Handsome Harry (25 page)

He grinned at me and said What’s the gag?

I nodded toward Mary and said Ask her.

Mary said You want some breakfast, Johnny?

Well, sure, John said.

Then you better drag your girlfriend’s lazy behind out of bed, she said, and have her make it for you. I’m not the household cook.

John stood there, rubbing his chin, then smiled and said, No, kid, you sure ain’t. I’ll be right back.

He returned in a few minutes with Billie in hand. Her robe was open and you could see her dark nipples pushing against the thin cotton undershirt. A few black curls of private hair were showing at the edge of her panties. She was rubbing her eyes like a drowsy child and grumbling about getting rousted from bed. What was going on, she wanted to know.

Time for breakfast, John told her.

I don’t eat breakfast, Billie said.

I
do, he said. And I’d be grateful as all hell, babydoll, if you’d make it for me.

Billie said
Me?
Jeepers, Johnny, I can’t cook.

Time to learn, he said.

I’ll teach you, honey, Mary said. She went around the table and closed Billie’s robe and belted it, like she was tending a disheveled child, and I pretended not to see the scolding look she gave me.

In no time at all, Mary taught Billie her way around the kitchen, and from then on they took turns making breakfast.

B
reakfast was about the only meal we ever ate at home. Christ, we had it good in Chicago. We were loaded with dough and spending it hand over fist on restaurants and sharp clothes and good times galore.

It might be hard to believe that we could move around in public so freely without being recognized, but it’s the truth. Like I said before, most people don’t really
look
at others, and it’s even truer in a big
city than in a burg. Only cops pay close attention to the faces around them—but then so did we. We all had pretty good antennas for detecting cops, and we almost always spotted them before they did us.

It was funny to have the police in three states searching for us, and all the while we were right in the heart of Chicago, having a swell time, us and our girls. Even Charley, the last of the bachelor holdouts, got himself a steady girlfriend, a singer he’d met in a lakeside club. He insisted we had to hear her sing, so one night the bunch of us went over to the club where she was working. And Charley was right, she was a really fine crooner, and very pretty. She was Mexican—her name was Corazón or Concepción, something like that, I don’t remember exactly because Charley had nicknamed her Tweetybird and then called her Tweet for short, and that’s what we all called her too. She had a beautiful complexion the color of caramel, and gleaming black hair she wore in a braid down to the small of her back. After her set, she joined us at the table, and the way she and Señor Charles looked at each other it was obvious that amor was in the making. Any woman who could appreciate Charley’s charms under his pudgy, middle-aged plainness was aces with us, but naturally that didn’t keep us from kidding him about robbing the cradle and asking her what kind of mickey he was using to make a doll like her fall for an old fatty like him and so forth. Tweet had a great sense of humor, however, and took the ribbing as well as Charley did. She had come to Chicago from Tucson, where her widowed mother and younger sister still lived, and she was the only woman in the bunch who had never set foot among outlaws before throwing in with us. When we met her, Charley had of course already told her who we were.

The next day, when it was only us guys having a drink together, he said he’d told Tweet the truth about himself on their second date. He was afraid she’d be shocked, scared, maybe go running to the nearest precinct station to rat him out. To the contrary, he said, she was—to use his word—enrapt.

A gentleman does not kiss and tell, he said, but I
will
say that the remainder of that evening proved most exhilarating.

I laughed and said It’s an old story, pal. Even the nicest girls can get all gooey about us gangster types.

That’s a fact, Charley said. A man can only wonder at the fearsome mysteries of the female heart.

Hell, Red said, even women don’t understand women.

Charley said some ancient sage once remarked that any woman on earth would willingly mate with the world’s bloodiest tyrant in hope of bearing a son strong enough to murder the father.

What the hell did
that
mean, Russell wanted to know.

Charley said he wasn’t exactly certain, but he didn’t for a moment doubt the truth of it.

It means they got a chip on their shoulder, John said. Broads are pissed-off because men can kick their ass and fuck them by force if that’s what it takes. The only way a broad can kick a man’s ass is if another guy does it for her, but then she’s got to fuck
that
guy, like it or not. They figure the only guy they can count on not to stick it to them is sonny-boy, so that’s who they try to use to get back at all the other men in the world.

A provocative thesis, Jonathan, Charley said. You should be lecturing in philosophy at Yale.

You mean
jail,
Russell said.

Charley ignored the wisecrack and said the weakness in John’s reasoning was that it didn’t allow for such aberrant sonny-boys as Oedipus. As I’m sure you gentlemen recall, he said, Oedipus slew his father and had highly improper relations with his mother.

Red said With his
father’s
mother? He fucked his
grandma?

Charley gave him one of his reproving schoolmaster looks and Red laughed.

Russell said he’d always thought Oedipus was the French word for a guy who jazzed with his face.
Eat
-a-puss, he said. Get it?

Charley looked pained, but he’d asked for it with that
as I’m sure
you gentlemen recall
remark. He rarely got high-hat about his education, but whenever he did we were quick to jump on him for it.

Oedipus sounds like some raggedy-ass foreigner just off the boat, John said. I wouldn’t put a thing past some wop named Oedipus.

Russell agreed. He was sure Oedipus was a mug who once worked for Capone.

I know the mug you mean, I said. Reggie Oedipus. Wrecking-ball Rex they called him. Was doing thirty-to-life in Joliet for stabbing his old man and jazzing his mom. He spent so much time in the hole it ruined his eyes.

That’s him, Russell said. Old Rex didn’t know the meaning of the word
fear.

Come to think of it, Red said, there were only about a dozen words old Rex
did
know the meaning of.

Charley said a little learning was a dangerous thing and most dismaying to behold. But he was laughing too.

E
xcept for Copeland and Shouse, we usually all had supper together and then went dancing afterward. When we didn’t go to a club we’d go to the movies, or now and then to the prizefights, where we always got ringside seats.

The girls loved boxing as much as we did, and sometimes they got so worked up at a fight it was more fun watching them than the pugs in the ring. I mean, when they got blood in their eye the girls were something to see. They’d holler for the boxer they were pulling for to kill the other one. They’d shout Kill him, kill him!—only they didn’t say it like guys say it, they meant
kill
him. When they’d get spattered with the fighters’ blood they’d go even wilder. They howled like wolves when their guy was landing some good ones, and when he was getting the worst of it they’d turn the air blue with the profanity they used on the other guy. Tweet’s Latin blood sometimes got so steamed she’d cut loose in Spanish that didn’t need translating but
surely would’ve made her momma’s ears burn. And
Billie
—oh man, sometimes she looked like she was ready to jump into the ring and scalp somebody. At the end of a great round, Mary would be panting like
she’d
been fighting, her eyes blazing with a furious thrill.

One time during a terrific middleweight fight, we were all on our feet and yelling like crazy, and Opal got so carried away, flailing with her big fists, that she accidentally clipped Russell on the side of the head and knocked him down into his seat, and a guy in the row behind us started counting over Russ like a referee.

The girls’ excitement, however, was why we didn’t go to the fights more often than we did. Their screaming and carrying on drew a lot of attention, and compared to a movie house a boxing arena is pretty well lit up. There was too much chance somebody in the crowd would recognize us and blow a whistle, and how do you make a fast getaway from a ringside row in a packed house?

As for Copeland and Shouse, none of us had seen either of them since the night at the Tiger’s Rag until one evening when Red and Patty ran into Shouse in the parking lot of a riverside club. He was driving a beat-up Model-T coupe with a missing front fender, and Red naturally asked him how come, a guy with his dough? Shouse said he’d bought a brand-new Lincoln the day after Greencastle, but inside a week he’d lost all the rest of his money at the gambling tables and had to sell the Lincoln and get a cheaper car. That was Shouse for you. He told Red he’d moved out of Copeland’s place and was now living with a girl near the university, and he gave Red her phone number in case we needed to reach him. He said Copeland had taken up with some bimbo who worked the box office at a girlie club.

I had already decided that Copeland couldn’t lick his booze problem and had to go, and John no longer had any objections. We went to Knuckles’ place to pay him off, but he wasn’t home, so we left a note saying to get in touch. A few days later he dropped by, and you could see in his face he knew what was coming. When I broke it to him, he asked for one more chance. He swore he quit drinking.

I said he’d had his one more chance.

He turned to John, who said Sorry, pal.

I gave him his share of the kitty money and wished him luck. He went out the door looking worn as an old man.

We didn’t think he would rat us if he got collared and the cops leaned on him, but then again why take the chance? The next day we all moved to new apartments. Billie and John continued to live with Mary and me, but now Red moved in with Patty and Russ and Opal. Charley took a small place of his own in the same building as theirs, even though he was spending most of his nights at Tweet’s place on the lake.

In only a few days, however, we’d all have to move again.

F
or all the fun we were having, we hadn’t lost sight of business. Just as we were about to get in touch with Sonny Sheetz to see if he had something for us, Pearl Elliott came up from Kokomo, bringing us a half-dozen cold license plates and a big fat tip on a bank.

It had nothing to do with Sheetz and it wasn’t a set-up. An associate of hers—Let’s call him George, she said—had it on good authority that a certain bank not far from Chicago would soon be receiving a shipment of cash to finance federal work projects around the state, something in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars.

Twenty-five, Russell said, is that
all?
—and got a good laugh. Before the Greencastle haul, not a man among us wouldn’t have drooled at the thought of a twenty-five-grand haul.

Most of the money wouldn’t stay in the bank for long before being routed to its various recipients. In exchange for the name of the bank and the date the cash would be there for sure, this George guy wanted 15 percent of the take. Pearl’s cut would come out of his.

It sounded too good to pass up, and the other guys were all for it.
I told Pearl she had a deal. It was the American Bank and Trust in Racine, Wisconsin, some sixty miles north of Shytown, and the cash would be there in eight days.

T
he next morning Charley and Mary and I drove up to Racine and spent two days doing the usual case—noting the bank’s routine, diagramming the layout, coming up with three getaway routes to a lakeside camp a little north of Milwaukee, where we reserved a pair of cabins for three days in the coming week.

We were heading back into Chicago on an icy morning, the skyline coming into view, when we heard a radio report that on the previous evening John and two companions, a man and a woman, had been in a gunfight with more than a dozen policemen.

According to the report, the cops had set a trap for him outside an office building where they’d been informed he had a doctor’s appointment. But John somehow managed to get to his car and take off before they could arrest him. One of the police cars gave chase through the city streets with the cops shooting at him as they went. They said they’d had to open fire and risk hitting bystanders because all three of the fugitives were shooting at them—Dillinger and the girl firing pistols from the windows, the other man shooting a machine gun from a porthole in back of the car—and they said they had a shot-up windshield to prove it. They claimed the fugitives’ car had been made bulletproof. The chase lasted about five miles before John gave them the slip.

Holy Joe,
Mary said.

Machine-gun fire through a
porthole,
indeed, Charley said. A
bulletproof
car. What patent nonsense.

Cops and newspapermen, I said. They have to pass a liar’s test before they can get the job.

Charley said he’d wager the whole gang had already changed residences.

He was right. John was waiting for us at the apartment, sitting at the table and reading the newspaper, and when we walked in he grinned big and held it up so we could see the headline about his skirmish with the cops. He said we didn’t live there anymore, everybody had moved to new places a few hours earlier. He and Billie had already transferred Mary’s and my belongings, and Russ and Opal had taken Charley’s stuff to a hotel apartment they’d got for him two streets over from the one they’d moved to with Red and Patty.

He tapped the newspaper and said You seen this?