Макс Коллинз - True Crime

Virtually every seat in the house was taken.

We met in the lobby.

“Did you spot ’em?” he asked me.

“No. You?”

He shook his head. “I’d hoped to find them, and three empty seats behind ’em.”

“You know what people in hell want.”

He nodded. “I wouldn’t mind some, either,” he said, and he went to a drinking fountain and gulped several mouthfuls. When he was done I did the same. Then we headed back out to the hot street, and waited for the reinforcements to arrive.

That was the last active role I’d been asked to play here thus far, and would likely remain so.

Now the street seemed filled with men in hats and suitcoats, when before the majority of pedestrians and motorists were in shirt sleeves and, if any hat, caps. The agents stood out like a battalion of sore thumbs. I watched the girl in the box-office window, a pretty little blonde barely out of her teens. She looked scared.

I ambled up to Cowley.

Without looking at me, he said, “What do you want?”

I said, “The girl in the box office is getting spooked. Why don’t you let her in on it?”

“Mind your own business, Heller.”

“She thinks you’re a bunch of hoods, probably. And where the East Chicago boys are concerned, she’s not far wrong. Anyway, she probably thinks she’s about to be robbed. Several theaters have been robbed, these past few months, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know. That isn’t a federal offense.”

“Nice to know you guys stay so on top of things. Best of luck in all your future endeavors, Cowley.” I faded back to my spot by the barber pole.

In a few minutes I saw the girl in her glass booth furtively talking to a man in a white shirt and a bow tie and a mustache: the manager, no doubt. He was nodding, and then rushed off. None of the feds picked up on it.

Within five minutes a blue sedan with CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT in white letters on the sides pulled up; there were two cops inside. Neither had their blue coats on — because of the scorching heat, the cops had been allowed to work out of uniform this week, just wearing their caps and blue pants with blue blouses with badges pinned to their chests. These boys, obviously from the nearby Sheffield Avenue Station, looked tough and suspicious, and one of them hopped out, clutching a shotgun.

Zarkovich ran up to him before the cop had reached the sidewalk.

“This is a federal stakeout, mac,” Zarkovich said. “On your way.”

The Chicago cop didn’t take kindly to that, but a more diplomatic Cowley interceded, showed the cop his ID, and affirmed that this was a federal stakeout.

“We’d appreciate it if you’d remove yourself from the vicinity,” Cowley said, “before you blow our cover.”

The cop made a face. “Yeah, right. They’ll never spot you guys in those suits. Oh, brother!”

And he got in the squad car and they rolled away.

I went up to Cowley and said, “You might’ve told them it was Dillinger.”

Cowley said, “Chief Purvis is insistent on no Chicago cops. Anna Sage is deathly afraid some insider with the police will tip Dillinger off.”

“At this stage, how, exactly? Mental telepathy?”

Cowley glared at me, and I went over and leaned against the building by the barber pole. I was tempted to go across and get in my coupe and drive away. I was helpless to do anything about this situation; I could only hope my presence would be a reminder, a nagging one, to both Cowley and Purvis, of their responsibilities. That both of them would rein in on the East Chicago cops more, if I were around; that they’d both work a little harder at keeping their prisoner alive. I had told Cowley I wasn’t his “conscience.” Now I found myself somehow hoping I was.

The night wore on; I wasn’t sweating much, but I didn’t have a coat on like the rest of these jokers. Most of them looked drenched. Across the street sweat beads hung on Purvis’ face like the tears of a bawling baby. He wiped his face now and then, with that monogrammed hanky, but the sweat popped right back. Every now and then he’d take his revolver out and see if it was loaded; every time, it was.

Then a little after ten-thirty, by my watch, people started to come out of the theater. They didn’t stream out: Nobody was anxious to trade the cool interior of the Biograph for the sweltering Chicago night.

And through the milling crowd I could see Jimmy Lawrence emerge, with a woman on either arm. Polly and Anna. And he was hemmed in by the crowd, men, women and children. He seemed to be rather near Purvis and the display of movie stills. He seemed to glance at Purvis, and then glance away. I wondered if Melvin’s shorts were dry, after that.

Then the crowd, getting reluctantly used to the heat again, began to disperse, some of them getting into autos parked along Lincoln Avenue, others crossing the street toward me (and Cowley and crew), some turning left, others turning right, down the sidewalk.

These people allowed the feds in their suitcoats to blend in better, simply because there was something to blend in with. But since Lawrence/Dillinger was back in the recessed area between the box office and the display case of movie stills, few of the agents had spotted him, and those of us across the street, with a relatively good vantage point, couldn’t see all the agents, now. I did notice several who were giving some good-looking girls in the crowd the eye. They’d apparently had Biology, these college-boy feds.

Gradually the field cleared a bit and Jimmy Lawrence, arm in arm with his ladies, one of whom wore a dress that glowed red in the bath of marquee lighting, stepped out onto the sidewalk.

And a nervous Melvin Purvis tried three times to light his cigar with a match, by way of signal, and on the fourth succeeded.

From my vantage point I saw it all go down.

The agents closed in on him, like flies swarming on a single drop of honey. He didn’t see them. He walked slowly, as if strolling on a Sunday afternoon (and this was Sunday, although later than that, particularly for him), past the tavern, past the grocery store, and just at the alley Zarkovich, who’d jumped from his parked car and run across the street, where traffic was at the moment nil, shoved Lawrence or Dillinger or whoever the hell he was face-first to the pavement, flinging him out of the grasp of the two women, who fell away immediately, or at least Anna did, pulling Polly back by the arm as Zarkovich fired and someone else, O’Neill I think, fired from the other side of the prone man, fired down into the man while he, whoever he was, lay half in the alley, headfirst in the alley, rest of him on the sidewalk, and took the shots in the back and in the back of the neck, his body jerking, flopping, like a fish on the beach.

I ran across the street; several cars screeched to a stop, not to avoid hitting me, but because they’d heard gunfire and screams.

The screams hadn’t come from Lawrence, but from two women; in a bizarre piece of slapstick, both of them were holding their dresses up over their legs, where blood streamed from ricochet wounds. One of them collapsed near my coupe, by the time I crossed the street. A man bent to help her.

The body of the man who’d been shot was surrounded, too, by the agents and East Chicago cops; when they broke their circle, they had turned the body over and it held a .38 automatic in its slack dead hand. I pushed my way through the already building crowd (“Dillinger has been killed! They got John Dillinger!”). Got a closer look.

His face was gouged by two slashing bullet wounds; his eyes were open and empty. His shattered eyeglasses hung cockeyed across the bridge of his nose; his straw hat was still on his head, the brim bent back with a bullet hole angled through it. I leaned over him and touched the face, looked into the face.