Handsome Harry (28 page)

I gave him the two-finger Up yours sign.

Yeah, he said, that’s what I’da liked to do to her too.

Russell thought it wouldn’t have taken much to talk her into joining us. She’s got the leaning, he said, I could tell.

All the best ones got the leaning, John said, and got no argument from any of us.

We made it to the cabins without incident. Even the weather was in our favor—a cold wind gusting off the lake and making it natural for everybody to stay indoors and out of sight.

The take came to a hair under $30,000. Forty-five hundred went to Pearl and her informant and we took cuts of five grand apiece and put the remainder in the common kitty. On top of the money we still had from Greencastle, we were feeling like fat cats.

We laid low for the next three days, enjoying the commotion we made in the news. Wisconsin lawmen promised to bring us to justice and blah-blah-blah. As we moseyed back to our cars in Waukegan by way of meandering back roads, the newspapers were still peddling panic to the citizens. As always, though, some of the letters to the editor made it clear that not everyone was howling for our scalps. There were plenty of citizens who didn’t think we were much worse than some civic officials and probably a lot less worse than most bankers.

A
fter the Racine job we took it easy for a while. John bought a new Terraplane, a sedan this time, so the car had room for a few pals. It was a deep blue color like none of us had ever seen on a car before, and he christened it the Blueberry. Red ponied up a hefty $2,600 for a new brown-and-yellow Packard coupe with white-walled tires, spoked chrome wheels, and tan leather seats. He also let us guys in on a secret—he’d recently taken up with a hotel waitress named Elaine Dent Sullivan Burton DeKant, a moniker that got the laugh from us he expected. He said he’d asked her name one morning as she served his coffee at the restaurant and by the time she got done saying it he was ready for a refill. She told him she was di
vorced but she continued to call herself Mrs. DeKant because it sounded more respectable. In addition to the apartment he and Patty shared with Russ and Opal, Red had rented himself another place under the name of Orval Lewis, and that was where he was putting the blocks to the respectable Mrs. DeKant. He said she had the best melons he’d ever seen—out to here and with nipples that stuck up like thumbs. She was giving him such a good time that when he bought himself the new Packard, he made her a present of his green roadster and even promised to get the crooked fender fixed. We got a kick out of his monkeyshines, but Russell warned him that if Patty found out what he was up to she was liable to go at him
and
the respectable Mrs. DeKant with a butcher knife.

We didn’t have any real close calls for about two weeks after Racine, not until the end of Prohibition—the fifth of December, who could forget?

On the first night of legal boozing in fourteen years, all of Chicago went on a toot. Every nightclub and neighborhood beer bar was packed to the gills. People drank in the streets, dancing and singing, offering toasts to each other. I’d never heard a louder night, not even on New Year’s Eve. Drunks yahooing and klaxons honking and firecrackers blasting and—just like on New Year’s Eve—gunfire sounding all over town as citizens took the opportunity to try to shoot down the moon from their windows and backyards. The city put extra cops on the streets, but most of them got pretty drunk themselves.

All our favorite speakeasies were now legitimate drinking joints, but with the heat on us more than ever after the ruckus we’d made in Racine, we hadn’t been sure it was a good idea to show ourselves in public on a night when half the city would be out carousing too. John suggested we go to the Silk Hat, a black-and-tan club with a great jazz band over on the south shore that he and Billie often went to and that he’d been recommending to the gang for weeks. None of the rest of us had gone there because we didn’t see any sense in driving that
far for a drink and a dance when the Loop was full of great clubs. John and Billie liked it because even though it was spacious and drew big crowds its lighting was really dim—except for up on the bandstand—and couples could get pretty intimate without attracting attention. John told me Billie once blew him at their table and not even the party sitting next to them was the wiser. Besides, the Silk Hat was also dark in another respect—most of its crowd was Negro, and spooks weren’t inclined to blow the whistle on anybody. So that’s where we went to celebrate.

The club staff all knew John—Mr. Sullivan to them—and knew him for a big tipper. We were given a choice table at a front corner of the large dance floor. It was a swell band and the service was good, and like John said, the lighting was so low it was hard for anyone to get a good look at your face unless they were right next to you.

In honor of the occasion, we’d loosened our drinking rules, boosting our limit to four drinks apiece—except for Billie, of course. John had finally wised up to how she’d been managing to get buzzed whenever we all had a night out together even though nobody ever bought her a drink. He gave Mary a lecture about it and Mary lectured him right back, saying she could share her drinks with anybody she wanted to without his permission, thank you very much. Since then he’d kept a closer eye on both of them. But on this special night he let Billie have three drinks on her promise to space them at least an hour apart and not to sneak sips from Mary’s glass.

Anyhow, what happened was this. Sometime around midnight, as I was making my way toward the gents’ through the raucous mob and a haze of blue smoke so thick you could feel it on your face, I spotted John coming out of the wide entrance to the men’s room. I was about to go up and ask if he could direct me to the local temperance hall, but at that moment a pair of palookas, white guys in overcoats, closed on him from either side. The taller one in a pale fedora grabbed his arm and John tried to pull away but the short one in the brown hat got hold of his other arm and John suddenly went still and I knew
Shorty was holding a gun on him through his overcoat. All I could see of their faces were their grins, like they’d just run into an old pal. Pale Hat slickly took John’s piece off him and put it in his own coat pocket. I figured them for cops trying to make an arrest without exciting all the drunks around them.

With a hand on John’s shoulder Pale Hat spoke to him with his mouth almost at his ear. I didn’t know if John had seen me, but if he had he was being careful not to look my way. There wasn’t fifteen feet between them and me, but the milling crowd made for good camouflage. I slipped a .38 out of the holster at the small of my back and held it under my coat flap, wishing I hadn’t left the .45 in the car. It was the .38 I’d taken from the sheriff in Lima. For some reason its grip felt perfect in my hand, and it had become my favorite backup piece.

Now Pale Hat stepped back from John and said something more. John shook his head, and the guy took a look around. I sidled over some to keep a screen of people between us. Pale Hat then put a chummy arm around John’s shoulders and was yakking into his ear again as the three of them headed for the side exit. I couldn’t see our table from where I stood, so I couldn’t signal for help before following them outside.

The side door opened into an alley crammed with cars parked at all angles. The night was still clamoring with car horns and fireworks and random gunshots. A faint scent of burnt powder mingled with the reek of garbage. About ten yards to my left the alley abutted a street and was illuminated by a streetlight. To the right the shadows were deep and long and it was a good thirty yards to the next street.

And there they were, maybe twenty feet away, the three of them standing next to a sedan facing in the other direction, its motor idling and its lights on. There were two vague figures in the car, at the front window and at the wheel.

As the short one started to open a back door, the tall one said Hey, and they all turned toward me.

Because of the streetlight, I was showing them a clear silhouette,
but I knew they couldn’t see the gun I held against the front of my thigh as if I had my hand in my pants pocket. And against the cast of the headlights down the alley behind them, their shapes stood out too. I could tell John was the one in the middle.

They didn’t know who I was or they wouldn’t have just stood there. Like skating on thin ice, speed was everything, and I was already moving toward them as I said in a buddy-buddy tone Hey guys, which way she go?

The short one said
What?

The blonde, I said, closing in on them, hoping John was set. She come this way?

No blonde come out here, Mack, the tall one said. Beat it.

Shorty put his hand in his coat pocket and took a step toward me.

There
the bitch goes, I said, and pointed down the alley with my left hand.

It put them off balance for half a second but that was enough. I was three feet from Shorty and shot him in the face, the bulldog sparking bright. John pounced on him as he fell and I shot the tall one twice and his gun clattered on the pavement and he staggered back and crashed into the garbage cans. The guy behind the wheel was halfway out of the car when I shot him in the head and he lurched against the door and slid to the ground in an awkward fold.

I spun toward the one still in the car as he was bringing up a shotgun and
bam,
John let him have it in back of the head with Shorty’s pistol. The guy pitched over on the seat and John poked the gun through the window and shot him again.

It was over just that fast. My ears rang and the gunpowder haze stung my nose.

Brother,
John said, and blew out a breath like he’d been holding it for an hour.

Bastard cops, I said. Even through the garbage stink and the gun-smoke I could make out the smell of their blood. A dark puddle of it was spreading around Shorty’s head.

Cops, my ass, John said. These are the Quarrys. Let’s scram.

We ran down the alley to the far end of the block and then tried to look casual as we walked out onto the street and up around the corner and ambled down to the club’s front entrance. I can’t speak for John, but my heart was going like a jackhammer and it was hard to draw an even breath and my legs were a little feathery and I had a strong urge to piss and I’d never felt more…
alive
…in my life.

We went in the club and rounded up the others and got out of there. As we headed for our cars parked a block away we gave the other guys a run-down of what happened. As we were driving off, a squad car with its light flashing but its siren mute turned onto the street flanking the club and stopped next to the alley entrance.

R
ed and Russell walked Patty and Opal to the front door of the apartment house while Charley put Tweet in a taxi for home. Then the guys followed me and John over to our new house. When we got there, Billie and Mary excused themselves and went to the bedrooms so we could talk in private.

John said the tall one in the pale hat was Art Quarry and the shorty was named Bud. The two in the car were their brothers. The Art one told John they’d been hunting him ever since he stole their money out of Greencastle. Then they got an anonymous telephone tip about his fondness for the Silk Hat. They’d been there every night for a week, waiting for him to drop by, posting themselves by the men’s room because sooner or later every man’s got to water the lilies. They were about to give up on the Silk Hat for good when they spotted him. If he’d waited five minutes to take his piss they would’ve missed him. The Art guy thought that was funny. He called it a quirk of fate.

I said the Art guy didn’t know the half of it. If they’d left five minutes earlier they wouldn’t be lying in the morgue.

They told John they were taking him where nobody would hear
his screams while they discussed how he would repay their fifty grand.

I have to tell you, boys, John said, I was never so glad to see anybody as when Pete came out that door.

They couldn’t hear enough about the fight. After John told it, they had me tell it, and both times Russell asked the same thing: They never got off a shot? Not
one
shot?

Never had a chance, John said, not against Pistol Pete.

Or him, I said. The shotgun might’ve nailed me if John didn’t nail him first.

Red said the whole thing sounded fucking outstanding and goddamnit why did he always miss out on the fun.

Charley asked if all four of the miscreants were expired.

I told him I thought so but we hadn’t bothered to make sure. We’d see what the paper said in the morning.

Russ wondered why the Micks had been hunting for John in particular and not for anybody else in the bunch. I asked who he’d look for if he’d read in the paper that the
Dillinger
Gang stole his money.

Quite so, Charley said—he who basks in the limelight shall attract the most attention, for worse as well as better.

John said if Mr. Makley’s crack about basking in the limelight was some kind of snide reference to the way he
used
to enter a bank’s cashier cage—and he hoped Mr. Makley noticed that he did
not
use that method in Racine—then Mr. Makley could go to hell.

I indubitably shall, Mr. Fairbanks, Charley said, and hard upon your heels, I’m sure.

As for the phone tip the Quarrys got about the Silk Hat, they might not’ve known who gave it to them, but we did. Ed Shouse, no question about it. He tipped the Quarrys to get back at John for the ass-kicking he gave him. John said he was putting the bastard at the top of his list.

After we all had a nightcap beer and the others left and it was only the two of us, John told me he’d never killed a man before. He
said it like he was unsure of how he felt about crossing that particular line.

Well, I told him, he sure killed that one tonight, and as far as I was concerned he couldn’t have picked a better time to bust his cherry.

Listen, I said, it’s them or us. Simple as that. Them or us.