Read Online True Crime by Max Allan Collins - Free Book Online

first, then finally begged: What did Cermak want from them, to get Stege out of their district?
    “Become Democrats,” Cermak said.
    And they did.
    Stege would’ve done anything for Anton J. Cermak, and I had dirtied His Honor’s posthumous honor. The last time I’d seen Stege—at City Hall, where I’d come to testify in one of the subsequent Lang-Miller proceedings—I’d nodded to the stocky, white-haired copper, saying, “Good afternoon, Captain.”
    And Stege had said, “Go straight to hell, you lying son of a bitch, and don’t come back.”
    Hal Davis of the Daily News had heard our exchange, and, cleaning it up a bit, added it as color in his coverage of the trial. Now whenever I talked to my few remaining friends on the force, the first thing I heard was, “Shall I say hello to Captain Stege for you, Heller?” Followed by smug laughter.
    No, I wouldn’t be able to go to Captain Stege with this; of course, if Jimmy Lawrence did turn out to be Dillinger, and I gave him to Stege, maybe I’d be off the captain’s shit list.
    But if Jimmy Lawrence turned out to be just another Dillinger double, I’d probably find myself tied up in a little room in the back of some station house somewhere doing the rubber-hose rhumba.
    Around dusk a Yellow cab pulled up in front of the apartment house, but on my side of the street, facing south. I leaned back and dropped my hat down over my face—mostly—and made like I was snoozing. A few minutes later Jimmy Lawrence and Polly Hamilton, arm in arm, came out the front and got in the back of the cab. I waited thirty seconds, crawled over in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and pushed the starter and pulled out after them.
    The Yellow cut over to Halsted and before I knew it the scenery was looking familiar.
    The cab stopped in front of a big graystone three-flat and waited as Jimmy Lawrence got out to hold the door open for Anna Sage, who came out of her apartment building in a smart blue dress and a broad-brimmed white hat.
    I followed them to the Marbro Theater on the West Side.
    We all saw You’re Telling Me with W. C. Fields.
    It was funny.

8
     
    The next morning around ten I walked over to the Banker’s Building on the corner of Clark and Adams and took an elevator up to the nineteenth floor, where the feds kept house. The chief agent of the Chicago branch of the Division of Investigation was Melvin Purvis, but I hoped to speak to Sam Cowley.
    Cowley I’d never met, but my friend Eliot Ness—who until about a year ago had been the top fed where crime-busting in Chicago was concerned—had spoken highly of him. Purvis, whom I’d met once or twice but didn’t really know, was another kettle of fish; Eliot had contempt for the man—though I had to keep in mind that Ness and Purvis were enough alike that a little professional jealousy on Eliot’s part was not to be ruled out.
    After all, Purvis, a Justice Department special agent, entered the Chicago picture about the time Eliot, a Treasury Department man, was being phased out, his Prohibition Unit going gradually out of business when Repeal came along (beer was legal first, so the Prohibition Unit limped along well into 33). Purvis was the guy who’d get to go after the outlaws like Dillinger, while former gangbuster Ness was being shuffled offstage, being turned into a mere “reven-ooer.” Even now Eliot was chasing moonshiners around the hills of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
    But from what I’d observed—admittedly from a distance, reading about him in the papers, listening to my pals on the pickpocket detail gossip—Purvis was a fuck-up. His biggest claim to fame was tackling the “terrible Touhys,” a gang of suburban bootleggers who’d been too minor for Eliot to mess with, though they’d somehow managed to keep Capone off their home turf of Des Plaines. Post-Repeal, the Touhys were really not worth messing with—but last year Purvis had charged Roger Touhy with the hundred