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Amazingly, no one said anything about the man in the car outside. Instead, for reasons he failed to mention in subsequent reports, Purvis took two agents and searched the tavern’s basement. Only after returning upstairs did it dawn on Purvis to ask how Billie had arrived. In a car, someone said. Several agents dashed outside, but for the second time in twenty-four hours, Dillinger was gone.

When Billie was arraigned several days later, she openly mocked the FBI to reporters, saying that Dillinger had been inside the Tumble Inn when she was arrested. “I have no comment to make on such a ridiculous statement,” Purvis replied. Dillinger hadn’t been in the bar, of course, but Purvis belatedly realized that he had been the man in the car. His agents’ memoranda on the topic were small masterpieces of apologia. Two said they had seen the man and were certain it wasn’t Dillinger. Agent Metcalfe, who had walked within inches of the car, said he hadn’t gotten a clear look inside “due to the fact that the car stood beside a curb of unusual height, so it would have been necessary to stoop very low in order to look into the car from the sidewalk.”14

Art O’Leary was at his apartment that night when the phone rang. It was Dillinger. “The G’s just picked up Billie,” he said.

“How did it happen?”

“I was sitting in my car right around the corner. There were too many of them for me to take her away. It was that rat Larry Strong. Where’s Mr. Piquett? Is he still in Washington?”

“Yes,” O’Leary said.

“Well, phone him right away, and tell him to try and get a writ to get Billie out.”15

Frechette was taken in handcuffs to the Bankers Building, where agents pushed her onto a chair beneath a bright light in the conference room. All that night and into the next day they pelted her with questions. Frechette would say nothing about Dillinger. She begged them to let her sleep, but the agents refused. At one point, Purvis’s secretary, Doris Rogers, took her a sandwich and was appalled. Seventy years later Rogers still remembers what she did next. “After I left,” she recalls, “I came back and I told Melvin, ‘This is inhumane.’”

“What do you think we should do?” Purvis asked.

“Let her sleep.”

“Where?”

“I’ll take her to the ladies’ room.”

With Purvis’s consent, Rogers returned to the conference room and invited Frechette to the ladies’ room.

“I can’t,” Frechette said. “They won’t let me.”

“Come on,” Rogers said.

There was a leather sofa in the ladies’ room. Rogers poured Frechette a glass of water and told her to lie down. She fell asleep. An hour later Rogers woke her up. Frechette begged not to be returned to the conference room. She said she would tell Rogers everything. But Rogers had no choice. Frechette went back under the hot lights.

“These women were such pities,” Rogers remembers. “Everybody was broke, and they were running with these men because they couldn’t get a meal. They all had a baby or two, and they were treated like dirt. I tell you, the Depression was a terrible time in America.”

As FBI agents fanned out across central Indiana in pursuit of Dillinger, Assistant Director Hugh Clegg pulled up a chair in the Bureau’s St. Paul office and began to talk to Eddie Green’s wife, Beth. Newspapers in the Twin Cities were already alive with rumors of the mysterious red-headed woman the FBI had captured, but to Clegg’s consternation, Beth Green wasn’t saying a thing. Not at first, anyway.

They made an interesting pair. Clegg was thirty-five but seemed older, a pudgy, compact attorney from rural Mississippi who was near the beginning of a long, distinguished FBI career. He was trained as an agent, but his skills were those of a bureaucrat; Hoover circulated Clegg’s inspection reports throughout the Bureau as models. Clegg was the very model of the yes-men who came to surround Hoover in later years. He worshiped Hoover, calling him “my hero”; Hoover, in turn, prized Clegg for his unwavering loyalty and his easy Southern way with the Washington elite. He had been