Sutton (2 page)

The dep is seated at his desk. He doesn’t bother looking up. Hello, Willie.

Hello sir.

Looks like we’re a go for liftoff.

Sir?

The dep waves a hand over the papers strewn across his desk. These are your walking papers. You’re being let out.

Sutton blinks, massages his leg. Let—
out
? By who sir?

The dep looks up, sighs. Head of corrections. Or Rockefeller. Or both. Albany hasn’t decided how they want to sell this. The governor, being an ex-banker, isn’t sure he wants to put his name on it. But the head of corrections doesn’t want to overrule the parole board. Either way it looks like they’re letting you walk.

Walk sir? Why sir?

Fuck if I know. Fuck if I care.

When sir?

Tonight. If the phone will stop ringing and reporters will stop hounding me to let them turn my prison into their private rec room. If I can get these goddamn forms filled out.

Sutton stares at the dep. Then at the guards. Are they joking? They look serious.

The dep turns back to his papers. Godspeed, Willie.

The guards walk Sutton down to the prison tailor. Every man released from a New York State prison gets a release suit, a tradition that goes back at least a century. The last time Sutton got measured for a release suit, Calvin Coolidge was president.

Sutton stands before the tailor’s three-way mirror. A shock. He hasn’t stood before many mirrors in recent years and he can’t believe what he sees. That’s his round face, that’s his slicked gray hair, that’s his hated nose—too big, too broad, with different-size nostrils—and that’s the same large red bump on his eyelid, mentioned in every police report and FBI flyer since shortly after World War I. But that’s not him—it can’t be. Sutton has always prided himself on projecting a certain swagger, even in handcuffs. He’s always managed to look dapper, suave, even in prison grays. Now, sixty-eight years old, he sees in the three-way mirror that all the swagger, all the dapper and suave are gone. He’s a baggy-eyed stick figure. He looks like Felix the Cat. Even the pencil-thin mustache, once a source of pride, looks like the cartoon cat’s whiskers.

The tailor stands beside Sutton, wearing a green tape measure around his neck. An old Italian from the Bronx, with two front teeth the size of thimbles, he shakes a handful of buttons and coins in his pocket as he talks.

So they’re letting you out, Willie.

Looks like.

How long you been here?

Seventeen years.

How long since you had a new suit of clothes?

Oh. Twenty years. In the old days, when I was flush, I’d get all my suits custom-made. Silk shirts too. D’Andrea Brothers.

He still remembers the address: 587 Fifth Avenue. And the phone number. Murray Hill 5-5332.

Sure, Tailor says, D’Andrea, they did beautiful work. I still got one of their tuxes. Step up on the block.

Sutton steps up, grunts. A suit, he says. Jesus, I thought the next thing I’d be measured for would be a shroud.

I don’t do shrouds, Tailor says. No one gets to see your work.

Sutton frowns at the three reflected Tailors. It’s not enough to do nice work? People have to see it?

Tailor spreads his tape measure across Sutton’s shoulders, down his arm. Show me an artist, he says, who doesn’t want praise.

Sutton nods. I used to feel that way about my bank jobs.

Tailor looks at the triptych of reflected Suttons, winks at the middle one. He stretches the tape measure down Sutton’s bum leg. Inseam thirty, he announces. Jacket thirty-eight short.

I was a forty reg when I came in this joint. I ought to sue.

Tailor laughs softly, coughs. What color you want, Willie?

Anything but gray.

Black then. I’m glad they’re letting you out, Willie. You’ve paid your debt.

Forgive us our debts, Willie says, as we forgive our debtors.

Tailor crosses himself.

That from your novel? Right Guard asks.

Sutton and Tailor look at each other.

Tailor points a finger gun at Sutton. Merry Christmas, Willie.

Same to you, friend.

Sutton points a finger gun at Tailor, cocks the thumb hammer. Bang.

The reporters talk about sex and money and current events. Altamont, that freaky concert where those four drugged-out hippies died—who’s to blame? Mick Jagger? The Hells Angels? Then they gossip about their more successful colleagues, starting with Norman Mailer. Not only is Mailer running for mayor of New York, but he just got one million dollars to write a book about the moon landing. Mailer—the guy writes history as fiction, fiction as history, and inserts himself into all of it. He plays by his own rules while his rule-bound colleagues get sent to Attica to freeze their balls off. Fuck Mailer, they all agree.

And fuck the moon.

They blow on their hands, pull up their collars, make bets about whether or not the warden will ever be publicly exposed as a cross-dresser. Also, they bet on which will happen first—Sutton walks or Sutton croaks. The reporter from the
New York Post
says he hears Sutton’s not just knocking at death’s door, he’s ringing the bell, wiping his feet on the welcome mat. The reporter from
Newsday
says the artery in Sutton’s leg is clogged beyond repair—a doctor who plays racquetball with the reporter’s brother-in-law told him so. The reporter from
Look
says he heard from a cop friend in the Bronx that Sutton still has loot stashed all over the city. Prison officials are going to free Sutton and then the cops are going to follow him to the money.

That’s one way to solve the budget crisis, says the reporter from the Albany
Times Union
.

The reporters share what they know about Sutton, pass around facts and stories like cold provisions that will have to get them through the night. What they haven’t read, or seen on TV, they’ve heard from their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Sutton is the first multigeneration bank robber in history, the first ever to build a lengthy career—it spans four decades. In his heyday Sutton was the face of American crime, one of a handful of men to make the leap from public enemy to folk hero. Smarter than Machine Gun Kelly, saner than Pretty Boy Floyd, more likable than Legs Diamond, more peaceable than Dutch Schultz, more romantic than Bonnie and Clyde, Sutton saw bank robbery as high art and went about it with an artist’s single-minded zeal. He believed in study, planning, hard work. And yet he was also creative, an innovator, and like the greatest artists he proved to be a tenacious survivor. He escaped three maximum-security prisons, eluded cops and FBI agents for years. He was Henry Ford by way of John Dillinger—with dashes of Houdini and Picasso and Rasputin. The reporters know all about Sutton’s stylish clothes, his impish smile, his love of good books, the glint of devilment in his bright blue eyes, so blue that the FBI once described them in bulletins as
azure
. It’s the rare bank robber who moves the FBI to such lyricism.

What the reporters don’t know, what they and most Americans have always wanted to know, is whether or not Sutton, who was celebrated for being nonviolent, had anything to do with the brutal gangland murder of Arnold Schuster. A fresh-faced twenty-four-year-old from Brooklyn, a baseball-loving veteran of the Coast Guard, Schuster caught the wrong subway one afternoon and found himself face-to-face with Sutton, the most wanted man in America at the time. Three weeks later Schuster was dead, and his unsolved murder might be the most tantalizing cold case in New York City history. It’s definitely the most tantalizing part of the Sutton legend.

The guards march Sutton back to admin. A clerk cuts him two checks. One for $146, salary for seventeen years at various prison jobs, minus taxes. Another for $40, the cost of a bus ticket to Manhattan. Every released prisoner gets bus fare to Manhattan. Sutton takes the checks—this is really happening. His heart begins to throb. His leg too. They’re throbbing at each other, like the male and female leads in an Italian opera.

The guards march him back to his cell. You got fifteen minutes, they tell him, handing him a shopping bag.

He stands in the middle of the cell, his eight-by-six home for the last seventeen years. Is it possible that he won’t sleep here tonight? That he’ll sleep in a soft bed with clean sheets and a real pillow and no demented souls above and below him howling and cursing and pleading with impotence and fury? The sound of men in cages—nothing can compare. He sets the shopping bag on the desk and carefully packs the manuscript of his novel. Then the spiral notebooks from his creative writing classes. Then his copies of Dante, Shakespeare, Plato. Then Kerouac.
Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live
. A line that saved Sutton on many long nights. Then the dictionary of quotations, which contains the most famous line ever spoken by America’s most famous bank robber, Willie Sutton, a.k.a. Slick Willie, a.k.a. Willie the Actor.

Carefully, tenderly, he packs the Ezra Pound.
Now you will come out of a confusion of people
. And the Tennyson.
Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone
. He says the lines under his breath. His eyes mist. They always do. Finally he packs the yellow legal pad, the one on which he was writing when the guards came for him. Not his novel, which he recently finished, but a suicide note, the one he began composing an hour after the parole board’s rejection. So often, he thinks, that’s how it happens. Death stands at your door, hitches up its pants, points its baton at you—then hands you a pardon.

Once Sutton’s cell is packed, the dep lets him make a few phone calls. First he dials his lawyer, Katherine. She’s incoherent with joy.

We did it, Willie. We
did
it!

How
did we do it, Katherine?

They got tired of fighting us. It’s Christmas, Willie, and they were just tired. It was easier to give up.

I know how they felt, Katherine.

And the newspapers certainly helped, Willie. The newspapers were on your side.

Which is why Katherine’s cut a deal with one of the biggest newspapers. She mentions which one, but Sutton’s mind is racing, the name doesn’t register. The newspaper is going to whisk Sutton aboard its private plane to Manhattan, put him up at a hotel, and in exchange he’ll give them his exclusive story.

Unfortunately, Katherine adds, that means you’ll have to spend Christmas Day with a reporter instead of family. Is that okay?

Sutton thinks of his family. He hasn’t spoken to them in years. He thinks of reporters—he hasn’t spoken to them
ever
. He doesn’t like reporters. Still, this is no time to make waves.

That’ll be fine, Katherine.

Now, do you know anyone who can pick you up outside the prison and drive you to the airport?

I’ll find someone.

He hangs up, dials Donald, who answers on the tenth ring.

Donald? It’s Willie.

Who’s this?

Willie. What are you doing?

Oh. Hey. Drinking a beer, getting ready to watch
The Flying Nun
.

Listen. It seems they’re letting me out tonight.

They’re letting
you
out, or you’re letting
yourself
out?

It’s legit, Donald. They’re opening the door.

Hell freezing over?

I don’t know. But the devil’s definitely wearing a sweater. Can you pick me up at the front gate?

Near the Sleeping Beauty thing?

Yeah.

Of course.

Sutton asks Donald if he can bring him a few items.

Anything, Donald says. Name it.

A TV van from Buffalo roars up to the gate. A TV reporter jumps out, fusses with his microphone. He’s wearing a two-hundred-dollar suit, a camel-hair topcoat, gray leather gloves, silver cuff links. The print reporters elbow each other. Cuff links—have you ever?

The TV reporter strolls up to the print reporters and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas. Same to you, they mumble. Then silence.

Silent Night, the TV reporter says.

No one laughs.

The reporter from
Newsweek
asks the TV reporter if he read Pete Hamill in this morning’s
Post
. Hamill’s eloquent apologia for Sutton, his plea for Sutton’s release, addressed as a letter to the governor, might be the reason they’re all here. Hamill urged Rockefeller to be fair.
If Willie Sutton had been a GE board member or a former water commissioner, instead of the son of an Irish blacksmith, he would be on the street now
.

The TV reporter stiffens. He knows the print guys think he doesn’t read—can’t read. Yeah, he says, I thought Hamill nailed it. Especially his line about banks.
There are some of us today, looking at the mortgage interest rates, who feel that it is the banks that are sticking us up
. And I got a lump in my throat at that bit about Sutton reuniting with a lost love.
Willie Sutton should be able to sit and watch the ducks in Prospect Park one more time, or go to Nathan’s for a hot dog, or call up some old girl for a drink
.

This sets off a debate. Does Sutton actually deserve to be free? He’s a thug, says the
Newsday
reporter—why all the adulation?

Because he’s a god in parts of Brooklyn, says the
Post
reporter. Just look at this crowd.

There are now more than two dozen reporters and another two dozen civilians—crime buffs, police radio monitors, curiosity seekers. Freaks. Ghouls.

But again, says the
Newsday
reporter, I ask you—why?

Because Sutton robbed
banks
, the TV reporter says, and who the hell has a kind word to say for
banks
? They should not only let him out, they should give him the key to the city.

What I don’t get, says the
Look
reporter, is why Rockefeller, a former banker, would let out a bank robber.

Rockefeller needs the Irish vote, says the
Times Union
reporter. You can’t get reelected in New York without the Irish vote and Sutton’s like Jimmy Walker and Michael Collins and a couple Kennedys in one big Mulligan stew.