Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [150]
But there were no developments. After a month of searching, neither Purvis nor any other FBI agent had the first clue where Dillinger was. And then a funny thing happened. Dillinger found them.
11
CRESCENDO
March 30 to April 10, 1934
As the FBI’s half-hearted manhunt continued, Dillinger rested and let his wound heal in his new set of rooms at the Lincoln Court Apartments, a compact, thirty-two-unit building on busy South Lexington Avenue, in the heart of St. Paul’s toniest neighborhood. Conditions were cramped with John Hamilton and Pat Cherrington sleeping in the living room. At least Nelson was gone, disappearing on one of his jaunts out west. Van Meter came and went like a ghost, his eyes always scanning the cars outside for a government license plate.
There was a theater down the street, and several nights Dillinger took Billie to the movies. One evening they watched a newsreel interview of Dillinger’s father. “John isn’t a bad boy,” the old man said. “They ought to give him a chance. He just robbed some banks.” Dillinger smiled. It was probably the nicest thing his father ever said about him. On Friday night, March 31, at the end of his second week in St. Paul, Dillinger took Billie to see Fashions of 1933, a review of the latest designer work from New York and Paris. That night Opal Long arrived from Chicago, having ditched her FBI tail there. She assured Dillinger she hadn’t been followed. He went to bed Friday night happy. The weekend loomed. Maybe they would take a ride in the country.
Snow lay thick on the streets of St. Paul that Friday afternoon when a woman named Daisy Coffey walked up the white-marble stairway of the Federal Courts Building and entered the FBI’s offices in Room 203. The SAC, Werner Hanni, and his men were focused on the Bremer case, but Hanni stepped away long enough to take her statement. Mrs. Coffey, who said she managed the Lincoln Court Apartments on South Lexington Avenue, told Hanni she was suspicious of the couple renting Apartment 303. Her new tenants, “Mr. and Mrs. Carl P. Hellman,” had frequent guests, always used the building’s rear door and kept their blinds lowered till 10:30 each morning. Hanni was unimpressed. “She says that she just has a feeling that there is something mysterious and questionable” about the Hellmans, he wrote in a memo.
After Mrs. Coffey left, Hanni handed her statement to a pair of young agents, Rosser L. “Rusty” Nalls and Rufus Coulter.bx Later that day the two drove uptown and showed Mrs. Coffey photographs of the only men the St. Paul office was interested in, Karpis and the Barkers. Mrs. Coffey couldn’t identify any of them. But she had taken down Mr. Hellman’s license plate number. Returning downtown, Agent Nalls ran a check and found the car registered to a Carl Hellman in North St. Paul. But when he called the post office for Mr. Hellman’s address, he found there was none. The name appeared to be fictitious.
The Lincoln Court was a three-story red-brick building; out back was a paved alley with a residential neighborhood beyond. That night Nalls and Coulter cruised through the alley and parked on a side street. They could see that the blinds in Apartment 303 were lowered. It seemed a normal thing to do; otherwise anyone could see right in. In the space beneath the shades they could see a man and a woman moving around inside the apartment. After three hours they returned downtown and reported they had seen nothing out of the ordinary.
Nonetheless, they returned the next morning at 9:00 to question the occupants of Apartment 303. Inspector William Rorer, who remained in St. Paul