Handsome Harry (21 page)

John agreed it was excessive, but pointed out that we’d still cleared eight grand, which was nothing to sneeze at.

I said okay, we’d set up a meeting and talk to him, but I’d be
damned if I’d cut him in for a third again. If he insisted on a third, I’d tell him to piss up a rope. John said good enough.

That was fine with the other guys too. Whatever John and I agreed on would always be fine with them.

Once that was settled, Russell and I went to a pharmacy down the street and made some long-distance calls from a booth in the back corner. Russ called Opal and found out that she and Patty had rented three apartments, each with two bedrooms and all of them ready to move into. John and I and the girls had already decided we’d go on living together. Opal and Patty would move out of their little place and share one of the other apartments with Russell, and Red and Charley would share one. Shouse would move in with Knuckles.

I called my mother and she sang me “Happy Birthday” before telling me that an army of cops had come charging into the house the night before, waving warrants and badges and guns and carrying on like marauders. They turned the place upside-down even worse than the last time, and were fit to be tied not to find any sign of us on the property.

I asked if one of them was an Indiana cop named Leach, and she said Oh golly, yes, how did you know? She described him as a tall, skinny man with piercing eyes and a sour expression like he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him. He’d warned her that he’d have her put in jail if he found out she’d been helping me in any way.

It enraged me that the bastard had threatened my mother. But she could always sense exactly what I was feeling, even over the telephone, and she said not to worry, she wasn’t the least bit scared of Captain Matt Leach, and made me promise not to do anything rash. They were watching the farm again, she said, and she didn’t want me to even think about going to visit her anytime soon. But she promised to bake me a belated birthday cake the next time I did.

Then I called Sheetz. He wasn’t in, but I got Cohen on the line and we arranged a meeting for two days later.

T
he next morning we cleared out of Cincy. While the rest of the bunch headed straight for Chicago, John and Charley and I went up to northern Indiana and robbed a police station.

A
police
station!
Wooo!
How many times you heard of somebody heisting the
cops
—and right in their own jail? Well, we did it. And it wouldn’t be the only time.

Some guy John met in the Lima jail had once done thirty days in the lockup in Auburn—a burg about twenty miles above Fort Wayne—and he’d told John the place had a Thompson submachine gun in its gun case. The guy couldn’t believe a hick force of a half-dozen cops would have a tommy. It didn’t seem right to us, either. We had a lot better use for it than a bunch of rube cops did.

We went in my car and stuck to a crisscross route along the Ohio-Indiana border. If we got recognized by cops on one side of the line we could quick cut over to the other side where they couldn’t follow. We didn’t see but three cop cars on the way, however, and none of them gave us a suspicious look. John’s cheek bulged with a chaw of tobacco and he was hatless, and with his hair plastered on his scalp and parted down the center he looked like a hayseed from the turn of the century. He added to the disguise when we stopped in at a five-and-dime in Fort Wayne and he bought some plain-glass spectacles like mine. We had supper in a café and lingered over our coffee till nightfall, then stole a license plate off another black Ford and put it on my Vickie. Then drove up to Auburn.

We parked at the curb in front of the courthouse and directly across from the jail. It was a Saturday night but you’d never know it by the nearly empty streets and the hush of the place. The only sounds were of leaves stirring in a light wind and a dog barking in the distance. Charley said they ought to change the name to Snoresville.

Fat Charles manned the front door while John and I took care of business. There were two cops on duty, both of them at the desk and
reading funnybooks. They were nothing more than farmers with badges, and their jaws dropped when we walked up with our pieces in our hand.

As we locked them in the holding cell, one of them asked Who
are
you fellas?

I said I was the fella who was going to shoot him in the teeth if he said another word.

The rube nodded real quick and made a little twisting motion with his fingers at his lips like he was turning a key on them. I don’t know if he was a nervy guy or just simple, but it was all I could do to keep from laughing.

We made fast work of cleaning out the gun case. There was a Thompson, all right, with both a fifty-round drum and a standard twenty-round magazine. And a pair of bullet-proof vests. Imagine—bullet-proof vests for a two-dog-town police force. They were nicely made and looked like blue serge suit vests with pockets and everything, but they were heavy as overcoats. The rest of the stuff in the case was a mix of weapons that had probably all been confiscated from local troublemakers. A few rifles and shotguns of different types and a half-dozen handguns, and none of them in very good shape except for a .30-06 Enfield rifle. We took it all simply to shame the cops even more by cleaning them out to the last bullet. Except for the Enfield, we later sold the whole kaboodle to a street gang on the South Side.

We spent that night at a motor court in South Bend, and next morning—John and me wearing our phony glasses—we had breakfast in a little café that was buzzing with talk about the cop station robbery. The few tables were all taken so we sat at the counter. We were ready to scoot out of there at the first suspicious look we got, but once again we were pretty much ignored. The fact is, most people are too self-conscious or wrapped up in themselves to pay much attention to anybody around them.

A radio was playing music next to the kitchen pass-out window, and the harried counterman told us the robbery news had been re
peated every fifteen minutes since the station came on the air at dawn and he was sick of hearing it. He no sooner said it than the music was interrupted and here came the report again. He was about to switch it off, but I told him I wanted to hear.

The announcer’s delivery was so breathless I couldn’t help getting a little excited myself. He said one of the robbers had been positively identified as John Dillinger, recently set free from the Lima, Ohio, jail by gunmen who murdered the high sheriff in the process. It was suspected that the same accomplices had been with him in the police holdup.

You could tell the radio guy liked saying John’s name. It’s a dramatic name, bold and dangerous-sounding, and people love to say it. Back in Pendleton, John used to complain that nobody pronounced it correctly, but by the time he left M City he knew it sounded better the wrong way. I told him once that he never would’ve gotten so famous if his name had been Patterson or Bratkowski or Jones. Or Clark, Russell said. Charley agreed that there was much in a name. Take Pierpont, he said, that’s a name for a railroad baron or an oil man. Yeah, I said, Pierpont sounds like one of the biggest robbers of them all.

Three locals claimed to have seen us exit the station house with a bagful of firearms and drive out of town. They couldn’t agree on the make of our car—one said a Ford, the other two said an Olds and a LaSalle, for Christ’s sake—but they all agreed that we were snappy dressers.

A bony waitress with rat-nest hair came over to hand in an order as the counterman was saying it was a hell of a note when even the cops got robbed. Charley said he couldn’t agree more, things in this country had certainly reached a new low.

Maybe so, the waitress said, but doggone if that Dillinger wasn’t a
bold
sonofagun—a
police station,
by God.

John said he’d always heard that the jails and the graveyards were full of bold sonofaguns.

You got a point there, mister, the counterman said. It’s the cocky ones get it the soonest, that’s for sure. He and the waitress moved off to other customers, and the three of us fought down our snickers.

We were in the news that morning in another way as well. The paper carried a report that Sheriff Jess Sarber’s funeral had been held the day before and was attended by three thousand mourners. I put my finger on the three thousand number for John and Charley to see, and I whispered Bullshit. I wasn’t about to believe so many people would
mourn
the passing of a damnfool car salesman.

John said maybe he owed them all money.

T
hat afternoon we were in East Chicago, meeting with Sheetz. As usual, Hymie Cohen was there and smiling his nervous smile. The guy with the black goatee was there too, at his post by the door, but I’d never seen him smile at all. John agreed he looked like a pirate and said he’d never been introduced to him either. Between ourselves we called him Captain Kidd.

Sheetz had a set-up for us. It’s a fat one, he said. In fact, it might turn out to be obese.

A bank he’d been skimming from by way of its chief accountant was in need of being robbed before a state audit scheduled for next month. The bank would of course claim a loss sufficient to balance its books, Sheetz said, but the heist would be good for an actual fifteen to twenty thousand bucks of bank money.

I said that was fat, but I wouldn’t call it obese.

I haven’t finished, Sheetz said. He went on to say there was a small outfit in St. Louis run by four brothers named Quarry who had prospered in the bootlegging business and come to own several riverfront speakeasies. Now that Prohibition was about to end, they were moving over to gambling. But the gambling in St. Louis was locked up by an outfit with tight ties to Chicago, and while the Quarrys had a reputation as a rough bunch, they had gotten as far as they had by
being careful not to get crosswise of the Shytown mob. So they’d moved into southern Indiana, which was open territory to anybody with the capital to set himself up. The Quarrys now had controlling interest in two gambling joints in Terre Haute and two others in Indianapolis.

I take it they know who runs things north of the Kokomo line, John said, since they’re staying well south of it.

Sheetz said he would presume so.

I asked what the Quarrys had to do with the bank set-up, and he said If you’ll permit me to continue, Mr. Pierpont, I’ll clarify that point.

My deepest apologies, I said, by all means proceed. John snorted.

It so happened, Sheetz told us, that one of the managers in the bank under discussion was a cousin of the Quarrys, and for the past seven or eight months they had been using the bank to transfer gambling profits off-the-books back to Saint Lou. The bank was convenient to both Terre Haute and Indy, and on the second and last Monday of every month, shortly after noon, couriers from both towns made cash drops to the Quarry man at the bank. A few hours later, just before closing time, a courier from St. Louie would arrive to collect the money.

But those fellas don’t know about
your
man in that bank, John said, and he got wise to the drops. That it?

Sheetz smiled.

And
, I said, you figure we might as well help ourselves to the Quarry dough while we’re balancing the bank’s books.

Sheetz said the amount of the drops always varied, but the Quarry money could be anything between twenty and sixty grand.

That’s on top of the bank’s money, he said.

John cut a look at me and said
Could
be obese.

I asked Sheetz what his end would be.

The usual, he said, a third.

Out of the question, I said.

He gawked at me like I’d spoken in a foreign language. Cohen cleared his throat and shifted in his chair.

Sheetz then gave us the same song and dance I’d heard from him before about the scarcity of fat banks, especially banks
this
fat, and how long we might have to look before we found one on our own, and how we ought to keep in mind that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, and how we better think pretty fucken hard about passing up such a sweet deal as this and yakkety-yak-yak.

I waited till he got it all out, then told him again that a third was too high, especially for this job. We were famous, I said. Our pictures had been on every front page in the country. We were going to be recognized the minute we stepped in that bank. Even if we wore masks, which we never did, everybody was going to know it was us—including the Quarrys. There were certain risks to every bank heist, but they didn’t usually involve making enemies of another outfit.

John said I was right, while on the other hand the deal worked out well for Sheetz all the way around. The Quarrys wouldn’t connect him to the heist. They didn’t know about Sheetz’s man in the bank and they didn’t know Sheetz knew us.

What they’re gonna figure, John said, is
their
man set them up for us. Poor bastard of a cousin is in for a bad time.

If you want us for this one, I told Sheetz, you’ll have to settle for fifteen percent.

He said
Fifteen?
You guys have me confused with a charity organization.

He wanted us bad and we knew it, and we wanted that big payday and he knew it. But there was no telling exactly how much Quarry money we’d get, so we haggled for a while longer before reaching an agreement that if the total take was less than forty grand Sheetz would get 15 percent. Between forty and fifty, he’d get 20. Over fifty and he’d get a quarter.

We shook on it.

O
pal and Patty did a great job picking apartments. All three places were in the Loop and only a few blocks from each other, but they were all in new apartment houses full of residents too busy with their big-city lives to pay much attention to their neighbors. The surrounding streets were heavily trafficked and the sidewalks teemed with pedestrians. Like Charley said, the easiest place to go unnoticed is in a daytime public crowd.