….. bawdy parts.”
“What’s bawdy parts?” Roger asked.
“The love parts,” she answered quickly. He made a face and lost interest. The boy fingered the two-inch-thick stack of Cops ‘N’ Robbers bubble gum cards carefully wrapped with a worn and dirty rubber band that lay beside his dinner plate.
“Tommy’s got two John Dillingers. Two! And a Melvin Purvis,” Roger complained. “And he wants live of my cards for one of his John Dillingers. Don’t seem fair.”
“Doesn’t seem fair,” Louise corrected.
“It’s business, son,” Ben Scoby said. “Called the law of supply and demand. He’s got the supply, you’ve got the demand.”
“But he’s my friend!”
“Don’t count in business matters,” Scoby said.
“Doesn’t,” Louise corrected.
“Doesn’t,” Scoby said with a frown.
“You and Fred do business at the bank ‘with your friends,” said Roger.
“Different,” Scoby said, and started explaining collateral and interest and payments to the seven-year-old, who quickly tuned him out and concentrated on how he was going to get the Dillinger card away from Tommy Newton without severely depleting his own collection.
“Which card is worth the most?” Fred asked.
“Oh, John Dillinger by far,” Roger said. “‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd is second, but he’s nowhere near John Dillinger.”
Scoby sighed. “Here I am in the banking business and my son’s primary interest in life is to acquire a gum card with the face of the worst bank robber in history.” He shook his head. “What’s the world comin’ to?”
“It’s supply and demand,” Roger answered, and they all laughed.
Dinner at the Scobys’ was routine. The conversation centered around Roosevelt and how he was handling the economy, and the baseball season, and the county fair coming up in two weeks, and what the Dillinger gang was up to now, and whether Jack Sharkey had the stuff to whip the German, Max Schmeling, for the heavyweight championship of the world. That was about as close as they ever got to German affairs. After all, Europe was half the world away from Drew City.
“Tell you what, Rog,” Dempsey said. “I’ve got to go up to Chicago this weekend and see my mother. Maybe I can find you a John Dillinger up there.”
“Really!”
“Maybe. Can’t promise but I’ll check around.”
“Why don’t you take the Buick,” Louise offered. “I won’t be using it and you can get back a lot earlier on Sunday.”
Dempsey reached in his pocket and took out the makings of a cigarette. Roger watched with rapt attention as he pulled a sheet of the thin paper from the packet and curled it with his forefinger into a little trough, then shook tobacco out of the package along the length of the curve of paper, rolled it into a tight cigarette and licked the paper and sealed it.
When Dempsey took out his lighter, Louise held out her hand. He put it in her palm. She loved the sensual feel of its smooth, gold sides, rubbing her thumb up and down its length and across the unique wolf’s head on the top, before she snapped it open and lit his cigarette.
Dempsey finally shook his head. “I’ll take the Greyhound like I always do,” he said.
He walked home in the cool spring rain and when he got to Third Street he stopped across the street from the old Victorian house that sat by itself in the middle of the block. Shoulders hunched against the rain, his hands stuffed in his pockets, he stared at Miss Beverly Allerdy’s parlor, where the shades were always drawn and you could hear the loud, Negro blues music playing inside the jaded walls and men sneaked in the back door and there was a lot of laughter. Women’s laughter. He wondered how far the ladies would go in this small town. He could not risk visiting the house. As he stood there he felt the familiar urge again, felt the familiar tightening in his crotch and the anger building up.
Dempsey had invented the story of an ailing mother in Chicago when the familiar urge had first come over him. Since then he had taken the four o’clock bus to Chicago every six or seven weeks, checked into the Edgewater Beach Hotel and employed one of the most expensive party girl services in the Midwest, girls who were willing to endure- his sadistic games for the right price. He had been thinking about taking the trip for several days. The need was building in him.
He decided he would bring up the trip to Chicago again and accept Louise’s offer of the car for the weekend—after a reasonable protest, of course. It might be interesting for a change, cruising the streets of Chicago, looking for something different.
As he walked home in the rain, Dempsey thought about what he had learned about Americans in the nine months since he had come to Drew City. They were generous. Too trusting. Good friends when they got to know you. They were crazy for fads. They loved sports and entertainment and elevated ballplayers and movie actors, even the very rich, to a kind of royalty status. They were radically independent. Their slang expressions changed from one place to the next, impossible to keep up with. Everyone went to church on Sunday. They all seemed to have an unusual fascination with the weather. And the entire nation seemed to gather around their radios every night.
But most encouraging of all, thought 27 with satisfaction, they were complacent.
Indiana Highway 29, a long, slender finger of concrete, stretched south from Logansport to Indianapolis under a bleak and threatening sky. A black Packard hummed toward the town of Delphi, its five passengers dressed in suits and dark felt hats except for the man sitting in the front next to the driver. John Dillinger wore a straw boater, which had become somewhat of a trademark for him.
“Car’s hummin’ like a bee, Russ,” Dillinger said to the driver.
“Put in new plugs and points, new air filter.
“Can the crap, okay?” Lester Gillis, who called himself Big George but was known to the world as Baby Face Nelson, growled from the backseat. “I wouldn’t know a spark plug from the queen of hearts and I don’t wanna”
“Everybody straight on the plan?” Dillinger said, leaning sideways in the seat and facing the three in the back. They all nodded confidently. “We need to go over it again?”
“Nah, we got it, fer Chrissakes,” Nelson said.
“You can be a real pain in the ass, y’know that, Lester,” said Dillinger.
“Don’t call me that. I told you, I like to be called George.”
“That makes a lot of sense,” the driver chuckled. “I suppose if your name was George you’d want us to call you Percy.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“Awright, awright,” Dillinger said. “No need to get hot. We got work to do.”
Nelson settled back and shook his shoulders. His short temper overrode a lifelong inferiority complex—he was only five-four, and he resented the fact that Dillinger was the most wanted man in America when Nelson felt he rightfully should have been Public Enemy Number One. But his own gang had been shot out from under him and he couldn’t operate alone. He calmed down.
“How come you do all this planning?’ he asked Dillinger.
“Learned it from the expert.”
“Who’s that?”
“Herman K. Lamm.”
“Who?” Homer Van Meter asked, speaking for the first time since breakfast.
“Herman Lamm. You ought to know that name, he’s the father of modern bank robbery. When you say you’re takin’ it on the lam? That expression is named for Herman Lamm. Robbed banks for thirteen years before they grabbed him.”
“C’mon,” Van Meter said skeptically.