Surprise, Arizona, 1984.
A short story
by
John William Tuohy
John Dillinger eyed the heavy
set man walk into park and continued to watch him as he passed the swings and
the broken water fountain and made his way to bleachers and took a seat two rows
down and just to the left of Dillinger. He studied the man. He had seen him
several times that week. He was too old
to an FBI agent or cop.
After a few minutes of sitting
in silence the man turned, looked up at Dillinger and smiled and nodded towards
the Little League players on the field.
“Follow the game?” he asked.
Dillinger shook his head “No,
not much” and then pointed at the boy on first base “My grandson”
They watched the game in
silence for several minutes before Dillinger spoke.
“You know who I am” Dillinger said
without taking his eyes from the game and then added “So who are you?”
“I’m Ray Brennan.”
Dillinger turned and looked Brennan
over and asked “FBI?”
“No” Brennan answered with a
smile. “Reporter. Chicago Tribune”
Dillinger sighed and then
nodded his head in the direction of his grandson and said “He’s never heard of
John Dillinger. Doesn’t know a damn thing about him. You know what he does
know?”
Brennan smiled softly and shook
his head.
“He knows that if you hurt
someone, you apologize. He knows God is good. He knows that he should love his
country, be respectful to his parents. That stealing is wrong. So is lying and
cheating. He knows those things because I taught him those things. He knows his
grandfather is a decent guy, a guy who would never harm a soul.”
He stopped talking and looked
down at the sun baked blue paint on the bleacher and said “I disappeared fifty
years ago. I haven’t robbed a bank or broken a law since….”
He stopped to recall the dates
and then continued “since we knocked off the Merchants National Bank in…………..”
he voice trailed off and he searched his memory for the banks location.
“South Bend, Indiana, June
1934” Brennan added.
They fell silent for a moment
and then Brennan asked “Did you pay the FBI to let you disappear? What was the
agent’s name?”
They both knew the agents name
and they both knew that asking was a reporter’s trick.
“Purvis” Dillinger added
“Special Agent Melvin Purvis. Did I pay him? No, Melvin Purvis was the straightest
arrow ever made by God or man.” And then he shook his head, smiled and said
“Did you know that the only federal charge
ever made against me was that he drove a stolen car across state lines? When I
broke out of that jail at Crown Point, Indiana.
“March
of 1934” Brennen added
“I
took a sheriff’s car and drove into Illinois.” Dillinger continued “Based on
that, and just that, the FBI decided I was Public Enemy Number One”
They booth watched a boy swing desperately
at a low pitch.
“So what’s the story?” Brennan asked.
“I don’t know much. What I heard was that
in the summer of 1934, a dirty cop in Chicago named Martin Zarkovic approached Agent
Purvis and told him that he knew a woman named Anna Sage who was running a
brothel and that one of her girls was seeing me as a regular. Anna Sage was an
illegal from some place in Europe, was getting booted out of the country after
a moral arrest and that she could set up Dillinger if Purvis would assure her
the deportation was called off”
“Were you?”
Brennan asked “Were you involved with one of her girls?”
“Hell” Dillinger
said “I never heard of no Anna Sage or nobody who worked for her.”
“So you didn’t know Zarkovic the cop was Anna
Sage’s partner in the brothel?”
Dillinger leaned
back slowly and said “I’ll be damned”
“Purvis had a
small army of agents with him waiting outside the theater.” Brennan said. “When the film was over, Sage would walk with
Dillinger. Purvis had told his men that he would light a cigar when he spotted
Dillinger and on that signal they would draw their weapons and move in.”
“And that’s when
his Jimmy Lawrence fellow saw the agents, figured they were cops and ran for it
down the alley next to the theater” Dillinger added “And Purvis shot him”
“Well that’s what
we wrote in the papers” Brennan said “What happened was that James Lawrence and
Sage started walking down the street when the cop, Zarkovic walked up behind Jimmy
Lawrence, fired two shots into the back of his head, Lawrence fell face down
into the alley entrance and then Zarkovic disappeared into the crowd. Purvis
and his men rushed in, guns drawn so everyone assumed the FBI fired the shots
because Dillinger had tried to escape down the Alley, it was just one of those
remarkable acts of God at the right place at the right moment”
“You can image I
surprised I was” Dillinger said “When I opened the morning paper the day after
to read that I was, shot and killed by Special Agent Melvin Purvis of the FBI outside
the Biograph theater”
“I went to the
morgue that morning” Brennan said “Jimmy Lawrence might have looked like you
alive but as a cadaver, you two had nothing in common”
“Is that so?”
Dillinger asked.
“Yeah” Brennan
continued “Purvis explained it away as plastic surgery. But I was there. I saw two pathologists
perform the autopsy before twenty medical students with a recording nurse in
attendance. She recorded ever word for the final report
“And where’s the
final report?” Dillinger asked.
“Agent Purvis took
it. And it was never seen again” Brennan answered. I got my hands on a copy of the original autopsy.
The nurse kept it. I’ve had it for almost fifty years”
He reached into
his pant pocket and took out a couple of sheets of folded papers and handed it
to Dillinger “You can see for yourself, it says right there, the corpse had
brown eyes”
“Mine are blue”
Dillinger said reading the report as he spoke.
“The four inch
scar on your abdomen from your surgery in the navy wasn’t on the corpse. The
bullet wound scars on the arms were missing. The measured the corpse at six
foot four, a full six inches taller than you and it just went on from
there”
“Fingerprints?”
Dillinger asked
“Provided to the Coroner’s
report by the FBI” Brennan said. “So how did you end up here?”
“I waited a few
weeks, you know, laid low” Dillinger said “The story disappeared from the
papers and I figured ‘Hell, I must be dead” so I high tailed out of Chicago.
Lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon for a while. The over to California for a bit
and then made my way down to Arizona when the war started, got a job at
airplane assembly plant near Tucson. That was in the winter of 43. Stayed with
em until 1973, retired. Full pension. Got married, good women, God rest her. I
never told her more than what she needed to know. Two kids, two girls. You?”
“Divorced” Brennan
said “No kids”
“What happened to
the woman, Anna Sage?” Dillinger asked.
“Purvis had her
deported back to Roumania. She died right after the war.” Brennan answered.
“And Zarkovic? The
cop?” Dillinger asked.
“He took over the
brothel for himself and was appointed chief of the East Chicago
Police Department” Brennan said. “The FBI backed the promotion”
“Purvis?”
Dillinger asked
“He shot himself
through the head in 1959”
“And you”
Dillinger asked “What made you find your way down here?”
“After I saw the
autopsy on Jimmy Lawrence I knew you were still alive. And I told my editor as
much. He had a good laugh and he said
“Well, kid, if you want to go find John Dillinger, by God, you go find John
Dillinger”. So I did”
“It took you fifty
years?” Dillinger asked.
“Well you’re not
an easy man to find. Worlds only travelling dead man.” Brennan said as he stood
to his feet “Besides, it isn’t the story that makes the reporter, it’s the
tenacity”
Brennan looked at
his watch.
“How did you find
me?” Dillinger asked.
“Tenacity” Brennan
answered.
“So” Dillinger
said “I don’t suppose there’s any way I can get you not to file this story”
“Nope” Brennan said “Not for
love or money. That is if I had a place to file it”
Brennan looked at his watch
again “By the time I get back to Chicago tomorrow, they will have retired me
from the paper”
“How do you know?” Dillinger
asked.
“I’m a reporter” Brennan said
“I find stuff out”
“So now what?” Dillinger asked.
“What happens next?”
“So now we enjoy the rest of
our lives and leave the past behind us” Brennan replied.
