Handsome Harry (9 page)

B
y that time, John had been at M City for about three years. He’d been transferred from Pendleton a few months before the inmate labor strike, when Russell and I got caught trying to escape by way of the rooftops, but he was never a part of any of my attempts to bust out. Not while he was
inside
the walls, I mean.

He’d arrived a few days after I’d been given two weeks in the hole for I-forget-what, so I didn’t know he was at M City until I came out of solitary. Russell and I were crossing the yard and I spotted him tossing a baseball with some of the guys on the prison team.

I went over and said Well now, look what the cat dragged in.

I was so skinny and beat-up it took him a second to recognize me—then he grinned and we shook hands. Christ, Harry, he said, it looks like they really gave you the business.

I said I’d be right as rain in no time and introduced him to Russell. Physically, he didn’t look too different from the way he had at Pendleton, maybe a little huskier. But he had a little more twist in his smile and a lot more iron in the eyes. I asked what kind of trouble he’d made at the reformatory to get sent to M City, and he said no trouble, he’d requested the transfer.

Russell said You
asked
for the pen? Goddamn, man, how long you been brain-damaged?

John gave him that cocky smile.

Later on he told me his request for transfer actually had to do with a couple of things that happened almost back to back. First of all, his wife divorced him. During the first three years he was in Pendleton she’d often gone to visit, but then the visits began to fall off, and her letters became long complaints about being lonely and feeling that she was wasting her youth and so on. He wasn’t surprised
when she filed for divorce, but it hurt like hell just the same. He said he hadn’t known what loneliness was until he got the divorce papers. He couldn’t put out of his mind that she was still so geographically nearby but was as removed from him as the moon.

A month after the divorce, he got another kick in the gut. He’d already served about five years of that ridiculous ten-to-twenty he got for a first-time conviction on a minor stickup and assault, and although he’d caused his share of trouble in his first two or three years at the reformatory, his record since then had been pretty good. What’s more, his partner in crime had been paroled two years earlier. John thought his own parole would be a cinch. It hit him hard when the board said no dice.

It amuses me that so many people like to think he would’ve gone straight if either his wife hadn’t left him or if he’d been granted parole at that Pendleton hearing. People are always saying If only this had happened, if only that, if only, if only…. That’s parlor-game stuff. The only thing that matters is what actually happens, not what should’ve or would’ve or could’ve. Like Fat Charley used to say, in any endeavor that’s over and done with, what
could’ve
happened…
did.

John was convinced the Pendleton parole board had it in for him on account of his early troublemaking in the joint, and he was sure they’d turn him down again next time. He figured if he transferred to M City he might get paroled sooner. His official reason for requesting to go to the penitentiary was that it had a better baseball team than Pendleton’s and playing for it would boost his chance of becoming a pro when he got out. Boss Miles thought John was being foolish, but he okayed the transfer.

I
t didn’t take long for him to pass muster with Red and Charley and Russ. He also started buddying with Van Meter again, but my attitude toward the scarecrow hadn’t changed
and never would, and John knew better than to bring Van Meter anywhere near me.

He tried hard to stay out of trouble with the hacks, and all of us encouraged him to keep his record as clean as he could. He would go before the parole board much sooner than any of the rest of us, and if he stuck to the straight and narrow he stood a good chance of being let out. But in a place where there were rules against nearly everything, it was hard for him not to break one now and then. It was usually for something petty—having a cigarette lighter in his cell, having a razor, gambling, stealing tomatoes from the garden house. I don’t think he did more than a one-day stretch in the hole until he was caught putting it to one of the cell house punks. That episode got him three days.

It wasn’t the first punk John put it to and it wouldn’t be the last, and I was always disappointed in him about that. Red and Charley and I were among the few guys I knew at M City who never used punks. Russell used them only to get sucked off, but as far as I was concerned any kind of sex with a punk was degrading. Whenever I got so worked up that the urge couldn’t be ignored or willed away, I’d lie in the dark with my horn in my hand and think about Mary’s ass and
bang,
in less than a minute it was done with. Beating off isn’t the best sex in the world but it beats—ha ha—using a punk. John used to give me a song and dance about how if he didn’t have frequent sex he’d get terrible headaches. He claimed that jerking off didn’t help, only sex with somebody else. He made it sound like doctor’s orders. I always thought it was a lot of hooey.

As long as we’re this close to the subject, it’s as good a time as any to say how sick and tired I am of being asked about John’s dick. Ever since he was put on display in the Chicago morgue, the rumor’s been going around that he had one like a smokestack, and I’ve been asked a hundred times if it’s true. I hear there’s even a Tijuana Bible about him and Mae West in which he lugs his hard-on around in a wheelbarrow. Jesus. I wish I’d done what Russell did one time when a re
porter who was interviewing him from a chair at his cell door asked how big John’s dick really was. Russ stood up and pulled out his pecker and held it through the bars in the guy’s face and said It was about like this.

The reporter jerked away from the bars so fast he fell over in the chair. He ended up writing that Russell was a degenerate personality and had the look of a born criminal.

Ten to one that none of the guys who have written about John’s dick ever saw it with his own eyes. Well
I
did, and I mean at full mast. Mary did too—she was with me at the time and I’ll get to that part of the story when I get to it. Suffice it to say for now that John’s tool was, to use Mary’s word, impressive. However—and as much as I hate to toot my own
horn,
ha ha—I have to be completely honest and say that he had nothing on yours truly. As you may have heard, the guys in the gang called me Pete, and why do you suppose? Because one Sunday afternoon at M City I’d been napping and dreaming about fooling around in a swimming pool with Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo, the three of us naked as jays, and I woke up to find Charley and Red and Russell at my cell door and grinning at the erection sticking out of my shorts. Russell and Red applauded and Charley said Good heavens man, that’s no peter that’s a nine pin. He always called a dick a peter. So they took to calling me Big Pete for laughs. After a while it was just Pete. Later on when Mary asked how I picked up the nickname and I told her, she waggled her brow and said she should’ve known. With her, though, I was always Harry.

As I was saying, John found it a lot harder to toe the line in M City than he’d thought it would be, but like Red and Charley, he was able to stay out of serious trouble. And being the easy guy to like that he was, he had a lot of pals.

One of them was a kid named Jenkins who was doing life for murder. The guy was friendly and a pretty good singer but there was something about him that struck me as a little off. I asked around and came to find out he’d hustled pansies on the outside. There was a
rumor he was punking for John but I didn’t know if it was true—I didn’t ask John and he didn’t say. In any case, Jenkins had a swell-looking sister, and the minute John saw her picture he went ga-ga. Jenkins said she was married but unhappy about it and would soon be filing for divorce. So John started writing to her. Next thing I knew he had his own snapshot of her taped on his wall. Like I’ve said, the man was cool in all things except women. He once said it himself: his dick was his weakness.

J
ohn got his early education in the ways and means of bank heists from me and Red and Charley and Russ—and then a couple of rough characters named Walt Dietrich and Oklahoma Jack Clark came to M City and we all learned even more about the business. For the previous two years they’d been part of the Herman Lamm gang, the best band of bank robbers ever.

The way Dietrich told it, Lamm had been an officer in the German army until he got in some kind of bad fix just before the war and amscrayed from Europe to the USA, where he took up the time-honored occupation of holdup man, and if anybody can be said to have made a true profession of bank robbery, Lamm’s the guy. Until he came along, bank robbers had been operating in much the same catch-as-catch-can fashion since the days of Jesse James. You picked out a bank and went in and pulled your piece and told everybody to stand pat, you bagged all the cash you could lay your hands on, and then you made a run for it. Lamm regarded that technique as primitive Wild West stuff. He believed a bank job should be a clockwork operation, as well planned as a military raid, and he worked out a system of operation.

The first step was to become thoroughly familiar with the bank he was going to hit. He learned its routine and found out how many employees there were and what their jobs were, who the manager was and what kind of safe or vault the place had. He made a map of the
layout and every member of the gang memorized it. He found out if the cops regularly patrolled the bank’s neighborhood, and if they did, he learned what the patrol schedule was. He studied street maps of the town and road maps of the region, then made his own map and noted on it the precise distances and speed limits and travel times from point to point on the getaway route. He’d do the same with a backup route, in case they’d have to use it. Every man in the gang had a specific job and every job had to be done with perfect timing. Timing was the key. Lamm would figure to the exact second how long a job should take from the moment they entered the bank until they came out again, and he never deviated from the timetable by a hair, not even if it meant leaving some of the money behind.

But there’s an old saying in the criminal trades—when you set out to pull a job there’s a hundred things that can go wrong, and if you can think of fifty of them you’re a mastermind. Even the best-laid plans require a lot of luck. Lamm sure had his share of it to last more than a dozen years, which is a hell of a long run in the robbery business. His luck ran out in Clinton, Indiana, when the getaway car blew a tire in front of the bank. They grabbed another car but it couldn’t go faster than thirty miles an hour, and Dietrich later read in the paper that the car belonged to an old man whose son had slyly rigged the throttle so his daddy couldn’t speed. The gang switched to still another car but it ran out of gas inside of ten miles. You run out of everything when you run out of luck.

Two hundred cops and vigilantes caught up to them and opened fire. Lamm and two others in the gang were killed. Walt and Okie Jack considered themselves blessed that they’d been allowed to surrender. They’d come to M City on life sentences for big bitch convictions.

There was no denying the beauty of Herman Lamm’s system. All it required was a smooth and well-disciplined team, and we knew that team was us. I think it’s safe to say it’ll be a good long while before anybody robs banks as…
artfully,
that’s the word for it…as artfully as we did.

I
hadn’t heard a word from Mary, not that I’d expected to, since she’d told me she’d gotten married, but I never did stop thinking about her. She stayed in touch with Earl, however, and he kept me informed of how things were going for her. Almost from the start they hadn’t gone well in her marriage. It turned out that her husband, the Kinder guy, was a small-time stickup man. Yep, the son of the police sergeant. They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but every now and then an apple will take a big bounce when it hits the ground and some will roll a long way down the hill. Earl said Mary hadn’t been specific, but reading between the lines he got the impression Kinder was a boozer and sometimes smacked her around. What I wouldn’t give for five minutes with that guy, Earl said. I didn’t say anything, but my gut was tight as a fist.

They hadn’t been married very long before Kinder took a fall for armed robbery and was sent to M City. Earl found out from Mary and his first impulse had been not to tell me until after he’d had first crack at the guy. But he’d been suffering for weeks from some kind of respiratory infection, coughing almost constantly, and he wasn’t sure he was in shape to give Kinder what he deserved. So he came to me and told me the news. Imagine my glee.

Red and Russell went with me to Kinder’s cell house one evening before lockdown. I wanted them along to keep away witnesses, but when the other cons on the row saw the three of us coming they all ducked into their cages and stayed there. Red positioned himself on one side of Kinder’s cell and Russell on the other, and I went in.

Kinder was on his bunk but jumped up when he saw me. His cellmate wasn’t there—maybe he’d seen us coming, maybe he was just lucky.

Who the hell are
you,
Kinder said, giving me a hard-guy look he’d probably picked up from the movies.

He was shorter than me but thicker and heavier. To tell the truth I wouldn’t have taken it any easier on him if he’d been a midget.

Got a message for you, I said. From Mary.

His expression got curious. My wife? What’s
she
want?

I gave him the first one in the solar plexus so he couldn’t yell out, then held him against the wall with one hand and punched him with the other for a while before I let him fall. I kicked him in the face until his nose was a bloody ruin and some of his teeth were on the floor and his lower jaw was turned at an angle you wouldn’t believe. I stomped on his hands until they were bloated and purple and some of the fingers pointed in different directions. See how many women he could beat up with those.