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Most mornings Negri drove into Fallon or Hawthorne to buy food and newspapers. Nelson avidly scanned the papers or sometimes a copy of Field & Stream; he liked the articles on guns. Some evenings everyone but Nelson would drive into Hawthorne for dinner at a restaurant called the Oasis; Helen would bring Nelson back a tray of food. She usually found him sitting in the Hudson listening to news on the car radio. When they ate at camp, Helen handled the cooking and cleaning, consulting handmade recipe cards she carried in a little box.

Backman didn’t help and didn’t offer to, which raised tensions within the group. When she and Chase were alone, she constantly asked when they would leave. Chase said soon; they were “waiting for news.” Backman wasn’t dumb. She demanded to know who “Jimmy” really was. After a day or two of pestering, Chase told her the truth. Backman was startled. She began to nag Chase to leave the group.

Nelson was preparing to head back east. One morning the men took the Hudson into Reno to have it overhauled. Another day Nelson took the trailer into Hawthorne to have a tail light fixed; the last thing he needed was for a patrolman to pull him over. Then, on Thursday night, August 23, Nelson was slouched in the Hudson’s front seat, listening to the radio, when he heard the news. It was Van Meter.

The night Dillinger was killed, Homer Van Meter took his girlfriend Mickey Conforti and drove to St. Paul, where he hoped to find shelter with Harry Sawyer at the Green Lantern or his partner Jack Peifer at the Hollyhocks Club. But Sawyer had disappeared that spring, and Peifer wanted nothing to do with the FBI agents on Van Meter’s trail. In desperation Van Meter rented a room at a tourist camp outside the town of Walker, Minnesota. Nights he drove into St. Paul, trying to find someone who could hide him someplace safer.

For the next month, Van Meter and Conforti shuttled among tourist cabins in the pines north of St. Paul. The FBI suspected they might be in the area, but could find no one with hard information. “About 75 percent of the gangsters and mobsters of the underworld have scuttled out [of town], had their telephones disconnected and have moved,” Cowley wrote Hoover at one point. “[E]verybody is on the hideout, knowing that they would be brought in for questioning.”

Just who betrayed Van Meter will never be known. According to a story an informant told the FBI five years later, it was probably Jack Peifer. On Thursday morning, August 23, according to this story, Van Meter visited the Hollyhocks, where he met with Peifer, who may or may not have been holding several thousand dollars of cash for him, just as he was still holding money for Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis. The informant told the FBI Peifer waited until Van Meter left before telephoning his old friend Tom Brown, the corrupt detective who had worked with the Barker Gang on the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings. Brown had fallen under intense suspicion in St. Paul and presumably welcomed the idea of bringing in a noted yegg to burnish his image.

At 5:00 that afternoon, a car dropped Van Meter off a car dealership near downtown St. Paul. He wore a blue suit with a matching tie, white oxfords, and a straw boater; apparently he was expecting to meet someone. When he walked out of the dealership’s front door at 5:12, he was confronted instead by Tom Brown, Police Chief Frank Cullen, two detectives, and their guns.

“Stick ’em up!” one of the officers yelled. Van Meter pulled a pistol from his waistband and sprinted across University Avenue, firing two shots over his shoulder; his straw boater teetered on his head and he grabbed it off, holding it in his hand as he ran. Brown and his men fired several shots and then, noticing a woman in their line of fire, ran after him. Dodging oncoming cars, Van Meter dashed down Marion Street, then ducked left into an alley.

It was a dead end. Van Meter stopped and turned to find the officers behind him. The first