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
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.
And if he was, maybe I’d do something about it. After all, the reward money was hovering at around twenty thousand dollars, half of it federal, half of it from half a dozen states in the “crime corridor” of the Midwest, where Dillinger had been harvesting banks for over a year now.
Only I couldn’t go to the cops. I was persona non grata with too many of the boys in blue for that. And the head of the special Dillinger Squad—forty officers strong—was none other than Capt. John Stege (rhymes with “leggy”), who would rather shoot me than give me the time of day.
