G-Man Page 8

  “I doubt you’ve ever seen a squad room so big,” said Clegg, gesturing to the pen before him that filled almost half the nineteenth floor. Actually, Charles had, as Dallas, Atlanta, and Kansas City all had big, busy detective departments, and he’d been welcomed in them all.

  Charles simply gazed at the large room, filled with grim government furniture, stacks of paper on desks, the typewriters that justified such a spread, telephone lines, wanted posters on the wall, the whole cop squalor and messiness that was universal from Scotland Yard to the NKVD to the Tokyo Municipal Police. In this room, men scurried, talked on the phone, worked paper, consulted and kibitzed. None of them had caught on yet to who Charles was, so nobody paid him any attention.

  “Suit coats on, that’s how the Director likes it. Ties up, no rolled-up sleeves. No feet on desk. No loud talking or laughing. Business first, last, and always. Shined shoes, trimmed, clean fingernails. You have to present well around here as well as work hard, pay attention, don’t crack off to any superior, and return all your phone calls. Suits only. No sport coats.”

  “I don’t own no sport coats,” said Charles.

  “Wonderful,” said Clegg. “You’re already ahead of the game.” It was doubtful he meant it as a compliment, for it carried the heavy weight of irony with each word. Clegg, also Southern, had a “high” aspect to him; coming from a fine family, he was a little too good for a fellow such as Charles, who fractured grammar, had big, strong, splayed hands and a bony, raw vitality, which he would consider red-dirt hillbilly compared to his own manner and tastes. He deserved better, he seemed to be saying.

  “Now, this way, let me show you the arms room.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He took Charles out of the big room and down an interior corridor lined with doors to smaller rooms, ticking off their purposes languidly.

  “Teletype. Interrogation, interrogation, interrogation, with one-way mirror and observation room available, Mr. Cowley’s office—”

  “He’s back here?”

  “It’s his preference. No name on the door, no receptionist’s office, no secretary. He’s in there by himself, and he types his own memos. Most days, you won’t see him, as he’s going over reports, on the phone with Washington or other field offices, talking to various law enforcement entities, that sort of thing. He makes assignments, keeps track of case progress, looks to cut down on duplicated effort or step in if communication breaks down somewhere. But every morning there’s a fresh memo on the bulletin board, and if you’re mentioned in it, it’s a good sign.”

  “He seemed like the no-bull sort, didn’t need much attention.”

  “That would describe him perfectly. Even though he was a minister for two years, saving heathen souls in Hawaii, he’s a technical. Everything by the book, then recorded in the book, the book then sent to Washington for the Director’s pleasure. Here we are.”

  Clegg led him into a large room, clearly a rough or wet room, meant for gunwork. A bench stood against the wall, with gunsmith’s tools, and jars of Hoppe’s No. 9 and Rem Oil, the pungent stench of the Hoppe’s clouding the air almost visibly.

  “Is there an armorer?”

  “We have a young agent named Ed Hollis who has recently inherited this room as one of his administrative duties. He’s more of a glorified clerk than an actual armorer, much less a gunsmith. He keeps track of ammo, records the guns coming in and going out, fills out a report if anything is damaged in a fight, ships guns to D.C. for lab work—really, it’s a hard, crummy, filthy job. But he earned it. He was at Little Bohemia and did not distinguish himself, so I thought it better to take him out of the lineup, so to speak, for a bit.”

  It was your plan, thought Charles.

  “He also runs the motor pool now, and maybe he’s tending to that. But on a day-by-day if you’ve got the possibility of a serious engagement and you need to check out a bigger weapon, you file with me and I’ll approve it and unlock the vault.” He gestured to the large steel door in the wall. “We store them in there. When you return, you bring your chit back to me for filing. That way, we always know what’s out, what’s not. The last thing we want to do is misplace a Thompson. The newspapers would fry us.”

  Troutmouth added, “The reason the gun room is here is because that”—he pointed—“was already there.”

  It was a grating, behind which, in squalid splendor, rough-walled, dirty, its paint peeling, lit by a single bulb, was a freight elevator. “We had it rewired so it only stops here on nineteen and in the lower-level garage, where our cars are. If we load for bear, that’s how we get to our vehicles. Don’t want to be storming through the lobby with machine guns and Browning rifles, looking like one of those army raiding parties.”

  Charles nodded.

  “Any questions?” asked Clegg.

  “I’ll have much business for Hollis later today. Does he, by the way, know anything about guns?”

  “I don’t know if he can take them apart or not, but I do know he has no idea when to shoot them.”

  Charles realized that it was, therefore, Hollis who had fired first on the three civilians getting into their car after dinner at the Little Bohemia Lodge. What was he supposed to do? Let them escape? Why wasn’t there an alternative plan, or a fallback against just this situation? Why hadn’t it been anticipated, as, after all, the agents had had time to fly up to northern Wisconsin, rent cars, and move to the lodge two hours from the Eagle River Airport? So this wasn’t an operational mistake, it was a tactical one: poor planning by Clegg here, and it’s Hollis who gets hung out to dry. He’d seen it all over the army.

  “Now, one last thing,” said Clegg. “This way, please, Sheriff.”

  He took Charles back to the squad room, and when they entered—and this time, word having gotten around—all the typing stopped, as did the chatting, the writing, the paper-shuffling. Charles felt eyes upon him but did not acknowledge them.

  Clegg led him to a big wall and upon it were the faces of the men they were hunting.

  “You’d best get to know these faces like your own children’s,” said Clegg, annoying Charles because of course he already did.

  Clegg rattled off the names. “Homer Van Meter, Harry Pierpont, Pretty Boy Floyd, the little pug is Les Gillis, known as Baby Face Nelson, a name he’s said to hate. And that one there, that’s the big dog, John Dillinger himself, Public Enemy Number One.”

  Dillinger didn’t look like much more than a potato-faced fertilizer salesman in a small Indiana town, which is how he might have ended up had he not been sentenced to twenty-five years for a rather minor crime when he was nineteen. In prison, he learned a trade, and like any trained man, when he got out he looked for a way to make a living practicing that trade.

  “He’s no genius, believe me, and possibly not even the leader of the gang. He doesn’t make plans or anything, he doesn’t scheme and plot, and there’s no record of him having a particular need to hurt or kill. He wasn’t a tough guy in the joint. In fact, they once found him snuggled in bed with another guy, so who knows what’s going on. This one is the psychopath.”

  Clegg’s elegant, polished finger came to rest on the square face of a guy who could have been in the Our Gang comedies, for he resembled the little picture-show boy Mickey McGuire more than anybody else, with a square, uptilted nose that spread his nostrils, a tumble of lengthy, pomaded hair full of blond highlights, a pair of small but not menacing eyes, and a blur of matinee-idol, make-believe mustache.

  “Don’t know what makes him tick,” said Clegg. “But he’s a monster, that’s for sure, and poor Carter Baum found out the hard way at Little Bohemia. Baby Face killed Carter in one second. If you see Baby Face any other way than over a gunsight, he’s probably going to kill you.”

  8

  GREENCASTLE, INDIANA

  June 15, 1934

  NOBODY WAS IN A GOOD MOOD, except for that idiot H
omer. But Les was in the worst mood of all. Tommy Carroll’s death hit him the hardest. He’d driven into Little Bohemia with Tommy sitting next to him, Helen in the back, and as old friends and colleagues who’d been on the wrong end of enough cop gunfire to know and trust one another well, the trip had been fun. Helen liked Tommy too; he was a big, handsome lug from Montana whose jaw had been busted in his boxing days and never set right, so that at its new angle, it looked like a lantern, making him look stupid, but of course he was not stupid.

  But the way Tommy Carroll had died had been stupid. Not on a job, not in a police ambush, not in a betrayal or a plot, but just by the dumb-bunny roll of the dice.

  He makes it out of Little Bohemia, the federals blazing away with choppers and filling the air with a blizzard of hardball and not a one comes near Tommy. And he gets downed by two hick detectives in a town called Waterloo, Iowa. The coppers probably didn’t even know who he was.

  “When your time is up, your time is up,” said Johnny. “That’s our business. That’s the risk.”

  Johnny would know. “Johnny” to his pals, he was John Dillinger, the most famous bank robber in the world. He had a gift for publicity, a vivid personality, a terrible beauty, and a sublimely cool aspect that enchanted everyone, friend or foe. Plus, a genius for escape, over and above his criminal skills. Twice he’d wriggled out of tough joints, once with pals and once on his own genius with three cents’ worth of scrap wood and shoe polish. He was a great criminal.

  “Some license plates in his backseat,” said Les. “Can you believe that? Some kid, some junior G-Man, notices ’em and that’s it, buster, you’ve been ventilated.” It seemed so unfair.

  “Arf, arf,” said Homer. “Me sad puppy.”

  Homer: his name was Homer Van Meter; he was as Indiana as Indianapolis, a string bean with a thick gush of hair and a long, bony Grant Wood face. He had a marksman’s gift for gunwork and a sense of humor that could be likened to the sound of sheet metal being ripped by insane dogs. In his life—he was twenty-five—he had told ten thousand jokes, of which at least nine, or possibly even ten, had been funny. He kept trying, however. He was a very good bank robber.

  “He didn’t even have a gun,” said Charlie in his Oklahoma twang. “As he’s running away, the cops shoot him down. They don’t even know who he is. The great Tommy Carroll.”

  Charlie—Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd—was out of the Cookson Hills and mean as a splinter in your ass. He was a good shot; too stupid to know the meaning of fear, either as a word or as a concept; big, strong, sullen, bitter. And that was sober. Drunk, look out. No one would ever accuse him of genius, and he couldn’t be trusted to plan his next bowel movement, but he was solid, steady, a good man with a gun, and so obsessed with bringing financial relief to his people back in the Oklahoma hills, just about unbudgeable in determination.

  “He did good at Brainerd,” said Johnny. “And he was a good man to be on the run with. No complaints, no whining, no ‘Why me?’ bullshit. He was a pro. He was there when we put Red in the ground.” Red Hamilton was another recent departee, having caught a slug at a roadblock he and Johnny had busted through on the way out of Wisconsin. They’d all been there. There were obligations, even in this little tribe of outlaws. You didn’t forget somebody just because he caught a cold from a bullet. You put him away, right and proper, or if you couldn’t, you drank a beer to him and said words. “He was an ace.”

  That was as good an epitaph as Tommy was likely to get, and of course Johnny, who always had a view toward the bigger picture, was the one to give it.

  And Les himself: he hated the moniker Baby Face, hung on him accidentally and not remotely accurate—he was a lithe, quick, fully developed male of a reasonable height, by the standards of the time, and had no physical oddities that compelled the name. His psychology was hammered into place by a drunken father, who hammered other things as well, namely, Les’s mother and Les himself. At some point Lester Gillis, of the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, with a hideous Windy City accent that turned all his vowels into the shrieks of geese as they were fed into a meat grinder tail first, just decided to hammer back at the world for giving him a childhood comprised mainly of getting the shit beat out of him, which didn’t bother him, but seeing his mother get the shit beat out of her, which did bother him. Smart, feral, without moral compass beyond the immediate tribe, devoted to his hot little bundle of wife and his two kids, though somewhat undone by a hair-trigger temper and an inability to conceive of getting hurt that expressed itself in a recklessness that was also sheer bravery, he was another professional, with great ambition, skill, and dedication. He wanted to be a great bank robber.

  The last man here was Les’s pal Jack Perkins, no genius and way overmatched by the all-star talents in the room, but at least he could be counted on to do what he was told, and he always had a smile on his face. The only thing demanded of him was that he learn his lines and not bump into the furniture.

  The chamber itself was the back room of a tavern that was, guaranteed Homer, part of the big thing the Italians had going. That is, it was connected up and therefore part of a web of activities and plots, all against the law, all nefarious, and so it could be trusted to play host to, and give suffrage and rest to, various on-the-lammers, various would-be torpedoes, even the odd actual torpedo headed to Cleveland or Chicago. It was about twelve miles out of South Bend, and all were here at the insistence of Homer, who was no Jimmy Murray when it came to spotting, planning, and pulling off jobs.

  Jimmy was a master; he’d run the biggest heist in history a few years ago in Illinois and that one had been a triumph, start to finish. Money, money, money for everybody and nobody dead. Now Homer was thinking he could come up in weight class, become a Jimmy Murray–class setup guy and thus grab a double share.

  “Why did the duck cross the road?” he asked.

  Nobody had an answer. Each had beer before him, except for Les, who never drank and kept a clear head. The air roiled with cigarette smoke, and from the bar in the front room the music of somebody’s Chicagoland band beat on, tinnily and slightly out of sync. “It Might as Well Be Spring.”

  “To get to the quackers on the other side, quack, quack,” said Homer, blowing up in laughter. Johnny laughed, though it was phony, and Homer’s cheap dame Mickey Conforti laughed, showing her horse teeth, and always polite Jack laughed, but Charlie, sour as cow piss, said, “Get on with it, goddammit, this ain’t no radio hour.”

  It was the only thing Charlie and Les would ever agree on.

  “Hey, a joke a day keeps Mr. Frowny Face away,” said Homer. Homer, a good man with the Winchester .351 he carried around in a billiards case, and he’d somehow glommed onto this hideous, loud skank of woman who was known to pass out sexual favors to any and all when she got a little buzzed.

  “All right,” said Homer. “Merchants National, South Bend, twelve miles north of here, sis-boom-bah, home of Notre Dame, and we are the Five Horsemen, not the Four, so we can’t miss. It’s a tidy little joint, the coppers are amateurs, but it’s got all that money these Indiana farmers rack in for growing peas in pods and corn in husks and chickens with goobery red beaks. Plus, every Saturday at eleven, two postal inspectors mosey down from the Post Office with a big bag or two of cash they’ve pulled in all week selling the folks stamps. That stamp money adds up!”

  “What’s the take?” Charlie asked.

  “Figure fifty, easy. More than Brainerd, more than Sioux City, a good haul with minimum risk, with the stamp money boosting it. Y’all are going to thank me when you’re in Miami, going to the track every day.”

  “I ain’t no track tout,” snarled Charlie. “I got family to take care of. There’s a Depression on, and nobody in Oklahoma is working—that is, them parts of it that ain’t blowed away in the wind.”

  “Yes sir,” said Homer, trying to oblige. “Well, we’ll get you paid up good. Now, I see this as an in-out
car job, never no split-up, so we don’t need to set a meet-up, one car for all of us, the South Bend coppers ain’t set up with radio nets, to any degree. Mr. Charlie, you’ll be the ringmaster, run the show; you got the deep voice, and you’re as scary as you are pretty.”

  “I ain’t pretty a bit,” said the sour Oklahoman. What a dick he could be!

  “You guys are big enough to have nicknames. Les’s Baby Face, Johnny’s Johnny D, and you’re Pretty Boy. I’m just And Others. It ain’t fair.”

  “When every cop in America knows it and your face, you won’t be so crazy about a nickname,” said Charlie.

  “I got a name for you,” said Les. “You’re Mr. Talks Too Much, Don’t Say Nothing.”

  “Les,” said Johnny, “calm down and stick to robbing banks. Comedy ain’t your talent.”

  “The feds I ran off the road in Wisconsin while you guys was shivering and shitting in the forest thought I was pretty funny.”

  “Anyhow, Mr. Jack,” said Homer, trying to get back on the program, “I know you’re new to this line of work, so you’re the early bird. You just set up and make sure no coppers are around and the postal clerks have brought the stamp money along, and if it’s clear, you give us the high sign, we park, we pile out and take it. Jack, you just hang outside as the sentry. Then we all pile in, and we’re gone in three minutes flat, while the cops are still sitting in the doughnut shop talking Notre Dame football.”

  “It’s never that easy,” said Les. “Johnny, you know that. You got to have backup plans, meet-ups set, maps in and out, alternatives, the whole shebang. You can’t just waltz in, waltz out. Jimmy Murray always—”

  “Is that your nose or are you eating a banana?” said Homer. “Jimmy ain’t here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Oh, I noticed when I felt the breeze blowing through your left ear and out your right,” said Les, riling up.

  He riled up too easy, too fast, and he knew it. It was always a problem. He would just sail away on a sea of anger and nothing else mattered. Only Helen could calm him down.