Handsome Harry (36 page)

All the same, when I heard he was out, I didn’t have a doubt in the world
we’d
soon be out too. How could it go any other way? He’d helped us bust out of M City, and then we’d busted him out of jail, and now he’d busted out of a lockup everybody said was escape-proof. Escape-proof for ordinary guys, maybe, but not for the likes of us. Whatever his deal with Sonny Sheetz, I knew he wasn’t going to leave us to the wolves.

Not him. Not us.

Naturally Charley and I couldn’t talk about it, not with the guards right there in the runaround. But he could read my face from his cell. He cut his eyes around at the bars and at the guards in the runaround and made a gesture indicating all the guard-power posted outside the jail—and he shook his head and made a face that said
I don’t think so.

The guards weren’t looking, so I raised a fist and shook it and nodded hard—
Yes, yes.

He shrugged with uncertainty. Then showed a small smile. Then made a face:
Maybe.

Russell was watching us from his cell. I shook my fist at him too.
Yes…yes, goddamnit.

He seemed to sigh and his shoulders sagged. He stared at me without expression for a minute, then lay down and turned his face to the wall.

I wanted to yell, to throw something at him.

W
ord of John’s escape put Lima in a panic. Every cop and citizen out there was as certain as I was that he was rounding up a gang to come and liberate us. Overnight the town turned into a National Guard camp—and those soldier boys were not in a good mood after the way John had embarrassed their Indiana comrades.

They built a fence around the jail and strung rolls of barbed wire around it. They swept searchlights over the streets and alleyways all through the nights. They had machine guns in sandbag emplacements at each corner of the courthouse and on the rooftops of neighboring buildings. They even set up a machine gun
inside
the jail, at the end of the corridor in full view of our cells. The officer in charge said if anyone tried to free us, the first thing to happen is we’d get shot into hamburger.

I said it looked like they were expecting an invasion by the Prussian army. Charley laughed along with me, and I was glad to see Russell smile. The officer told us to shut the hell up, and Charley and I grinned and grinned.

Matt Leach arrived with a warning. He’d received a tip that Dillinger and his confederates were planning on sneaking into town in National Guard uniforms. Another rumor had it that John intended to kidnap the governor of Ohio and use him to ransom us. Every day a team of mining experts checked the grounds around the jail for signs of tunneling. Every day an army airplane scouted the local roads and rail tracks.

Jessie Levy brought word from Mary that she was thrilled to hear of John’s escape but was awful glad she’d been sticking close to home
and that the cops had been keeping her under surveillance. Otherwise they would’ve accused her for sure of abetting John in some way or other.

I
went to trial shackled hand and foot, the cops shoving a path through the rubbernecking yokels and bellowing newshounds mobbing the front of the courthouse. I held my cuffed hands up in front of my face as the cameras snapped all around me. Some of the papers described the atmosphere of the trials as carnival-like, but nuthouselike would’ve been closer to the mark.

The courtroom was packed, of course. Every spectator was patted for weapons before being allowed to enter, and a dozen men with shotguns were positioned around the room. Two guards, one in front, one behind, led me to the defense table. A man seated in a nearby chair held a submachine gun and stared hard at me. One of the cops said he was the son of the man I’d killed. He’d replaced his daddy as the high sheriff.

I never killed anybody, I said. I was damned if I was going to make it easy for them.

Not that the verdict was ever in doubt. The sheriff’s widow and the deputy who’d been on the scene each pointed at me from the stand and said I was the one who pulled the trigger.

And then they brought Ed Shouse from the Michigan City pen. He’d agreed to testify against us in exchange for Indiana dropping all charges on him pertaining to the killing. I wanted to jump up and throttle the bastard with my manacle chains. He never looked my way as he testified about being part of the crew that busted John out of Lima, not until the DA asked him if the man who shot Sheriff Sarber was present in the courtroom. Shouse pointed at me and said That’s him, Harry Pierpont, and he quick cut his eyes away again. I yelled out he was a low-down yellow liar, which of course is what he was, never mind that it was true about the sheriff—everybody already
knew that was true. The judge banged his gavel and said to strike my remark from the record. Shouse didn’t look at me again before they took him out. They would’ve nailed me even without his testimony, but that’s hardly the point. There’s nothing lower than a guy siding with the law against somebody he partnered with, no matter what kind of personal bitterness there is between them.

My defense was that I wasn’t in Lima on the day in question, that, in fact, I’d never been in Lima in my life. So how did I explain that the revolver taken off me in Tucson belonged to Sheriff Sarber? I’d had no idea it was Sarber’s gun—John had given it to me after someone else, I didn’t know who, had given it to him in Chicago. The widow Sarber and the deputy who said I shot the sheriff were simply mistaken. They’d been subjected to a terrifying experience and their memories couldn’t be trusted to recall the details of it accurately. Besides, there were thousands of men who looked like me. As for Shouse, you couldn’t believe a word out of his mouth. He was bitter because John beat him up and we kicked him out of the gang for trying to poach his partners’ women. He even stole a car from one of us. On top of all that, he was insane and everybody knew it. Ask Charles Makley. Ask Russell Clark.

Not much of a defense, I’ll be the first to admit, but it was all I had.

My mother took the stand and swore I was having supper with her at the farm in Leipsic on the day the sheriff was killed. She said I hid in a secret nook in the attic when the cops came searching for me a couple of hours after the jailbreak. The jurymen looked at her like she was saying she could fly. I wanted to kick hell out of all of them.

Like I said, the verdict was a foregone conclusion, and there was really no need for me to take the stand. But I did. I wanted to have my say. That gave the DA the chance to try to get my goat, but if you want my opinion, I got the better of him. The bastard said the only reason I’d agreed to stand trial in Ohio is that I wasn’t tough enough to take the hole at Michigan City. I said I’d been in the hole more times than he’d been kissed by women who weren’t his mother—
which got a small laugh from the crowd. I said I’d done stretches in the hole so long that I couldn’t stand up when they took me out, that I couldn’t see straight and it took days for my eyes to adjust to the light. I said a guy like him would bust into hysterics before he’d been in the hole an hour.

When he said we’d taken more than $300,000 from banks since breaking out of M City, I said if that was true I’d be retired in Miami Beach right this minute, sitting in the sun and sipping rum cocos. That got another laugh from the spectators and the judge warned them to keep order.

The DA said I couldn’t deny robbing several banks since my escape from Michigan City—there were dozens of eyewitnesses who’d identified me. I said I wasn’t denying it, but I was honest enough to do my robbing with a gun and man enough to take my chances against anybody who tried to stop me. At least I wasn’t a two-faced, double-talking, hypocritical bank president who used crooked books to rob widows and farmers of their property and life savings.
That
one got a big roaring laugh, and had the judge banging his gavel like a carpenter in a hurry.

I told the DA that men like him hated men like me because they knew damn well they didn’t have the daring to do what we did. It was that simple. Every time you look at me, I said, you see what a coward you are.

He acted all indignant, of course, but you could see in his face how hard the truth hit. I felt great, never mind that at the defense table Jessie Levy had her head in her hands.

It took the jury about forty minutes to convict me of murder in the first degree. The only question was whether they’d recommend mercy and spare me a mandatory death sentence—
and,
I might add, give me another chance to bust out of whatever joint they put me in. But when they came filing back into the courtroom I knew the answer before they gave it. One or two of them couldn’t even look at me, but the others, oh man, you could see the pleasure in their eyes.
A few of them were smiling at me the way sissies smile when the teacher pinches the ear of some classmate they’re all afraid of, some kid they show a completely different kind of smile to when it’s just him and them. I never smiled at
anybody
the way they were smiling at me. I wouldn’t be able to keep my self-respect.

Guilty and no mercy. The judge said I’d be sentenced after all three trials were concluded, but that was a mere formality. I couldn’t help thinking that if it hadn’t been for Shouse, the jury might’ve made the mercy recommendation. Then I thought
If, if, if,
and had to laugh out loud—which got me a lot of horrified looks.

The reporters swarmed up to the table, their flashbulbs popping. Mom rushed over to me and did her best to shield my face from them. She was crying and called them cannibals. I kissed her and whispered in her ear to not let them get her goat, to be strong. And then they took me away.

Charley’s trial was next. A half brother I didn’t even know he had came to testify that Charley was with him in St. Marys at the time of the Sarber shooting. The trial ran four days and then his jury was out all night, which Jessie said was a good sign—somebody was obviously arguing for mercy. As Charley left for court the next morning, I wished him luck. He grinned and said Seven come eleven. He wasn’t grinning when he came back. I asked what he got, and he said The kit and kaboodle. And didn’t say another word the rest of the day.

Then it was Russell’s turn. His disposition by then can be described as sheer indifferent gloom. He’d been sleeping eighteen, sometimes twenty hours a day. Jessie said he even nodded off in court a time or two. When they’d bring him back at the end of the day, we’d ask how it was going, and if he bothered to answer at all, he’d only shrug and stretch out on his bunk and be asleep as soon as his head was down.

But he got the luck. The verdict was guilty but with a recommendation of mercy. That was as it should’ve been. He never laid a hand on the sheriff.

The judge rejected Jessie’s motion for new trials, and we all got the sentences we expected. Russell drew life. Charley and I got the chair. We were scheduled to ride the lightning on a Friday the thirteenth less than four months away.

A
ll during the trials, I kept an eye out for John. But the news always had him a long way from us. He robbed a bank in South Dakota, of all places,
three days
after breaking out of Crown Point, though we didn’t hear about it till well after that. Mr. X told me there’d been a lot of shooting on that job and somebody wounded a cop. He said the gang took hostages on the running boards for the getaway, and I was reminded of Racine.

A week later, during Charley’s trial, they hit a bank in Iowa, and it was a wonder they got away. There was more wild shooting and the cops used tear gas and some of the citizens joined the police in taking shots at the robbers. To top it off, although they got around twenty grand, they left behind more than $150,000. Christ almighty. The whole thing smacked of bad comedy. I was sure Red was working with John on those jobs and I couldn’t believe they were capable of such sloppy work. But when I found out Homer Van Meter was in with them, plus that trigger-happy runt named Nelson or Gillis, whichever it was, it was clear enough to me why the jobs were going rocky. Still, I figured John was working on a plan for our deliverance, and I kept watching for him.

And he did show up. On the day we were sentenced.

We were being led back to the jail, shuffling in our shackles between two rows of National Guard riflemen forming a wide corridor across the street and holding back the crowd of spectators braving an icy wind to have another look at us. The three of us were bareheaded and the wind whipped our hair. It had the cops holding on to their hats. And as we started up the jailhouse steps, I spotted him.

He was well beyond the crowd, standing at the foot of a monu
ment in front of the courthouse, bundled in an overcoat and with his hat low over his face—but I knew it was him. It was only a few seconds, but long enough to see him raise his fist.

I’m out here, brother…hang on….

I laughed as I went through the door. Fat Charley arched his brow at me like I might be losing my grip, and I shook my head and laughed some more. I never did tell him about seeing John that day. I was afraid he’d say I couldn’t be sure it was him, not at that distance, and my disappointment in Charley would’ve been hard to take.

W
e were transferred to the Ohio state prison in Columbus on a frigid morning of blowing snow, once again in separate vehicles and accompanied by a caravan of cop cars. We sped along country roads and barreled through town after town, and even the bad weather didn’t keep the folk from gathering on the sidewalks, huddled in their coats, to squint at us as we whizzed by.

At one point, the car I was in fishtailed for a moment as we went through a curve, and I said to the driver What’re you trying to do, kill me? A couple of the cops snickered. One said it was too bad I was such a crumb or I might’ve made a good cop. Not on your life, I said—too many rules and too many bosses. I was sure right about that, the cop said.