He arched an eyebrow. “I hear that from a lot of people—most of them aren’t trained detectives, however. You wouldn’t make a statement like that lightly, now, would you, Mr. Heller?”
“No I wouldn’t. I’d like to ask you something, though.”
“What is it?”
“After the affair at Little Bohemia, I heard Will Rogers say on the radio that he figured the feds would eventually shoot John Dillinger—if he could manage to get himself in the middle of some innocent bystanders.”
To his credit, Purvis only smiled. And on both sides of his face, this time. “I heard him say that, too. What’s your point?”
“It’s just that I read in the papers that the Justice Department has admitted it’d prefer its agents shoot Dillinger on sight rather than risk another gun battle. That both your boss Hoover and his boss the attorney general have said, ‘Shoot to kill, then count to ten,’ where Dillinger’s concerned.”
Purvis was leaning on his elbows, his hands clasped together prayerlike; he smiled impishly and shrugged.
“That’s what I figured,” I said. I stood up.
“Where are you off to, Mr. Heller?”
“I don’t feel confident enough that this individual is Dillinger to give you specifics of where you might find him. There’ve been too many people who look like Dillinger lately almost get their heads shot off by overeager lawmen. I don’t think I want to be part of that.”
“And you think I’m capable of that?”
“I think you want a dead Dillinger awful bad.”
“Sit down, Mr. Heller.”
I just stood there.
“Please,” he said. He gestured with an open hand. “Sit down.”
I did.
“Your concern is noted,” he said. “Perhaps justified. The Little Bohemia debacle has served to make yours truly look a little trigger-happy. That I admit. But consider this: if I shoot the wrong man, if I shoot an innocent bystander, I’ll find myself the next day back in South Carolina mowin’ my daddy’s yard.”
“I doubt that,” I said, charmed a little in spite of myself. “You’re a lawyer, and that daddy you mentioned is rich, I hear.”
“You hear right. That just means he has a bigger yard for me to mow. Times are a little hard to be hangin’ out a shingle. I need this job, Mr. Heller. Can I call you Nathan?”
“Nate.”
“Call me Melvin, if you would. I need this job. I don’t need to mess it up—not any further. Little Bohemia was the last mistake I can afford to make.”
“So if I give you this information, you won’t fuck it up.”
He didn’t flinch at the harshness of that; he just shrugged again. “I’ll try not. Who can say? Public enemies don’t tell you when or where they’re going to be, or what they’re going to do. A crystal ball is not part of a special agent’s government issue.”
“Who said it was?”
“You did, Nate. You asked me, in effect, to guarantee that if you give me some information, I won’t…foul up. Correct? How can I guarantee you anything, other than I’ll give it my best shot?”
The guy was sincere—he had a touch of Southern bullshit, and a streak of pomposity—but he was for real.
“I don’t know,” I said, glancing around the room at the young agents scurrying about, going no place. “I don’t know if these college boys can cut the mustard.”
“Nate,” Purvis said, leaning forward, looking like a puppet come to life. “The division has found it infinitely more sensible to teach intelligent men to be manhunters than to try teaching manhunters to be intelligent.”
“Don’t make me sick.”
“I notice you didn’t go to the police with this—”
“No, I didn’t go to the cops. The head of their Dillinger detail isn’t fond of me.”
“Ah. Captain Stege. Seems to me I heard that you and he weren’t close. But even without Stege, I wonder if you’d go to Chicago’s finest—a corrupt, lazy, unskilled bunch of louts, as we both know. My people, however, have gone to school. For which you deride them, but they’ve gone to school, and not just college. They’ve learned to photograph fingerprints and where to look for them. They’ve learned how to use a microscope. They’ve learned the science of ballistics. They learned how to shoot every weapon, from a pistol to a machine gun. Nate, the criminal mind is clever—but the scientific mind is
“Let me ask you something.”
“Of course.”
“Tell me the inside story on the Kansas City Massacre.”
At Union Station in Kansas City, federal and local officers ushered gangster Frank “Jelly” Nash from a train to a car that would take him to Leavenworth. Just as they’d piled into the car at Union Station, a big man with a tommy gun showed up, quickly joined by two other gunmen, and all three sprayed the car with bullets, killing four lawmen, and Nash.
Purvis cocked his head back. “It’s one of the two events that gave the Justice Department the punitive power it has today. The other, naturally, being the Lindbergh kidnapping.”
“I see.”
“When I became a special agent, I was limited in the cases I could investigate. My duties were largely…inquisitorial. I couldn’t even make an arrest. When I ran down my man, I was compelled by law to call in a local policeman or a U.S. marshal to snap on the bracelets.”
