Handsome Harry (6 page)

They found the bank money and Earl’s guns, then took him to the station and told him to save himself a hard time and give up the other
two partners. Earl said he didn’t know anything about us, including our names. Like Skeers, he was facing life on the habitual law, but he wouldn’t finger me or Pearl, even though they really gave him the business. Then the head cop sent a guy back to Earl’s place for another look-around and there was Sandra’s river house address on the icebox exactly where I’d left it.

They took me back to Indytown for the night, then drove me to Kokomo the next day and booked me into the Howard County jail. When they took me downstairs to the central lockup, we passed by Skeers in his isolated cell. I pointed my finger at him like a gun and said Your days are numbered,
Thaddeus,
you sorry son of a bitch. He wouldn’t even look at me.

Earl was stretched out on a bunk, his face bloated and black-and-blue. His ears looked like clusters of purple grapes. He said he’d been about to take the address off the icebox and put it in his pocket when the cops busted in. I told him he was a backbone guy and I was proud to know him. He said I shouldn’t talk too soon, that if they’d given him the business another five minutes he would’ve caved in.

We’d been in the clink two weeks when Pearl showed up for a visit. She signed in as my sister Gladys and showed a birth certificate to prove that’s who she was. She told me she’d arranged for a lawyer for us but it wouldn’t do much good, not with Skeers’s turning state’s evidence. She said Skeers hadn’t finked her too because he knew she was friends with Sonny Sheetz, the Indiana mob boss up in East Chicago, and nobody with an ounce of brains wanted trouble with Sonny. I said she didn’t have to worry about me and Earl keeping our mouths shut, but it wasn’t because we were scared of Sheetz or anybody else. I’d heard of Sonny Sheetz, but to tell the truth I was still ignorant of how much clout he really had. Pearl said she knew Earl and I were backbone guys and she appreciated it and that we could always count on her to help in any way she could.

Earl’s jury was moved by the testimony of his mother and his sis
ter Mary and refrained from recommending the habitual criminal sentence. Instead, he got twenty years at the state penitentiary at Michigan City. As for me, the prosecutor insisted that I was a hardened criminal who deserved the state pen no less than my partner. But Mom again came through with a good attorney. He made an eloquent argument that I was a young victim of bad company, that I never would’ve broken my parole or become involved in a bank robbery if it hadn’t been for the nefarious influence of Earl Northern, and that, given a chance at rehabilitation, I would yet prove a lawful and productive citizen.

Let’s hope so, the judge said—and packed me off to the new reformatory at Pendleton, saying I could be out in three years if I walked the straight and narrow while I was there.

It took a few hours for it to fully hit me that I was headed back behind bars, and then I was in such a rage I was afraid to open my mouth for fear I’d start howling and never be able to stop.

T
he Pendleton superintendent was a bigmouth named Miles. He liked for everybody to call him Boss. He was at the reception building to look me over when I arrived. He made a little speech about having read my Jeffersonville file and how he was convinced the court had made a mistake putting me back in a reformatory when my crime warranted the penitentiary and that I better not think I could get away with any monkey business at Pendleton and blah-blah-blah. When the processing clerk at the desk asked my name—as if he didn’t know—I said Millard Fillmore. I refused to sit in front of the mug-shot camera, so Miles ordered the hacks to force me into the chair and hold me there. Each time the guy was ready to take my picture, I shut my eyes or turned my head or stuck out my tongue and he’d have to take another one. After more than a half-dozen tries, Miles said the hell with it and told the clerk to use the best of the lot.

A pair of hacks yanked me up out of the mug chair and one of them said Real hardcock, ain’t you?

I said That’s exactly what your mother told me, only she was smiling.

I dodged his wild punch and gave him a knee in the nuts and down he went. Then down
I
went as the others laid into me with their canes. Miles wrote me up on the spot and told them to put me in the hole.

As the hacks dragged me out, he said I don’t believe you’ll be with us for long, Mr. Pierpont.

Me neither, I said, but my mouth wasn’t working quite right and he might not have understood me.

P
endleton was a larger and more modern version of Jeffersonville. Like J-ville it had a clothes plant, a bigger one, and its laundry was about twice the size of J-ville’s. It had a shop for making furniture and cabinetry, and a foundry for producing all kinds of ironwork. And just as at J-ville, all of it was operated for profit by a bunch of private bloodsuckers using inmate labor.

I was in solitary for two weeks before they assigned me to the furniture shop. The other inmates were respectful of me right from the start. Fight the hacks in front of the superintendent on your first day in the joint and nobody fails to understand that you’re not afraid of punishment and are not to be trifled with. But there was more to it than that. In any prison, everybody knows everything that’s on everyone else’s record, and a hell of a lot that’s not. By the time I came out of solitary every guy in Pendleton knew why I was there and had heard a lot more.

On my first day in the yard there were whispers all around me everywhere I went.

That’s him right there…Handsome Harry…Robs
banks,
man….
Shot
a man in Indytown…
Killed
a guy in J-ville with his bare hands….

And so forth.

I won’t deny the pleasure I got from all the talk, from the looks I drew. I never would care for public recognition out in the free world, but in the joint all you’ve got is the reputation you make for yourself and the balls to back it up. In the joint recognition is everything.

The first time I went to the mess hall, I picked out a table by the wall, where three guys were already sitting. I set my tray down and stood there staring at them. One didn’t lose any time picking up his tray and moving to another table. The other two looked at each other and then back at me and for a minute I thought they’d make a stand. But then they got up and moved too. It was my table from that day on and everybody knew it.

I’d been out of solitary less than a week when three guys came over at lunchtime one day and asked if they could join me. Two of them, Timmy Ross and Joe Pantano, I knew from J-ville. I’d never seen the other one before. I gave them the okay to sit down.

Ross introduced the third guy as John Dillinger. He pronounced the last syllable of his name the way John himself always did—
grrr,
like a growl, and not
jer,
the way everybody in the country would be saying it one day.

John offered his hand and I shook it. He said he was glad to know me, he’d heard a lot about me and so on. He was dark-haired and short, not much over five and a half feet, but he had a limber way of moving, like a boxer or a dancer—I would come to find out he’d been a good semipro baseball player—and he had a hell of a grip. He was only a year younger than me, but at the time he struck me as hardly more than a kid. There was nothing in particular about him to make you think he’d ever be the stuff of headlines. He was one of the few married guys in the place—I think he’d been married a year or so at the time—and he was dippy as hell for his wife. Beryl, her name was.

It was his first time in stir and he’d gotten a raw deal. Every guy behind bars says the same thing but in John’s case it was true. He and some stumblebum a lot older than him had robbed a grocer, and in
the course of things John gave the grocer a good whack on the head. It wasn’t long before they got pinched and were charged with felonious conspiracy and assault with intent to rob. The prosecutor assured John that if he pled guilty the judge would go easy on him as a first-time offender. So he went to trial without a lawyer and pled guilty—and the judge hammered him with ten to twenty years. His partner hired a lawyer for his own trial and even though he had a record he only got two to fourteen.

That’s the Law for you. Its promise isn’t worth spit. There’s never been a day I haven’t heard or seen something about the Law to make me hate it even more than I did the day before.

Anyhow, John worked in the clothes factory, and I heard he could operate a sewing machine like nobody’s business. As I came to find out, he was a whiz with anything mechanical. He could listen to a car motor and tell you why it was running rough. Show him some gadget he’d never seen before and in ten minutes he could tell you how it worked. One morning at breakfast this guy came up to our table and handed him a pocket watch, saying he’d won it in a bet but it wasn’t running and he wondered if it could be fixed. John put it to his ear and shook it slightly, then fiddled with the stem and said yeah, he could fix it. The guy asked how much he’d charge, and John said Hell, buddy, let’s call it a favor. The guy couldn’t thank him enough.

That’s how he was. Everything you’ve heard about his charm is true, never mind some of his blowups with Billie. And nobody was a better friend, take it from me. Ask Russell. Charley and Red would’ve told you the same. Of course, we were a pretty special bunch. His later friendships were obviously another story. I mean, I don’t know much more about what happened at that Chicago movie house last July than what I read in the papers and heard through the grapevine, but I know what went wrong. He trusted those two whores is what went wrong. He thought they were his friends.

Then again, I never did understand why he made some of the
friends he did. Like that clown, Homer Van Meter. They got to be pals when we were all at Pendleton and they worked on the shirt line together. Van Meter was a real fumbler, and John was always helping him meet his work quota. From the day we met, that guy and I had it in for each other. It happened one morning when John and I and a few other pals were in the yard exercising with the punching bags and dumbbells and jump ropes. The other inmates were keeping their distance from us, as always, but then this goofy-looking guy with a stupid grin comes ambling over as casually as if he’d been invited. He was at least six feet tall but he was skinny as a cue stick and his smirky manner irritated me the minute I laid eyes on him.

He walked up behind John, who was skipping rope and unaware of him, and stood watching the rope whipping around and then suddenly stamped his foot on it, stopping it short. The rope handles slipped out of John’s hands and for a moment he was whirling a rope that wasn’t there anymore. He said What the
hell
and spun around, ready to start punching, then saw the goof grinning at him. He said Homer, you asshole, and they both laughed.

John started to introduce him all around, but before he could tell him my name, Van Meter said, Wait, don’t tell me, I know who this guy is—he’s the famous big-time bank robber. He snapped his fingers a few times like he was trying to recall my name. Then he made a scared face and held his hands up and pretended to be trembling and said, Oh my God, it’s Jesse James!

If it had come from somebody else, I might’ve smiled to be sociable, but not from this creep. John saw my face and said Ah hell, Harry, he’s just being funny.

He’s funny, all right, I said. Funny looking.

Funny
looking!
Van Meter says, and goes into a big loud show of phony laughter, holding his belly and slapping his thigh, saying Boy, that’s a
hot
one, all right! Funny
looking—
whew!

That did it. I pulled off the bag gloves and said Beat it, clown.

And what’s that fool do? He makes a face of exaggerated ferocity
and starts shuffling around me with his fists up in the old-time way of John L. Sullivan or somebody. Mocking me.

I hooked him good on the jaw but he scrambled right back up and came at me like a bulldog and we went down snarling and punching. The bastard was tough, I have to give him that. He was skin and bone but he was strong and his fists were like rocks. The hacks pushed through the crowd and pried us apart and hauled us off to the solitary cells. A week later they made the mistake of taking us out at the same time. We shoved the guards aside and got into it again right there in the isolation block. While we were beating on each other the hacks were beating on us. Van Meter got another week in the hole and I got ten days.

John couldn’t understand why Van Meter and I disliked each other so much. I couldn’t understand how he could tolerate the dopey son of a bitch. He said Van Meter wasn’t as dopey as he made out, he just liked to clown around. John was sure the two of us would get along if we got to know each other. I told him Look, you want to be his friend, that’s your business, but he comes near me again I’ll break his scrawny neck.

He said okay, have it my way, but he stayed friends with both of us. From everything I’ve heard, Van Meter was loyal to him to the end, which is good to know. But it doesn’t change the fact that he was a goofy bastard and I couldn’t stand him.

For the rest of the time I was at Pendleton—only another few weeks—the scarecrow kept away from me, but we’d still see each other now and then, almost always at a distance. And every time we did, he’d make a stupid clown face and do his old-timey pugilist act, trying to get my goat. I was aching to kick the hell out of him. By then, however, I had something much more important than him on my mind and I didn’t want to jeopardize it by getting put in the hole for fighting.

I’d smuggled a six-inch piece of saw blade out of the shop, and every night after lights out I went to work on the bars of my cell door.
I knew some of the other guys could hear the rasping, but it couldn’t be helped. Then Boss Miles ordered a shakedown and the hacks found the saw in the lining of my mattress and discovered where I’d cut almost all the way through two of the lower bars. Somebody had finked on me, but no telling who, the place was so full of finks. At any rate, it was all Miles needed to get me out of his hair. I was in solitary for the few days it took them to complete the paperwork, then I was taken to Miles’s office, where he was waiting for me with a smart-ass smile and the news of my transfer to the pen at Michigan City.