Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [34]
Just after ten o’clock that night, Dunn drove north on Highway 61. He passed the town of White Bear Lake and continued north in the darkness. Just before Pine City, about halfway to Duluth, a car roared past at a speed of over seventy miles per hour. A second car followed. Dunn slowed and watched as the two cars pulled to the side of the road. They let him pass, then pulled out and passed him again. After a few minutes, Dunn saw headlights ahead of him in the darkness. They flashed five times. It was the signal. He stopped the car and threw out the money.
Dunn drove on to Duluth, where he had been told Hamm would be waiting at the New Duluth Hotel. He wasn’t there. Soon Dunn was joined by the kidnappers’ secret liaison, Tom Brown, and another detective. They sat all night, waiting. Hamm never showed.
Fred Barker and George Ziegler returned to the Bensonville safe house the next morning and threw the satchel on the kitchen table. “You better round up some Hamm’s beer,” Ziegler announced. “I got a feeling that it’ll be my favorite for a long time to come.”
The next morning at dawn, after an all-night drive back to Minnesota, Karpis left William Hamm blindfolded in a field outside the town of Wyoming. After a few minutes, Hamm took off his blindfold and trudged to a farmhouse, where he telephoned his mother in Minneapolis. By noon he was back at his mansion, standing dazed before a crowd of reporters.
Several members of the gang also returned to the Twin Cities that morning, and if not for the intervention of Tom Brown, the Barkers’ careers would have ended that day. At the house Fred Barker was renting on Vernon Street, neighbors had noticed his strange habits and the arrival and departures of all sorts of large cars at all hours, and had taken to joking that the home’s occupants were gangsters, maybe even the Hamm kidnappers. As the gang piled out of its Buick that morning, one neighbor joked, “There goes the ransom money.”
Not everyone was joking. One young man was suspicious enough to phone in a tip to an editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The editor phoned the police who, to the Barkers’ good fortune, turned the matter over to Tom Brown. Brown slipped out of his office and phoned a friend, who alerted the Barkers. All that evening neighbors watched as the gang scurried through the house, slamming doors and tossing suitcases into their cars. When two officers arrived to check out the house the next morning, they found it empty.
By that Monday, as the Barkers scrambled to escape St. Paul, the rest of the gang had already decamped to apartments in Chicago. There they read in amazement newspaper stories of the Kansas City Massacre. Everyone affiliated with the gang realized Verne Miller must have done it to rescue his best friend, Frank Nash.
In the suburb of Maywood, Dock Barker’s friend Volney Davis paced his second-floor apartment all that morning. “That shooting is sure going to turn the heat on,” he told his girlfriend, Edna “Rabbits” Murray. Davis and Murray were still debating what to do around noon when they heard a car horn blaring. Murray stepped to the window. To her horror, she looked down on the blond head of Verne Miller.
“Is Curly there?” Miller asked.
“Yes,” Murray said.
Davis stepped to the window. “Come downstairs for a minute,” Miller hollered.
Murray watched as Davis walked downstairs, drove Miller’s car into a garage across the street, then handed Miller the keys to his own car. Afterward Miller came upstairs, plopping down on a divan. “I’m all in,” he said. “Had a tough time getting out of Kansas City. Got any iodine?” He had a small wound on one finger. As Murray swabbed it with iodine, Miller’s discourse grew