Public Enemies (41 page)

“I need a car,” Dillinger told Blunk.

“There’s lots of cars,” Blunk said. “Take what you want.”

They walked up to a thirty-year-old mechanic named Edwin Saager, who was hunched over an engine.

“What’s the fastest car in the garage?” Dillinger asked.

Saager noticed the submachine gun hanging at Dillinger’s side. He thought he was a deputy. “The V-8 Ford,” he said, returning his attention to the engine. Dillinger raised the gun and said, “Get going.” Saager was looking at the engine. He didn’t seem to hear.

“Get going,” Dillinger repeated.

Saager turned and saw the gun pointed at him.

“He means business,” Blunk said. Finally Saager realized this was no deputy. Dillinger led the two men to the V-8 Ford, which was also owned by Sheriff Holley. “You want me to drive?” Saager asked.

“No, Mr. Blunk will do the driving,” Dillinger said. “You get in the backseat.” Youngblood slid in beside him. Dillinger sat in the front seat, the submachine gun across his lap.

“Someone open the doors!” Dillinger shouted. A mechanic pressed the air-compressor button and one of the garage’s two rear doors opened. Blunk drove the Ford out of the garage onto Joliet Street, then headed west through city streets in the rain. Dillinger told him to keep his speed down. Crossing the town square, Blunk narrowly avoided a collision with another car; Dillinger told him if they had a wreck, he would be the first to die. At the edge of town, Dillinger said to keep heading west, keeping to dirt roads. A few minutes later they crossed the state line into Illinois. As he had at Racine four months earlier, Dillinger turned buoyant as they entered the countryside. He began singing, warbling a rendition of “The Last Roundup,” repeating the phrase “Get along, little dogies, get along.”

The singing stopped when the Ford slid off the muddy road into a ditch. After ten minutes Youngblood and Saager managed to push it back onto the road. Saager then took a half hour putting chains on the car. As they continued driving west, Dillinger turned chatty. Blunk asked if he planned to rescue Pierpont and the others in Ohio.

“They’d do the same for me,” Dillinger said.

Outside the town of Peotone, Dillinger began looking for telephone wires. When he didn’t see any, he had Blunk stop the car and get out. He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket, peeling off four singles. He offered them to Blunk, who shook his head. Dillinger offered the money to Saager, and Saager took it.

“It’s no use for me to tell you fellas not to get in touch with the police, ’cause I know you will,” Dillinger said.

“Put yourself in our positions and you would do the same as we’ll do,” Blunk said.

“I could make you shut up now if I wanted to,” Dillinger said, brandishing the Thompson gun.

“I don’t think you would kill a man without giving him a chance,” Blunk said.

Dillinger grinned, slid behind the wheel of the Ford, and drove off. Blunk and Saager stood in the mud, watching Dillinger disappear toward Chicago.
¹
By noon he would be the most wanted man in the country.

 

 

Lou Piquett and his investigator, Art O’Leary, arrived at the lawyer’s office that morning, waiting for news. Billie Frechette showed up around eight. Piquett’s gofer, an ex-con named Meyer Bogue, drifted in later. They were sitting around at 9:30, already drinking gin, when Piquett’s nephew telephoned to say he had just heard of Dillinger’s escape on the radio.
²
“Seems that everything worked out,” Piquett announced as he put down the phone. “I think I’ll call Warden Baker.”

Piquett dialed Crown Point. “Hello! Mr. Baker? This is Lou Piquett, in Chicago.”

“Yes hello, Lou,” Baker said.

“What truth is there in the radio report that my client just broke jail?”

“That’s right. He just left us.”

“Anybody killed or hurt?”

“No, nobody was hurt.”

“That’s good, I’m glad to hear that,” Piquett said. “Say, he didn’t leave a forwarding address, did he?”

When Piquett put down the phone he said, “By golly it’s true! He got away!”

Billie let out a little yell and thrust her face into her hands. “Poor Johnnie!” she said. “Oh my God, they’ll kill him!”

“Quit your squawking,” Piquett said playfully. “They’ll probably never get another look at his coattails.”

The gin flowed freely for the next few hours as the four celebrated. Bogue ran out and grabbed newspaper extras that were already appearing, and they read them between drinks. Outside, police were swarming into the streets, taking positions at the main entryways to the city from the south. Piquett realized his office would be watched. He thought of a former secretary, a woman named Esther Anderson, who lived on Wellington Avenue, on the North Side. He sent Billie over, then followed in a taxi. O’Leary stayed behind, waiting for Dillinger’s call. It came around three. Dillinger’s only words were, “Where will I go?”

“Go to 434 Wellington Avenue,” O’Leary said. “Piquett will be waiting.”

Piquett was leaning against the Wellington Avenue building, hat tucked down, hands stuffed in his pockets, when Dillinger drove up.

“Hi ya, counsel,” he said with a wave.

Piquett stepped to the car. Herbert Youngblood was lying flat on the backseat, the two tommy guns clutched in his hands. “Is this the place I’m gonna stay?” Dillinger asked, eyeing the building.

“No,” Piquett said, “I just want to bring you up here for a few minutes so we can talk.”

The two men walked into the lobby, where Billie leaped into Dillinger’s embrace. Upstairs, Esther Anderson took one look at Dillinger and told them to get out. Dillinger returned downstairs to the car, Billie attached to his side. Piquett came down a minute later.

“Billie says we can go over to her sister’s place on Halsted,” Dillinger said. “Come over there this evening about half past seven. And I need some money. Let me have whatever you’ve got with you.”

Piquett fished in his pocket and handed Dillinger a roll of bills, about three hundred dollars.

“Thanks, counsel,” Dillinger said. “I’ll see you soon.”

On the way to the apartment, Dillinger put Youngblood on a streetcar, handed him $100, and thanked him.
^bo
He and Billie drove to her sister’s place, a second-floor flat at 3512 North Halsted. That night Piquett visited and listened as Dillinger, snuggling with Billie on a davenport, told them what had happened at Crown Point.

“Say, Dillinger,” Piquett said at one point. “When am I gonna see some money? I haven’t had a dollar yet, you know?”

A cloud passed over Dillinger’s face. “What? Didn’t [that lawyer my father hired] give you anything? He took my dad’s last five hundred dollars. You tell him to cough up those five C’s, or I’m coming down and take care of him.”

The next day Dillinger stayed in the apartment, speaking at one point with John Hamilton, who briefed him on the arrangements with the Nelson gang. Everything was set. That night Nelson’s partner Tommy Carroll drove up in front of the building in a green Ford. Dillinger and Billie came out a side entrance, carrying suitcases as they ducked into the backseat. Under their coats both carried submachine guns.

They headed northwest out of the city, toward St. Paul and Dillinger’s rendezvous with his new partner, Baby Face Nelson.
^bp

While Indiana politicians and prosecutors squabbled over responsibility for his escape, Dillinger arrived in Minnesota that Sunday night, thirty-six hours after fleeing Crown Point, and tossed his things into Apartment 106 at the Santa Monica Apartments on South Girard Avenue in Minneapolis. The jug marker Eddie Green had rented the flat for him under the name “Mr. and Mrs. Olson.” Billie handed the janitor a fifty-dollar deposit, and they wired the shades closed.

No record exists of Dillinger’s first meeting with Nelson’s gang the next day. The two gang leaders probably knew each other; there are unconfirmed accounts they met in East Chicago the previous June, and there had been talk of teaming up for a train robbery that autumn. Certainly they knew each other by reputation. Dillinger was grateful for Nelson’s acceptance after his escape; for weeks afterward he remarked to people what a huge favor Nelson had done for him.

As for Nelson, working with Dillinger meant instant respect, and prestige, things Nelson craved; this, after all, was a twenty-four-year-old who just twelve months before had been a gangland chauffeur. Now he would “command” the nation’s most wanted bank robber. Dillinger gracefully accepted a secondary role in Nelson’s gang, but it was a distinction that would be entirely lost on the press. When the two were eventually linked the newspapers dubbed them “The Second Dillinger Gang,” a view that angered Nelson. Before long his envy would curdle into jealousy.

It is unclear whether Dillinger realized he was joining forces with a psychopath. The night Dillinger arrived in the Twin Cities, Nelson was driving through Minneapolis with his gofer Johnnie Chase when the two cut in front of a car driven by a thirty-five-year-old paint salesman named Ted Kidder, who was returning from a birthday party with his wife and her mother.

“Damn it, they can’t do that to me,” Kidder said as Nelson’s car veered in front of him.

Irritated, Kidder sped up and cut back in front of Nelson’s Hudson. This enraged Nelson. He pulled alongside Kidder’s car and attempted to force it into the curb. Kidder pulled ahead, but Nelson stayed directly behind him as they neared the salesman’s home in the St. Louis Park section of Minneapolis. Not wanting to lead the angry driver to his house, Kidder headed toward a drugstore to call the police. Reaching the store, he had just leaped out of his car when Nelson drove up and shouted something. A moment later three shots rang out. Two struck Kidder in the midsection, and he fell, dying.

His wife, Bernice, ran to his side.

“You’ve killed him!” she screamed.

“Keep your damn mouth shut,” Nelson snapped, “or I’ll let you have it, too.”
³
He backed up the car and drove off.
^bq

This was John Dillinger’s new partner.

The temperature hung at the freezing point as the green Packard sedan pulled up in front of the Security National Bank & Trust Company a few minutes before ten. Six men in dark overcoats stepped out into the street, glancing about, wisps of steam rising from their lips. Stern, unsmiling, and unshaven, wearing fedoras tugged low over their foreheads, they were a rough-looking bunch. A bank stenographer saw them through a window. “There’s a bunch of holdup men,” she joked to a clerk. “I don’t like the look of this,” the clerk said.

Just three days after his escape from Crown Point, Dillinger was about to rob a bank. One of the men remained by the car as Tommy Carroll took a position on the sidewalk by the front door, a submachine gun beneath his coat. Dillinger led Nelson and the others inside. Nelson threw open his

A clerk pressed a button, and as the dozen or so employees and customers inside the bank lay on the floor or backed against the walls, the alarm began ringing loudly outside the bank. At the sound of the alarm, Nelson flinched. Dillinger, by now accustomed to working to the sound of an alarm, strode coolly behind the teller cages and, with Van Meter, began clearing stacks of cash off the counter. The alarm enraged Nelson. In contrast to his partners, who remained calm, he began pacing the lobby nervously, sticking his submachine gun at people.

“I’d like to know who set that alarm off!” Nelson shouted. “Who did it? Who?”

As Dillinger and Van Meter shoved the bank president toward the vault door, Nelson seemed to be working himself into a frenzy. He pointed his gun at one frightened employee after other.

“If you want to get killed, just make some move!” he announced. “If you want to get killed, just make some move!”

Within minutes policemen began to arrive. A traffic cop, Homer Powers, was the first to run up. Tommy Carroll met him with his submachine gun, and within moments Powers was standing on the sidewalk, hands above his head. The police chief, M. W. Parsons, and a detective arrived next. They were disarmed and joined Powers on the sidewalk. A crowd of townspeople began gathering, drawn by the alarm and the spectacle of three policemen standing with their arms raised.

In the lobby, Nelson was working himself into a lather. Just then a motorcycle cop named Hale Keith pulled up beside the bank. Spotting him through a window, Nelson leaped a low railing, scrambling atop a loan officer’s desk, and let loose a deafening burst of gunfire through a plate-glass window. Women screamed as Keith fell, struck by four bullets. “I got one! I got one!” Nelson cried.

As Dillinger and Van Meter finished in the vault, the crowd outside was still growing. People were hanging out of second-story windows, watching Tommy Carroll pace up and down in the street, his gun trained on the policemen he had taken hostage. A sheriff and several deputies headed onto rooftops, hoping to pick off one of the robbers as they tried to escape. Inside, Dillinger and Van Meter were finishing up. Just as the first Dillinger Gang had done at Racine, they grabbed a bank manager and four tellers and herded them out onto the sidewalk to the car. As they left, Nelson shot out the bank’s front window.

Scattered gunshots rang out as the gang loaded the bank manager, Leo Olson, and the tellers onto the Packard’s running boards. The car had just begun to move when a patrolman fired a shot into its radiator. Steam began to rise from the hood. The car stopped, and the hostages jumped off. One of the women began to run.

“Come back here!” one of the robbers shouted. A minute later, the hostages back on the running boards, the Packard again moved forward slowly through city streets, south toward the frozen prairie at the edge of town. Once they hit Route 77, the main road south, Dillinger reminded the others to toss roofing nails behind them. With the Packard’s engine coughing and sputtering, he could see it was only a matter of time before a posse caught up with them.