True Crime

by Collins, Max Allan

  We moved past a shocked field, then down into a hollow. We stopped near a clump of trees. Near the trees, but not so near as for the roots to be a problem, we began to dig.

  Everybody had a turn, even Nelson, but first up was me and Moran. The body, for the moment, had been rested beneath the nearby trees, out of the way of the dirt.

  With everybody having a turn, it didn’t take long, despite being six feet deep. Two people going at it at a time made for a hole larger than need be, but we got the job done. For some reason the physical labor felt good to me. The night had a clarity that made the event seem very real, and yet completely dreamlike.

  The two Barker brothers, having hauled the body here and apparently feeling it therefore their province to do so, carried the body of Candy Walker over and rolled it out of the sheet into the hole. They stood looking down in there dumbly, the empty sheet in their hands, like a husk.

  Nelson stood there, no tommy gun, but vest open and .45 sticking threateningly up out of his waistband, hands on hips, and ordered Moran: “Get down in there—you’re gonna dump some lye on his hands and face.”

  “I will not!”

  “Do it,” Nelson said.

  Moran, quite sober now, the outburst at the hardware store/saloon well behind him, said, “If you’re considering killing me, keep this in mind: my attorney has an envelope in which much that I know has been recorded. Upon my death, that envelope will—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Nelson said. “Get in there and use the lye. Hands and face. It’ll be the best plastic surgery job you ever did.”

  Moran snorted at that, but he climbed down into the hole. Doc Barker handed him down a can of lye, already opened; the strong odor rose up out of the grave like a chemical ghost.

  “It’s done,” Moran said hollowly, looking up out of the hole. Wondering if he’d be allowed to emerge.

  Nobody said or did anything for the next few seconds, so I reached my hand down to him and pulled him up and out.

  Then Nelson said to him, “Now dump some quicklime on him. Half a bag will do. You can do that from up here.”

  Moran sighed, irritated but still apprehensive, and took the bag of quicklime from Doc Barker, ripped it open; Freddie stood casually nearby, shovel over his shoulder.

  The doctor poured the lime down into the hole, over the body, like he was planting seed; then he set the half-empty bag on the ground near the hole and, standing at one end, looked across the hole where Nelson was and said, “Now what?” and Fred Barker hit him in the back of the head with the shovel.

  The sound was something I’ll never forget, yet I can’t describe it. Two sounds, actually, all the result of Fred Barker’s roundhouse swing: metallic at first, almost a clang, echoing across the night; followed by a smack, a sickening smack, like a melon hitting the pavement from a high building. That’s as close as I can come to the sound. But I can hear it to this day.

  Dr. Joseph Moran wasn’t hearing anything. He fell facedown into the hole, sprawled on top of dead Candy Walker; the back of Moran’s head was caved in and his brains showed. Doc Barker, without climbing in, poured lye down on the doc’s hands, not bothering with getting in to do his face, then poured the rest of the quicklime over him. And dropped the sheet into the hole; it fluttered in like a wounded bird.

  “Come on, come on,” Nelson said to me. “Grab a shovel and start filling in that hole!”

  Fred, Doc and I filled in the hole; Fred used the same shovel he’d used on Moran.

  We headed back, each of us but Nelson with a shovel over his shoulder, like Snow White’s dwarfs, our footsteps on the grassy ground the only sound in the clear, dead night. Not a cricket nor a farm animal had a thing to say in the immediate aftermath of Doc Moran’s murder.

  Nearing the lights of the house, I somehow managed to ask Nelson about that envelope Moran had claimed his attorney had.

  “That’s where you fit in,” Nelson grinned.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those phone calls I made. One of ’em, I checked with Nitti. Nitti himself.”

  “And?”

  “They got to Moran’s lawyer.”

  “Killed him?”

  “No! Bought him. Chicago, remember?”

  “So Nitti told you Moran could be killed without any worry of…”

  “Right. And Nitti wanted him dead.”

  “Because he passed hot money…?”

  “That, and Nitti was just as nervous about how the doc’s drinking was going to his mouth as we was.”

  “Oh.”

  “Didn’t you know that’s why you was here? To hand Doc Moran his passport to the next life? D’you really think Nitti wanted him back in Chicago just to pull a rabbit outa some bimbo or something?”

  That was one little thing Nitti hadn’t told me, in generously providing me with Jimmy Lawrence’s identity and the accompanying cover story: that I’d been sent here to set Doc Moran up.

  And now here I was, right in the middle of a nest of public enemies and who could say I wasn’t one of them?

  I was an accomplice, now. In my way, I’d helped kill Moran. I hadn’t seen it coming. I couldn’t have stopped it. But I was there; here. I filled in the hole.

  I knew where the bodies were buried.

  “O

  LD

  C

  REEPY

  ” K

  ARPIS

  32

  By eight o’clock that evening, the farmhouse was humming with leisure activity: Dolores and Helen were sitting on the sofa listening to Burns and Allen on the radio (Gracie was still looking for that missing brother of hers) and Ma had found a little table to work one of her jigsaw puzzles on, sitting on the window seat as she did, feet not touching the floor; Mildred Gillis was doing needlepoint in the sitting room with the piano, her boys spread-eagled in the middle of the floor, playing a board game, getting loud occasionally and getting shushed accordingly; a penny-ante poker game was going on in the kitchen, the players crowded down at one end of the banquetlike table—Fred and Doc Barker, Verle Gillis and Baby Face Nelson were playing. Despite the stakes, everybody seemed to be taking the game quite seriously, especially Nelson, whose displeasure and glee seemed disproportionate to the nickels and dimes he was alternately losing and raking in. I played a few hands myself, stopped when I was thirty cents ahead—and Nelson glared at me like I was leaving with everybody’s money.

  You would never have guessed two men died tonight. Certainly not one of them on this card-and-change-strewn table. And cheerful Fred Barker, with his ready-to-smile mouthful of gold teeth, did not seem like somebody who’d killed a man with a shovel recently.

  I, on the other hand, felt exactly like a man who’d help dig—and fill—a grave.

  I went out into the almost cool night, walking around the farmyard, getting a feeling of where the buildings were. This was made easy by several electric lights on tall posts. Some of the cars were parked out back, but others (I surmised) must’ve been in the barn. The hayloft door stood open. Crickets were chirping and there was manure in the air. I found Karpis sitting on the porch, in the swing, gently rocking. The porch light wasn’t on, but I could see him fine. He looked small, slight. Which he was.

  He smiled at me and nodded; the smile was meant to be friendly but it was just unsettling.

  I leaned against one of the porch pillars.

  “It was bound to happen,” Karpis said matter-of-factly.

  “What’s that?”

  “Doc Moran.” He lifted his shoulders, set them back down. “Just a matter of time.”

  “I guess.”

  “You look like killing don’t agree with you.”

  “It’s not my favorite thing.”

  “Me either. Oh, I don’t mind putting a little muscle into a stickup, waving a gun around. Don’t even mind winging a guy. But I don’t look to killing for my fun.”

  From the living room, laughter came from the radio; Gracie had said something funny again.

 
“Now, you take Freddie,” Karpis said, amused, smiling his ghastly smile, “he’s a born killer. Sometimes it shocks me a little to see how free and easy he is with a gun. He don’t mind gunning down somebody that gets in his way—cop or hood or ordinary joe, it’s all the same to him.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  Karpis went on: “Maybe it’s being raised in the Ozarks; maybe all those hillbillies are like that. I don’t know. Could be it runs in the family—their older brother Herman died shooting it out with the cops, and Doc, hell, he’s got quite the itchy trigger finger himself.”

  “Ma seems harmless enough.”

  The swing made a creaking sound as he rocked; it seemed louder than the crickets and other night sounds, and the muffled radio from within the house.

  “Yeah, Ma’s harmless all right. She’s quite a character, though.”

  “She doesn’t seem to mind what her boys do for a living.”

  Karpis smiled some more and moved his head side to side. “Anything her boys do is okeydoke with Ma. They can do no wrong.”

  “They seem to feel the same about her.”

  “Well, look how she sticks by them. Sometimes she travels with us, and Freddie and Doc and me are just three brothers taking care of our widowed momma, should anybody ask. Foolproof cover. What could look more innocent?”

  The swing creaked; laughter from the radio.

  I said, “I didn’t know Nelson ran with your gang.”

  “Usually don’t, but I’ve known him for years and he’s sharp and loyal and there’s nobody braver. We’re hooking up for something big.” He gave me a long sideways appraising look. “You strictly a rackets guy, or do you ever work for a living?”

  I sat in the swing next to him; Karpis stopped rocking, but it rocked on a little anyway, on its own steam.

  I said, “I don’t get you. You said something like that at supper, and I didn’t get you then, either.”

  He sighed, and started gently rocking again; I joined in.

  “Now look,” he said, as if explaining the obvious to a small child, “we’re strictly heist guys. We done some branching out into kidnapping, but that’s just another kind of stealing. Plus, our gang’s on the fluid side….”

  “Fluid?”

  “Yeah—people come and go. Me and the Barker boys have been together a long time, but we worked with dozens of guys, from time to time. Not tight and organized like you rackets guys.”

  “What’ve you got against rackets guys?”

  He made a face. “They’re too picky about what they’ll let you steal. They don’t like the kind of stealing that gets the heat turned on ’em; they’re in more public-service-type business.”

  “Public service?”

  “Yeah—pussy, drugs, bookmaking. That ain’t crime. That’s business. True crime’s you when get out and work for a living, like robbing a bank, or breaking into a place, or kidnapping somebody. Really give some effort to it. The rackets guys aren’t up for that. Yet at the same time, when those guys get mad at you, well, Jesus…anything can happen.”

  “Yeah. Ask Doc Moran.”

  Karpis raised a lecturing finger; he looked even more like a math teacher, now. “Okay, so maybe Chicago did okay Moran’s exit—maybe even requested it—but they didn’t pay for it. Killing people for money don’t appeal to me, or anybody connected with me. I’ll leave that to the rackets guys.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you’re no Chicago hoodlum.”

  The Auburn keys were in my pocket.

  “I’m not?”

  I edged my hand near the gun under my arm.

  “No,” Karpis smiled, “you’re from out East. You’re a fish out of water, in Chicago. You looking for some honest work?”

  I sighed relief. To myself, that is.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Something real big’s coming up, soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Friday.”

  “This Friday?”

  “This Friday.”

  “Day after tomorrow, you mean?”

  “Right.”

  “What is it?”

  “A snatch.”

  Fine. Now I was mixed up in a kidnapping; I could see myself, being strapped into the chair, telling the reporters in the gallery how I was a private detective gone undercover to retrieve a farm girl.

  “Interested?” Karpis asked.

  “I might be,” I said.

  “Decide by tomorrow. We’ll be driving back to Illinois, to a tourist court near Aurora. We’re meeting some people there, to go over the plans.”

  “I appreciate the offer.”

  “We can use you. We were counting on having Candy Walker, you know. And we don’t really have time to go pull somebody else in.”

  “How could Walker have helped you, if he was recovering from plastic surgery?”

  Karpis shifted his smile to one side of his face; it didn’t look any better there. “We just need someone to stick by the women. While we pull the snatch, and for a time, after. Easy work. Candy could’ve cut it, even with bandages on his puss.”

  “I see. Well…”

  “You’d only get half a cut—half of which goes to Candy. Or to Lulu, that is. We look after our own.”

  “That’s only right.”

  “Still, it should run five grand. What do you say?”

  Five grand!

  “I’ll, uh, sleep on it.”

  “Good. Maybe you can get to know Lulu while you’re at it.”

  “You got to be kidding…she just lost her man…”

  “She’s going to need comforting. She needs somebody to look after her.”

  “Well, uh…”

  He put a fatherly hand on my shoulder; he was younger than me, and I owned suits that weighed more than he did—but his words carried weight just the same.

  He said, “Guys like us got to pick our girls from the circles we move in. My first real girl was Herman Barker’s widow. Took up with her before Herman’s body was cool. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—just the facts of life in this game.”

  “I do feel sorry for the kid,” I said, referring to Louise. This was perfect, actually: Karpis was trying to fix me up with the girl I’d come here after.

  He slipped his arm around my shoulder. “Don’t feel like you’re getting sloppy seconds, Jimmy. Mind if I call you Jimmy? For example. I took up with a lot of whores in my time, but I never had any complaints about their personalities or their morals or brains or what-have-you. You can always trust a whore.”

  That might make a nice needlepoint for Mildred Gillis to hang on her farmhouse wall.

  “Now, Dolores, she was the sister-in-law of a guy I used to do jobs with; she’s been with me since she was sixteen. Don’t get the idea she’s fat, either—she’s just knocked up. Second time. We decided to have this one—what the hell.”

  “Uh, congratulations, Karpis.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy.”

  I noticed a small figure walking across the farmyard toward the barn; he had a bottle of liquor in one hand, tommy gun slung over one arm.

  Nelson.

  “What’s he up to?” I asked.

  “Oh—just taking his friend Chase some refreshment.”

  “His friend who?”

  “Chase. John Paul Chase. Guy worships Nelson; adores him.” He let out a nasty snicker that went well with his smile. “If Helen weren’t around, I think they’d be an item.”

  “What’s Chase doing in the barn?”

  “Staying there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Karpis shrugged. “Staying there. He sits up in the loft with a rifle and keeps watch out that little window or door or whatever it is. See?”

  I looked over toward the barn, and saw the open loft door, but nothing else.

  I said, “Doesn’t anybody take turns with him?”

  “No,” Karpis said. “Nelson told him to take that post, and he didn’t even blink
. Just does whatever Nelson says. Sits up there and reads Western pulp magazines and keeps watch. Three days, now. Sleeps there, too—but I never knew a man to sleep lighter. Nice to have him around.”

  “Hell, he didn’t even have supper with us.”

  “Nelson took some out to him. He treats Chase fine—like a faithful dog.”

  “Is there anybody else here I haven’t met yet?”

  Karpis flashed that awful smile. “Not that I can think of, offhand.”

  He went inside and I followed him; he joined the poker game, taking Nelson’s empty chair. I watched for a few moments, then went into the living room, where Burns and Allen were just getting over. When George had said “say good night, Gracie,” I asked Karpis’ girl Dolores about sleeping arrangements.

  “You could take Doc Moran’s bed,” she suggested. “It’s free.”

  “No kidding.”

  “There’s a lot of bedrooms in this house, but they’re all taken. The Nelsons sleep upstairs, and Alvin and me have an upstairs bedroom, and so do Paula and Fred, and Candy and Lulu too, or anyway they did.”

  “Where did Moran sleep?”

  She pointed behind her. “There’s a sewing room back by the kitchen, and the two Docs each had beds back there. Cots, actually.”

  “Where do the farmer and his wife sleep?”

  “There’s a Murphy bed in the sitting room.”

  This was turning into home away from home.

  “The boys sleep in there, too,” she continued, “in pallets.”

  “Sounds like a full house.”

  “Sure is. Could be a topsy-turvy one tonight, though. Last I knew Paula was upstairs in her and Fred’s bedroom nursin’ Lulu.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, and Lulu don’t want to sleep in her and Candy’s bed tonight. She wants to sleep with Paula.”