“J. Edgar probably can’t get that good a blow job from a dame.” How we laughed! Sure, Purvis got Johnnie in the end, but only after setting an ambush outside the Biograph and shooting him in the back while he was running down an alley. He fell down in the muck and the cat shit and said, “How’s this, then?” and died.
Still folks won’t believe it. Johnnie was handsome, they say, looked 87
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almost like a movie star. The fella the Gees shot outside the Biograph had a fat face, all swollen up and bloated like a cooked sausage. Johnnie was barely thirty-one, they say, and the mug the cops shot that night looked forty, easy! Also (and here they drop their voices to a whisper), everyone knows John Dillinger had a pecker the size of a Louisville Slugger. That fella Purvis ambushed outside the Biograph didn’t have nothing but the standard six inches. And then there’s the matter of that scar on his upper lip. You can see it clear as day in the morgue photographs (like the one where some yo-yo is holding up my old pal’s head and looking all solemn, as if to tell the world once and for all that Crime Does Not Pay). The scar cuts the side of Johnnie’s mustache in two. Everyone knows John Dillinger never had a scar like that, people say; just look at any of the other pictures. God knows there’s enough of them.
There’s even a book that says Johnnie didn’t die—that he lived on long after the rest of his running buddies, and finished up in Mexico, living in a haci and pleasing any number of señoras and señoritas with his oversized tool. The book claims that my old pal died on Novem-ber 20, 1963—two days before Kennedy—at the ripe old age of sixty, and it wasn’t no federal bullet that took him off but a plain old heart attack, that John Dillinger died in bed.
It’s a nice story, but it ain’t true.
Johnnie’s face looks big in those last photos because he’d really packed on the pounds. He was the type who eats when he’s nervous, and after Jack Hamilton died, in Aurora, Illinois, Johnnie felt he was next. Said as much, in that gravel pit where we took poor old Jack.
As for his tool—well, I’d known Johnnie ever since we met at Pendleton Reformatory in Indiana. I saw him dressed and undressed, and Homer Van Meter is here to tell you that he had a good one, but not an especially great one. (I’ll tell you who had a great one, if you want to know: Dock Barker—the mama’s boy! Ha!)
Which brings me to the scar on Johnnie’s upper lip, the one you can see cutting through his mustache in those pictures where he’s lying on the cooling board. The reason the scar doesn’t show in any 88
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of Johnnie’s other pictures is that he got it near the end. It happened in Aurora, while Jack (Red) Hamilton, our old pal, was on his deathbed. That’s what I want to tell you about: how Johnnie Dillinger got the scar on his upper lip.
Me and Johnnie and Red Hamilton got away from the Little Bohemia shootout through the kitchen windows in back, making our way down the side of the lake while Purvis and his idiots were still pouring lead into the front of the lodge. Boy, I hope the kraut who owned the place had insurance! The first car we found belonged to an elderly neighbor couple, and it wouldn’t start. We had better luck with the second—a Ford coupe that belonged to a carpenter just up the road. Johnnie put him in the driver’s seat, and he chauffeured us a good way back toward St. Paul. Then he was invited to step out—
which he did quite willingly—and I took over.
We crossed the Mississippi about twenty miles downriver from St.
Paul, and although the local cops were all on the lookout for what they called the Dillinger Gang, I think we would have been all right if Jack Hamilton hadn’t lost his hat while we were making our escape.
He was sweating like a pig—he always did when he was nervous—
and when he found a rag on the backseat of the carpenter’s car he whipped it into a kind of rope and tied it around his head, Injun style.
That was what caught the eye of those cops parked on the Wisconsin side of the Spiral Bridge as we went past them, and they came after us for a closer look.
That might have been the end of us right there, but Johnnie always had the Devil’s own luck—until the Biograph, anyway. He put a cattle truck right between us and them, and the cops couldn’t get past.
“Step on it, Homer!” Johnnie shouts at me. He was in the backseat, and in rare good humor from the sound of him. “Make it walk!”
I did, too, and we left the cattle truck in the dust, with those cops stuck behind it. So long, Mother, I’ll write when I get work. Ha!
Once it seemed we had them buried for good, Jack says, “Slow down, you damned fool—no sense getting picked up for speeding.”
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So I slowed down to thirty-five and for a quarter of an hour everything was fine. We were talking about Little Bohemia, and whether or not Lester (the one they were always calling Baby Face) might have gotten away, when all at once there’s the crackle of rifles and pistols, and the sound of bullets whining off the pavement. It was those hick cops from the bridge. They’d caught up, creeping easy the last ninety or a hundred yards, and were close enough now to be shooting for the tires—they probably weren’t entirely sure, even then, that it was Dillinger.
They weren’t in doubt for long. Johnnie broke out the back window of the Ford with the butt of his pistol and started shooting back.
I mashed the gas pedal again and got that Ford all the way up to fifty, which was a tearing rush in those days. There wasn’t much traffic, but what there was I passed any way I could—on the left, on the right, in the ditch. Twice I felt the driver’s-side wheels go up, but we never tipped. Nothing like a Ford when it came to a getaway. Once Johnnie wrote to Henry Ford himself. “When I’m in a Ford, I can make any car take my dust,” he told Mr. Ford, and we surely dusted them that day.
We paid a price, though. There were these spink! spink! spink!
noises, and a crack ran up the windshield and a slug—I’m pretty sure it was a .45—fell dead on the dashboard. It looked like a big black elm beetle.
Jack Hamilton was in the passenger seat. He got his tommy gun off the floor and was checking the drum, ready to lean out the window, I imagine, when there came another of those spink! noises. Jack says, “Oh! Bastard! I’m hit!” That bullet had to have come in the busted back window and how it missed Johnnie to hit Jack I don’t know.
“Are you all right?” I shouted. I was hung over the wheel like a monkey and driving like one, too, very likely. I passed a Coulee Dairy truck on the right, honking all the time, yelling for that white-coat-farmer-son-of-a-bitch to get out of my road. “Jack, are you all right?”
“I’m okay, I’m fine!” he says, and shoves himself and his sub gun 90
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out the window, almost to his waist. Only, at first the milk truck was in the way. I could see the driver in the mirror, gawking at us from under his little hat. And when I looked over at Jack as he leaned out I could see a hole, just as neat and round as something you’d draw with a pencil, in the middle of his overcoat. There was no blood, just that little black hole.
“Never mind Jack, just run the son of a bitch!” Johnnie shouted at me.
I ran it. We gained maybe half a mile on the milk truck, and the cops stuck behind it the whole while because there was a guardrail on one side and a line of slowpoke traffic coming the other way. We turned hard, around a sharp curve, and for a moment both the milk truck and the police car were out of sight. Suddenly, on the right, there was a gravel road all grown in with weeds.
“In there!” Jack gasps, falling back into the passenger seat, but I was already turning in.
It was an old driveway. I drove about seventy yards, over a little rise and down the other side, ending at a farmhouse that looked long empty. I killed the engine, and we all got out and stood behind the car.