True Crime

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Oh, Melvin,” I said.

  He stopped momentarily, the door open.

  I said, “You may catch your train, but you are definitely missing the boat.”

  He snorted and went out.

  Cowley and I just sat there awhile.

  Then I asked, “Where’s he off to?”

  “Washington, D.C.,” he said, quietly.

  “Going to shake his boss’s hand, I take it.”

  “Yes. He’ll be meeting with the director, and the attorney general as well.”

  “Lots of publicity shots, I suppose.”

  Cowley shrugged, then nodded.

  I said, “Melvin Purvis is building a big reputation on this dead man’s back. I wonder how Little Mel’s going to sleep, over the next twenty or thirty years, knowing the man he’s supposed to have killed might turn up, any minute?”

  Cowley said nothing.

  I got up. “I wish you guys luck. At least I wish you luck, Cowley. You seem decent enough.”

  He stood, shook my hand. “You’re all right yourself, Heller. I don’t really think there’s anything much to what you’ve said here today…” He didn’t sound quite convinced of that. “…but I do appreciate that you, out of some sense of civic duty or honor or whatever, chose to come to us with this.”

  I laughed. “That’s a new one. I never had civic duty or honor laid on me before. By the way, I got a piece of that reward money coming, don’t I?”

  Cowley seemed surprised by that. He said, “I would assume so.”

  “Well, if this sweater don’t come unraveled in the next few days, and that stiff manages to get planted under a gravestone that says Dillinger, you know where to send the check.”

  He nodded.

  The check came in a few weeks. Five hundred dollars was all I got. Word was Anna Sage got five grand, though some said ten. Zarkovich got around five gees, too, word was. That’s what the government paid ‘em. Who knows how much they got from John Dillinger. And/or Nitti.

  What followed, in the aftermath of the Biograph shooting, I viewed from the sidelines, reading the papers, listening to the radio, and hearing small talk in bars and such.

  During the next day or so, more morbids thronged the small funeral home in Mooresville, Indiana, Dillinger’s hometown. The papers reported another five thousand people (one for every dollar the feds paid Anna Sage) viewed the corpse, laid out on a brocade spread in the visitation parlor. The papers reported that most of the people who had known Johnnie over the years had “difficulty” recognizing him, he’d changed so. This included the corpse’s sister Audrey, who’d all but raised him; she never did identify the body exactly—she only said, “There’s no question in my mind—just bury him.”

  When Dillinger’s father had come to Chicago to pick up his son’s remains, the early interviews had the father bemoaning the lack of funds for burial; but by late the same afternoon, after a meeting with attorney Louis Piquett, a more cheerful elder Dillinger said it turned out there was money enough after all. Maybe he found somebody’s wallet on LaSalle Street.

  Among the other interesting events of the days that followed was Anna Sage coming out in the open, for newspaper interviews and such, basking in her “lady in red” celebrity. Early stories circulated by Purvis and Cowley—complete falsehoods designed to shield Anna and Polly—were soon forgotten, and Anna held court with the press—until Cowley and Purvis sent her on a paid vacation.

  A discovery the Chicago police made, at Anna’s apartment in the early days, was that somebody had been staying with her, rooming with her—a man. According to the papers, the cops believed Dillinger to have been that man. Nothing ever came out, though, as to what might or might not have been found in the fancy apartment near the lake, on Pine Grove Avenue.

  On the Friday after the Biograph shooting, one James Probasco (the papers said) fell nineteen stories from a window in the Banker’s Building to the alley below; he splattered headfirst, getting some of himself on a passing pedestrian. He had fallen from that same interrogation room where Purvis and Cowley and I talked; he’d been left alone there, by Cowley and some other agents who’d been questioning him (Purvis was still picking up accolades in Washington at the time), and jumped to his death, reportedly. Cowley said the man had seemed “despondent”; nobody in the building across the way, the Rookery, saw the man leap. One of the reasons for Probasco’s despondency, besides a fear of his underworld associates thinking he may have “talked,” was a nerve infection called herpes, for which he was under medication.

  Probasco, whom I’d heard of but never met, was said to be a “hot-money” fence, and his connections to both the mob and the likes of Dillinger were well known. He even had some political connections, being related by marriage to an old Cermak crony, former alderman Thomas J. Bowler, currently president of the Sanitary district.

  A man in his mid-sixties who’d be facing at most a year or so in jail on harboring a fugitive and conspiracy charges, Probasco seemed an unlikely candidate for suicide. Something that didn’t get much coverage in the papers was the word among cops and crooks in town that the feds regularly hung suspects out the windows by the feet to try to make ’em talk. In Probasco’s case, they were probably trying to make him comply with the face-lift story they were trying to make float.

  Probasco, a former veterinarian, apparently had, in addition to his fencing activities, been running a face-lift shop for some time—the feds found rubber gloves, ether, bandages, adhesive tape, iodine and guns in his apartment. He was, they said, part of a conspiracy that included Piquett’s personal investigator and two other doctors and Piquett himself, in giving Dillinger (and his pal Homer Van Meter) face-lifts.

  Eventually the story did float (just as Probasco’s “suicide” did) and virtually everybody turned state’s evidence in return for probation, with only Piquett actually standing trial, and he was found not guilty, since the jury felt he was just an attorney trying to help a client, Dillinger.

  Whoever it was that was murdered at the Biograph that hot Sunday night ended up being buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis on the Wednesday after. This time the crowd of morbids was chased away by God—a thunderstorm beat down on the graveside ceremony, lightning and thunderclaps overseeing the casket’s entry into ground that also held the remains of President Benjamin Harrison, several U.S. vice presidents, several Indiana governors, novelist Booth Tarkington, poet James Whitcomb Riley and the inventor of the machine gun, R. J. Gatling.

  A few days later, the elder Dillinger, that dirt-poor farmer, paid to have the casket uncovered. Over the casket was poured concrete mixed with scrap metal; when that had set, some earth was shoveled in. Then four concrete slabs reinforced with chicken wire were buried, in staggered intervals, over the concrete-entombed casket.

  Dillinger’s father did this, he said, to prevent “ghouls” from disturbing his son’s rest.

  “If they want to get him out of there,” the father said, a smile cracking his weather-beaten face, “they’ll have to blast him out.”

  The old man needn’t have worried.

  Nobody wanted him out of there.

  25

  A month later I was starting to wonder if Sally might not be right about my chosen profession. My name had been in the papers—including my address, in the News—but no business had been generated by this notoriety, not even a death threat or two from Baby Face Nelson or Homer Van Meter. All I had to show for my trouble was a few hundred bucks and the growing suspicion I was a horse’s ass.

  “What good am I?” I asked her, as we lay in her soft bed, the silk sheets draped around us, Sally snuggled against me in the dark.

  “You’re very good,” she said, smiling up at me.

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Do you have to be so gloomy, Heller?”

  “Am I getting you down with this talk?”

  She shrugged. “Not really.”

  She was a better dancer than actress; I told her so.<
br />
  “Go to hell, Heller,” she said. Good-naturedly. Sadly.

  “I was right on top of this,” I said, “and it didn’t do a damn bit of good.”

  “Why don’t you get right on top of this,” she said, snuggling closer.

  “I quit the cops ’cause I was sick of being used. I quit and went in business for myself because people kill people in this town as casual as flushing a toilet, which is fine, which is great, that’s their goddamn business. Just leave me out of it.”

  She pulled away from me and sat on the edge of her side of the bed, her back to me.

  “What the hell kind of detective am I, if I can’t stop something like this from happening when I see it the hell coming?”

  She was lighting a cigarette.

  “Not that I give a damn about Jimmy Lawrence, whoever the hell he was. I never even met the son of a bitch. What’s it to me if Indiana and Frank Nitti want him dead. Just don’t make me part of it! Damnit!”

  She sighed and blew smoke out at the same time.

  “Helen…you okay?”

  I touched her shoulder and she flinched and I took my hand away.

  “I’ve been going on about this too much, haven’t I?”

  Without turning to me, she said, “It has been a month, Nate.”

  “I know. I didn’t mean to get going again.”

  “I thought maybe you were over it,” she said, wistfully. “It’s been almost a week since you last went into this song and dance.”

  That made me bristle a little. “It isn’t a goddamn song and dance. It’s something that’s eating me. Sorry!”

  She turned and smiled over her shoulder at me; breathed smoke out her nostrils like Dietrich. “Whatever happened to the strong and silent type? I didn’t think you tough detectives ever wore shirts made outa hair.”

  That made me smile and I touched her shoulder again; this time she didn’t flinch.

  In fact she was in my arms after that and I kissed her on the mouth and remembered why being alive was worthwhile.

  I kissed her neck, whispered into her ear. “Sorry. Sorry. I won’t go on about it anymore. I’ll let go of it…”

  She pulled back to look at me and smile, just a little.

  “I don’t mind that what you were caught up in bothers you,” she said. “That quality in you is probably why I love you so damn much….”

  In our time together, this was the first love had ever come up; in words, anyway. Hearing her say that was like getting struck a blow. Pleasantly struck. But struck.

  She put a hand in my hair, roughed it up, smiled her sad wry little half-smile. “I just hate seeing it eating you up like this.”

  “I love you, too, Helen.”

  “I know. Quit the business.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be leaving in a few months to go on the road with my show. Starting in November.”

  “Please, Helen. Not this again…”

  “I listened to your song and dance, now you listen to mine.”

  “Helen…”

  “I need somebody smart and tough to handle the sharks in my business.”

  “Your business.”

  “Show business. I want you to be my personal manager.”

  “What I know about show business you could store in a flea’s navel.”

  “You know people.”

  “I know crooks.”

  Little wry half-smile, “Perfect.”

  “We’ve been through this before…”

  “Nate. We’d be together. Work together. Live together.”

  “You’d marry me, you mean.”

  “Sure.”

  “What about kids?”

  She shrugged. “Anything’s possible.”

  “You’d need a bigger bubble.”

  “I wish you’d take this seriously. I really want you to consider what I’m offering.”

  “You make this sound like a business proposition; before it was love.”

  “It’s both. You’re in a business that’s making you very little money and has given you a good deal of heartache. I’m giving you the opportunity of getting into a business that’ll make you a lot of money and warm your heart, among other things.”

  “Helen, this Dillinger thing was…”

  “Just a fluke. Not the sort of thing that happens every day in your business. Yes, I know. I’ve heard you say that over and over. I’ve also heard your stories about the Lingle killing and the Frank Nitti shooting and the Cermak assassination and Nate, give it up. Come live with me.”

  “And be your love?”

  She laughed. “Poetry, huh? You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Heller.”

  “My father ran a bookshop. A little of it rubbed off.”

  “My father had a farm. A little of that rubbed off on me—enough to make me long for some of the traditional virtues, like having a man who loves me around.”

  “A bookshop and a farm. Neither one of us seems to have gone into the family business. Though we each have our own cockeyed idea of how to go about making a living, don’t we?”

  She stroked my face with the back of her cool long-nailed hand. “Let’s merge.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “let’s,” and kissed her again.

  Now, the next day, a balmly Friday afternoon, I sat behind my desk in my dreary little office thinking about life with Sally Rand and show business and how any guy in his right mind would jump at this chance.

  If I was so goddamn set in my ways, where the A-1 Detective Agency was concerned, I should’ve been doing my fucking job instead of sitting staring at my new office furniture. I had an afternoon’s worth of phone calls I was supposed to be making; credit checks. But I couldn’t seem to do anything but sit there and stare and wonder about my future. Would I be in this same office, a year from now? Five years from now? Ten years from now? Would I ever have a secretary? Operatives under me? How ’bout a wife and kiddies? Or was I destined to plod along making just enough money to deceive myself into thinking I had a “growing” business. Never getting far enough ahead to feel secure enough to make a home and family. Just sitting in this office till hell froze over.

  I’d used up part of the six hundred-some dollars I’d cleared off the Dillinger fiasco to improve my office. I’d got rid of the patched brown-leather couch and put in a modern one, artificial-leather maroon cushions on the left and right and cream cushions in the middle, sitting on a swooping chrome-tube frame. I’d picked up a matching chair with maroon seat and cream back cushion; it looked like an electric chair out of Buck Rogers, and the couch was like something in the drinking car on the Silver Streak. A little steel smoking stand with an ebony Formica top was to one side of the couch, and in front of it was a steel, ebony-Formica-topped coffee table. The woman at Sears said the stuff was “as modern as tomorrow.” And on sale today.

  Sally had helped me pick it out, and her thinking had been to make my office look more like an office, and in the showroom she seemed to make sense—this streamlined modern furniture seemed just the ticket to pull me up into the twentieth century. Today it all seemed silly to me, absurd in the same room as my Murphy bed and scarred old desk and cracked plaster walls.

  On a more practical note I’d put in a water cooler, which was humming over against the wall near the washroom. No use carrying that bottle too far to fill it back up. I’d picked it up used from a small import-export business down the hall, that went under a few weeks before. The heat wave had let up a bit but wasn’t exactly gone, and the little paper cups of refrigerated water made life slightly more bearable.

  I was filling one of the cups and the water cooler was saying, “Glug glug,” when somebody knocked on my door.

  “It’s open,” I said, and drank my water.

  The door opened slowly and a thin man of about forty stepped one foot tentatively inside and peeked in around as if looking to see if the coast was clear.

  “Mr. Heller?”

  “Yes. Can I help you?”

 
“Might I step in, sir?”

  “Certainly.” I gestured with the now-empty paper cup toward the maroon-and-cream, chrome-tube throne I was now providing for clients, opposite my desk.

  He came all the way in, a man about my height but twenty pounds lighter; his face was gaunt, weathered, lined with work, with eyes of that odd light blue color like the sky on certain washed-out summer days. He held his straw hat—not a boater—in his hands, and smiled one of those polite smiles that barely qualifies as smiling and nodded as I walked behind my desk and made his way uncertainly toward the chair of tomorrow.

  He clearly was a man of yesterday. He slouched a bit—not from the weight of the world, but from something much heavier: he wore a sense of personal tragedy like a topcoat. A snug-fitting one. His clothes didn’t make as close a fit: his dark brown suit wasn’t cheap but wasn’t tailored (like my furniture, it might’ve been gotten at Sears—though in his case surely by mail-order catalog) and shiny brown shoes and his light brown bow tie were obviously Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, and he was less than comfortable in them. If he’d ever been comfortable in his life.

  Certainly he wasn’t in the modern chair; he looked at it suspiciously before sitting, then did, as if he had no choice, like Zangara taking the electric cure. He smiled again—it was just a crease in his face—and patted the ebony armrests atop the tubing at either side of him and said, “Seen some things like this at the Century of Progress last year.”

  I ventured a smile. “Nobody said the future was going to be a picnic.”

  He tilted his head; it was like a hound dog trying to understand an abstract concept.

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, sir,” he said.

  “Skip it. And let’s skip the ‘sir,’ too—you can put a ‘mister’ in front of the Heller, if you like. Or not. I don’t stand on ceremony.” I ventured another smile. “Not as long as you’re a paying customer.”

  His face creased in the sort of smile again, but he still didn’t get my drift. Humor was as foreign to him as the chair he was sitting in.