Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [177]
The car that entered the lodge’s driveway after the initial shooting was driven by the gang’s gofer, Pat Reilly, returning to the lodge with Pat Cherrington. Cherrington had just opened the car door when she heard a voice yell, “Halt!” She replied, “Go to hell,” jumped back into the car, and told Reilly to step on it. When he reached the highway, Reilly lingered a minute, unsure what to do. When shots rang out, he lost control of the car, running it over a tree stump.
Fighting to get the car off the stump, he threw two pistols into Cherrington’s lap and told her to start shooting. She told him to go to hell. When the car was freed they passed the lodge a second time, drawing gunshots that struck their tire; the car door swung open and Cherrington fell out, fracturing her left shoulder. Later that night, after replacing their punctured tire at a filling station, the two hapless fugitives drove their car into a mud hole. Stuck, they sat in a field drinking whiskey, becoming drunk.22 Not till the next day, after a series of further misadventures, did the two reach St. Paul.
Dillinger and the others, meanwhile, thrashed through the pines, looking for a house with a car they could steal. In the darkness Tommy Carroll became separated. In the end it was Carroll who had the easiest time of it; he made his way to Manitowish, stole a Packard, and drove toward St. Paul. Dillinger, Van Meter, and Hamilton emerged from the woods a quarter mile north of Little Bohemia; had the FBI established roadblocks or patrolled Route 51 they might have been spotted. As it was, Van Meter was free to step out onto the road and attempt to flag down a passing car; the car, driven by Nan Wanatka’s brother, George LaPorte, was following the ambulance to the lodge and didn’t stop.
Across the road, Dillinger spotted Mitchell’s Rest Lake Resort, a wood-frame house with several cabins behind. Inside, its seventy-year-old owner, Edward J. Mitchell, was trying to explain something to his German handyman. His wife was lying on a couch, sick with the flu, when they heard a knock at the door. It was Hamilton, who after asking for a glass of water, casually walked across the living room and yanked the phone from the wall. The Mitchells had heard the rumors about gangsters at Little Bohemia. They’d heard the shots, too.
“You couldn’t be Dillinger, could you?” Mrs. Mitchell asked.
Dillinger grinned. “You couldn’t have guessed better,” he said. He noticed the terrified look at Edward Mitchell’s face. “Now don’t worry, old man,” he said, “I’d never harm a hair on your head.”
“My wife is just getting over the flu,” Mitchell said.
Dillinger took a moment to drape a blanket across the old woman. “Here you are, mother,” he said.23
All he needed, Dillinger said, was a car. Mitchell said he had a Model T, but it had been sitting on blocks all winter. Van Meter walked outside and saw a Model A truck, but it wouldn’t start. He asked Mitchell who owned a green Ford coupe parked next to it. Mitchell said it was his carpenter’s. He lived in one of the cabins. The carpenter, Robert L. Johnson, had been asleep when he was awakened by a knock on his door. He dressed, grabbed a flashlight, and shuffled in his slippers to the door, where he found Dillinger, Van Meter, and Hamilton hovering outside. Dillinger said they needed a doctor for Mrs. Mitchell. The .45 in his hand suggested the matter was more urgent than that. Johnson led them to his car.
Baby Face Nelson had the worst of it. Cut off from the rest of the gang, he ran the other way, south along the lakeshore, stumbling through underbrush for a half hour until he saw the lights of a cabin a half mile beyond Little Bohemia. Inside was another elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. George W. Lange. Nelson didn’t bother knocking; he walked right in, pistol in hand.