s your story, Heller?”

  I told him my story. I told him that in the course of working in Uptown on a div
orce case for a client, who would have to remain nameless, I’d stumbled upon a man who resembled John Dillinger. I’d reported this to Melvin Purvis and Samuel Cowley of the federal Division of Investigation. They had kept me informed as the inquiry developed, including the fact that two East Chicago, Indiana, police officers had corroborated my story through their own sources. For that reason, I’d been invited as an observer to the showdown at the Biograph.

  I also gave him a detailed description of the way the stakeout had been conducted, and the manner in which the suspect had been taken down, though I did not mention that he’d been shoved to the pavement and shot in the back of the head. I said only that officers had swarmed toward him and shots had been fired.

  No mention of Anna Sage, Polly Hamilton or Jimmy Lawrence.

  I sipped my milk.

  Frank Nitti would’ve been proud of me.

  And Hal Davis gave me fifty bucks—two double sawbucks and two fins—and left.

  I put the money in my pocket and walked outside. The heat was even worse today. I ought to go to the beach and find an umbrella to lie out under, and splash around in the lake when the shade got old.

  Instead, I drove over to the morgue.

  23

  For a dreary-looking stone structure on a blistering hot July afternoon, the morgue was doing brisk business. About the only difference between it and the Biograph last night was the lack of a marquee, and the melodrama attracting the crowds was Chicago, not Manhattan.

  The line to the front doors was a double one and, splitting off, extended well down the sidewalk in both directions; a steady stream was coming out the morgue doors, as well. Formal attire was not required, at this mortuary—the dressiest “mourners,” many carrying cameras, were men in shirt sleeves and women in summery dresses, and not a few females were in beach apparel, and many a male wore his undershirt. There were plenty of kids in the crowd, mostly boys with their thoughtful moms. The hot air was filled with hot air—a constant chatter not limited to the dead subject at hand added to the holiday mood. A guy in a big orange tie and orange cap was hawking orange juice a dime a cup out of a tray full of ice slung over his shoulder on a couple of straps, cigarette-girl style; the ice was melting quickly, but not as quickly as the paper cups of orange juice were going. Another guy, wearing a straw boater and no tie, was going around waving two handfuls of blood-stained swatches of white cloth, yelling, “Genuine guaranteed Dillinger’s blood!” More bloody swatches protruded from three of his four bulging pants pockets; apparently blood had been running down Lincoln Avenue like a flood, last night.

  All this humanity, if you want to call it that, was being overseen by a handful of cops, uniformed guys still lacking their uniforms due to the heat wave, badges on their light blue blouses; but the caps and guns and nightsticks were still there. These were cops, no mistaking ’em.

  I walked up to a burly Irish flatfoot in his forties, with red cheeks and light blue eyes; I didn’t know him, and hoped he didn’t know me—and would maybe take my reddish-brown hair as us having a bit of the Blarney in common.

  “What’s the chance of getting in past this crowd?” I asked him.

  He smiled and shook his head. “Slim and none.”

  “What if I just wanted to talk to a morgue attendant and didn’t care about getting a view of the stiff?”

  He scratched his head, still smiling. “Might be done. But they’re greedy lads, those boys.”

  “Think you could pave the way for me?”

  “Might be done.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and shook his hand; mine had a buck in it. For a while.

  He led me through the crowd, saying, “Make way, make way,” and introduced me to a pasty-faced, pencil-mustached, skinny fellow named Culhane. White-smocked Culhane had eyes like a gingerbread man and was about as animated. We were in a big reception area on the first floor, where the lines of people coming through the door turned into a mob, a vocal one, waiting to be let down the stairs by a police guard, who was only letting ten or so at a time go. There was no air conditioning and the place smelled stale and bad; body odor was on a rampage. Culhane curled a finger and led me to a corridor, where we were alone.

  His voice was soft and oddly seductive. “I can take you downstairs and inside the cubicle with him.”

  “Swell. How much?”

  He pursed his lips and the tiny mustache went up at either end. “There’s a group down there right now that gave me fifty dollars.”

  This wasn’t a morgue, it was a whorehouse.

  I said, “How many in the group?”

  That threw him momentarily; then he said, “Five.”

  “Then I’ll give you ten.”

  Being a man of science, he could hardly argue with my logic. But he was pouting as he led me back into the big reception area and through the noisy, pushing-and-shoving crowd, where at his nod the cop let us down the steps into the basement. We moved past and cut through a single line of curiosity seekers that extended down the corridor. Culhane led me through a door into a larger room, where the smell of formaldehyde sliced through the air and made me nostalgic for the body odor upstairs. The smell was so overpowering you didn’t notice at first that the room was refrigerated. Or that along the walls were rows of corpses, in open vaults, one atop the other. Most of the tenants—running to old folks and down-and-outers—had died of the heat; hell of a way to get into an air-conditioned room.

  Culhane led me into a small adjacent chamber off the main room and there, with four men and a woman crowded around him, was the dead man, propped up at a forty-five-degree angle on the slab, his body partially covered with a sheet, his face completely covered by a damp white mass. The man applying the damp white mass, a heavyset brown-haired man about forty, wearing a towel like a bib, looked up nervously and said, “We’re from Northwestern University, officer. We got permission to do this.”

  The other four, including the rather pretty girl, who had a cute brunette bob, were young, in their early twenties; they looked at me apprehensively.

  “I’m not a cop,” I said, and Culhane whispered to me, “They’re making a death mask for the Northwestern Museum of Crime.”

  I’d never heard of any such museum, but couldn’t have cared less.

  “I need a look at him,” I said to the heavyset man, presumably the professor to these apparent students.

  “Oh, but we can’t remove the moulage yet,” he said, still nervous.

  “I don’t need to see his face,” I said. “I’ve seen his face.”

  I lifted the sheet back. Glanced at the body; noted various scars. I had company: through a glass panel just a few feet away from me, the openmouthed spectators were slowly filing by, pointing fingers, taking pictures. Their jabbering was faintly audible through the heavy plate glass; it sounded like swarming insects.

  Before I left, I looked at the heavyset man and said, “If you’re from Northwestern, why does your towel say Worsham College on it?”

  He glanced down at the bib and swallowed. “We—we, uh, frequently exchange ideas with the Worsham faculty.”

  “And towels?”

  He swallowed again, and I pulled a confused-looking Culhane by the arm out into the larger room, where stacked stiffs seemed to eavesdrop as I said, “Worsham’s a trade school for morticians. Those people in there are having a little practice session at your expense.”

  “Oh my…”

  “Better clear ’em out. Letting somebody from Northwestern play footsie with your prize corpse isn’t going to get you in trouble; but some yo-yos from an embalming society using him to make practice death masks, that could lose you your job.”

  He nodded gravely, and I followed him out into the hall, away from the formaldehyde smell and the cool air, and up the stairs into body-odor heaven. He found a spare cop, told him to evict the embalming students and their prof, and the cop went off to do so. Then Culhane turned and looked at me, with some irritation, his little mustache twitching over a puckered mouth.<
br />
  “Are you still here?” he said. It wasn’t a question that wanted an answer.

  “Least you could do is say thanks.”

  “Thank you. You’ve had your ten dollars’ worth. Now go away. Shoo.”

  I put my arm around his shoulder and walked him toward that private corridor; he pouted, but seemed to like it.

  “Mr. Culhane,” I said, “I have another request. I also have another ten dollars. As a matter of fact, I have twenty dollars.”

  He began nodding. His puckered lips smiled.

  I removed my arm from around his shoulder; enough’s enough. I said, “I’d like a look at the autopsy report.”

  He thought that over. Then he said, “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  He thought some more. “Who are you? A reporter?”

  “I’m a guy with twenty dollars.”

  He held out an open palm. “If you want it, it’ll cost a lot more. There’s only two carbons, you know.”

  I put a sawbuck in the open palm. “I don’t want a copy. I won’t even make notes. I just want to look at it, for a couple minutes.”

  He thought again, but not for long; closed his hand tight over the sawbuck, touched my sleeve with his free hand and said, “Don’t move from this spot.”

  I didn’t, and soon he was back with three sheets of paper. Handed them to me.

  It was a carbon copy of the coroner’s protocol, two pages of which were a form, the final page of which was a separate typed sheet, elaborating on the wounds and condition of the dead man’s organs. Fairly detailed, it took me five minutes to read and absorb, while Culhane stood there like a skinny stone. Then I handed it back to him, gave him the other sawbuck and walked ahead of him out into the reception area, pushing through the noisy, smelly crowd.

  A fat blonde in a polka-dot dress was scrunched beside me, putting on her lipstick, looking in her compact’s mirror, as we moved through the sea of flesh; she managed to put the lipstick on without mishap, as well as make a comment.