“Yes. And she’d go off to town without asking him. And do Lord knows what. Men. Drink.” He covered his face with one weathered hand and wept. Tears found their way through the cracks of his fingers and fell on his lap. I’d never had a client cry in the office before—not even when I handed ’em my list of expenses—and it made me uncomfortable. This man was devastated by the road his daughter had gone down. His moral and religious convictions must’ve been strong, I thought, for him to take having a loose daughter so hard.
I got up and began filling a cup of water for him from the cooler, which said, “Glug glug.” I said, “So her husband beat her, and she skipped.”
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, dried his eyes, blew his nose. “Yes. She ran off.”
I handed him the cup of water; he drank it greedily, then didn’t know what to do with the cup. I took it from him and wadded and dropped it in the wastebasket behind the desk. Sat again.
“Did she come home to you?” I said. “After she left her husband?”
He shook his head. “She never thought to. She never even thought to. She lumped me in with Seth—I must’ve seemed just as bad as he was, in her mind.”
“Seth is her husband.”
One quick curt nod.
“How’s he feel about getting Louise back?”
“Ain’t interested. He’s took up with several other ‘ladies,’ hear tell.”
“I see.”
“But I want her back. I want to do right by her. Make it up to her. She’ll like livin’ in town….”
“I’m sure. You mentioned something about her running with a ‘bad crowd.’ How bad?”
The blood drained out of his face.
“That bad?” I said.
“Ever hear of a man called ‘Candy’ Walker?”
“Jesus.”
He sighed heavily. “I take it you heard of him.”
I had. I’d never met him, but Clarence “Candy” Walker was a small-time hood from the North Side, a handsome ladies’ man of about thirty, a wheel man who drove beer trucks for Bugs Moran in the old days and had been in Nitti’s stable till maybe a year ago. Since then—like Baby Face Nelson and a few other graduates of the Capone mob who’d been laid off after Repeal—he’d been seen driving for the Barkers. The bank-robbing Barkers.
He’d also driven for Dillinger a few times in the last six months, if I wasn’t mistaken. Small world.
I said, “I take it from your tone you know who Candy Walker is.”
“He drives what they call in the papers the ‘getaway car’ in robberies. He’s a bank robber.”
“He drives getaway cars, and he’s a bank robber. Yes.”
He dug in his left suitcoat pocket. Took out a folded newspaper clipping; as he did, he said, “She ran off to Chicago about a year ago. She was seen with him here. She was living with him, as a matter of fact.”
“How did you find this out?”
“Seth reported her as a missing person. He left it pretty much drop, after that. But I kept after the sheriff’s office, and the sheriff’s office said the Chicago police knew she was in Chicago living with this Candy Walker feller.”
“If you’re thinking Walker is still around Chicago, I’d doubt it…”
“That’s what the sheriff’s office’s been tellin’ me. And I can figure that for myself. Melvin Purvis has made your town too hot for them gangsters. This Walker’s living out on the road somewheres. Going from here to there. Stealing. May the Good Lord damn him to hell for eternity.”
“Good odds on that,” I said, taking the clipping he was holding out. It was an interior page from a
At 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, June 30, five men (later identified as John Dillinger, Homer Van Meter, Baby Face Nelson, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and Clarence “Candy” Walker) parked their Hudson in front of the bank. Walker remained at the wheel, and Nelson, his machine gun under his coat, took up position near the rear of the car. Van Meter, with a rifle, took position just down the street, in front of a shoe store. Inside the bank Dillinger and Floyd made a withdrawal—only when the tellers weren’t filling their sacks up quickly enough, Floyd fired a burst from his machine gun into the ceiling, to perk up the proceedings. Outside, a traffic cop heard the commotion and came running. Van Meter fired his rifle and the cop fell in the street, stopping traffic. The owner of a jewelry shop down the way ran out of his shop and shot at Nelson, whose bulletproof vest saved him as he spun and began firing wildly. Only the cop was killed, but several pedestrians were wounded, including the hostages who were made to ride the running boards as Candy Walker wheeled out of town, with around twenty-five thousand of the bank’s money in tow. On the west side of South Bend, the hostages were set free; the group split in two and climbed into separate cars.
This was, as far as anybody knew, Dillinger’s last caper.
