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Afterward they walked out into the chilly night air. “You know, if I’d have listened to you,” Nelson told Karpis, “I wouldn’t be mixed up in this damn thing.”

Karpis laughed. “It seemed to me like you told me once in Reno that if you could get ten thousand dollars, you was going back out to Reno. What happened? You got more than that on your first caper.”

“Yeah,” Nelson said with a grin, “but when I got that I wanted twenty. And when I got twenty, I wanted forty. You know how these damn things are.”bn

Back in Chicago the next day, Karpis mentioned the brewing rescue attempt to Fred Barker. “Geez, I hope they have better luck than we had with Bailey,” Barker said.

“I don’t know,” said Karpis. “I’ve got a feeling that Dillinger’ll get killed there in that jail. I don’t think he’s gonna make it, but they’re goddamn sure gonna try.”

10

DILLINGER AND NELSON

March 3 to March 29, 1934

Crown Point, Indiana Saturday, March 3

A hard rain pelted the streets of Crown Point that morning, sluicing down the gutters on Joliet Street behind the jail. It was a chilling dawn, raw and gusty, low gray clouds skidding south off Lake Michigan. Sam Cahoon, a sixty-four-year-old janitor, trotted through the dim light into the jail a few minutes after eight. He shook the rain from his overcoat and waved hello to a guard. His first duty was to clean the criminal cell block, where Dillinger was held. Cahoon passed through the receiving room and trudged up the seventy-two-foot corridor that ran the length of the jail, ending at the barred door to the cell block.

After gathering his mops, Cahoon hollered for a guard named Win Bryant to let the prisoners out of their cells so he could clean. Together the two men opened a metal box on the corridor wall and threw the lever that opened the cells, allowing Dillinger and his fourteen fellow prisoners to roam the corridor behind the barred cell-block door. A few minutes later, after doing some other chores, Cahoon returned, and, with Bryant looking on, pulled the lever to open the barred door, letting in two trustees, who carried a box of toilet paper, soap, and Dutch cleanser.

Cahoon had just stepped into the cell block when Dillinger sprang forward and thrust what appeared to be a gun into his stomach. He turned Cahoon around and faced Bryant, poking the gun into Cahoon’s back. “Come on, Sam, we’re going places,” Dillinger said. “You’re gonna be good, aren’t you?”

Cahoon, flummoxed, said something like “I’m always good.”

A hulking black prisoner, Herbert Youngblood, materialized at Dillinger’s side, holding a toilet plunger menacingly over his head; he was the only inmate Dillinger had been able to lure into helping him. “You got a gun?” Youngblood asked Bryant. The guard shook his head no. It was jail policy; no one carried guns near the cell block.

Dillinger motioned toward an open cell. “Come on, boys,” he said. “Get in there.” Bryant and the two trustees filed in. When Dillinger shut the door, Cahoon stepped toward the cell. “No, I got use for you,” Dillinger said. “You’re gonna get me outta here.”

Dillinger pushed the janitor outside the cell block. Seventy feet down the concrete corridor the warden and a group of guards were sipping their morning coffees in the warden’s office at the front of the jail. It was the only way out. A flight of four steps bisected the corridor, dividing the old jail from the new addition. It put Dillinger just above the group’s line of sight.

“How many doors between me and the outside?” Dillinger asked.

Cahoon thought a moment, then said, “Four.”

Dillinger knew he didn’t have long, maybe minutes, before someone wandered back to the cell block. Quickly he fired questions at Cahoon, demanding the locations of guards, doors, and guns. He produced a pencil and drew a diagram of the jail on a shelf. Cahoon nodded. It was close. Then Dillinger, his gun still in Cahoon’s back, led Youngblood slowly along the corridor, stopping at the head of the steps.