Public Enemies (45 page)

“What the hell good is money if I gotta be by myself?” Ma asked. It took another hour of arguing before Ma gave in, beaten. “All right,” she said sadly. “If you boys will come and visit me when you’re in Chicago. But that don’t mean it’ll be like this forever. This summer we’ll get a cottage on a lake. How’ll that be?”

Karpis promised a summer cottage, even as he realized it would never happen. He would have said anything to get Ma Barker to shut up. The next day they all drove to Toledo. Ma stayed behind. It was the last anyone would hear of most of the Barker Gang for a long time.

 

 

By the time Karpis and the Barkers fled Chicago, the FBI’s pursuit was losing steam. Unlike the Dillinger Gang, which shed talkative confederates like dandruff, the Barkers seemed like clannish urban hillbillies, opaque and unknowable. A month after identifying them as Edward Bremer’s kidnappers, the FBI hadn’t found a single reliable source of information on the gang. Agents had prison snitches and old wanted posters from Oklahoma and Missouri, but little more.

It took weeks to compile lists of the Barker Gang’s relatives and prison contacts. Brothers and sisters of several gang members and their girlfriends were put under surveillance, as were Karpis’s parents in Chicago. Letters poured in to FBI offices from people who said they thought they knew or had seen members of the gang. Only one, a Texas prison inmate named Henry Hull, offered solid information. A prison pal of Dock Barker’s, Hull had once visited Barker in Nevada. FBI agents descended on Reno and identified every apartment, grocery, dry cleaner, and gambling house the gang had visited during its two stays there. They collected phone records and assorted arcana—from a tailor they learned Fred Barker had a 13½-inch neck—but none of it led anywhere. The most recent sighting of the gang was six months old.

For his part, Hoover was obsessed with identifying the house where Bremer had been kept. Thousands of hours were spent searching for a town in Wisconsin or Illinois that matched the descriptions Bremer had given. More than a hundred were surveyed. Police and mailmen were interviewed in each one, but none seemed to match Bremer’s memory. One of Purvis’s men, Ralph Brown, actually checked the correct town, Bensonville, but failed to recognize it.
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If anything, progress in the Dillinger case was even slower. By the end of March, Purvis and his men had spent four weeks on the case, yet had failed to unearth a single lead on the gang’s whereabouts, nor any hint they were behind the robberies at Sioux Falls and Mason City. As the Crown Point publicity died down, in fact, the Bureau’s investigation lost what little momentum it had. In hindsight Purvis’s choices seem inexplicable. He didn’t bother placing the Dillinger farm in Mooresville under surveillance; had he done so, agents might have been waiting for Billie when she visited on March 19.

The one solid lead the Bureau managed to generate was appropriated from Matt Leach’s men, who had discovered Russell Clark’s girlfriend, Opal Long, living with her mother in Detroit. The Detroit office forced the Indiana police to withdraw and took over their surveillance in hopes Long might contact Dillinger. Even this minor lead Purvis managed to squander. On Thursday, March 29, agents in Detroit followed Long to the downtown train station, where she boarded a train to Chicago. When she arrived in Chicago, Purvis had his men tail her to the Commonwealth Hotel, where Hoover approved a tap on her phone. Long, however, realized she was being followed.

That night she climbed into a taxi, peering through its rear window at a pair of agents following her. The cab took what Purvis described as “a zigzag course” through downtown streets, easily eluding the FBI men. Weeks later agents learned that Long had gone straight from Chicago to St. Paul, where she joined Dillinger.

By the end of March, Hoover was growing impatient. Irked by newspaper coverage of Dillinger raids police were making in Chicago, the director sent Purvis a sharply worded letter. “The Division has never been informed by your office of the details concerning this raid or of the information leading up to it,” Hoover wrote Purvis. “The Division is inclined to wonder concerning the intimate acquaintance on the part of your office with the actual developments in the Chicago district relative to the search for Dillinger.”
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But there were no developments. After a month of searching, neither Purvis nor any other FBI agent had the first clue where Dillinger was. And then a funny thing happened. Dillinger found them.

 

 

As the FBI’s half-hearted manhunt continued, Dillinger rested and let his wound heal in his new set of rooms at the Lincoln Court Apartments, a compact, thirty-two-unit building on busy South Lexington Avenue, in the heart of St. Paul’s toniest neighborhood. Conditions were cramped with John Hamilton and Pat Cherrington sleeping in the living room. At least Nelson was gone, disappearing on one of his jaunts out west. Van Meter came and went like a ghost, his eyes always scanning the cars outside for a government license plate.

There was a theater down the street, and several nights Dillinger took Billie to the movies. One evening they watched a newsreel interview of Dillinger’s father. “John isn’t a bad boy,” the old man said. “They ought to give him a chance. He just robbed some banks.” Dillinger smiled. It was probably the nicest thing his father ever said about him. On Friday night, March 31, at the end of his second week in St. Paul, Dillinger took Billie to see
Fashions of 1933,
a review of the latest designer work from New York and Paris. That night Opal Long arrived from Chicago, having ditched her FBI tail there. She assured Dillinger she hadn’t been followed. He went to bed Friday night happy. The weekend loomed. Maybe they would take a ride in the country.

 

 

Snow lay thick on the streets of St. Paul that Friday afternoon when a woman named Daisy Coffey walked up the white-marble stairway of the Federal Courts Building and entered the FBI’s offices in Room 203. The SAC, Werner Hanni, and his men were focused on the Bremer case, but Hanni stepped away long enough to take her statement. Mrs. Coffey, who said she managed the Lincoln Court Apartments on South Lexington Avenue, told Hanni she was suspicious of the couple renting Apartment 303. Her new tenants, “Mr. and Mrs. Carl P. Hellman,” had frequent guests, always used the building’s rear door and kept their blinds lowered till 10:30 each morning. Hanni was unimpressed. “She says that she just has a feeling that there is something mysterious and questionable” about the Hellmans, he wrote in a memo.

After Mrs. Coffey left, Hanni handed her statement to a pair of young agents, Rosser L. “Rusty” Nalls and Rufus Coulter.
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Later that day the two drove uptown and showed Mrs. Coffey photographs of the only men the St. Paul office was interested in, Karpis and the Barkers. Mrs. Coffey couldn’t identify any of them. But she had taken down Mr. Hellman’s license plate number. Returning downtown, Agent Nalls ran a check and found the car registered to a Carl Hellman in North St. Paul. But when he called the post office for Mr. Hellman’s address, he found there was none. The name appeared to be fictitious.

The Lincoln Court was a three-story red-brick building; out back was a paved alley with a residential neighborhood beyond. That night Nalls and Coulter cruised through the alley and parked on a side street. They could see that the blinds in Apartment 303 were lowered. It seemed a normal thing to do; otherwise anyone could see right in. In the space beneath the shades they could see a man and a woman moving around inside the apartment. After three hours they returned downtown and reported they had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

Nonetheless, they returned the next morning at 9:00 to question the occupants of Apartment 303. Inspector William Rorer, who remained in St. Paul supervising the Bremer case, decided they needed a police escort. Agent Coulter volunteered to find a patrolman while Nalls drove ahead to establish surveillance. Nalls reached the building just before ten and parked beside it. A few minutes later he watched as two women left the back entrance. They walked to a parked car, talked to a man inside, and then drove off. As a matter of routine, Nalls wrote down their descriptions. Not till later would anyone realize he had seen Opal Long, Pat Cherrington, and John Hamilton. They were heading out for breakfast and grocery shopping. Nalls didn’t recognize them.

At 10:15 Nalls saw Agent Coulter and a policeman drive up and disappear inside the building. A minute or two later Nalls watched as a thin man drove up in a green Ford sedan, got out, and walked inside. Agent Nalls was still sitting in his car a few minutes later, watching the front entrance, when he saw Agent Coulter running toward him across the building’s snowy front yard, holding his pistol. Coulter turned and exchanged gunshots with the thin man who was chasing him.

 

 

Agent Coulter and a sixty-five-year-old St. Paul detective named Henry Cummings had stood before the door of Apartment 303, waiting for someone to answer their knock. After a long minute, the door opened a few inches. A woman peeked out over a chain. Detective Cummings identified himself and asked to speak with Carl.

Billie forgot Dillinger’s alias.

“Carl?” she said. “Carl who?”

“Carl Hellman.”

Billie gathered her senses. “He’s just left and won’t be back till this afternoon,” she said. “Come back then.”

“Are you Mrs. Hellman?” Cummings asked.

Billie nodded.

“We’ll talk to you then,” he said.

“I’m not dressed,” Billie said. “Come back this afternoon.”

“We’ll wait until you dress,” Coulter said.

Billie said it would take a second. She closed the door. Coulter heard a second latch close inside.

Dillinger was still in bed when Billie ran toward him.

“It’s the cops!” she said. “What should I do?”

Dillinger jumped out of bed and began dressing. “Keep your shirt on,” he said, “and get some things into the large bag.”

As Billie tossed clothes into their bag, Dillinger opened a dresser drawer and lifted out the parts of his submachine gun. Then he walked toward the door. Outside, Coulter and Detective Cummings waited in the hallway. Coulter didn’t like this. “We’ll have to call for some help,” Coulter whispered. “You can go call or I will.”

“Who do you want?” Cummings asked. “Your department or ours?”

“I want to get our department,” Coulter said.
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Coulter trotted downstairs to the manager’s office to phone the office. When he returned upstairs, Cummings was still standing in the hallway. Together they waited, nine more minutes by Coulter’s estimate.

It was then that Homer Van Meter, having parked his green Ford outside, appeared at the head of the third floor’s rear stairwell. He sensed trouble the moment he saw the two outside Dillinger’s door. His head lowered, Van Meter walked right up to the two lawmen, shouldered past them, and stepped to the head of the front stairwell. Then he stopped. “Is your name Johnson?” he asked Coulter.

“No,” Coulter said.

As Van Meter headed down the front stairwell, Coulter stepped forward and said, “What’s your name?”

Van Meter turned and stopped on a landing. “I’m a soap salesman,” he said.

“Where are your samples?” Coulter asked.

“Down in my car.”

Coulter asked if he had any identification.

“No. But I have down in my car.”

Van Meter disappeared down the stairs. After a moment, Coulter decided to follow him. He walked down to the lobby and peered outside. The “soap salesman” was gone. Coulter had just turned to walk back upstairs when he saw Van Meter crouched in the shadows of the basement stairs, a pistol in his hand.

“You want this, asshole?” Van Meter asked. “Here it is!”

As Van Meter raised his gun to fire, Coulter leaped backward, crashing through the front door. He turned and ran across the snowy yard, and Van Meter gave chase, firing wildly, his shots throwing up little explosions of dirty snow. In the calm of a St. Paul Saturday morning the gunshots sounded unreal—
pop, pop, pop—
like firecrackers. As Coulter raced across the snow, he pulled his pistol, wheeled, and returned fire. Van Meter ran back into the building.

Up in Apartment 303, Billie begged Dillinger not to start a gunfight. But the minute he heard shots, Dillinger raised his submachine gun and fired a burst through the door. He opened the door a few inches, stuck the Thompson gun’s muzzle outside and began firing down the hallway. Detective Cummings flattened himself into an alcove as bullets whizzed by his chin. The moment Dillinger stopped shooting, Cummings ran down the front stairs. Inside the apartment, Billie came out of the bedroom and found Dillinger smiling. Thin shafts of sunlight stabbed into the room through the holes he had blasted in the door.
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“Keep your shirt on,” Dillinger repeated when Billie begged him not to fire again. “You’re coming with me. Snap that suitcase together and follow along.” Dillinger stepped to the door and fired another burst of bullets down the hallway. Billie followed, lugging his heavy suitcase with two hands; there were more guns inside.

Outside, chaos had engulfed the neighborhood. Cars were stopped, and people were leaning out of windows. Recognizing Coulter’s assailant as the man from the green Ford, Agent Nalls pointed out his car, and Coulter promptly shot out one of its tires. Nalls ran toward a drugstore to telephone for reinforcements.

Neither agent thought about the building’s rear entrance. It was from this door that Billie and Dillinger emerged; Van Meter sprinted out the same door a minute later. Dillinger, in a light-gray suit and no tie, walked casually down the alley, carrying the Thompson gun close to his right leg. He handed Billie the car keys and took the suitcase, watching over his shoulder as he walked.
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Billie hurried ahead to the garage where they stored their black Hudson and backed the car out. Dillinger threw the suitcase into the backseat and got in. Billie stomped the accelerator, and the Hudson roared down the alley. “Slow down! Slow down!” Dillinger ordered. “You’ll attract attention.”