Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [154]
The apartment’s windows were closed; from the outside it looked vacant. Betting their suspect was too smart to return, agents had the manager unlock the apartment at 7:30. Inside they found what was clearly a bank robber’s lair: a Thompson submachine gun stock, a two-foot dynamite fuse, road maps and airline schedules, license plates, three notebooks filled with getaway maps, and bullets—lots and lots of bullets. After dusting for fingerprints and collecting stray receipts and laundry tags, everyone but two junior agents returned downtown.
A few hours later, just before noon, the two agents were pacing the apartment, submachine guns in their hands, when they heard a key enter the front latch. The agents leaped to the door just as a startled “negress”—as an FBI report termed her—stepped into the apartment and found herself facing the muzzle of a Thompson gun. She said her name was Lucy Jackson. She was a maid. She said her sister had asked her to clean the apartment. The sister, whose name was Leona Goodman, was sitting in a car outside. The two agents brought her in.
The story Leona Goodman told the FBI would prove as important as any the Bureau heard all year. She said she worked for a man she knew as “Mr. Stevens”; as agents were to learn later, “Mr. Stevens” had arranged for Mrs. Goodman to clean the homes of a series of major criminals, from Van Meter to Frank Nash to Harry Sawyer. Just that morning, Mrs. Goodman said, Mr. Stevens had visited her home, handed her a key, and asked her to clean out this apartment. She was feeling sickly, so she had asked her sister to do it. She had promised to pack some clothes into a tan suitcase and bring it to her house. Mr. Stevens had promised to come for the bag later that day.
The agents took Mrs. Goodman downtown, where the tan suitcase was emptied and refilled with stacks of Wanted posters. Inspector Rorer approached Ed Notesteen, the agent who had manned the infamous kitchenette viewing post during Verne Miller’s Halloween escape in Chicago, and told him to take Mrs. Goodman, the bag, and two agents back to Mrs. Goodman’s home to await the arrival of the mysterious “Mr. Stevens.” As he left, Notesteen asked Inspector Rorer what to do if he appeared. According to Agent Notesteen’s memorandum on the day’s events, Rorer’s reply struck him as unusual: “Shoot him.”
By early afternoon, Notesteen and the other two agents had taken up positions in Mrs. Goodman’s faded clapboard house, located on a quiet street in a black neighborhood. From the tone of his memos, it’s clear that Notesteen wasn’t comfortable with the setting or his orders. Agent George Gross, who sat in a window with a submachine gun across his lap, noticed several suspicious cars driving by.bz Notesteen called Inspector Rorer and asked for reinforcements; a little later he was relieved to see several agents driving nearby streets. While on the phone, Notesteen pointedly asked Rorer to restate his orders. It all depended on Mrs. Goodman’s identification of “Mr. Stevens,” Rorer said. “If she says that’s the man,” he said, “kill him.”6
As the afternoon wore on, Notesteen paced from room to room. This wasn’t right. They didn’t have the first clue who “Mr. Stevens” was. He could be a real estate agent. He could be anyone. And Notesteen had orders to shoot him on sight. Notesteen repeatedly asked Mrs. Goodman, who sat in the kitchen, whether she could be certain if she saw Mr. Stevens. “I’ll know him,” she assured him.
Three hours passed. Then, about five-thirty, Agent Gross saw a green Terraplane sedan coasting to a stop outside. “There’s a car,” he said. “It’s stopping across the street.”
A man in an overcoat jumped out of the car and in three or four long strides was at the kitchen door. Mrs. Goodman saw him coming. She opened the door, shoved the suitcase outside, and slammed the door in her visitor’s face without a word.
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