“Has she been missing for some time?”
He nodded. Kept nodding as he went on: “Last I knew she was running with a bad crowd.”
“A bad crowd.”
He looked at me with those empty light blue eyes; they were as barren as an unplanted field.
“I better tell you the story,” he said.
He told me the story. At seventeen his daughter Louise had married another farmer, only a few years her father’s junior. Her father, a widower since the girl’s childhood and a rigidly religious man, admitted having been a strict disciplinarian with his only child.
“By that,” I said, “you mean you beat her.”
Nodding, head gazing down, blue empty eyes finally filling with tears, he said, “I make that admission freely.”
“Mr. Petersen, this isn’t a court, and it isn’t church, either. You don’t have to punish yourself, here. And I’m certainly not going to judge you. But you do have to tell me the facts, so I can help you.”
He nodded some more. Said, “No need to punish myself.”
“That’s right.”
“The Lord will take care of that.”
I sighed. “I suppose he will. Please continue your story.”
He went on in a voice as hollow as his eyes; his words had a formal, practiced sound—as if he’d said these words to himself every night, over and over again, when he should have been sleeping.
“It was my cruel treatment of Louise that drove her from me,” he said. “Into his arms. But he was worse than I was. More cruel, more jealous than ever I was. His punishment exceeded the crimes.”
“Mr. Petersen, I’m not following you. What man are you taking about? Her husband?”
He looked at me sharply. “Yes. Her husband.”
“And he was a farmer, too?”
“Yes. And she’d go off to town without asking him. And do Lord knows what. Men. Drink.” He covered his face with one weathered hand and wept. Tears found their way through the cracks of his fingers and fell on his lap. I’d never had a client cry in the office before—not even when I handed ’em my list of expenses—and it made me uncomfortable. This man was devastated by the road his daughter had gone down. His moral and religious convictions must’ve been strong, I thought, for him to take having a loose daughter so hard.
I got up and began filling a cup of water for him from the cooler, which said, “Glug glug.” I said, “So her husband beat her, and she skipped.”
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, dried his eyes, blew his nose. “Yes. She ran off.”
I handed him the cup of water; he drank it greedily, then didn’t know what to do with the cup. I took it from him and wadded and dropped it in the wastebasket behind the desk. Sat again.
“Did she come home to you?” I said. “After she left her husband?”
He shook his head. “She never thought to. She never even thought to. She lumped me in with Seth—I must’ve seemed just as bad as he was, in her mind.”
“Seth is her husband.”
One quick curt nod.
“How’s he feel about getting Louise back?”
“Ain’t interested. He’s took up with several other ‘ladies,’ hear tell.”
“I see.”
“But I want her back. I want to do right by her. Make it up to her. She’ll like livin’ in town….”
“I’m sure. You mentioned something about her running with a ‘bad crowd.’ How bad?”
The blood drained out of his face.
“That bad?” I said.
“Ever hear of a man called ‘Candy’ Walker?”
“Jesus.”
He sighed heavily. “I take it you heard of him.”
I had. I’d never met him, but Clarence “Candy” Walker was a small-time hood from the North Side, a handsome ladies’ man of about thirty, a wheel man who drove beer trucks for Bugs Moran in the old days and had been in Nitti’s stable till maybe a year ago. Since then—like Baby Face Nelson and a few other graduates of the Capone mob who’d been laid off after Repeal—he’d been seen driving for the Barkers. The bank-robbing Barkers.
He’d also driven for Dillinger a few times in the last six months, if I wasn’t mistaken. Small world.
I said, “I take it from your tone you know who Candy Walker is.”
“He drives what they call in the papers the ‘getaway car’ in robberies. He’s a bank robber.”
“He drives getaway cars, and he’s a bank robber. Yes.”
