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“You can’t tell from this distance,” Notesteen said.

The couple strode briskly down the hall. There were three overhead lights in the hallway. As Miller passed beneath the first, Notesteen still couldn’t make out his face.

“That’s Miller!” Mrs. Rogers urged. “It’s Miller!”

The man was heading straight for Notesteen’s hiding place behind the ventilation shutter. As he passed beneath the second light, Notesteen still wasn’t certain. “It’s him!” Miss Rogers blurted.

At the door, agents stood ready. Johnny Madala, the office boy, opened the door a few inches.

“It’s Miller!” Madala mouthed. “It’s Miller!”

Just then the man passed beneath the third light, not twelve feet in front of Notesteen. In an instant Notesteen glimpsed the familiar face, the strong jaw, the flattened cheekbones.

It was Verne Miller.

Notesteen gave the signal, making the chopping motion with his hand. But Agent Guinane had stepped into the living room and didn’t see it. At that instant Miller paused, sensing something. Suddenly he broke into a run, darting around the corner toward the elevators.

Agent Notesteen yelled, “It’s him! It’s him!”

“There he is!” Madala shouted, flinging open the apartment door. There was a split-second logjam as everyone scrambled into the hallway. First through the door was a beefy Chicago police sergeant, Frank Freemuth, followed by a group of agents. They raced toward the corner, intending to confront Miller at the elevators. But as the group turned the corner, they encountered a rude surprise.

Miller was gone.

“The staircase!” someone yelled.

Sergeant Freemuth rammed through the stairway door. Bounding down the stairs, he burst into the lobby, where he spotted a man in a brown suit standing at the front desk.

“What’s your name?” Freemuth demanded.

An agent jammed his pistol into the man’s ribs. When the man turned, everyone could see it wasn’t Miller.

“He’s gone out to the car!” someone shouted.

Outside, Agents Allen Lockerman and Julius Rice were watching Bobbie Moore when they noticed the man in the fedora emerge from the side entrance.ar The man trotted toward the car, hands sunk into the pockets of his trench coat. “That looks like the man,” Lockerman said.

But, both agents thought, it couldn’t be Miller. There had been no signal from Guinane upstairs, no coat or shirt flapped in the apartment window; in the excitement Guinane had forgotten to give the signal. Just then, as the man stepped into the door of Bobbie Moore’s Auburn, several officers and agents tumbled out the side entrance.

As Miller slammed the car door, the big Auburn surged forward down Galt Street, heading east toward the lakefront. An agent named Lew Nichols ran alongside it, still uncertain the man in the passenger seat was really Verne Miller. “Stop that car!” he hollered.

Miller turned in his seat, a pistol in his hand, and fired two shots at Nichols, missing. Nichols fell to one knee and fired. Agent Lockerman sprang from his car and began firing as well. Everywhere, up and down the sidewalks, people dived for cover. As the car surged down Galt, a state trooper fired two bursts from his tommy gun. The Auburn’s rear window exploded. Bobbie Moore screamed but kept control of the car, swinging the steering wheel left, squealing north onto Sheridan Road. The agents ran after it, but it was already gone.9

Agent Guinane hustled to a drugstore to call downtown. A citywide alert for Miller’s car was broadcast, and twenty minutes later the Auburn was found abandoned in a cul-de-sac several blocks north of the Sherone. Eyewitnesses said a man had run from the car and leaped a fence into the backyard of an apartment building on Clarendon Avenue. (In a bizarre coincidence, this was the very building where John Dillinger was then living.) There were seven bullet holes in the car and traces of blood. All that night Chicago police raided underworld haunts and checked local hospitals, but there was no sign of Miller. Vi Mathias was taken into custody. Bobbie Moore surrendered a few days later. Both women told the FBI absolutely