True Crime

“Got to hand it to that bastard,” Davis conceded. “Hell of a piece of work.”

I took a bite of bagel.

Davis cleared his throat. “I hear you were at the Biograph last night.”

“So were a lot of people.”

“Garage mechanics sitting on their stoop and old ladies hanging out their windows ’cause of the heat. Not trained observers like you, Heller. Your version of the shooting could be a corker.”

“Gee whiz, aw shucks. I’m real flattered, Davis. Now can I finish my bagel?”

T

HE BODY AT THE MORGUE

“Hell, I’ll buy you another! How ’bout giving me your eyewitness account. For old times’ sake.”

“What old times are those? When you dredged up the Lingle case in your coverage of my part in the Nitti hit? Get fucked, Davis.”

He smiled. “A newsman knows he’s doing a good job when people resent him. You can’t hurt my feelings, Heller, don’t even bother trying.”

“You’re short.”

He stopped smiling. “You get fucked, Heller.”

I gulped my milk. “Every rag in town this morning, including yours, had a dozen eyewitness accounts of the Biograph shooting. This is old news. Why bother?”

Davis waved that off. “Dillinger dying’s gonna be front-page fodder for days, maybe weeks. Besides, the bozos we got eyewitness stories from came in after the show started; you were there for the whole picture, and the featured attractions to boot.”

“What’s in it for me?”

He shrugged facially, “How ’bout a double sawbuck.”

“I don’t think so, Davis.”

“What do you want?”

My curiosity got the better of me. “Were you at the inquest?”

“Yeah,” he said, shrugging, with his body this time.

“Anything interesting come out?”

“What’s interesting is what didn’t come out. Excuse me.” He went up to the deli counter and got a cup of coffee, and came back and told me about the inquest.

Coroner Walsh himself had presided, at the Cook County Morgue on Polk Street, and had gone first into the little formaldehyde-reeking basement room where the corpse was displayed on a tray draped with a towel, nude but for tags on his toes. The body, that is, not Walsh, who was a big man, sweating, beet-faced, posing stiffly with the stiff for press pictures. This was in the same room where, late last night, those thousands of “morbids” milling about the morgue had finally been allowed to file past their dead “hero.”

Then Walsh moved to the inquest room where the noon sun blazed through the wire mesh on the windows and made checkerboard patterns on the spectators and witnesses and officials who baked their way through the perfunctory proceedings.

“The odd thing,” Davis said, “is Melvin Purvis wasn’t there. By all accounts, it was his operation—some of the witnesses say he’s the one fired the shot—but instead his assistant Cowley takes the stand.”

I didn’t correct any of that, just nodded interestedly.

“And Cowley ducked the issue—when Walsh asked him who committed this ‘homicide,’ Cowley would only say that it was ‘a government agent, properly authorized.’ No names. And they never even broached the subject of who the informant was.”

“Is that right.”

“Do you know, Heller? Do you know who the ‘lady in red’ is? Or the other dame with Dillinger? What were you doing there, anyway?”

I sipped my milk; it was getting warm. “Did they introduce fingerprints into evidence?”

He shook his head. “Another government agent testified that the prints corresponded, is all. They didn’t enter comparisons of the prints or anything—this guy just said the prints compared. A botched acid job, I hear.”

Davis meant the corpse’s fingertips had been dipped in acid, back when he was alive, in the usual (unsuccessful) underworld attempt to obliterate prints.

“And,” he continued, “the pathologist, Kearns, read a summary of his autopsy. Four wounds, one of which caused death.” He got a notebook out of his back pocket and flipped through some pages; read aloud: “‘Medium developed white male, thirty-two years of age, five feet seven, one hundred and sixty pounds, eyes brown.’” He put the notebook away, shrugging again. “Pretty standard.”

“I see.”

He stirred his coffee absentmindedly. “Something else odd, though. The corpse only had seven dollars and eighty cents. Word was Dillinger always wore a money belt, with thousands of dollars. Think somebody stole it?”

“Maybe that money belt’s just a myth.”

“Yeah, maybe. But why would a guy like Dillinger, who might have to lam at any moment’s notice, go out with little more than movie and popcorn money?”