Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [211]
Closeted at Jimmy Probasco’s house, Dillinger and Van Meter had sharply different reactions to their friend’s passing. Van Meter swore he would never die like that, gunned down in some filthy alley, and the rest of his career he did his best to stay out of public view.
Not Dillinger. Once his wrappings were removed, he wanted nothing more than to taste life. The day after Carroll’s death, Friday, June 8, Dillinger decided to attend a Chicago Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field. Piquett went with him, and later said he saw John Stege of the Chicago police’s Dillinger Squad there as well. “Fuzz,”24 Piquett whispered to Dillinger outside the ballpark. “Big fuzz.”
If Dillinger worried about being seen, he rarely showed it. By all accounts, he appeared intoxicated by his ability to circulate among the crowds without being recognized. Later, some would attribute this to his “new face,” others to his burgeoning ego. By that weekend Dillinger was feeling well enough to visit a Chicago nightclub, and he may have visited a whorehouse. By the following Monday, June 11, he had met a pretty waitress named Polly Hamilton and was thinking of seeing more of her.dd “That reminds me of Marie,” Van Meter remarked, mentioning his former girlfriend, Mickey Conforti, whom he hadn’t seen since abandoning her at Little Bohemia two months earlier.25
By Wednesday morning, June 13, Van Meter was feeling chipper enough to go in search of his old flame. He rose early, put on his best dark suit and white shoes, then added his latest bit of disguise, a set of delicate pince-nez eyeglasses, attached by a long black ribbon to his vest. Thus attired, he walked outside and slid behind the wheel of his maroon Ford sedan. Reuniting with Mickey Conforti, he knew, was a calculated risk. The FBI had been watching her for weeks.
The death of Tommy Carroll gave Hoover’s men their first new batch of clues in weeks. None came from Jean Delaney; the morning after Carroll’s death, agents questioned her till 4:15 A.M., but she said little of use. Even the persuasive Hugh Clegg got nothing out of her. She was sentenced to a year and a day and shipped to the federal women’s prison in West Virginia.
The clues were in Carroll’s luggage, a black leather Gladstone bag. Two of the dead man’s dress shirts were still in wrappers from a laundry in suburban Niles Center.de When the owner was shown a photo of Carroll, she identified him as one of her customers; he’d only been in a few times. Shown photos of other Dillinger and Barker Gang members, she identified Baby Face Nelson as Carroll’s friend, “Mr. Cody,” a “nice young man” who had been bringing in his laundry since early May. Once, she remembered, when he arrived to pick up a load of shirts that wasn’t yet ready, he snapped his fingers and remarked that he had driven fifty miles to pick it up.
Despite some progress, Cowley still had a lot to learn. His worst mistake was taking his men off Mickey Conforti. Conforti knew she was being watched; Cowley thought it a waste of time to keep her under surveillance when she was unlikely to contact Van Meter. He was wrong. On the night of June 14 his office received a call from Conforti’s foster mother. Conforti had disappeared.
Cowley could kick himself. Van Meter had simply approached one of Conforti’s girlfriends, sending her to Conforti’s house with the message he wanted to reunite. She had thrown some things in an overnight bag, met him on a corner, and vanished. Two weeks to the day after Purvis had let Baby Face Nelson retrieve his wife—the debacle that prompted Cowley’s reassignment—Cowley had done the same thing. The last known link to the Dillinger Gang had slipped from his hands.
Losing Mickey Conforti was bad enough. But Cowley’s