True Crime

Purvis said, “That’s Dillinger’s old sweetie, Evelyn Frechette. No doubt about it.”

Cowley nodded.

I took a look at it. The picture was of Polly Hamilton. I didn’t say anything.

A couple of Chicago uniform cops, in blue shirts with badges pinned on, pushed through the crowd.

“So this is John Dillinger,” one of them said, looking down at the corpse.

Purvis said, “Yes it is. Uh…what do we do now?”

The two cops looked at each other. Then they looked at Purvis.

“Who’s in charge here?” one of the cops asked.

“I am,” Purvis and Cowley said.

The Chicago cops shook their heads and one of them said, “I’ll call a meat wagon.”

In minutes it was there, and the dead man was put on a stretcher and slung in back of the wagon; Purvis rode with him, with several other feds. Cowley stayed behind. The crowd remained thick. I pushed through toward my parked Chevy.

In the midst of the crowd, by the tavern, I bumped up against a big guy in a fedora. The tavern’s neon turned his face orange. He had a bandage across his nose. I gave him the hardest kidney punch I could muster.

“Oooofff,” he said, and hit the pavement. People were walking on him.

I kicked him in the ribs, while he was down there, and another East Chicago cop, a guy with a puffy face— courtesy Barney Ross—came pushing through the crowd, having seen what I did, and he swung at me and hit some woman in the side of the head. A barrel-chested man with her, her husband I guess, said, “Hey!” And smacked the East Chicago cop in the face a couple of times.

The crowd was such that it didn’t go further than that—no fight ensued or anything; and I was to my coupe, with a small sense of satisfaction in having somewhat settled a score.

But as I pulled away from the Biograph theater, I felt sick to my stomach, and vaguely ashamed. I’d seen this happening, and I hadn’t been able to stop it. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough or brave enough or tough enough. I must’ve been lacking something.

Because a man had died tonight. A man I had, in a roundabout way at least, fingered.

I’d got my first good close-up look at Jimmy Lawrence tonight, when I’d held his dead head in my hands.

And he’d looked less like John Dillinger close up than at a distance.

But he had looked real dead.

P

OLLY

– T

HE

P

HOTO IN THE

W

ATCH

20

By a quarter till midnight, I was sitting at my desk in my office in the dark. Neon pulsed through the half-open windows in tempo with the rubber-hose aches and pains that had started in again, now that Sally’s last round of aspirins had worn off. I’d considered stopping in at Barney’s Cocktail Lounge for another sort of painkiller, but was in the sort of black mood that drinking would only turn blacker.

This was the first I’d been back to the office since I took that beating. Barney had cleaned the place up; everything was in order. What did I have to complain about? I had the world’s lightweight champ for a personal valet.

My mouth was trying to remember how to smile when the phone rang.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Nate?”

It was Sally.

“Hi, Helen.”

“I thought maybe you might’ve gone back to your office…”

“Where are you calling from? Didn’t you have a show tonight?”

“Yes—I’m calling from backstage. I tried to get you at my suite, thinking you’d be back there by now…I did give you a key, didn’t I?”

“You did. I just didn’t think I’d be very good company the rest of the night.”

“I understand.”

“You do, Helen?”

“Yes.” A pause. “People are saying John Dillinger was shot.”

“Christ, word travels fast in this town.”