pretty girls.
They loved Johnny, period. Because when he robbed his banks, he leapt over bank railings, flirted with the ladies and was courteous to the men. When somebody got shot, Johnny never was the one to do the shooting; and he regretted such violence—such as when Pierpont shot the sheriff during the Lima crash-out, and Johnny paused to kneel by the dying man, whom he’d grown fond of during his incarceration, saying sadly to Pierpont, “Did you have to do that?”
The public loved that; they loved it when he allowed the depositers unlucky enough to be in the bank being robbed to hold onto their dough—he wanted only the “bank’s money.” And when he busted out of the Crown Point, Indiana, jail using a wooden gun he’d carved and then darkened with shoe polish (so the story went), the common man said, “Nice going, Johnny—you showed ’em, Johnny!”
The common man liked identifying with John Dillinger, and why not? He had the common man’s face. Oh, perhaps a shade on the handsome side, at least for a bank robber; and his photos often showed him with a wry smile worthy of a picture-show heavy. But he had the kind of face you passed in the street and didn’t think twice about.
Unless a sort of national hysteria was under way, as in these past three or four months, when “positive identifications” of Dillinger would be reported in, say, Massachusetts and Ohio—on the same day.
So when Anna saw a Dillinger resemblance in Polly’s dapper Dan, I was momentarily caught off guard, but not bowled over. Dillinger was on everybody’s mind, in every paper’s headlines; like this one I was pretending to read —DILLINGER SEEN IN FLORIDA—and the one Jimmy Lawrence had been reading a few nights ago in Anna’s flat. So she said.
It had gone like this: Anna had prepared a Romanian specialty for Lawrence, Polly, Anna’s out-of-work son Steve and his girl, whose name Anna didn’t mention. They’d eaten in the kitchen, next to several open windows, which helped with the heat. After dinner, the women cleared the table and began doing the dishes; there was talk of playing pinochle later. Conversation lagged—too damn hot for chatter. Still, despite the heat, Lawrence lit up a cigar—a big, fat expensive one. And he began to read the paper.
After a while he said, “Well—they’ve got me in St. Paul today,” and laughed.
Then he got up and went out on the back stairs to smoke some more, and get some air. Anna stopped polishing a dish long enough to look at the front page of the paper Lawrence had been reading; the face of John Dillinger stared at her, from a photo.
I had said to her, on hearing this tale, “How can he be Dillinger? He looks a
Hadn’t I heard about plastic surgery? Gangsters go underground and get plastic surgery these days, she said. Like she was talking about the latest dance step.
Still, it was hard to dismiss Anna’s opinion. This was not the hysterical reaction of a harried housewife in Duluth, on her way to the bank with this week’s hard-earned deposit in hand, who spotted a man who looked like that John Dillinger and ran immediately to the station house. No. Anna had been around; she’d been dealing with crooks and crooked cops since I was in knee pants. If she thought this guy might be Dillinger, well…this guy might be Dillinger.
And if he was, maybe I’d do something about it. After all, the reward money was hovering at around twenty thousand dollars, half of it federal, half of it from half a dozen states in the “crime corridor” of the Midwest, where Dillinger had been harvesting banks for over a year now.
Only I couldn’t go to the cops. I was persona non grata with too many of the boys in blue for that. And the head of the special Dillinger Squad—forty officers strong—was none other than Capt. John Stege (rhymes with “leggy”), who would rather shoot me than give me the time of day.
Stege was a rarity in Chicago—an honest cop; he was one of half a dozen individuals credited with being “the guy that got Capone” (my friend Eliot Ness was another) and, in a way, Stege was as worthy of that credit as the next guy (Eliot included). Stege had fought Capone’s Outfit all through the twenties and it was his raid on Capone’s Cicero joints that brought forth the ledgers that allowed the feds to put together the income tax evasion rap that finally sent the Big Fellow to Atlanta.
But Stege’d had his share of bad press, too. He’d lost his job as chief of the Detective Bureau over the Jake Lingle case; he’d looked dirty, guilty by association, because he was thick with the police commissioner, who in turn had been thick with reporter Lingle, who’d been thick with Capone and company. This all came out after Lingle was murdered in the subway tunnel under Michigan Avenue.
I’d been involved in that case; specifically, I’d been a traffic cop on Michigan Avenue, and had pursued, and failed to catch, the fleeing killer. I’d been a star witness at the trial. I’d lied, of course, to help put away the scapegoat the Outfit had given the D.A.’s office to satisfy the public and the press. And had gone on to be a plainclothes cop, as part of my good-conduct reward.
It was then that my father, an idealistic old union man who hated the cops and hated me becoming one, blew his brains out with my gun. But that’s another story.
Stege, like my father, smelled a bad apple when young Nate Heller traded his uniform, and his integrity, in for plain clothes. He—and a lot of people on the force—pegged me as a kid on the make, willing to go along with just about anything. That led to my being pulled in by two real sweethearts named Lang and Miller—the late Mayor Cermak’s chief bagmen and bodyguards (this was before Cermak was late, of course)—on an attempt on Frank Nitti’s life.
That was when I left the force to go private; but eventually I had to testify about the Nitti hit, and—since Mayor Cermak had since been killed in Miami by a Sicilian assassin named Zangara—I felt under no obligation to lie. Maybe I was trying to make it up to my old man and his Bughouse Square idealism. Or maybe I was trying to make it up to me. But I told the truth on the stand—a novelty around these parts—and made Lang and Miller, and the late mayor, look very bad.
Stege, though a tough, straight cop by Chicago (or any) standards, had a blind spot: he didn’t like even a crooked cop getting a public bath. And I was an ex-cop who’d publicly bathed not only two Chicago police sergeants, but Mayor Cermak as well.
And Stege had been a Cermak crony. The story went that shortly after Cermak was elected, Stege had been transferred to the South Wabash station, in the heart of Bronzeville, to “raise hell with the Policy racket”—and in the process the captain put about two hundred colored prisoners in jail per day, in cells so crammed they couldn’t sit. The Negro politicians had bitched to Cermak, at first, then finally begged: What did Cermak want from them, to get Stege out of their district?
