Handsome Harry (19 page)

We had lunch with Opal and then I went to the address Pearl had given me, a five-story apartment house a few blocks over from the El. The name Evelyn Frechette was on the foyer mailbox for apartment number twelve, third floor. I went up and knocked on the door but got no answer. A rummy-looking janitor replacing a pane in a window at the end of the hallway said he hadn’t seen her since she’d left for her job the afternoon before. He claimed not to know where she worked, only that she was a checkroom girl somewhere. I borrowed a sheet off his work-order pad and wrote her a note saying I was a friend of John D’s and to give me a call. I put down Opal’s number and signed it Pete and folded it and slid it under the door.

She called at three in the morning. The phone was next to the sofa
and its ringing woke me from a sound sleep. She had a smoky sort of voice and sounded a little drunk. She wanted to know what news I had about Johnny.

I suppose I could’ve explained things to her on the phone, but I was irked about being jolted awake in the middle of the night, and it chafed me all the more that she was tipsy.

I said I didn’t want to talk about it on the telephone, no telling who might overhear her end of the conversation, so why didn’t she name a place where we could meet in the morning?

I figured the crack about being overheard might get her goat, and it did. She said You think there’s somebody else here? Some
guy?

I said How would I know?

Listen you, she said, I know your real name and it isn’t Pete. And I know about the crate of thread, you get me? I know things because Johnny trusts me. So get this straight—there’s nobody here but me, and don’t go telling Johnny any different.

I would’ve laughed at stinging her so good if I hadn’t been pretty stung myself at learning John told her about how we’d pulled the break. I would come to think the world of Billie once I got to know her, but at that point I didn’t know Billie Frechette any better than I knew Billy the Kid. For all I knew, she was one more bimbo John had taken a passing fancy to, and I couldn’t help thinking he’d been a dope to trust her.

I said I’d talk to her at breakfast, to name a place where we could meet at eight o’clock. She said she didn’t eat breakfast and never got out of bed before noon, so why didn’t I just tell her what I had to say? I said she could either meet me in the morning or forget the whole thing, it didn’t matter to me one way or the other.

She gave a big exaggerated sigh and muttered something I didn’t catch, which was probably just as well, then said she’d see me at Paulie’s, a café about a block east of her place. I told her I was a tall good-looking blond guy and she couldn’t miss me. Yeah yeah, she said, and banged the receiver in my ear.

At a quarter to nine I’d had two cups of coffee and three cigarettes and she still hadn’t showed. I was about to say the hell with it, let John fetch her himself, when she came through the door. She was coatless, wearing a black suit and cloche hat. Copeland hadn’t lied about her looks. She spotted me, and as she made her way across the room every eye in the place was on the swing of her caboose. She was a few inches taller than Mary and her cheekbones were a work of art and the hair curling out from under the little hat was black as crow feathers. She slid into the seat across from me in the booth and I wondered why somebody with such a pretty face would bother with so much makeup. Her eyes were bright and quick but a little bloodshot, no doubt from the booze I’d heard in her voice the night before.

Without so much as a hello, she took a cigarette from her purse and held it in front of her mouth like the Queen of Sheba expecting some flunky to light her up. I thought about not doing or saying anything until she
asked
for the light, then immediately felt ridiculous, like she was gulling me into some stupid kid’s game. I struck a match and fired up her fag.

She took a pull and blew a stream of smoke at me. Okay handsome, she said, you got me up with the roosters—now what’s the word?

I kept it brief, telling her that John expected to get out of confinement in a few days and would like it if she was on hand when he did.

For a moment she simply stared at me and I couldn’t read a thing in her face. Then she said You busting him out?

Ask no questions, I said, I’ll tell no lies. You coming or not?

Christ, she said, you
still
don’t trust me. She made a big production out of snuffing out the cigarette. Then said He really wants me with him?

Why else would he send for her?

I knew it, she said, I knew he wouldn’t forget me.

I told her to be all packed and set to go by noon, but it didn’t sur
prise me that it was nearly two o’clock before she was ready. We gave Opal and Patty enough money to rent three downtown apartments while we were gone. I told them to get two-bedroom places, each in a different apartment house, to make sure each building had at least three exit doors on the ground floor and fire escapes at every hallway window. We wanted places we could get away from fast if the need arose.

I
drove and Russell rode shotgun and Billie sat in the back and talked our ears off. She said she was half French on her daddy’s side and half Indian on her mother’s.

Do tell, Russell said. He leaned over the seat and gave her a good once-over and asked which half was which. She laughed along with us and said she could see she was among rascals.

She said she got the name Billie when she was a kid because she was such a tomboy. She’d grown up on a Menominee reservation in Wisconsin. Smallpox nearly did her in when she was eight. She’d gone to an Indian school and hated the place with a passion. When she was sixteen she ran off to Milwaukee, and two years after that she moved to Chicago. She took up with a guy named Sparks, a stickup man, and why she married him she’d never know. Sparks’s partner was Bobo Cherrington, and Bobo’s wife Patty became her best friend. Patty’s marriage was no better than Billie’s, and when their husbands got convicted on a mail robbery rap and sent to Leavenworth neither girl shed any tears. Billie never once went to visit Sparks and they’d never exchanged a letter. She didn’t care if she never saw him again. She said Patty felt the same way about Bobo.

Russell said So you’re divorced?

She said As far as I’m concerned.

For the past year she’d been working in the coat room of the same club as Patty. They were better buddies than ever and liked to go dancing in speakeasies. One night about a month ago Patty’s latest
beau, Harry Copeland, showed up at a club with a friend he introduced to them as Johnny.

The minute I laid eyes on him, Billie said, brother, that was it.

I kept our speed slightly under the limit for the whole trip. We didn’t want to attract attention, especially not with a satchelful of pistols in the trunk. Whenever we spotted a police car, Russell and I would eyeball it on the sly until it was out of sight. The first time it happened, Billie kept right on chattering behind me and I thought she hadn’t even noticed the cop. But the next time I spied one, I glanced at her in the mirror and saw that even as she talked she was watching the cop car too. That’s when I knew Billie Frechette was no greenhorn.

We got into Cincinnati around ten o’clock. It was a pretty night—a nearly full silver moon, the air chilly and tinged with river odors. I’ve never forgotten that town’s lovely fall evenings.

We found Charley and Mary playing rummy and drinking beer at the dining table. When I introduced Billie, Charley kissed her hand and said You are exquisite, my dear.

You smoothie, she said, I bet you say that to all the girls.

Mary gave her a big hug and said Welcome to the club, honey.

W
hat happened in Lima two days later—on Columbus Day, to be exact—was in all the papers, it made the newsreels, and five months down the road it all came out at my trial. But the way things are reported in the news or presented in a courtroom is hardly ever the way they really happened. At best, what you get in a newspaper or at a trial are some of the facts, but facts are never the whole story. There can be a big difference between what happened and what
happened,
if you get my meaning. As far as most people are concerned,
what
happens is all that counts, not the whys and wherefores. Actually, I tend to agree. Just the same, I’ll tell you what
happened.

But first I want to set something else straight. There was a hick-head Lima lawyer who claimed that Russell and I went to his office that afternoon and tried to arrange for John’s
sister
to visit him in his cell. He said he told us he’d have to discuss it with the sheriff, and that even though he didn’t know who we were at the time he was suspicious, and that he tried to tip off the sheriff but the man didn’t take him seriously. Well, that shyster’s a liar. I never met him in my life. He’s one more guy who used us to get attention for himself. His story doesn’t even make sense. We didn’t need to get anybody in to see John. What for? To sneak him a gun? To check the layout of that shoebox jail? Christ, all we had to do was exactly what we did—walk in and take him. The whole thing was easy as pie.

Except of course for that business with the sheriff.

We got to Lima a little after six in the evening. We were in the stolen Chrysler and Studebaker and had left our own cars in Dayton. There was hardly anyone on the streets, which of course was why we’d chosen the supper hour to do it.

Red parked the Chrysler in front of the jail office and kept the motor idling. Half a block behind us, Copeland pulled the Studebaker to the curb. He left the motor running too and Shouse got out and lit a cigarette and leaned on the fender. His job was to watch the street behind Red. Red’s job was to watch the jail door.

I had a .45 in a holster under my arm and a .380 tucked under my belt at my side. All right, I said, let’s do it.

Charley and Russell and I got out of the car and they followed me up the walkway and through the office door.

The sheriff was at his desk and looked up from some papers when we entered. He was portly and his thinning hair was slicked with oil—and his eyes told me right off the bat he was no pushover. I thought Oh hell.

Two others were in the room, a woman in a chair with a folded newspaper in her lap, and a lanky deputy playing with a pup on a couch. Against the far wall was an iron-barred door that Charley had
said opened onto a short passageway to another barred door, the one to the cells. The deputy was unarmed, but a gunbelt with a holstered pistol hung on a hatrack next to the couch. There was a large round clock on the wall, and in the momentary silence I heard its clunking tick.

Evening gentlemen, the sheriff said, can I help you?

The badge on his vest had been polished to a gleam. He was smiling but his eyes were sizing us up. He eased his roller chair a little nearer to the corner drawer of his desk, and I figured that’s where he kept his piece.

I told him we were state officers from Indiana, working the Michigan City break. He had a prisoner named Dillinger who was a friend of the fugitives and we wanted to have a word with him.

The sheriff said sure thing, just sign the register and show him some credentials and we could talk to the prisoner all we wanted.

I pulled the .380 and said Here’s my credentials, mister, now open the lockup.

The woman said Oh my God. Russell told the guy on the couch Stay put, Mac, and I heard the hammer cock on his piece.

Be reasonable, sir, Charley told the sheriff, there’s brave and there’s foolish.

The wall clock seemed to hold its next tick like a breath while the sheriff stared at me with a sort of sadness, like he knew what was coming and it was already as good as done for the plain and simple reason that he was who he was and I was me. Then the clock ticked and his eyes went bright and hard as his badge and he said You bastards can’t do this. And he turned and grabbed at the drawer.

The man gave me no choice. That’s the simple fact of it.

In those close quarters the gunshot sounded like the slam of an iron gate. He spasmed and slid off the chair and the woman cried out
No.

There was hollering in the cellblock. The sheriff cursed and sat up and groped for the drawer again.

Charley said You
stupid
man and whacked him on the head with
his pistol—and accidentally fired a round that glanced off the cell house door and hummed past my ear and thumped into the wall.

But the guy was an ox and he clung to the desk. Charley was wild-eyed now and cracked him with the pistol again, harder, and that did it. The sheriff slumped to the floor with blood running out of his hair. There was a thick red stain on his side.

The woman yelled
Stop
it,
stop
, and threw herself on top of the sheriff.

I opened the drawer and took out a .38 revolver and put it in my coat pocket. Russell had the deputy’s gunbelt over his shoulder and his gun to the deputy’s head. The pup was nowhere in sight.

Charley rifled the desk but couldn’t find the keys. I told the woman to get the keys
now
and she said yes, yes, only please don’t hurt her husband anymore. She hurried into the kitchen and retrieved a big key ring and gave it to me.

I opened the outer door and went to the inner one where John was already in his hat and coat and adjusting his tie. Some of the other inmates started crowding him at the door and saying they wanted out too and he tried to elbow them back. I fired into the ceiling and they jumped away from the bars and shut up.

I unlocked the door and John scooted out and slapped me on the shoulder and said About time, brother.

I gave him the .45 and he checked the load in the chamber. Russell brought in the woman and the deputy and put them in the cell and I locked them in. The woman was crying hard and the deputy had his arm around her. He gave John a hard look.

John said I’m sorry, missus, but if she heard him she gave no sign of it.