Then a little after ten-thirty, by my watch, people started to come out of the theater. They didn’t stream out: Nobody was anxious to trade the cool interior of the Biograph for the sweltering Chicago night.
And through the milling crowd I could see Jimmy Lawrence emerge, with a woman on either arm. Polly and Anna. And he was hemmed in by the crowd, men, women and children. He seemed to be rather near Purvis and the display of movie stills. He seemed to glance at Purvis, and then glance away. I wondered if Melvin’s shorts were dry, after that.
Then the crowd, getting reluctantly used to the heat again, began to disperse, some of them getting into autos parked along Lincoln Avenue, others crossing the street toward me (and Cowley and crew), some turning left, others turning right, down the sidewalk.
These people allowed the feds in their suitcoats to blend in better, simply because there was something to blend in with. But since Lawrence/Dillinger was back in the recessed area between the box office and the display case of movie stills, few of the agents had spotted him, and those of us across the street, with a relatively good vantage point, couldn’t see all the agents, now. I did notice several who were giving some good-looking girls in the crowd the eye. They’d apparently had Biology, these college-boy feds.
Gradually the field cleared a bit and Jimmy Lawrence, arm in arm with his ladies, one of whom wore a dress that glowed red in the bath of marquee lighting, stepped out onto the sidewalk.
And a nervous Melvin Purvis tried three times to light his cigar with a match, by way of signal, and on the fourth succeeded.
From my vantage point I saw it all go down.
The agents closed in on him, like flies swarming on a single drop of honey. He didn’t see them. He walked slowly, as if strolling on a Sunday afternoon (and this was Sunday, although later than that, particularly for him), past the tavern, past the grocery store, and just at the alley Zarkovich, who’d jumped from his parked car and run across the street, where traffic was at the moment nil, shoved Lawrence or Dillinger or whoever the hell he was face-first to the pavement, flinging him out of the grasp of the two women, who fell away immediately, or at least Anna did, pulling Polly back by the arm as Zarkovich fired and someone else, O’Neill I think, fired from the other side of the prone man, fired down into the man while he, whoever he was, lay half in the alley, headfirst in the alley, rest of him on the sidewalk, and took the shots in the back and in the back of the neck, his body jerking, flopping, like a fish on the beach.
I ran across the street; several cars screeched to a stop, not to avoid hitting me, but because they’d heard gunfire and screams.
The screams hadn’t come from Lawrence, but from two women; in a bizarre piece of slapstick, both of them were holding their dresses up over their legs, where blood streamed from ricochet wounds. One of them collapsed near my coupe, by the time I crossed the street. A man bent to help her.
The body of the man who’d been shot was surrounded, too, by the agents and East Chicago cops; when they broke their circle, they had turned the body over and it held a .38 automatic in its slack dead hand. I pushed my way through the already building crowd (“Dillinger has been killed! They got John Dillinger!”). Got a closer look.
His face was gouged by two slashing bullet wounds; his eyes were open and empty. His shattered eyeglasses hung cockeyed across the bridge of his nose; his straw hat was still on his head, the brim bent back with a bullet hole angled through it. I leaned over him and touched the face, looked into the face.
A hand on my shoulder pulled me back. It belonged to Zarkovich.
“Get away from there, Heller!”
Another hand from behind me yanked me into the alley. People were coming down the alley toward the body; their feet clomped, echoing on the cobblestones.
But two others were running down that alley, away from the scene, hand in hand, like schoolgirls.
Anna and Polly.
I walked back toward the gathering crowd.
Then Purvis was in their midst; he was angry.
“Get away!” he said. “Get away!”
They scrambled away, like rats in dresses, clutching their bloody booty. Purvis had frightened them, because he had a gun in his hand, and his coat was open, the buttons torn away when he reached for the revolver, going after Dillinger. But he hadn’t fired the gun.
Zarkovich and O’Neill had done all the shooting.
Cowley appeared from somewhere and was directing his men to cordon the body off.
“Keep these damn ghouls away!” Cowley ordered.
I approached the body again and looked down at it. Purvis and Cowley were there with me. They glanced at each other, then looked at me. They actually seemed embarrassed.
“I wanted to take him alive,” Purvis said, “but he pulled a gun.”
Cowley nodded, pointed down to the gun in the corpse’s slack hand. “You can see it right there.”
Purvis knelt over the body; with both him and the dead man wearing straw hats, Purvis seemed to be looking down at a ghastly mirror image. “It’s Dillinger, all right. No doubt about it. But it’s amazing the extent of plastic surgery he underwent. All the distinguishing marks on his features have been worked over. It was a good job the surgeon did.”
“Check his pockets,” Cowley said.
Purvis did. He found $7.80 and a gold watch.
Purvis held out the $7.80 in the palm of one hand, and said, “So much for the fruit of crime.”
Cowley took the watch; popped it open. There was a picture inside. He showed it to Purvis.
