Handsome Harry (15 page)

The radio was tuned to a big-band show, low but loud enough so that if the music was interrupted by news we’d know it. The latest word was that roadblocks were still in place in most of northwest Indiana and the police continued to get reports of us being here and there and everywhere. So far so good.

Mary came out in her black dress and she and Pearl greeted each
other with hugs, then Mary went in the kitchen to make scrambled eggs for everybody while Pearl filled us in.

She’d been to visit John in the Lima jailhouse, claiming to be Pearl Morehouse, his aunt from Toledo. She had a driving license with that name and address to prove who she was. In fact, she had lots of driving licenses, each one with her description but a different name and address, and she said she’d see to it we all got a few tailor-made licenses of our own. Anyhow, John told her the cops had taken more than four grand off him when they arrested him in Dayton, never mind that they told the newspapers it was only two. That was the money meant to tide us over till we went to work.

Pearl took a roll of bills from her purse and handed it to me. She said it was four hundred dollars and to call it a loan until we got on our feet. She was sorry it wasn’t more, but the girl business had been slow and her police payoffs had been jacked up, plus her booze sales had fallen off now that Prohibition was as good as dead and more gin mills than ever were operating in open defiance of a law that had lost its teeth.

I thanked her for the money, which would be enough to get us some clothes and see us through for a short while, but we needed to round up some operating capital fast. They weren’t going to keep John in that jail till it was convenient for us to spring him.

Pearl said our luck might be running better than we thought. For one thing, it was certain now that John wouldn’t be going to trial till the middle of next month. What’s more, the Allen County sheriff didn’t consider John anything more than a small-time stickup man and wasn’t taking any special precautions to beef up the guard at the jail. And last but not least, Sonny Sheetz had gotten in touch with her to say he was impressed by our breakout. He wanted to meet me. He had a proposition I might be interested in.

Russell said Hot damn, Sonny Sheetz. Now we’re talking.

I asked what he had in mind, but Pearl didn’t know, I’d have to find out from him.

I looked at Red and Charley. Red said what the hell, there was nothing to lose by talking to the man. Charley said there was no telling how long it might take us to find a lucrative bank, and we had to make haste to liberate John. If Mr. Sheetz had a sure thing to offer, Charley thought we should accept it.

I didn’t bother to solicit an opinion from Jenkins or Shouse.

One other thing, Pearl said, taking a folded piece of paper from her shirt pocket and handing it to me. Written on it was the name of Evelyn Frechette and an address. Pearl said she was the tootsie John had been seeing in Chicago. He wanted me to go get her and have her waiting for him when I sprung him.

Well Jesus Whore-hopping Christ, Red said. Anything
else
he’d like? A chauffeured limousine, maybe? With a bucket of champagne in the backseat?

I was tickled by John’s audacity. Even before I’d made it out of M City, he was planning on me rounding up his girl and having her standing by when I busted him out of jail. Talk about confidence.

He said to tell you she’s Patty Cherrington’s friend, Pearl said to Russell.

Small world, Russell said. He told us Patty Cherrington was Opal’s sister, who our old pal Knuckles Copeland had been dating for the past few weeks. But to hear Opal tell it, Patty wasn’t nearly as keen on Copeland as he was on her.

Ah yes, Charley said,
that
old sad song.

W
hile Mary and Pearl were buying clothes for us, Red and Shouse went off to another part of town and abandoned the Phaeton in a grocery store lot and pilfered another V-8, a year-old Deluxe Ford Fordor.

Around midafternoon Knuckles Copeland showed up. Pearl had phoned him and told him where to find us, and he’d wasted no time driving down to Indy. Poor old Ralph must’ve felt like his little house
had been turned into a hotel lobby. I didn’t want him listening in on us so I had Jenkins take him out in the backyard. I introduced Knuckles to the others, and Russell asked him how Opal was doing.

She says to tell you she can’t wait, Knuckles said, and wagged his eyebrows.

Russell said
She
can’t?

I asked him if he knew a woman named Evelyn Frechette and he said sure, she was John’s girl, her friends called her Billie, and it was Patty who’d introduced them. He said he’d seen her the day before yesterday and told her about John getting pinched, but he didn’t tell her about the blonde John was with at the time. She seemed almost as angry as sad about the news. She was a hard one to figure, Knuckles said, but man, she was a nice piece of work. He described an hourglass shape with his hands.

Knowing John, I already knew what she was a nice piece of.

Charley cleared his throat and asked if we could dispense with the small talk. He wanted to know if Copeland had found us a place to hide out.

He sure had—a secluded country place in Ohio, a big roomy farmhouse on the Great Miami River, just outside of Hamilton and about fifteen miles north of Cincy. The bad news was that the owners were still finishing up a few repairs on the place and it wouldn’t be ready for another two days. Knuckles said not to blame him for the delay. John hadn’t given him the job of looking for a hideout till about two weeks ago, and it hadn’t made the job any easier that he’d insisted the place be within an hour’s drive of Dayton.

Golly gosh, Russell said, I wonder why he wanted to be so near Dayton?

Charley was speaking for all of us when he said a country place was a bad idea. Bumpkins took too much notice of outsiders. They were too damn nosy and loved to gossip. They were too likely to blab to the cops. The best place to hide was in the heart of a large city,
where everybody was a stranger and nobody gave a damn about anybody else, including the people next door. Anonymity is our great ally, Charley said. He had assumed John knew that and would get us a hideout in Chicago. As much as he hated to say it, he thought perhaps Johnny Fairbanks’s good judgment had been fuzzied by his carnal yens.

I knew there was no perhaps about it, but I said that under the circumstances we didn’t have much choice but to go to the country place and we’d see about getting a better hideout later on. We spread a road map on the table and Copeland made a little
x
on it to show where the house was. I made him give us specific directions for getting there, in case any of us got separated on the way.

When the girls got back from shopping and Pearl heard about the delay with the hideout, she said some of us could stay at her house in Kokomo for the two days till it was ready, and she had a trusted friend who could put up the rest of us.

She and Mary did a good job of getting all of us some nice clothes in proper fit. They’d played it smart and gone to a variety of stores, shopping for one of us here, another of us there, so as not to raise curiosity about buying so much men’s clothing in a lot of different sizes. It was a wise precaution. The talk in every store was about the Michigan City break. Everybody was wondering where the fugitives might be. People were dreaming out loud about how they’d spend the reward money if they were the first to spot the escaped convicts and tip off the cops.

As we got ready to leave, Pearl said she could kick herself for not having brought a set of license plates to replace those on whatever stolen car we were driving. I said forget it, we wouldn’t be driving this one for long, anyway.

I took Mary aside and asked what she wanted to do.

What do you mean, she said.

I mean do you want to stick with us or what, I said.

I can’t, she said, I have to go home.

I’d been afraid she would say that, and my chest suddenly felt hollow.

She had to see her mother, she said. She had to talk to her. She needed to take care of things.

Yeah, I said, I get it.

And I need to pack a bag, she said. And then you better pick me up on your way back, mister, and I don’t mean maybe.

She giggled at putting one over on me. I couldn’t stop smiling even as we kissed.

Ralph didn’t know our plans and there was nothing he could tell the police that would do us much harm. We’d already told Mary that if the cops ever got hold of her she should say we forced her to take us to Ralph’s. Just the same, I warned Ralphie-boy not to blab to anybody about our visit, and he said he never would, never. Do you swear on the Bible, I said, ribbing him a little, and he said Yes, oh
yes,
I have one in the bedroom, I’ll get it. I had to laugh. Never mind, I told him, I believe you.

Jesus, how do guys like that live with themselves?

We left late in the afternoon—Red riding with Pearl in her roadster, Copeland following her in his Olds with Jenkins and Shouse. Russell and Charley were with me in the Ford. We dropped Mary off at home and headed for Kokomo.

It was a short drive, a little more than an hour, and we didn’t talk much on the way, Russ and Charley and I. The rain had quit and the low sun was shining bright. It was a pleasure simply to gawk at the broad, flat countryside passing by.

At all that free and open world.

P
earl owned her house under the name of Dewey, the same name she used for her telephone listing, and of course had a driving license in that name too. Dewey was her Good Citizen identity.

I hid the Fordor in her garage and then she phoned the friend she’d mentioned, Darla Bird, who agreed to stash some of us for the next two nights and said she’d be right over. Pearl said we could trust Darla to keep things under her hat. Besides being Pearl’s friend, she was the most popular girl at the Side Pocket, and when she showed up it was easy to see why—she was a blond knockout, far prettier than most women you’ll find in a cathouse. Pearl said she was one of those rare working girls who knew how to manage their money, which was how she’d come to own a two-story house on a large piece of wooded property on the edge of town. She lived by herself except for three cats. Her house was bigger than Pearl’s, so Red and Shouse and Jenkins all went with her, and Charley and I stayed put. Copeland and Russell had gone to Chicago together to spend some time with Opal and Patty before rejoining us for the drive to Ohio.

The next day we laid low and caught up on our sleep and Pearl arranged a meeting between me and Sonny Sheetz. After supper I telephoned my mother. She was elated to hear from me. She said the police had been there early that morning and searched for me over every inch of the place. She said she should’ve been an actress, she’d wept so convincingly as she told the cops how much heartache I’d caused her with my criminal misdeeds. Two of them stayed in the house most of the day in case I showed up or telephoned, and she made sandwiches for them to show what a good citizen she was, but it was all she could do to keep from putting rat poison on the salami. A car finally came and got the two cops, and she’d waved goodbye to them even as she was wishing they would all be killed in a crash. She had me laughing and I said Easy does it, Killer. She wasn’t sure if they had anybody watching the house but she intended to take a long walk all the way around the property twice a day and see what was what. She said for me not to go see her until she gave the all clear. I said she was a champ and I’d call again in a few days.

Pearl and Charley were playing double solitaire and drinking wine at the kitchen table. I said goodnight to them and went off to
the guest room with its comfortable twin beds. When I woke in the morning I saw Charley’s bed hadn’t been slept in. I found him and Pearl still in the kitchen, only now they were wearing fresh clothes and Charley’s thin hair was wetly combed. Pearl said good morning and went to the stove to fry me some eggs. Charley was smiling
very
big.

I sat down and glanced at Pearl’s back, then grinned at Charley and raised my brow in question and lightly tapped the top of a fist against my palm. His own grin got even wider and he nodded, and we both tried to stifle our snickers with our hands.

Without turning around, Pearl said I
know
what you guys are giggling about—you sound as silly as schoolboys, I swear. Then she gave us a scolding look and all of us busted out laughing.

A
n hour later she and I were on our way to East Chicago in her roadster. I wore a rube’s straw boater and plain-lens eyeglasses she’d bought for me at a novelty store, and we wore matching wedding bands. If we should be questioned by the cops we would say we were Mr. and Mrs. George Elliott of Kokomo. Pearl could produce a driving license and automobile registration to verify the Elliott name and address, but I couldn’t because I’d recently been assaulted and robbed of my wallet while taking a stroll in the park—and where were the police when you needed them, anyway? Despite our careful preparations and cover story, I was a little jumpy about going back to the region I’d fled less than two days earlier. But we must’ve looked respectable enough because we were waved through without questioning at both of the roadblocks we came to.

Sheetz’s headquarters was in an old three-story building with the paint peeling off and a sign saying
INDIAGO INDUSTRIES
. It was flanked by a smoky refinery on one side and, on the other, by a dark green canal that ran out to the lake. Sheetz’s office, however, was
nicely appointed with dark leather armchairs and sofa. His bare desktop gleamed like brown glass. I sat across from him, and Pearl made herself at home on the sofa. Also in the room were a nervous, portly man named Hymie Cohen, whom Sheetz introduced as his associate, and a big guy with a black goatee who looked like a well-dressed pirate and whom nobody introduced. He stood next to the door and his nicely tailored jacket almost hid the pistol bulge under his arm.