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“Yes,” Mrs. Goodman. “That’s the man who came by this morning, and that’s the man from the apartment.”

“Let him have it!” Notesteen shouted to Agent Gross.

There was a burst of machine-gun fire and the sound of shattering glass. A moment later, Notesteen stepped to the window. Lying on the sidewalk outside was a man with a suitcase. To Notesteen’s surprise, a woman was leaning over his fallen body, sobbing. “Are you positive that was the right man?” Notesteen asked Mrs. Goodman, who had begun crying hysterically. “Oh yes,” she managed to say. “It was.”

Notesteen telephoned Inspector Rorer and told him what happened. Then he ran outside, where he saw agents jogging toward the fallen man, who had been shot in the head and appeared to be dead or dying. No one knew who the wounded man was. The crying woman wouldn’t say. It wasn’t Dillinger, they could see that. A driver’s license identified him as Clarence Leo Coulter. It was a fake. The next day the FBI would identify him as Eddie Green. The crying woman was his wife, Beth.

Both knew where Dillinger was hiding.

Eddie Green was still alive when attendants wheeled him into St. Paul’s Ancker Hospital. In fact, he was raving. Lapsing in and out of consciousness, thrashing and babbling incoherently, Green was tucked into a hospital bed. A bullet had entered the back of his head through the brim of his fedora, traced a half-circle around his skull, and come to rest above his right eye. Doctors said he couldn’t live long. A pair of agents took positions by his bed, jotting down everything he said.

All night Green hollered for someone named Jim, who agents later learned was one of his brothers. He asked for a Fred, then a George and a Lucy, then asked: “Honey, back the car to the door.” As daylight approached, the agents began peppering Green with questions about Dillinger. Much of what he said was unintelligible. At one point, agents heard him say, “I’ve got the keys, he wants them.”

“Whose keys are those?” an agent asked.

“John’s.”

“John who?”

“Dillinger.”

Green made no meaningful responses when agents pressed where Dillinger could be found. At one point, however, he mentioned a doctor he had paid. Agents asked if anyone had been shot at the Lincoln Court Apartments. Green said “Jack . . . In the leg.” They pressed for the doctor’s address and Green said, “Wabasha Street.”

Where on Wabasha Street? “980, I guess.” The agents checked; there was no 980 Wabasha Street.

When the sun rose Green remained alive. In fact, he was stabilizing. But his pronouncements remained gibberish. By nightfall on Wednesday, April 4, Green was still talking. A new set of agents arrived. In an effort to focus Green’s rambling soliloquies, they decided to question him while posing as doctors and gang members. To their surprise, their tragicomic masquerade began to work. At one point, Agent Roy Noonan, posing as a doctor, asked Green if he knew the man who drove the green Ford and fired on Agent Coulter.ca

“Doc, you sure are a nosey fella,” Green said. “Give me a shot so I can sleep.”

“I will if you tell me who drove the green Ford,” Noonan said.

“You know as well as I do.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“What do you want to know that for?”

“Well, I just want to know. Did Jack drive it?”

“Yes.”

“Jack who?”

“You know without asking me.”

“No, I don’t know. Who was he?”

“Dillinger,” Green said. “Doc, will you give me that shot?”

And so it went. Bit by bit, agents coaxed more information from the dying man. A breakthrough came around eleven that night when an agent tricked Green into naming an address in Minneapolis where he said Dillinger was hiding: 635 Park Avenue. Down at the FBI office, adrenaline surged through the ranks. Agents scrambled to Park Avenue, but found no 635. An agent at Green’s bedside telephoned a few minutes later. Green was now saying the correct address was 1835 Park Avenue, Apartment 4. This address they found. It was a two-story rooming house in a run-down area where, FBI agents