He dug in his left suitcoat pocket. Took out a folded newspaper clipping; as he did, he said, “She ran off to Chicago about a year ago. She was seen with him here. She was living with him, as a matter of fact.”
“How did you find this out?”
“Seth reported her as a missing person. He left it pretty much drop, after that. But I kept after the sheriff’s office, and the sheriff’s office said the Chicago police knew she was in Chicago living with this Candy Walker feller.”
“If you’re thinking Walker is still around Chicago, I’d doubt it…”
“That’s what the sheriff’s office’s been tellin’ me. And I can figure that for myself. Melvin Purvis has made your town too hot for them gangsters. This Walker’s living out on the road somewheres. Going from here to there. Stealing. May the Good Lord damn him to hell for eternity.”
“Good odds on that,” I said, taking the clipping he was holding out. It was an interior page from a
At 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, June 30, five men (later identified as John Dillinger, Homer Van Meter, Baby Face Nelson, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and Clarence “Candy” Walker) parked their Hudson in front of the bank. Walker remained at the wheel, and Nelson, his machine gun under his coat, took up position near the rear of the car. Van Meter, with a rifle, took position just down the street, in front of a shoe store. Inside the bank Dillinger and Floyd made a withdrawal—only when the tellers weren’t filling their sacks up quickly enough, Floyd fired a burst from his machine gun into the ceiling, to perk up the proceedings. Outside, a traffic cop heard the commotion and came running. Van Meter fired his rifle and the cop fell in the street, stopping traffic. The owner of a jewelry shop down the way ran out of his shop and shot at Nelson, whose bulletproof vest saved him as he spun and began firing wildly. Only the cop was killed, but several pedestrians were wounded, including the hostages who were made to ride the running boards as Candy Walker wheeled out of town, with around twenty-five thousand of the bank’s money in tow. On the west side of South Bend, the hostages were set free; the group split in two and climbed into separate cars.
This was, as far as anybody knew, Dillinger’s last caper.
Of course that wasn’t what made this clipping noteworthy: it was the other story, the sidebar. A Pontiac with Indiana license plates stopped at a filling station near Aurora, Illinois, later that same afternoon. Two men and two women were in the car. The men seemed to be Candy Walker and Homer Van Meter; police sketches of them were reproduced, as well as of the “unidentified molls” who’d been with them.
Petersen stood and pointed at one of the molls pictured. From an inside coat pocket he produced a snapshot of himself and a pretty teenage girl with blond bobbed hair, a farmhouse glimpsed behind them. He had his arm around her and was smiling—a real smile, not a crease—and she had a glazed smile, behind which unhappiness clearly lurked. Still, these were happier times (at least for him).
And, of course, the girl in the snapshot closely resembled the police sketch of one of the women seen with Candy Walker and Homer Van Meter.
“Mr. Petersen, this police sketch resembles your daughter, but she’s a pretty woman, a young woman, and a lot of pretty young women look pretty much like this….”
“It’s her,” he said, flatly. “Now let me show you something else.”
This guy had something in every pocket; he reached into his right suitcoat pocket and produced another clipping. He spread it before me.
“This was in this morning’s paper,” he said. “I read it and went and got on the train—I knew I’d waited long enough. Maybe too long.”
I’d already seen this: a story from this morning’s
The St. Paul police had shot about fifty bullets into Homer Van Meter yesterday. Not surprisingly, it killed him.
Petersen, trembling, sat back down.
“I’ve been reading the papers,” he said, “reading the blood in the headlines. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker… John Dillinger…now Van Meter…the outlaws, they’re all going to die like that, aren’t they? In hails of bullets?”
I shrugged. “More or less.”
“I’m afraid for my daughter, Mr. Heller.”
“I don’t blame you.”
He sat forward; earnestness engulfed his face. “Retrieve her for me.”
“What?”
“Get her back for me.” He pointed to the Van Meter clipping. “Before she meets a similar fate.” He sat back, as if to say, I rest my case.
I looked at this gaunt Midwestern ghost sitting holding onto the ebony armrests on the chrome tubes of my silly goddamn chair, and I wanted to laugh. Or cry.
Instead I simply said, “Mr. Petersen, surely you understand what you’re asking is, well…a tall order. Maybe an impossible one.”
He said nothing, just leaned forward, with anticipation. Waiting for me to say yes. Or even no. Something.
His daughter would go to jail, upon capture—if she was lucky. She could just as easily die—go down “in a hail of bullets,” as he had said. But since she was just another faceless moll (but for one police artist’s sketch), a name that hadn’t got into the papers as yet, it was vaguely possible it wasn’t too late, that she
“Okay, Mr. Petersen,” I said. “I tell you what. I’ll snoop around a bit. Walker used to live in Chicago, so maybe through some of his old contacts I can find out if your daughter’s still with him. If so, maybe I can get a message to her that her father would welcome her home, with open arms.”
