“Become Democrats,” Cermak said.
And they did.
Stege would’ve done anything for Anton J. Cermak, and I had dirtied His Honor’s posthumous honor. The last time I’d seen Stege—at City Hall, where I’d come to testify in one of the subsequent Lang-Miller proceedings—I’d nodded to the stocky, white-haired copper, saying, “Good afternoon, Captain.”
And Stege had said, “Go straight to hell, you lying son of a bitch, and don’t come back.”
Hal Davis of the
No, I wouldn’t be able to go to Captain Stege with this; of course, if Jimmy Lawrence
But if Jimmy Lawrence turned out to be just another Dillinger double, I’d probably find myself tied up in a little room in the back of some station house somewhere doing the rubber-hose rhumba.
Around dusk a Yellow cab pulled up in front of the apartment house, but on my side of the street, facing south. I leaned back and dropped my hat down over my face—mostly—and made like I was snoozing. A few minutes later Jimmy Lawrence and Polly Hamilton, arm in arm, came out the front and got in the back of the cab. I waited thirty seconds, crawled over in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and pushed the starter and pulled out after them.
The Yellow cut over to Halsted and before I knew it the scenery was looking familiar.
The cab stopped in front of a big graystone three-flat and waited as Jimmy Lawrence got out to hold the door open for Anna Sage, who came out of her apartment building in a smart blue dress and a broad-brimmed white hat.
I followed them to the Marbro Theater on the West Side.
We all saw
It was funny.
8
The next morning around ten I walked over to the Banker’s Building on the corner of Clark and Adams and took an elevator up to the nineteenth floor, where the feds kept house. The chief agent of the Chicago branch of the Division of Investigation was Melvin Purvis, but I hoped to speak to Sam Cowley.
Cowley I’d never met, but my friend Eliot Ness—who until about a year ago had been the top fed where crime- busting in Chicago was concerned—had spoken highly of him. Purvis, whom I’d met once or twice but didn’t really know, was another kettle of fish; Eliot had contempt for the man—though I had to keep in mind that Ness and Purvis were enough alike that a little professional jealousy on Eliot’s part was not to be ruled out.
After all, Purvis, a Justice Department special agent, entered the Chicago picture about the time Eliot, a Treasury Department man, was being phased out, his Prohibition Unit going gradually out of business when Repeal came along (beer was legal first, so the Prohibition Unit limped along well into 33). Purvis was the guy who’d get to go after the outlaws like Dillinger, while former gangbuster Ness was being shuffled offstage, being turned into a mere “reven-ooer.” Even now Eliot was chasing moonshiners around the hills of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
But from what I’d observed—admittedly from a distance, reading about him in the papers, listening to my pals on the pickpocket detail gossip—Purvis was a fuck-up. His biggest claim to fame was tackling the “terrible Touhys,” a gang of suburban bootleggers who’d been too minor for Eliot to mess with, though they’d somehow managed to keep Capone off their home turf of Des Plaines. Post-Repeal, the Touhys were
Purvis proudly told the press he had an “ironclad case,” an opinion the jury didn’t share. Even before Touhy was cleared, underworld word was the Karpis-Barker gang had pulled the Hamm snatch; if Purvis was any kind of investigator he’d have heard that too—
Almost immediately, Purvis hit Touhy with another kidnapping charge—that of Jake “The Barber” Factor, no less, a notorious if slick international con man with Capone ties. Everybody in town knew that Factor was just looking to avoid extradition to England, that he’d kidnapped himself (with a little help from his Capone connections) and framed Touhy.
Everybody but Purvis, apparently; he’d bought it—and managed to sell it to a jury, this time, because poor old Roger “The Terrible” was doing ninety-nine years at Joliet. And no sooner had the prison doors shut than Frank Nitti—at the helm of the Capone Outfit—waltzed into Des Plaines.
Purvis had come off looking good in the press, however, though the Little Bohemia episode, last April, had finally caught “Little Mel” with his pants down. (I heard Purvis didn’t like
M
ELVIN
P
URVIS
being called Little Mel to his face, but that’s how everybody referred to him behind his back.)
Purvis had had a tip that Dillinger and his gang were holed up in the Little Bohemia Lodge way at the top of Wisconsin. He and a couple handfuls of other agents piled into three little planes and flew to Rhinelander, where they connected with Division of Investigation agents from St. Paul. The hastily assembled task force commandeered some local cars and drove another near-fifty miles over snow-covered secondary roads. Two of the four cars broke down along the way, and by the time the sixteen agents reached Little Bohemia, half of them were riding the running boards, chattering with cold.
They approached the lodge on foot, moving through the pines, flashlights in hand. As the agents reached the lodge, which was brightly lit, three men exited the front door and went quickly to a coupe in the nearby parking area, and Purvis ordered his men to open fire. One of the three men was killed instantly; the other two were wounded.
