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“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.

“She said she did. And you, maybe you liked her, a little?”

“I liked her in the sack, Anna, to be blunt, but that’s as far as it went. I was drunk, remember? And if you do remember, you’re one up on me.”

Her face looked pale and tragic, the dark eyes hooded, the red mouth a thin line. “I thought you might be interested in…helping her.”

“Well…sure. I guess. Anna, I’ve been shadowing her for a couple of days, and she hasn’t recognized me, even up close. We’re not bosom buddies.”

“But you’d help her, if you could. You’d help anybody in trouble.”

“Not really. But make your pitch. You’ve got my curiosity back up, if that’s what you’re after.”

She stood and paced; whether for dramatic effect, or out of actual nervousness, I didn’t know. I still don’t.

She stopped and said, “Polly may be in dangerous company.”

“How so?”

“This Jimmy Lawrence. She brought him here. For dinner. Polly, and several of the other girls, are more than just employees to me—they’re family. And I often invite them here. Have Romanian specialties, which I cook myself. I’m famous for my culinary arts, for my dinner parties.”

“I’m convinced. But you’ve drifted off the point, Anna.”

She paced some more, then sat down next to me; put a hand on my knee. She smelled good—face powder and exotic perfume. She might have been as much as fifteen years older than me, and I was very much aware that she had been in the cold-blooded sex business for decades, that she’d been a hustler then and a madam now; nevertheless, she had a sultry sensuality that made me uneasy.

“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.”

D

ILLINGER

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.