Макс Коллинз - True Crime

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.”

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 Daily News from July 2 of this year, detailing the robbery of the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, Indiana.

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 Trib. But it took on a new significance, now.

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.”