“Who is Mr. Smith?” she asked.
“The world’s greatest dog robber,” he said.
“The what!”
“Just joking,” he said, but there was little humor in his tone. “I’m going to have to go back to Washington tomorrow,” he went on. “But I don’t think I’ll be gone much longer.”
“You don’t sound very happy about it,” she said.
“I made a promise to somebody,” said Keegan. “Now it looks like I can’t keep it.”
“Did you try?”
“I did the best I could,” he said.
“Then God will forgive you,” she said softly.
“I didn’t know there were this many crooks in the world,” Dry- man groaned as the hours got later and the days dragged on. Kirbo helped when he could, a methodical man who worked slowly and overlooked nothing. Their attention span and energy level began to fall rapidly. Keegan began to wonder whether checking the records was ever a good idea. But they did not have an alternative. They made jokes to kill the deadly boredom, sometimes got hooked on a case that was unusual and spent hours poring over the ancillary reports.
“How about a dead witness?” Dryman said one night as he was leafing idly through one of the reports.
“We got enough live ones, H.P.” Keegan answered.
“Geez, this guy really had bad luck, didn’t he? First his bank gets robbed by Dillinger and if that isn’t bad enough, he gets killed in a car wreck the same day.”
“I assure you, the guy we’re looking for didn’t get his neck broken in a car accident. If you’re looking for drama, there’s a great report over there on a bank job Pretty Boy Floyd pulled in Wisconsin.”
“He drowned.”
“Beg pardon?”
“He didn’t get his neck broken, he drowned.”
“Get on with it, Captain. I want live witnesses.”
Dryman threw the folder in the discard pile and moved on to the next folder. Hours later when they were getting ready to leave for the night, he picked it up again and started reading through it, rooting through the reports attached to the cover sheet. He didn’t know why, it was an impulse.
“Just seems weird,” he said to himself.
“What’re you mumbling about?” Keegan asked.
“It seems a little weird, this guy is the loan officer in a bank that gets robbed, then drives into the river on his way to dinner with his girlfriend.”
“Bad luck, he had real bad luck,” Keegan answered and started putting away the folders they had completed. Dryman kept leafing through the reports.
“They killed the chief of police,” he said.
“Who?”
“The Dillinger gang. They killed the chief of police in this little town, uh . . . Drew City, Indiana.”
“Uh huh,” Keegan said, slipping the folders back in their proper places in the drawers.
Then as he was about to put the folder away, Dryman stopped. He pulled a sheet from the thick file.
“Hey Boss?” Dryman said.
“Yeah?”
“This guy from the Dillinger job that drowned?”
“Yeah.”
“They never found his body.”
Dryman roared across Indiana at three hundred feet with a Sinclair Oil Company road map in his lap, trying to figure out exactly where he was.
“Are we lost, H.P.?” Keegan asked. He had the folder on the Dillinger job in his lap, reading through every sheet of paper.
“Of course not,” Dryman said, insulted. “I’m looking for landmarks.”
“You’re going to knock some farmer’s hat off if you don’t put some altitude under us.”
“I can’t navigate from ten thousand feet,” Dryman complained and changed the subject. “You’re really hot on this one, aren’t you, Boss?”
“It’s desperation. We’re running out of subject matter,” Keegan answered sourly. “Just keep flying.”
Keegan remembered something Eddie Tangier had told him.
Fred Dempsey had supposedly drowned in an auto wreck but they had never found his body. He was the loan
