Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [193]
Every day brought new Dillinger sightings, almost all of them spurious. On May 4, after Louis Piquett made a joshing comment to a reporter, there was a flurry of articles that Dillinger was heading for England; Canadian, British, and American authorities searched dozens of transatlantic ships in vain. Every morning Purvis’s men shuttled out to a new town to check a new sighting; every night they returned to the nineteenth floor, exhausted and depressed. Two agents looked into the Fostoria robbery, but returned unpersuaded it was Dillinger’s work; not for two more months would the FBI confirm it was. One of the stranger reports agents repeatedly checked was that Dillinger was receiving coded messages from a pirate radio station. Despite dozens of similar tips, the FBI was never able to find such a station.
Purvis’s best hope remained the stakeout at the Audrey Russ home in Fort Wayne. For the agents who pulled rotating assignments there, it was a nightmare. The problem was Mrs. Russ, who possessed, as one agent put it, “a mean and avaricious disposition.” In one memo, Agent John T. McLaughlin described her as “demented.” At various times Mrs. Russ accused agents of spitting on her floors, scratching her grand piano, and shooting out a window. The agents paid her $2.50 a day rent until Mrs. Russ demanded and received three dollars. “[H]er whole desire seemed [to be] to secure as much money from the agents as possible, and furnish them the least amount of food,” Agent McLaughlin complained. As the days wore on with no sign of Van Meter or Dillinger, the agents began to suspect Mrs. Russ had concocted the story of Dillinger’s visits in order to lure wealthy government boarders .20
In Mooresville, Earl Connelley’s men kept the Dillinger farmhouse under round-the-clock surveillance, but no one thought Dillinger would return there now. In desperation Purvis sent agents to interview anyone who had ever known Dillinger, including William Shaw, his teenage partner from the previous summer, and Mary Longnaker, the Dayton woman he romanced. Other agents began rounding up Baby Face Nelson’s boyhood pals and some of Tommy Carroll’s old girlfriends. None had anything useful to offer. For the moment Purvis had nothing. Nothing at all.
For two weeks Dillinger and Van Meter remained in their portable hideaway, the red truck. When they needed a bath, or just got tired of the truck, they ducked into a tourist camp. At one point they spent several nights in a cottage outside Crown Point. They were still living in the truck when Dillinger reestablished contact with Art O’Leary on May 19. O’Leary drove to a tavern on the outskirts of Chicago and waited until Dillinger drove up after nightfall. He followed the truck until it eased to the side of the road at a remote site.
Dillinger was sick. By O’Leary’s estimate, his temperature was 104. O’Leary hopped into the truck and they idly drove the back roads, Dillinger driving and talking, while Van Meter remained in the back, peering out the windows with his machine gun. Dillinger’s mood had grown bleak. He needed a doctor but was afraid to visit anyone he didn’t know. He asked about Billie Frechette, whose harboring trial was under way in St. Paul, and about the cosmetic surgery he still wanted Piquett to arrange. When they returned to O’Leary’s car, he asked him to return the next evening with medicine and cough syrup.
The next night O’Leary brought Dillinger his cough syrup and a pint of whiskey. Both Dillinger’s health and his mood were improved, and his spirits lifted further when O’Leary handed him a note from Frechette, who remained in a St. Paul jail cell. In it, O’Leary recalled, Billie beseeched Dillinger not to attempt her rescue. She would only be killed. She promised to do her time in prison and meet him afterward. Dillinger appeared moved.