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least two months, that Zarkovich had arranged the May 24 murders of two East Chicago detectives to cover this up, and that he had conspired to have the FBI kill Dillinger so that he could steal Dillinger’s money. Leach said a “serious investigation” was warranted, and suggested the FBI conduct it. Cowley was skeptical. He said the Bureau was investigating the possibility Hamilton and Sage had harbored Dillinger, but noted that since Zarkovich had participated in his killing, there was no way a court would convict him of harboring. If Zarkovich had arranged to have the detectives murdered, he went on, that was a state crime, over which the FBI had no jurisdiction.

When Leach left, unsatisfied, Cowley telephoned Hoover. “Mr. Cowley stated he believes this is a frame-up,” Hoover wrote in a memo that day. “I stated I am of the same opinion; that I believe they are jealous because they didn’t get him themselves . . .”24

The FBI had no intention of investigating Hamilton and Sage, much less Zarkovich; the mysterious trio had become the Bureau’s de facto allies, and Hoover’s attitude appears to have been that anything that reflected badly on them, reflected badly on the Bureau. In the weeks after Dillinger’s death, FBI agents took a single signed statement from Sage and none at all from Hamilton or Zarkovich. Two agents did interview Hamilton in Detroit on August 2, and from her evasive answers they believed she was hiding something.

“[I]t may clearly be seen that [her] information is very sketchy, and is in direct conflict with information furnished by Mrs. Anna [sic] Sage,” the two agents wrote Cowley afterward. “In this regard, it is the conviction of both agents that no information will be developed that Dillinger ever resided at the residence of Mrs. Sage, as she has cautioned Polly against furnishing any information concerning this matter, and she, Mrs. Sage, is very careful that no opportunity is had to question Polly out of her presence.”25

That was the last questioning of Hamilton the FBI ever did. Both she and Sage were released after their stay in Detroit. Hamilton vanished, hiding out with her parents in South Dakota. On Cowley’s urging, Sage fled to Los Angeles, where in October Cowley visited her and handed over her share of the Dillinger reward money, $5,000.

Rather than delve further into the conspiracy that Matt Leach alleged, the Bureau began asking questions about Leach himself. Earl Connelley nosed for dirt around Indianapolis, and in mid-August notified Cowley that Leach had been paying “considerable attention” to a lady—not his wife—who was staying at the Spink Arms hotel.26

Leach was not intimidated. “We want to get to the bottom of this whole mess,” he told the Chicago Tribune.27 He never would.

They buried John Dillinger in the sprawling Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, amid a sudden summer rainstorm and a symphony of heavenly thunderclaps. His father had brought the body back from Chicago, the hearse trailed by a line of cars packed with reporters. A crowd of five thousand people pressed against a high stone fence beside the gravesight. John Dillinger, Sr., stood by solemnly as his son’s coffin was lowered into the ground. The rain that ran in rivulets down his face looked like tears. Later that day he returned to his empty farmhouse. The reporters returned to their offices. The show was over.

16

THE SCRAMBLE

July 23 to September 12, 1934

Baby Face Nelson refused to panic, but he needed to get out of Chicago. The night after Dillinger’s death he met his friend Jack Perkins in a North Side restaurant and asked him to come west with him and bring his wife and three-year-old son, Jackie. The group would look less suspicious with a child along, Nelson explained, and he couldn’t bring his own; he assumed the FBI was watching them. Perkins agreed.

Two days later, Nelson’s little band left Chicago in two cars, driving west across Iowa. Sleeping at out-of-the-way tourist camps, they reached Reno two nights later. Skirting the city, Nelson drove to the Cal-Neva Lodge, rousting