Handsome Harry (10 page)

He was curled up on his side and moaning low, his breath gargly, when I bent close to his ear and said Don’t call her your wife again, you yellow son of a bitch. And don’t even dream about fingering me. You do, you’re dead.

As Red and Russ and I walked back down the row, not a con was out on the tier and nobody said a word to us as we passed the cells.

Not long after that I got a letter from Mary saying Earl had told her what I’d done, although he’d been skimpy on details. She thanked me for taking up for her. She called herself the biggest dope in the world for marrying Kinder. She’d known he wasn’t very smart but she’d had no idea he was so stupid or such a bully. Talk about stupid, she said, look how stupid
she’d
been to think it was so god-awful important to wait till she was married rather than indulge herself with me—that was how she put it—while she’d had the chance. I rue my mistakes, she wrote. She placed a bright red lipstick kiss at the end of the letter, and below that she wrote Thinking of you.

She came to see me on the next visiting day and brought me a batch of fudge. The scooped neck of her dress exposed the sprinkle of freckles along her collarbone. I had an aching erection the whole time we talked.

She thought she must be awful bad luck for the men in her life,
seeing as she had a husband
and
a brother
and
me all in prison. She didn’t care that she was bad luck to Kinder, but she was sorry about me and Earl. She thought a curse ran in the women in her family. Her mother’s most recent ex-husband, Burke, had been killed in a car crash a week before their divorce was to become final. He was on his way back to Indy from Cleveland after phoning her and saying he wanted to talk about the two of them giving it another try. God only knew what was in store for her mother’s new husband, a car mechanic named Jocko who’d already had a few scrapes with the law.

Her mother’s problem wasn’t that she was bad luck for men, it was that she took up with men who were no good, and I told Mary she’d made the same mistake with Kinder. She wasn’t bad luck, I assured her, not for me.

When our time was up we touched fingertips through the wire mesh and she looked like she might cry and laugh at the same time. She whispered Oh baby how I wish. And blew me a kiss as she got up to go.

T
hat winter the wind came off the lake and over the dunes even harder than usual. It ripped through the prison grounds every day like an icy sandblast. I’d walk in the yard with my collar up and my hands deep in my pockets, my eyes stinging, and I’d think and think. By winter’s end I’d come up with an escape plan.

It was different from my others in that it was long-range and called for patience, never my strong suit. Still it was a plan we all agreed on.
We
was only six of us to begin with—me, Red, Charley, Russell, Walt Dietrich, and Okie Jack.

It was my plan, but in fairness I have to give a lot of credit to Fat Charley. He always insisted that a plan should be simple as possible. The more complicated the scheme, he said, the more things that can
go wrong with it. The way he saw it we needed only one thing to try a break—guns. With guns and a little luck we might be able to take hostages and use them to get past the gates to the outside.

When Charley had first mentioned this idea to the rest of us, Russell smacked a palm up to his forehead and said
Guns,
of course—why the hell didn’t
I
think of that? Then he laughed in Charley’s face.

Red said That’s a pretty simple plan all right. Why don’t we just ask the warden if we can borrow the keys to the place? That’s even simpler and it’s got about as much chance.

That was the problem in a nutshell—how to get the guns into the joint. Months crawled by and none of us could think of a way. Then there was a major change in inmate job assignments and Dietrich was made the supply clerk in the shirt factory. That’s when the answer to the gun problem came to me.

I didn’t say anything about it right away. I wanted to have the thing worked out as much as possible before running it by the guys. I grilled Dietrich like a cop about the supply procedures in the shirt factory. And then I had a talk with Pearl Elliott. I needed her to convey a proposal to a Mr. Williams, the shipping manager of a certain trucking company in Chicago. She was gone for a week before coming back and informing me that the deal was acceptable to Mr. Williams, but he’d have to have his money in advance. No tickee no washee was how he’d put it to her.

The following afternoon out in the windy yard I laid it all out for the other guys. The whole thing depended on John and on the assumption that he would get his parole when he went up for it sometime in the coming spring. I wasn’t sure he would throw in with us, and if he hadn’t, the plan would’ve died then and there. But he was as keen for it as the rest of us.

You boys can count on me, he said.

It was a lot of groundwork he’d have to do, I said, and it wouldn’t be easy.

He said he could handle it.

Red said that was easy to say, but rounding up the dough to pay for the groundwork would be one risk after another.

John said it wouldn’t be as much fun if it wasn’t.

Oh man, Russell said, listen to this guy.

I told John it might be fun for
him
because he’d already be out there free as a bird, but we’d still be inside, sitting on our hands waiting for the big day.

Dietrich said John hadn’t got the parole yet and we were counting an unhatched chicken there as far as he was concerned.

John said the man had a point. After all, he thought a Pendleton parole was a cinch and it fell through.

I said if he kept his nose clean until he went before the board the parole would be in the bag.

He looked around at the others and said Get a load of who’s telling who to keep his nose clean.

It got a laugh. Charley said it was a distinct case of the pot advising the kettle against blackness.

They were right, and from then on I began walking a finer line myself. I couldn’t afford to get put in the hole while we were prepping John, and once he was out I didn’t want to get clapped into solitary and miss out on anything going on with him.

The only thing John asked for was that Jenkins be in on the break. His correspondence with Jenkins’s sister had heated up plenty—whenever he got a letter from her he brought it over so I could smell the perfume—and I guess he felt an obligation to her brother.

It was a minor favor compared to what John would be doing for us, so I said Okay, he’s in.

S
muggling the guns into M City required a five-thousand-dollar payoff to Mr. Williams in Chicago and we didn’t have five bucks among the lot of us. But bringing in the guns was
the last step in the plan. As I’d come to see it, the trouble with most prison breaks was that the guys didn’t plan far enough ahead. Almost all their thinking went into the break and not to what they’d need after they got outside the walls—namely, safe places to stay and enough money to get by on. Guys who don’t plan ahead are forced to act out of desperation, and desperation makes for bad decisions. That’s why most guys who make it over the walls are caught so soon. My idea wasn’t simply to break out but also to have everything else all set up and waiting—two or three separate hideouts with the rent paid two months in advance at each one. Clothes, guns, good cars with legitimate plates. And sufficient cash on hand to get by on until we were ready for our first job.

No telling how long it would take John to round up the money for all those things—on top of the five grand for Williams—and get everything in order, but he had to do it all before smuggling the guns to us. Once we got the guns, we’d have to move fast, before they could be discovered in a sudden shakedown or some fink got wind of them and put the button on us.

Over the next few months we gave John a crash course in the basics of making your way around in what the newspapers love to call the underworld. We made up a roster of guys for him to get in touch with who would make good heist partners. We drew up a list of banks that we knew handled payrolls for factories and other businesses. Charley and Walt made a list of different fences in Indianapolis, Chicago, and East Chicago where John could sell bonds and new currency.

Charley and I also helped him play the Good Convict in preparation for his parole hearing. We kept him on a tight leash and out of trouble with the other cons and made him mind his p’s and q’s—no gambling or sassing the hacks or fooling around with punks and never mind his complaints about headaches. We edited every letter he wrote to his family. Each one testified to a reformed character and sincere contrition for his wayward youth and was of course meant to im
press the prison censors and make it into his board review file. Now and then he’d sound like he was auditioning for a church choir and we’d make him tone it down. Sincere but restrained, I told him, that was the ticket.

Pearl Elliott had agreed to be our go-between once he got out. I made John memorize her telephone number and the address of the Side Pocket in Kokomo. He asked if I was sure she could be trusted, and I said As sure as I am about you. Oh hell, he said, you better keep a damn close eye on her.

We grinned at each other like loonies.

Sometime in there I came to find out Homer Van Meter would be going before the board within days of John’s hearing and that he was pulling the same Good Convict act. He was working in the prison hospital and walking the straight and narrow, doing his best to convince the bosses he had finally seen the light. When I asked John if he knew the scarecrow was coming up for parole, he said sure he did but he hadn’t mentioned it because he didn’t think I’d be interested. I said I’d be sorely disappointed if he took up with the guy once they were both out. He’s a damn clown, I said, and you don’t have time for clowns. You said we could count on you and we’re taking you at your word.

He gave me that wiseguy smile and said the only way he’d ever let me down is if they killed him.

I
n May he got the parole. On the morning of his release he shook hands with all of us and said to sit tight and he’d be in touch soon. Then the Indiana state penitentiary gave him five dollars and showed him the door.

Out in the yard a little later that day Russell said that if he was in John’s shoes he might have second thoughts. He might wonder why he should risk getting put back in the slam for any reason except robbing banks.

I could tell by their faces that the others had been thinking along the same line. There were ten of us in on the break now. John Burns had thrown in and so had Joe Fox, who was doing life, and Ed Shouse—
that
miserable bastard. Shouse was doing twenty-five years for robbery, but if I’d known back then the kind of guy he really was, he would’ve received capital punishment. From me.

You might have second thoughts, I told Russell, but you’d come through.

Yeah, Russell said, but that’s me.

Charley said he didn’t know if John would have second thoughts but it wouldn’t be surprising if he was distracted from his mission. After all, he said, the lad hasn’t had a taste of the free life in nine years.

Hasn’t had any poon in nine years is what you mean, Red said. He said if he was in John’s shoes the top item on his things-to-do list wouldn’t be us guys, it’d be making up for what he’d been missing. The way he saw it, even if John didn’t have second thoughts, it’d probably take him a while to get around to business.

And even when John did get around to business, Dietrich said, if just one job went bad and he got taken down, that would be all she wrote. We’d have no man on the outside and it’d be back to the drawing board.

He’ll come through, I said.

Perhaps he will, said Charley, but like all else beyond the immediate moment, it remains to be seen.

He’ll come through, I said.

How do you know, Russell said.

I just do, I said.

Well hell, Pete, that’s a load off my mind, Red said.

Jesus. I think about it now and I wonder what made us think we had a chance. So
many
things could’ve gone wrong.

Then again, what could’ve happened…did.

It took another four months to pull it off, four months of the same old suffocating routine, never mind that we got a new warden. Wardens come and go, but prison routine never changes. This one was another hardnose but he liked to keep his distance from the cons, and none of us ever got a look at him. We called him Bashful Louie.

Before he’d been out a month, John hit his first bank—in New Carlisle, Ohio—and took away $10,000. Not bad at all, especially for a beginner. Pearl brought the news on visiting day, giving it to me in her expert whisper so the guards in the room couldn’t hear. Unfortunately, the bills had been brand new and in consecutive serial numbers and John couldn’t risk passing them, so he’d had to fence the bundle. He got a good rate—three for five—but still, that’s 40 percent down the rathole. After splitting the take with his partners and covering his expenses, he was way short of what he needed to finance our arrangements. Just the same, it was an encouraging start and we were sure that one or two more jobs and he’d have the necessary grubstake. Then bring on the guns.

New Carlisle, however, proved to be a fluke. We hadn’t figured on the damn Depression. It didn’t mean much to us inside the walls, but as John quickly came to find out it was kicking hell out of the real world. He’d go to case a bank on our list and as often as not it turned out to have boards on the windows and a padlock on the door. And of the banks still in business, most weren’t holding enough cash to make them worthwhile. Pearl told me he had hit some drugstores and a few supermarkets but none of those jobs got him more than pin money. I said to tell him to quit the penny-ante heists, they weren’t worth the risk. He could get collared on one of them as easy as on a bank.

Then there was no more word from him. A month went by and Pearl had no idea what he was up to. The absence of news put us all on an edge. Russell got in a fight and beat up a guy for no reason except raw temper and did two days in the hole for it. Charley had a rare case of the grumps and Red was ready to bite off heads. Okie Jack’s chronic ulcers were eating him up.

Walt Dietrich said that for all we knew John had been arrested and was cooling his heels in some hick jail. He could’ve been killed and how would we know? We could be waiting on a dead man, Walt said.

I said that was possible, but more likely he’d met some looker and was enjoying himself for a while.

Russell said it was a hell of a note if John was spending his time dicking the chippies while we were waiting on him to set things up.

As if any of us would not do likewise, Charley said.

He’s supposed to be taking care of
business,
Shouse said.

I told them not to worry about it, John would come through.

Red said I sounded like the president of the optimists’ club.

Why’s that, I said. Because I think every cloud has a silver lining? Because I think it’s always darkest before the dawn? That for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows? That he who laughs last laughs loudest?

He who laughs last, Red said, is the dimmest fucken wit in the room.

Charley said his favorite adage about laughter held that a man who can laugh at himself is truly blessed, for he will never lack for amusement.

John Burns chuckled for a moment and then suddenly looked puzzled and asked what the hell
that
was supposed to mean.

Which got a laugh from everybody. Then Burns joined in and we all nearly split a gut.

T
he next time Pearl came to see me she was smiling when I entered the visiting room, and so I knew John was all right. She said he’d shown up at the Side Pocket one night and told her he’d been in Ohio hunting for fat banks, but he’d only found slim pickings. He’d then come back to Indiana and with a couple of partners hit a bank in Daleville for about three grand.

Three grand wouldn’t leave much to put in the breakout kitty, not after the split and expenses. At the rate he was going, I said, we’d die of old age before he got the dough together.

Maybe not, she said. She leaned even closer to the screen and told me she had talked to Sonny Sheetz, her old pal and East Chicago outfit boss. When she told Sheetz that New Carlisle and Daleville had been John’s work, he said he might have something for the guy and to send him around.

John’s in East Shy right now meeting with him, she said.

I’d learned a lot about Sonny Sheetz in the time I’d been at M City. They said he got a cut of every illegal dollar that changed hands in Indiana between Kokomo and the Michigan border. There wasn’t a cathouse or gambling joint or speakeasy in the northern part of the state that didn’t pay him for something, if only for protection. The other guys knew about him too. Red said the man was well named, because anybody who got on the wrong side of him ended up under a sheet.

I asked what Sheetz might want with John, and Pearl said he might want to make some banking arrangements with him is what he might want. For a second I didn’t know what she meant and she said You know…set-ups.

Of course. Fat Charley had explained them to me once, except he’d called them cover-ups. He’d even done one for an old pal who managed a bank in Ohio and was headed for an embezzlement rap until he thought to ask Charley for help. Pearl said Sheetz had people in a number of banks—including one or two in Indianapolis—regularly skimming the books for him or doing some other kind of inside larceny. Usually all it took to cover such theft was a talented bookkeeper. But there were times when even the most creative accounting wasn’t going to get past the auditor on his next visit, and the best way out of the jam was to get robbed. Robbery was a swell solution because the bank could claim a loss that balanced its books, plus it got fully reimbursed by the insurance company. Fat Charley said it wasn’t unheard of for insurance agents to be included in such operations for a cut of the profits. The only ones left holding the bag were the insurance company itself and the depositors. Of course the insurance company wasn’t about to go broke, no matter what, and the depositors, well, they got what they deserved for trusting a bank. The American way of business, Charley once said to me and John, was designed to let the intelligently greedy fleece the stupidly greedy, never mind the plain stupid, and the law was their set of rules for keeping it that way. I said he took the words right out of my mouth, and John laughed and said Me too.

A set-up by Sonny Sheetz, Pearl said, meant that the vault at such and such bank would be found unlocked at a certain hour of a certain day and all the cash would be ready to go. It meant that, under the guise of protecting the customers, certain bank employees would not set off the alarm until the robbers were on their way. It meant that erroneous serial numbers could be reported for the stolen money in case the cops decided to send the numbers out around the state.

And how much of the take from a set-up, I wanted to know, did Mr. Sheetz get?

A third, Pearl said.

Let me see if I got this straight, I said. He skims who-knows-how-much from a bank, then has the bank robbed to cover the skims, and
then
gets a third of the rest of the bank’s dough?

And
then,
she said, he goes back to skimming the same bank after it collects on the insurance.

Nice work if you can get it, I said.

She said guys like Sheetz weren’t called bosses for nothing, but to keep in mind that the other two-thirds of the take was practically found money for the guys who did the job. The way she figured it, if John got one or two set-ups from Sheetz our financial problems were over.

I didn’t get why Sheetz didn’t use his own people for the set-ups. Why bring in somebody from outside?

Because strictly speaking, she said, Sonny wasn’t in the holdup business. His main dealings were in booze, whores, gambling, and loansharking. Now and then he would also broker certain projects—including an occasional bank robbery—but he never used his own people for those projects because even in a set-up there was no guarantee that nothing would go wrong. Something could
always
go wrong. And if it did, Sonny did not want the robbers to have any record of connection to himself or his associates. He liked to use stickup men with no known ties to the mob and who could be trusted to keep their mouths shut. John had no mob associations, none of us in the gang did. And because I’d vouched for John to her, she had vouched for him to Sheetz.

I’ve told him about you, baby, she said. Play your cards right and you can do business with him yourself when you’re out of here.

I didn’t say anything to that. The way I saw it a boss was a boss, whether he was a prison warden or the head of some outfit, and I was never one for taking orders.

Pearl was a smoothie—before she left she managed to pass me a small wad of paper through the wire mesh without the guard noticing. Back in my cell I saw it was a newspaper report about the Daleville robbery. A young female teller had been the only employee in the place when two men entered the bank and announced a stickup. One of them jumped up on the teller counter and then vaulted over the barrier into the cashiers’ cage and started gathering the money. The cashier said she didn’t know why he made the leap, since the door to the cage was wide open. Several unsuspecting customers entered the bank while the holdup was in progress and the other robber rounded them up as they came in. The holdup men herded everybody into the vault and made their getaway with $3,500.

That newspaper article was the first time I ever heard of Captain Matt Leach of the Indiana State Police, and we would sure get to know that bastard well enough in days to come. He was quoted as saying he already had a good lead on the identity of the robbers and expected to make an arrest very shortly.

When the other guys read the report, Red said What’s with the acrobat stuff? I’m telling you, if he breaks a leg and gets put back in here I’ll bust his other fucken leg for being such a dope.

I agreed it was a stupid stunt.

Johnny Fairbanks, Charley said. Our boy has a flair for the dramatic and likes to impress the ladies.

What bothered Dietrich was the business about Leach having a lead on the robbers. He asked Fat Charley if he thought it was true.

Charley said of course not, it was simply a standard police pronouncement. More troublesome to him was the size of the take. He thought it was rather meager, considering the sum John needed to raise.

That’s when I told them about Sonny Sheetz and the possibility of John getting a set-up bank.

Man alive, Russell said, a set-up from Sonny Sheetz would be a piece of luck.

Maybe so, Walt said, but he wasn’t going to count that chicken till it was hatched.

T
he following Sunday Jenkins got an unexpected visit from his sister. I caught a look at her through the screen as I went past them to where Mary was waiting. Sis was a honey, all right, as pretty as her picture, with a dark blond bob and nice-looking tits in a yellow dress. When I had told the guys it wouldn’t surprise me if John was spending time with some girl, she was the one I had in mind.

After my visit with Mary I found Jenkins waiting for me in the yard. He was holding a basket of fruit Sis brought him. She had also given him a message for me. John says go to the Crow’s Nest, he said.

Go there when?

His sister hadn’t specified, but he guessed she meant now. Oh, and she said give you this, he said. It’s a present from him.

He handed me a banana. I figured it for some kind of joke and stuck it in my pocket.

Say Harry, he said, what’s the Crow’s Nest?

I ignored him and went over to the mess hall. They kept the coffee urns full all day on Sundays. I poured a cup and casually ambled over to the bank of north windows. I was aware of the mess guards watching me closely from the far side of the room like I might try to bust the thick glass and wriggle through the six-inch-square grillwork of iron bars and drop two stories to the concrete pavement of the exercise yard below and then run across the yard and scale the twenty-foot-high perimeter wall like a fly in full view of the gun bulls in the towers and drop down on the other side and run all the way to Lake Michigan and swim out of sight.

The windows offered one of the few views a convict could get of the outside world. I’ll grant you it wasn’t much of a view, which explains why most guys didn’t look more than once if they ever both
ered to look at all. There was nothing beyond the perimeter wall except scrub grass and dunes and an isolated strip of sandy road. Some of the visitors and prison staff used the road as a shortcut to the old Gary highway. John and I had liked to go to the window after breakfast on Sundays and have a long look. We liked to see for ourselves that the free world still existed and was out there waiting for us, no matter how scrubby it was. I forget which of us named the spot the Crow’s Nest, but we’d kept the name to ourselves.

I was the only one at the windows. It was a brightly sunny day and there wasn’t a thing unusual about the view. I wondered what I was supposed to see. Then here came a green Chevy roadster with the top down. There was no mistaking John at the wheel or Sis Jenkins in her yellow dress beside him. Another girl was in the rumble seat, a longhaired brunette wearing blue. He stopped the car directly in view of the Crow’s Nest. I didn’t think he could see me through the window bars, but later on when we talked about it he told me he could just barely make out a silhouette and figured it was me.

He was wearing a white suit and fedora. He turned and said something to the two girls and they stood up on the seats. They were hatless and even at that distance I could see their grins. They raised the hems of their dresses way up high and started doing a sort of clumsy little rumba step in place. Sis wasn’t wearing stockings and garters like her friend and her legs were long and pale. My dick swelled in my pants. It was all I could do to keep a straight face and not give the game away to the mess hall guards. The hacks in the corner towers were either paying the car no mind or they were enjoying the show as much as I was. John held his arms toward the girls like a stage host presenting an act and then said something to them and Sis stopped dancing and shook her head no-no-no. The brunette laughed kept on dancing and showing those garters. John turned up his palms to Sis like he was making some special plea while she looked down at him. She tossed her head back and laughed big and he reached up and stroked that long bare thigh. Whatever he said did the trick because
the girls turned around and bent waaaay over and pulled their skirts up to show me their panties. The Jenkins girl’s were yellow and the brunette’s white and, oh man, I wanted to howl like a moonstruck hound. They were waggling their behinds and just as I was thinking the entertainment couldn’t get any better John reached up and yanked down Sis’s underpants to expose her ass—and I glimpsed a dark patch between her legs. I heard a faint
Woooo!
from one of the guard towers. Sis jerked up and around so fast she lost her balance and John caught her by the skirt to keep her from falling out of the car. She dropped down on the seat and started beating at him with her fists and knocked off his hat. He hunched a shoulder against her assault as he worked the gearshift and got the car rolling. The brunette was sprawled in the rumble seat and looked like she was dying of laughter. As the car pulled away, John raised a fist up high in the air and shook it. And then they were out of sight.