Handsome Harry (34 page)

I slept late and then ate a large breakfast in the hotel dining room and read the newspaper versions about the East Shy job. The cops had recognized John and Red but not me. They’d found the shot-up Plymouth and said that judging from the blood-soaked seat they were sure they had
mortally wounded
John Hamilton. Good. If they thought he was dead they wouldn’t be searching all over Chicago for him.

The cop John killed was named O’Malley. The story mentioned more than once that he had a wife and kids, and it used the word
tragic
at least a half-dozen times. As if having a family was supposed to give a cop some kind of special protection from harm. As if we weren’t supposed to shoot back if a
family man
shot at us. Christ, where do people get such loony notions? If a cop doesn’t want to risk making his wife a widow or leaving his children fatherless, what’s he doing being a cop? Awfully irresponsible, if you ask me. There oughta be a law.

In spite of the cold wind, I took a stroll through the riverside park. The trees were skeletal and the sky had no color at all. The buildings looked like huge gray tombs. People were bundled deep into their coats, their faces muffled to the eyes and their hats pulled down tight, and they walked with their heads bent to the wind. My memory of Florida seemed unreal, Miami like something I’d dreamt.

In the afternoon I went to the movies, a double feature—
Gold Diggers of 1933
and a Mae West flick with angels in the title. I’d seen the Gold Digger one before, together with the other guys, and we’d argued about which of the dancers was the best-looking. But there was no disagreement with Red’s idea that a wonderful way to die would be to smother under a pile of the entire long-legged, bare-assed gang of them.

I missed Mary bad. I hadn’t spent much time alone since getting clapped into Pendleton nine years before, and the solitude felt strange in a way I can’t explain. Back at the hotel I telephoned my mother and said I wanted to pay a quick visit. She said she hadn’t spotted any cops for the past few days, but that didn’t mean they weren’t watching, so be careful.

It was already dark outside when there came a knock at the door and a husky female voice said Telegram for Mr. Roark. I figured it was from Mary and thought maybe something had gone wrong. I was digging in my pocket for a tip as I pulled the door open—and there she stood, holding her overcoat closed around her, a small travel bag dangling from her shoulder, and smiling the greatest smile I’ve ever seen.

Actually, sir, Mary said, it’s more a special delivery than a telegram. She glanced up and down the hall, then said
Ta-daaa
and threw the coat open to show me how terrifically naked she was underneath it.

I pulled her into the room and shut the door and she shrugged out of the coat and jumped on me and we tumbled to the floor, laughing and grabbing and smooching. Our first go of the evening was there on the floor with my pants around my ankles and my knees getting rug burns.

W
e were at my mother’s for two days and saw no sign of police lookouts. My dad and Fred took turns going for casual walks to scout the property line. Mom told us about her and Fred’s run-in with the law in Terre Haute and their four hours as jailbirds. Her description of the dressing down she gave Matt Leach made Mary laugh, but I felt a touch of the anger that had taken me to Indy to shoot him for the bullying bastard he was. We told them about our Florida vacation, and they marveled at Mary’s descriptions of Miami and said the place sounded too good to be true. I
said it did to me too, and I’d seen it with my own eyes. We caught up on our sleep and went for walks in the woods behind the property and had fun sliding around on the frozen surface of the creek. And on a Friday morning before sunrise we said goodbye and promised to visit again as soon as we got back from out West.

It was cold but mostly sunny as we angled down through the bare cornfields of Illinois, and crossed the river into St. Louis. If you’ve never seen the Mighty Mississip, brother, you’ve got a treat in store. Then came the rugged Ozark country of south Missouri and northern Arkansas, the roads winding through dense thickets and around deep ravines. We went through the Indian Nations in Oklahoma and through oil field country where the earth was stained black for miles and miles.

We crossed the Red River into Texas and spent a night in Dallas. While we were taking supper in a café, I saw in a newspaper a few days old that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had busted a partner of theirs out of an East Texas prison camp in broad daylight and killed one guard and wounded another in the process. We’d been hearing things about those two since the spring and summer before we broke out of M City. They’d been in some bad shootouts with the cops, and I recalled that Clyde’s brother had been killed in a police ambush sometime the previous summer. John thought they were nothing but triggerhappy, harebrained hillbillies, but I always admired their moxie. The only picture I’d seen of Bonnie Parker was the one almost everybody had seen, the one with a cigar in her mouth, which as much as anything else established her newspaper reputation as a rough, queer hardcase. But the farther south we went, and especially once we got into Texas, the more we heard the rural folk speak of them in the same admiring way a lot of Midwest working people spoke about us—not to mention a lot of people who were
out
of work. When folks see the Law siding with those who make life hard for them, they’re just naturally going to root for the outlaws.

Anyhow, the picture of Bonnie that ran with this story was a different one. She was posing against the back of a Ford and smiling at the camera with her hip angled sexily in a clingy black dress and her blond hair showing under a sassy beret. I’d had no idea she was so pretty, or so small. It wouldn’t be till I was on death row and heard the news of her and Clyde getting ambushed by a posse—a bunch of goons so scared of a pair of kids they had to shoot them more than 150 times to be sure they were dead—that I’d find out she was exactly the same size as Mary. Four feet eleven and ninety pounds. Mary took a look at the picture and said Bonnie was wearing really nice shoes, a detail that had escaped my notice. In the interest of sticking with the whole truth, I’ll confess that after I saw that picture of Bonnie Parker I had dreams about her. I’ll even admit some of them were a little racy—like the one where we were sharing a tub filled with bubble bath in some luxury hotel and she said she never imagined anything could be so grand and Chicago was like a dream come true. She was excited about our plan to rob a bank together. She was smart and funny and had a Texas accent that knocked me out. I have no idea what she kissed like in real life, but let me tell you, the kiss she gave me in that tub was the kiss of all time. In most of the dreams, though, we had our clothes on and were either walking along the lakeshore or sitting at an outdoor café table and laughing about something. When I’d wake up I could never remember what we’d been laughing about. And I’d be holding on to Mary and feeling guilty as sin.

We drove across dusty brown North Texas plains that stretched to the horizons, and I bought some arrowheads for Red at an Indian curio shop. We entered New Mexico and took a look at Albuquerque, then turned south along the Rio Grande. The river was the color of rum and ran past yellow hills and green pepper fields and red and blue mountain ranges under thunderheads and faraway purple rain. We stopped for the night at a motor court in Las Cruces,
and we made love at sunset in an unreal ruby light flooding the cabin through an open window. Then we got dressed again and walked to a Mexican restaurant down the road and had a supper of roast kid and rice while a small brown man in a white suit sat in a corner playing a guitar and singing softly in Spanish. When we walked back to the cabin the sky was packed with stars, and a copper crescent moon was low over the mountains. I can close my eyes and still see it all as clear as a snapshot.

Mary phoned Tweet and they chattered loud and all excited for a while in the way women friends do. Tweet gave her a telephone number for Charley and Russell and one for John. She said Russ and Charley had stayed in a hotel their first few days in town, but the night before last the place caught on fire. Lucky for them they’d rented a house the day before and it was ready to move into. They were using the names Davies and Long. As for John and Billie, they’d arrived yesterday and were staying in a tourist-camp cabin until they could find a house too. She gave Mary the name and address of the camp and said John was registered as Frank Sullivan.

We had an early breakfast and then headed west. At daybreak the Buick’s shadow reached way out ahead of us. We passed through landscapes marked by buttes and mesas, low dark mountains and flat stretches of scrubland. We rarely saw another car. By midmorning we were in Arizona and the mountains grew higher and more jagged. We started seeing a lot of those big cactuses with their arms up like they’re being robbed. We drove through narrow red canyons and thickets of scraggly trees with bright green bark.

All in all, I liked the desert country, but Mary wasn’t keen on it. She preferred places with tall leafy trees. As far as she was concerned, a mesquite was nothing but a big thorny weed, and the wide open spaces made her nervous. She wished we’d never left Florida, and her heart was set on Miami more than ever. I said we’d be back there soon enough—and for some reason thought of the big laugh John and I
had on the drive from Daytona when we’d asked each other about our plans for settling down.

I don’t even bother trying to imagine the life we could’ve had in Florida. It’d be like trying to imagine the life we could’ve had on the moon. Because once we got to Tucson, the life I could’ve had was all decided.

It was a small, pretty town with mountains on almost every side, and I hadn’t seen so many people in cowboy hats except in movies.

The Wild West, Mary said.
Yeeee
-haw.

I said not every town could be as sophisticated as Chicago.

For God’s sake, Harry, she said, this burg makes Indianapolis seem sophisticated.

We stopped for lunch at a chili parlor, then found the tourist camp and I registered us as Harry and Mary Thompson. I asked if my friend Frank Sullivan had checked in, and the clerk said he sure had, yesterday, and he kindly assigned us the cabin next door to John’s. As soon as I parked the car, John and Billie came rushing out their door to greet us and there was a lot of back-slapping and hugging and laughing and how-about-this-town and so on.

We had a beer and told each other about the family visits and our drives west. After visiting his dad, John and Billie had gone to Kansas City for two days and had a great time in the jazz clubs, which
he said could hold their own with Shytown’s. We begged off joining them for lunch and a movie since we’d already eaten and wanted to shower and rest up, but agreed to supper at seven o’clock at a steak house Russ and Charley had recommended. He wrote down the address and said he’d stop by their place later and ask them to join us.

I joined Mary in the shower and we fooled around some and did each other’s back, then took turns drying each other off, then flopped on the bed and had a nice quickie. After napping a couple of hours, we decided to go out and have a drink somewhere before meeting the others at the steak house. It was another beautiful desert sunset as we drove out of the tourist camp and turned toward downtown.

When I stopped for a red light at the end of the block, a cop car pulled up behind me. I checked them out as I pretended to adjust my phony specs in the rearview. There were two of them in the car, a uniform behind the wheel, a plainclothes in the shotgun seat. The driver tapped his horn lightly and the plainclothes guy stuck his head out the window and smiled and waved us over to the curb.

I gave him a friendly wave in return and pulled over, and the cops parked behind me. I thumbed off the safety on the .45 under my arm and drew the .38 from its belt holster on my side and held it in my left hand, against the door. Be ready, I whispered to Mary.

She was looking back at them and said she didn’t think they were wise to us. They didn’t seemed scared enough.

The one on the passenger side got out with his hands empty and came up to my window all smiles. Nice brown suit. He said he was sorry to trouble me but apparently I wasn’t aware that visitors with out-of-state license plates were required to register their vehicles with the city police. I said I’d never heard of any such ordinance anywhere, and he said neither had he. It was intended to cut down on smuggling cars across the Mexican border—a pretty useless law, if you asked him, but what could you do? Every officer on the force—uniform
and
plainclothes, mind you—was under orders to strictly enforce the ordinance or lose his job.

I thanked him for letting me know about it and promised to take care of the registration first thing in the morning. He said if I didn’t take care of it right away, I’d be getting pulled over every few blocks, and as much as he hated to admit it, there were fellows on the force darn quick to ticket an out-of-state car if it didn’t have a registration decal—and even to impound the car if they got an argument. That’s what happened to his own cousin visiting from Oregon two weeks ago, believe it or not. His cousin swore never to set foot in Tucson again and who could blame him. Wait till enough tourists got mad and stopped coming to town, see how fast they got rid of the stupid law then and quit wasting police manpower. Meantime, the best thing was to get my car registered right away. Wouldn’t take two minutes, and he’d even ride with us to give me the quickest directions to the station and make sure we didn’t have to wait around when we got there.

I had to decide fast—shoot him and run, or play it like a good citizen and see what happened. If he was on to me, he was cooler than any cop I’d ever come across. But for weeks I’d been going unrecognized by cops all over the Midwest, so how could this hick be wise? Not likely. I turned to Mary and she made a face and said she wasn’t the least surprised about the dumb law and let’s just get it over with.

Hop in, officer, I said, and slipped the .38 under my belt at my side.

He directed me to the station, chatting like an old buddy, asking about Florida, saying he’d always wanted to take a vacation there. I said he should, it was a great place and I ought to know, having lived there for the last ten years. We pulled up in front of the station and I told Mary I’d be right out. The other cop had followed us, and he parked in back of me and got out of his car too. He was bigger than Brown Suit and came ambling behind us.

Brown Suit said the registration forms were in the chief’s office and led the way through the door. The chief was standing beside his desk. His eyes widened when he saw me—and I saw Russ and Charley’s luggage piled against the wall behind him.

The next few seconds were pretty much a blur. I grabbed for the .45 but the big cop got me in a bear hug from behind and I couldn’t pull the piece out of the holster. Brown Suit tried to get my hand off the gun and I kneed him in the balls and sent him banging into the chief. I bucked and twisted, trying to shake the big one off me, and there was a lot of shouting as we crashed around the office and lost our hats and my glasses flew off and then Brown Suit and the chief were on me too and the four of us went down in a struggling heap. I got the gun out but couldn’t cock it because the big guy had his hand around the hammer. Then here came more cops, cursing, kicking me in the ribs, stomping on my head. Somebody wrenched my arm hard enough to make me holler and the .45 dropped out of my hand and the .38 was yanked off my belt. They wrestled me onto my belly and somebody sat on my head and somebody else pinned down my legs and they got the cuffs on me. And that was all she wrote.

They pulled me up on my feet and the chief grabbed me by the hair and said Oh yeah, oh
yeaaah
—we got us Mr. Handsome Harry here. You’re under arrest for a whole bunch of shit, Pierpont. And you’re gonna
burn
for killing that cop.

Christ on a crutch, I
walked
into that jail! I should’ve let that cop have it the second he stepped up to my car window, then jumped out and let the other one have it, then made a run for it.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda…. What could’ve happened did.

I’d been a free man exactly four months.

T
hey hustled me off to the county jail, which was bigger and more secure than the city lockup. When we got there the cops had to clear a way to the doors through a crowd of reporters shouting questions and popping flashbulbs. I couldn’t believe how fast they’d got the word about me, but a cop said they’d been hanging around the jail since my buddies got brought in a couple of
hours earlier. They were all locals so far, he said, but reporters were on the way from every corner of the country.

They took my prints, then sat me in front of the mug camera. I closed my eyes before the shutter clicked, so they tried again and I did it again. The booking sergeant said Piss on it, who cares? And they took me up to the cell block.

Charley and Russ were in adjoining cells and didn’t look happy to see me. Russell’s face was beat up and he had a bandage around his head like a big turban. They put me in with Charley, who quick stuck his hand out said The name’s Charles Makley, sir, what might yours be?—letting me know he’d been made, but he didn’t know if I had. We shook and I said I was Harry Thompson. He introduced Russ as Mr. Clark. The cops at the bars laughed at us and said we could quit the act anytime, that as soon as my prints were run they’d have me cold too. I asked what became of my lady friend and they said what did I think—she was under arrest for aiding and abetting. So was Opal, who in addition had been charged with assault.

When the cops moved out of earshot, the guys told me the sad story. Charley had been collared around two o’clock. He and Tweet were shopping for a radio in a store when suddenly there was a cop on either side of him and a gun in his ribs. One of them grabbed him by the hand and took a look at his mutilated finger and said Got you, fatso. They weren’t interested in a thing he had to say. The last time he saw Tweet, a cop had her by the arm out on the sidewalk, waiting for a squad car to come for them.

Russell they took at the house, but not without a scrap. A guy in a Western Union cap came to the door with a telegram for Mr. Long. He was such a shrimp Russ never suspected he was a cop. When he opened the door to sign for the message, the guy went for a gun under his jacket. Russ grabbed him and yanked him inside and they wrestled for the gun all over the house. The guy was little but he was a bulldog. Two more cops barged in through the back door and there was a lot of swearing and yelling and Russ caught a glimpse of Opal
swinging on them with both fists. Then he was on the floor with three guys on him and one of them whacking him on the head with a pistol like he was driving a nail. Next thing he knew they were dragging him out in cuffs and he could hear Opal cursing them but he could hardly see for the blood in his eyes. Later he found out that another cop had come running up to the front porch and Opal slammed the door on his hand and broke one of his fingers.

Our undoing, as Charley called it, was on account of the hotel fire. He’d awakened to the sound of an alarm and the smell of smoke and he ran out of his room just as Russell and Opal came rushing out of theirs, all of them in bathrobes. They got downstairs before remembering they’d taken all their guns out of the car and put them in one of the suitcases and the suitcase was up in the room. Except for a twenty-dollar bill Charley had in his robe, all their cash was in their bags too. They tried to go back upstairs but the firemen wouldn’t let them. Charley offered them the twenty if they’d save their luggage, and the firemen did it. He and Russ considered themselves lucky, not only because of the bags, but because they’d rented a house the day before and had been assured it would be ready to move into that morning. Russ took charge of the suitcase with the guns and Charley got some money from his bag and paid a hotel worker to take the rest of the luggage to their new place.

That,
Charley said, was a stupid move on his part.

I didn’t see the need to say how much I agreed with him.

The way the cops told it to Charley, the two firemen had raved to everybody in the firehouse about the double sawbuck tip. Somebody wondered what the luggage contained that was so important, and somebody joked that maybe the big tippers were gangsters, and somebody said maybe they really were. They started going through a stack of true-crime magazines, and
bingo
—there’s an article about John and his pals, and it’s got mug shots of all of us. The firemen called the cops. The cops interviewed the hotel staff. And soon enough they talked to the guy who’d taken Mr. Davies’
and Mr. Long’s luggage to their new address. They staked out the house, then followed Charley to the store and pinched him, then pulled the phony telegram business to get at Russell. In addition to all the guns and cash they found in the house, they came across a piece of paper with the address of a local tourist camp. Thinking John and I might be staying there, they’d sent a couple of men to scout it.

And now here
you
are, Charley said. It boggled his mind that a bunch of cowboys had apprehended the three of us with not a shot fired or an injury among them except for a fractured finger.

Listen, I said, as long as John’s still out there, this ain’t over, not by a long shot.

Ten minutes later here came John—wearing cuffs and leg irons. They’d laid for him at Russ and Charley’s, hoping he’d drop in. And he did.

W
e were allowed a phone call but it had to be local, so Charley called Tweet. Her mother answered and he identified himself as Leo Davies and the old lady gave him an earful before Tweet was able to get the phone away from her. Tweet said the cops had grilled her for two hours before she convinced them she’d had no idea of his real identity and let her go. Was there anything she could do? There was indeed, Charley told her. She could call Paulette Dewey, our attorney in Kokomo, Indiana, and tell her we were in severe need of legal representation. Charley didn’t enlighten her as to who Paulette Dewey really was—the less Tweet knew, the less legal risk she ran. We figured Pearl would call Sonny Sheetz, and he would either do something for us or he wouldn’t. Charley told Tweet that after making the call to Kokomo she was to stay out of the whole business and not contact him in any way. If she ever claimed she knew him as anyone other than Leo Davies, he would say she was a lying, publicity-hungry bimbo. She cried but
said she’d do as he asked. As far as I know, they never exchanged a word again after that phone talk.

At our arraignment the next day we had a lawyer, a guy from Los Angeles named Van Buskirk who we nicknamed the Dutchman. By that time I had been positively identified too, but not John. When they called his name in court and he was told to stand up, he said why should he, he wasn’t Dillinger. He insisted he was Frank Sullivan right up until his prints proved otherwise later in the day. The girls were in court too, all three of them charged with abetting us in some way or other. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Mary, but I gave her a wink and she managed a little smile in return.

During the next few days we were besieged by reporters at our cell doors. Russell said he now knew what the animals in a zoo felt like and all that was missing was peanuts for them to throw at us through the bars. One idiot asked Charley his opinion of the jail, and Charley said he had been in better bastilles. The guy started to write it down, then looked confused, and Charley spelled it for him. Another newshound turned out to be the son of an old friend of Charley’s back in St. Marys, and they chatted about mutual acquaintances and the old home ground. The kid couldn’t understand why a man as highly educated and well mannered as Mr. Makley would choose to become a gangster. Charley told him the reason was quite simple—because as a gangster he lived more in forty minutes than his old man had lived in forty years. The kid said Oh, I see. But you could tell that he didn’t see a thing.