Handsome Harry (17 page)

Our first full day in the house was a Saturday and we mostly lazed around. Mary and I took a stroll along the riverbank and found the head of a toy wooden soldier. It was about the size of a strawberry, and
because I’ve been a pretty good whittler since I was a kid I carved it into a little heart for her. She loved it and had me make a small hole at the top of the heart so she could wear it around her neck on a fine gold chain. Then it was her turn to surprise me by proving to be a first-class cook. She fixed a big supper of fried chicken that night and everybody said it was the best they’d ever had. When we were done with it, there was nothing left but bones. Charley and I and Russell did the dishes afterward.

We had just finished up in the kitchen when the report came over the radio that Jenkins had been killed by a bunch of farmers in some two-dog burg near Indianapolis. There’d been a shootout and he wounded some yokel before another one let him have it with a shotgun and took off half his head.

The news put a damper on the rest of the evening and everybody went to bed early. Mary didn’t say much about it, but when we made love I felt how tense she was. Afterward, as we lay there in the dark, I said that what happened to Jenkins could happen to any of us, even to her, if she should have the bad luck to be too close to me at the wrong time. I said she better give a lot of thought to what she wanted to do.

I couldn’t see her face, and she didn’t say anything for so long I’d thought she’d fallen asleep. Just as I was about to nod off, she hugged me tight and said I’m
doing
it.

T
he next day we all went up to St. Marys in two cars. It was a pretty morning of crisp air and soft autumn sunlight. St. Marys was a trim little town, nice and quiet except for the church bells, with red and gold trees shedding leaves along the streets. We cruised around and got acquainted with the place. The cop station had only two cars in the lot. We drew a street map of the bank’s neighborhood and we made our own road map of the surrounding region, including every farm lane not shown on a regular map and marking
the exact distances between every road and intersection. Then we went back to the river house and made copies of the map for each of us to study until we had them memorized.

On Monday morning Russ and Charley and I went back to St. Marys to case the bank itself. I was wearing my phony-lens spectacles, and Russell was cultivating a mustache that was coming along nicely. We wore seersucker suits, white skimmers, and green bow ties and looked every inch like yokel businessmen. Take it from me, a simple disguise is the best. The only one of us who never used any kind of disguise at all was Fat Charley. He looked so thoroughly common, so ordinary and benign, he didn’t need one.

We took turns going into the bank on different pretexts—to break a large bill, to ask directions to some local address, to pick up an application for a checking account—and each of us took a good look at the layout. We then put our heads together and drew a diagram of it while we had lunch in a rear booth of a café. We went back to the hideout by way of one of the getaway routes we’d decided on, making a stop at a hardware store in Greenville to buy two large cartons of roofing nails. That was my own embellishment on the Lamm method. If they came after us we’d dump the nails behind us. See how far they chased us on flat tires.

That evening we had a light meal of soup and sandwiches and went over the plan until everybody had his job down pat. The only hitch was Copeland, who’d started puking before supper and would keep at it, off and on, for the rest of the night. He’d picked up a case of beer and a couple of bottles of whiskey from a bootlegger in Cincinnati and had been taking nips from one of the bottles all afternoon. He wasn’t drunk but he was sick as a dog, and it was Charley’s guess that he’d gotten a batch of bad booze. I wasn’t sympathetic. He wouldn’t have been so sick if he didn’t have such a taste for the stuff.

His condition caused us a problem. The plan called for three guys in the bank, one on the street, and a pair of drivers—one for the heist car and one to wait with the switch car outside of town. Without
Copeland, we’d either have to leave the switch car unattended, never a good idea, or go in the bank with only two guys, which we could do, but it was always best to go in with three. Lamm had thought so and I did too.

When Mary said she’d be willing to take Knuckles’ place with the switch car, we all stared at her for a minute. I could see she was serious. There were grins around the table.

She gets an equal share, I said.

I should say so, Fat Charley said.

Red said Holy smoke, Pete, you been smooching it up with a damn
bandit.

Mary just beamed.

W
e pulled it off a little before closing time. I hadn’t been sure the other guys would share my disdain for masks, but they did.

Masks or not, Fat Charley said, they’ll know who we are.

Russ said Who cares? They got enough on us already to lock us up forever. A hundred more robberies ain’t going to make it any worse.

Fuck ’em, Red said. I
want
them to know who I am.

Mary was waiting in Copeland’s Oldsmobile at a small picnic park not far from a highway intersection and about three miles west of town. Russell was at the wheel of the Hudson, parked halfway down the block from the bank and with a clear view of the doors. Shouse had the street. Red and Charley and I did the inside work.

The manager and an assistant were at their desks and a single teller was in the cage. Charley paused inside the door and checked the time on the bank’s wall clock and pretended to set his watch. Red unfolded a road map and went over to the manager to ask if he knew the best route to Bellefontaine. I strolled up to the cage.

The teller didn’t seem to recognize me from the day before when
I’d gone in to get change of a twenty. I shoved a flour sack across the counter and brought up the sawed-off from under my coat. I told him to empty the drawers into the sack and be quick about it.

He went white, and I thought Not again, remembering my first bank job ever and the teller who fainted off his stool. Luckily, this one managed to stay conscious.

I heard Red tell the manager not even to dream about touching a goddamn alarm button. He had his gun to the guy’s head. A few customers came in while I was scooping up the cash in the vault, and Charley got them together all nice and quiet. When I came out of the vault we ordered the bunch of them in there and Charley told them to stay put until the manager had counted aloud to five hundred.

I’d figured it for a five-minute job but we were out of there in a little over four. Russell pulled up in front of the bank and we got in the car and he drove us off nice and easy.

Oh man, Red said, oh
man.

The alarm still hadn’t sounded as we eased around the corner and then all of us were laughing like we’d just heard the best joke in the world.

Somebody tell me, Russell said,
how
long we been out of M City?

We have been at large exactly one week today, Charley said.

World, watch your ass, Red said.

In minutes we were at the picnic spot and Mary smiled big at the sight of us. I took the shotgun seat beside her, and Charley and Red got in back. She drove us out of there nice and smooth, and Shouse and Russell followed along.

We were all still pretty pumped up from the job, and Red said Boys, we are one
fine
fucken team if I do say so myself. Then looked at Mary and said Pardon my Turkish, honey.

She looked at him in the mirror and said I think you speak it quite fluently, Jack, and got a big laugh. She always called him Jack, ever since finding out some of the cons had called him Three-finger Jack.

At the next highway intersection, Mary turned south but Shouse kept going west. He and Russ wouldn’t get back to the hideout till an hour after us—in a brand-new Chrysler they’d stolen in Celina. They ditched the Hudson in the woods along Grand Lake.

We made the next day’s newspapers, of course. And of course there’d been a to-do—cops all over, roadblocks, the usual routine. The bank employees had looked at mug shots and put the finger on us. Matt Leach came over from Indiana and told reporters he was hot on our trail. They probably laughed at him as hard as we did.

The haul was twelve thousand, a convenient sum for cutting into shares. Four thousand would go to Sheetz, and everybody in the gang got $1,050, including Mary. She said she’d never expected to see that much money in her hand in her life. She got to hold even more when we named her the keeper of the common kitty and gave her the leftover $650 bucks to hold.

Copeland was a little sheepish in accepting his cut, saying he felt like he hadn’t done much to earn it. Shouse said he could say that again. Mary said Oh hush, Ed. I told Knuckles he’d done plenty in getting us the hideout house and letting us use his Olds for the switch car. Besides, all that mattered was he was in the gang, and as long as I had anything to say about it, every member would get an equal share of every job.

The only problem we had with that job was the money itself—it was too new. You could smell it all through the house. It looked so unreal Russell said if he didn’t know where it had come from he’d swear it was counterfeit. The bills were perfectly smooth and they crackled when you balled them up and no matter how hard you tried to smooth them out again they stayed so stiffly crinkled it was hard to stack them neatly. With money that new, the cops were sure to circulate the serial numbers and alert every business in the Midwest to report all transactions in which they received brand-new currency.

Nobody was for selling the cash. We all hated fences—a bunch of
thieves who rarely paid more than fifty cents on the dollar. We figured the thing to do with the money was age it.

We put the bills in a big sack and took turns beating the sack against a tree truck for a while and then walking back and forth on it. We filled a large bucket with damp dirt and mixed in a touch of lard for that slightly greasy feel paper money gets over time and we worked the cash around in the dirt by the handfuls. Then we rinsed the bills under the tap and spread them on cookie sheets and put them in the oven at low heat. We took them out again while they were still damp and balled up each bill and then opened it up and passed it to Mary who pressed it flat with a clothes iron. It was a day’s work, believe me, but at long last the money looked and felt and even smelled a little like it had been around a while.

Before we did all this, we set aside Sonny Sheetz’s cut. If he wanted his money aged he could do it himself.

L
ate that afternoon a man and two kids wandered across the rear of the property, carrying fishing poles and a bucket and stringers of fish. Russ and Red watched them from behind the curtain and figured they were taking a shortcut home from the river. The man and kids all had a good look at the cars and no telling who they might talk to about them. That night we all slept in our clothes and took turns keeping watch out the window. The next morning we cleared out of the river house and moved to Cincinnati.

M
ary and I rented a furnished two-bedroom in an apartment building two blocks from the Ohio. We were Mr. and Mrs. Harold Wahl. The other bedroom would be for John and his Chicago girlie—if I was able to find her. Russell and Charley took a two-bedroom in the same building and down the hall from us, and Red and Shouse rented a place a few blocks away.
Copeland had gone off to his own place in Chicago and to be with Patty. I told him Russ and I would see him there in a few days.

We stored the stolen Chrysler and the Studebaker in a downtown garage and then we all went out and bought ourselves some legitimate cars. Mary and I went to the Ford place, me in my phony specs and my skimmer and green bow tie, and I bought a new V-8 Victoria. The car had a radio, a clock, leather seats, dual wipers and horns, whitewall tires—the works. I told the salesman the Vickie was a fifth-anniversary present for my wife and gave Mary a big hug and a pat on the rump and she blushed fetchingly and told the sales guy I was the best husband a girl could ask for. We then took in a movie, and then went shopping for clothes and I bought some tailor-made suits for myself and a pair of red shoes and some pretty dresses and underthings for Mary. In one store, she held a sheer nightie in front of her and said Pardon me, but can you see through this?

It was a line from the movie we’d just seen in which Jean Harlow asked a salesgirl the same question. I smiled and answered with the salesgirl’s line: I’m afraid you can, my dear.

In that case, Mary said in Harlow’s line, I’ll take it.

We had supper with Russ and Charley that night in a restaurant down the street from the apartment house. They’d gotten themselves some dapper new duds too, but I was the sharpest dresser in the bunch and always would be, if I say so myself. Charley had bought a Terraplane roadster with a rumble seat and was happy as a kid with a new toy. He said the car was a rocket, just like the ads claimed. Russ said a Terraplane was a fine car, all right, but it tended to draw attention, which was why he’d got himself a plain Essex sedan. Charley ribbed him about that, saying a young man like Russ ought to have a sporty car with which to impress the ladies, not some crate better suited for a fogey.

Take it from one who knows, my boy, he told Russ, youth is fleeting.

I know it, Russell said, and I’d prefer it to fleet into old age instead of an early grave.

We had a fine time, the most relaxed we’d been since the breakout. The night was cool, and as we strolled toward home the air smelled faintly of the river and burning leaves. Mary said fall had always been her favorite time of year. Charley gestured at the city lights all around us and said
This,
ladies and gents, is a proper refuge—among the urban multitude.

Cincinnati’s all right, Russell said, but I’ll take Shytown any day.