I never pass up the opportunity to write about Depression-era crime. My first novel, The Oklahoma Punk (terrible title, forced on me by the publisher; I’ve retitled it Red Highway in all subsequent editions), was my first foray into that territory. I doubt “You Owe Me” will be my last.
• • •
Robbing banks is a tough habit to break.
I’ve got the old itch; disaster whispering in my ear, its lips warm as a woman’s. I get stiff as a fencepost just thinking about it.
It’s been months since South Bend. Gigantic foul-up that it was, with too many heroes and that gun-silly Nelson shooting up half the town, I’m ready to go again. My face is about healed, except for some puffiness around the eyes, and in the mirror I look like a cousin of mine a couple of times removed. I doubt even Pop would know me at first glance. Doc Cassidy does good work.
As he should, for the money.
This being on the lam is costly. I don’t recommend it, unless you’ve got cash in the bank; but I don’t recommend that, either.
I just might take it.
They call me “John the Killer” in the Literary Digest—a rag I’d never have gotten into under normal circumstances. Which is a raw deal. I only killed one person, a cop, and he shot me first.
The name didn’t stick, though; no one else uses it. Of all the Baby Faces, Pretty Boys, Mad Dogs, and Machine-Guns this and that, I’m the only bandit known almost exclusively by his last name. “Dillinger” in a headline is enough to sell out several editions.
Public Enemy Number One; that stuck, and how. But it isn’t really a nickname, now, is it?
I’ll need three things.
The car’s easy. I can boost one off the street or grab a brand-new demonstrator from a dealership, like in Greencastle. Guns are more challenging, but if I drive around long enough I’ll see the Stars and Stripes hanging from a pole and do some shopping in a National Guard armory. I keep a .45 handy for just such errands.
A crew, that’s something else. Nelson, Van Meter, Charley Floyd are scattered all over the forty-eight, and the screws in Indiana are measuring Handsome Harry for the hot seat. That means a trip to St. Paul and the mail drop there to see if the others have left any word. You can’t stick up a bank alone.
You need a man at the door, preferably with a chopper, a man to clean out the vault, someone outside for crowd control, and a wheel, the best you can find. Two or three more top hands, just for insurance. They don’t come cheap, so all this guff you hear about John Dillinger’s hidden loot is strictly for Dime Detective. It goes out almost as fast as it comes in. If anyone had told me how expensive it is to live the Life of Crime, I’d have trained for the stock market; it’s just as crooked, but the risks are less fatal.
Not that I’d choose that route. I’d rather go down in a hail of lead than molder away in some office, waiting for my heart to blow out.
I’m at least partly to blame for all the bother.
They didn’t install all those time locks and solid oak tellers’ cages to keep out a hick like Clyde Barrow and his slutty gal-pal, that’s certain. And if I put any more armed guards to work I’ll clear up the Depression single-handed. I should be with FDR’s Brain Trust.
But I don’t do it for the money.
Sure, I like twenty-dollar shirts, suits cut to my build, a legit new car every few months for joy-riding, room service in St. Paul—a good old town where the graft’s reasonable so they mostly let you alone—and a fat roll in my pocket; but I’d knock over the brokest bank in Podunk for no more than you’d get from a cash register in a Piggly Wiggly, just for kicks.
Regrets? Some; I wish I’d kept my head that time in East Chicago. Nelson thinks a day without killing is a day wasted, but not me. That poor sap was just doing what they paid him for, and not enough in these times. I miss Billie, my one-and-only. That midget Purvis locked her up after Little Bohemia, just for hanging around with me. Little Bohemia, I regret that one major-league; though not as much, I bet, as the G-men who put us wise by opening fire on a group of law-abiding fishermen, thinking it was the “Terror Gang.”
I wish my mother didn’t die when I was three.
I’d do a lot of things different, given half the chance. But I don’t regret not being a straight.
In 1923, I knocked a greengrocer over the head and stole his roll. They said if I turned myself in, the judge would go easy on me. They said I wouldn’t even need a lawyer. I was twenty years old. I was thirty when I got out of the Indiana State Penitentiary.
You support these jokers; you make them possible.
You owe me ten years’ wages; counting penalties and interest, you’re deep in the red.
I met useful people in the Michigan City pen: Bankrobbers who’d worked out all the wrinkles, based on past mistakes. No one ever learned anything from his successes. I can quote Dale Carnegie on that.
That was just fourteen months ago, but I’ve been busy ever since.
A year ago May I was just another ex-con, dumped out into the middle of an economic emergency. Now I’m more famous than Babe Ruth. Even that crumb Hitler knows my name: He says America’s chock-full of gangsters like John Dillinger.
I’m no gangster. They’re foreigners, Eye-ties and Micks, stirring up illegal booze in bathtubs and gunning down one another in the streets; and God help the innocent that wanders into the crossfire. Me, I go where the money is and take it straight from the source, just like Jesse James. All clean and straightforward: Robin Hood, if he had V-8 Fords and General Thompson’s gun. Imagine what Billy the Kid could do with those.
I’ll never get shut of the stink of that craphole in Michigan City. I sure as hell am never going back. That’s why I didn’t hang around Crown Point any longer than I had to.
Truth to tell, though, that bust-out was almost as much fun as pushing in a First National.
I walked square into the arms of the cops in Tucson like a dumb cluck. You can put that one on my list of things I’d do different. They flew me back to Indiana; only time I was ever in a plane. I didn’t enjoy the experience. I thought they were going to dump me out at a thousand feet and save the state the expense of an electric bill.
But I survived, to cool my heels in the Crown Point Jail awaiting trial for the murder of a sheriff in Lima, which wasn’t even my deal. I was still in my cell when Pierpont and Boobie Clark split open his skull with a gun-butt busting me out. I’m almost as much a whiz at getting arrested as I am at avoiding it.
Crown Point was no crackerbox, I can tell you that. It took up a city block and was built better than most prisons. And the sheriff, Lillian Holley, wasn’t the creampuff the press made her out to be, based on her sex, after I crashed out. She’d stepped into the office after the former sheriff, her husband, was shot to death by some screwball, and she didn’t waste any time. She took firearms training, learned to pick ants off a hill with a chopper, and looked me square in the eye when they brought me in wearing bracelets: Public Enemy Number One face-to-face with Molly McGee. She was a tall woman, dressed like the president of a ladies’ garden club, and brought sandwiches and beer for the gang of laws crowded around to make sure they got the credit they thought they had coming to them; but for me all she brought was that steely-eyed stare. Not in a million years would she have let her picture be taken with my arm on her shoulder, like that dope of a prosecutor. That was the finish of him; the press came down on him like a flock of crows.
But it wasn’t the finish of me.
They said I carved a wooden gun and bluffed my way out of that hole. Well, it was a fake, sure enough, but it wasn’t all wood, and I’m nobody’s idea of an artist with a jack knife even if it was. The barrel was bored out with a drill press by Mr. None-of-Your-Business in Chicago, with the hollow handle of a safety razor slid in to make it look more genuine. You can get almost anything in jail if you’re good to the turnkeys and you’ve got somebody on the outside; a decent imitation, if not a real gun. But it’s part of the legend now. I gave it to my sister Audrey to hand down to her grandkids someday. See, I was a celebrity now, thanks to the press I got in stir. I scooped Stalin’s purge.
That toy gun got me through a dozen doors. I don’t know how many times I marched the length of that building, forward and back, collecting hostages and information on the layout, the number of armed men outside, and whether I could get to the garage without stepping into the open. At the end I had to cross through an exposed courtyard, every nerve standing on edge, in a scrum of hostages. I guess they were just as agitated as I was.
I smashed the carburetors in all the vehicles that could chase me and hopped into a sweet black Ford V-8 sedan, which was always my automobile of choice when I was working. It turned out to belong to Sheriff Holley. She took heat for that along with everything else.
Then I made the mistake of my life: Regret Number Six, if you’re keeping count.
I drove a stolen car across the Indiana state line into Illinois. That made me a federal case. Before that, J. Edgar Hoover, that sawed-off little fairy, couldn’t touch me. They’re talking about making bank-robbing federal now, which is something else you can thank me for; but not then.
So now I was number one on the G-men’s hit parade. It meant there was no place in the United States I could hole up safely for more than a few days.
Everyone knows about Little Bohemia. It was supposed to be a vacation for me and the boys and girls, a quiet lodge in the woods in Wisconsin, and it would have ended peaceful if the mom-and-pop that owned it didn’t rat us out to the locals. All it came to was their house shot to pieces, a bunch of drunken fishermen with it, and Nelson two more notches on his belt. That made three feds for him; so far nobody’s matched his record.
We had to leave the girls behind, but all of us desperate characters crawled out second-story windows and ran away through the woods like a herd of deer.
I went to cover after that, holing up in Chicago with a new face and a new girl. I can’t be without a woman: Call it my weakness if you like, but I can never get such tender mercy from anyone else in this world. Polly’s good company, though she’s no Billie. She thinks I’m a salesman named Jimmy.
St. Paul will probably cost me double, given the present situation; that city understands the basic principles of supply and demand. I may have to go on the cuff until I make the score. But I need the contacts if I’m going to round up a crew I can count on.
Tonight, though, I’m taking Polly to the Biograph Theater, to see Clark Gable’s latest. Her friend Anna’s coming along, a third wheel if ever there was one, who wears red dresses that don’t do a thing for her substantial figure; but who’d look for the world’s most wanted fugitive between two women, one of them dressed for the circus? Tomorrow I’ll take the train. If I make all the hook-ups I need, I’ll boost a car and scout out some prospects on the way back.
Don’t try to talk me out of it, America. You owe me.
—John Dillinger
July 22, 1934