“My son Steve and his girl, they’ve gone out with them. Several times.”
“Gone out with who?”
“Polly. Polly and her boyfriend Lawrence.”
“So?”
“Do you know how much danger they’re in?”
“Who’s in? What danger?”
“My son Steve! And his girl. They’re just kids. In their twenties.”
“So am I, Anna, and your point eludes me.”
“Do you know what the other girls at the sandwich shop call Lawrence, behind his back?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“Dilly.”
“Oh. What’s that stand for? Has he got a pickle in his pocket, or what?”
“No,” Anna Sage said. “They think he looks like Dillinger.”
7
I drove over to Pine Grove Avenue and parked just across and down from the ritzy digs where Polly Hamilton’s boyfriend lived. Since she had called in sick today, Polly might well be in there with Jimmy Lawrence right now; bedridden, probably. I hoped the poor girl got to feeling better...
I sat in my shirt sleeves on the rider’s side with the windows rolled down; I could actually feel something passing for a lake breeze. In front of me was this morning’s Herald and Examiner: “a paper for people who think,” according to Mr. Hearst. Well, maybe he was right — I wasn’t reading, but I was thinking.
Thinking about Anna Sage, and her contention that Polly Hamilton’s male companion Jimmy Lawrence was really one John H. Dillinger.
“Didn’t you notice the resemblance?” she’d asked.
No, I’d said; but, yeah, I guessed he looked a little like Dillinger.
So did a lot of people. Every few days, these last months, there’d be another story about a “Dillinger double” who’d been picked up by the police, somewhere in the Midwest. One poor guy in St. Paul had been arrested five times and was on his way to the local police station to try to work out this mistaken-identity problem for good when he was arrested again; he wasn’t sprung till they’d taken his fingerprints and compared them with Dillinger’s.
Less than a month ago, another unwitting Dillinger double had strolled out of the lobby of the Uptown Theater — where Polly and her beau and yours truly had seen Viva Villa last night — and faced six riot squads of Chicago cops, who advised him not to move or they’d blow his head off.
And just this past Sunday an insurance salesman in Columbus, Ohio, had got off a plane from a business trip to Indianapolis only to be greeted by a dozen shotgun-bearing cops who had received “positive identification” of his being Dillinger from the manager of the hotel where he’d stayed the night before. Whether the guy sold life insurance or not, the papers hadn’t said.
A sort of Dillinger fever gripped the country, and had ever since the bandit’s year-long spree of bank robberies came to a bloody head a few months ago, at the Little Bohemia Lodge in upper Wisconsin, when the feds’d had Dillinger trapped and managed only to kill a civilian or two, and capture a few of the gang’s molls, while Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson and crew slipped out the back door.
How this “public enemy” (a phrase borrowed by the feds from Chicago, where the Crime Commission had coined it for Al Capone) became a household word in one short year had more to do with the style the outlaw brought to his robberies than the robberies themselves. The outline of his legend was already known to every man, woman and child in the country — including this kid.
Given a twenty-year sentence by a hanging judge for his first, relatively minor offense, twenty-year-old Johnny Dillinger had gone from his father’s farm to the reformatory and on to jail, spending nine years going to school under the tutelage of the likes of Harry Pierpont, Homer Van Meter and John Hamilton — experienced, hardened criminals all, skilled in the art of robbing banks.
When Johnny was paroled, following a petition seeking his release to help work on his father’s farm (signed by the man Dillinger had robbed as well as the now-repentant judge), he immediately began robbing banks and stores to raise money to finance a jailbreak, to get Pierpont, Van Meter, Hamilton and six other of his buddies out of the state prison at Michigan City. He smuggled several guns into the prison in a barrel of thread sent to the prison’s shirt factory; the nine Dillinger pals escaped just in time to bust John himself out of the jail at Lima, Ohio. Seems he’d been captured while visiting pretty Mary Longnaker, one of his numerous girls. The press loved Johnny and his pretty girls.
They loved Johnny, period. Because when he robbed his banks, he leapt over bank railings, flirted with the ladies and was courteous to the men. When somebody got shot, Johnny never was the one to do the shooting; and he regretted such violence — such as when Pierpont shot the sheriff during the Lima crash-out, and Johnny paused to kneel by the dying man, whom he’d grown fond of during his incarceration, saying sadly to Pierpont, “Did you have to do that?”
The public loved that; they loved it when he allowed the depositers unlucky enough to be in the bank being robbed to hold onto their dough — he wanted only the “bank’s money.” And when he busted out of the Crown Point, Indiana, jail using a wooden gun he’d carved and then darkened with shoe polish (so the story went), the common man said, “Nice going, Johnny — you showed ’em, Johnny!”
The common man liked identifying with John Dillinger, and why not? He had the common man’s face. Oh, perhaps a shade on the handsome side, at least for a bank robber; and his photos often showed him with a wry smile worthy of a picture-show heavy. But he had the kind of face you passed in the street and didn’t think twice about.
Unless a sort of national hysteria was under way, as in these past three or four months, when “positive identifications” of Dillinger would be reported in, say, Massachusetts and Ohio — on the same day.
So when Anna saw a Dillinger resemblance in Polly’s dapper Dan, I was momentarily caught off guard, but not bowled over. Dillinger was on everybody’s mind, in every paper’s headlines; like this one I was pretending to read — DILLINGER SEEN IN FLORIDA — and the one Jimmy Lawrence had been reading a few nights ago in Anna’s flat. So she said.
It had gone like this: Anna had prepared a Romanian specialty for Lawrence, Polly, Anna’s out-of-work son Steve and his girl, whose name Anna didn’t mention. They’d eaten in the kitchen, next to several open windows, which helped with the heat. After dinner, the women cleared the table and began doing the dishes; there was talk of playing pinochle later. Conversation lagged — too damn hot for chatter. Still, despite the heat, Lawrence lit up a cigar — a big, fat expensive one. And he began to read the paper.
After a while he said, “Well — they’ve got me in St. Paul today,” and laughed.
Then he got up and went out on the back stairs to smoke some more, and get some air. Anna stopped polishing a dish long enough to look at the front page of the paper Lawrence had been reading; the face of John Dillinger stared at her, from a photo.
I had said to her, on hearing this tale, “How can he be Dillinger? He looks a little like Dillinger. Sure. But not just like Dillinger.”
Hadn’t I heard about plastic surgery? Gangsters go underground and get plastic surgery these days, she said. Like she was talking about the latest dance step.
Still, it was hard to dismiss Anna’s opinion. This was not the hysterical reaction of a harried housewife in Duluth, on her way to the bank with this week’s hard-earned deposit in hand, who spotted a man who looked like that John Dillinger and ran immediately to the station house. No. Anna had been around; she’d been dealing with crooks and crooked cops since I was in knee pants. If she thought this guy might be Dillinger, well... this guy might be Dillinger.