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By Root 2134 0

friend, a zaftig thirty-year-old chorus-line dancer named Patricia Cherrington. Brassy and melodramatic, the redheaded Cherrington fancied herself a bed-hopping party girl; she, too, was a refugee, a Texas-raised high school dropout at thirteen, a bride at fifteen, a divorced mother by her early twenties. She and Frechette worked in a series of nudie nightclubs and were drawn to the scarred men who frequented them. In June 1932 they were arrested with their boyfriends, a pair of stickup men named Welton Spark and Arthur Cherrington. The women were released. Spark and Cherrington were remanded to Leavenworth for mugging a mailman. On the eve of their departure, the women impulsively married them.

In the summer of 1933, Frechette and Cherrington, never to be reunited with their husbands, were drifting through life, dating the wrong men, living in fetid hotels. A gallbladder infection had ended Cherrington’s dancing days, and she was rooming with her younger sister Opal Long, a chunky redhead with thick eyeglasses and a derriere so bounteous she earned the nickname “Mack Truck.” No one knows precisely how the three women were drawn into Dillinger’s orbit. Much later, Frechette insisted she met Dillinger in a nightclub that November. In fact, it’s likely she met him earlier, probably in August, when Dillinger first took an apartment in Chicago. It was then that his partner, Harry Copeland, met Cherrington, who at a cabaret one night introduced Dillinger to Frechette as “Jack Harris.”

Billie would claim she never forgot Dillinger’s first words. He was standing beside her at the table, looking down with that lopsided grin. “Hey Baby,” he said. “Where have you been all my life?” They danced. Dillinger was polite, which was enough for Frechette. If she needed further motivation, it came from the large roll of bills in his pocket. “I didn’t ask any questions,” she wrote months later. “Why should I? From the very first night I met him there was nobody else in my life, and I didn’t want anybody else. He treated me like a lady.”13

In Chicago, Dillinger and Pete Pierpont decided to live together with Frechette and Mary Kinder, renting a four-room apartment at 4310 Clarendon Avenue on the North Side. The bellman would recall that the two couples’ luggage was extremely heavy. Most mornings everyone slept late, rolling out of bed at ten or eleven. Dillinger kept the guns in a locked closet and handled the cleaning chores, wrapping a towel around his waist as he scrubbed the dishes and ran a dust mop over the floors. Hands on hips, Billie and Mary would watch in awe; Dillinger explained that cleaning was a habit he learned in prison. They had a phone but never bothered to hook it up. Delivery boys rang the bell at all hours, arms brimming with covered dishes from neighborhood restaurants and the downstairs delicatessen. When they came, Dillinger hid.

Most afternoons the two couples went out driving, stopping at shops up and down State Street to buy new clothes. Dillinger bought several new blue suits and a brown one, and admonished the others not to buy anything too flashy, although he did spend $149 to buy Billie a new winter coat. Like generations of striving farm boys before him, Dillinger was a bit of a clothes horse, keeping his suits pressed and his hats blocked; Mary Kinder was impressed that he changed his underwear every day. When they weren’t shopping, the four could usually be found at a dentist’s office on Washington Avenue, enduring a numbing series of cappings and fillings. By Kinder’s count, at least one of them sat in a dentist chair every day for two weeks.

Nights were for fun. Their first stop was usually a movie theater. Dillinger, who had entered prison before the advent of talking pictures, was a movie fanatic, pushing the group to go three and four nights a week; soon they had seen every picture on the North Side. Afterward they would hit a restaurant and then a nightclub, usually the College Inn or the Terrace Garden. All refrained from hard liquor, mostly drinking beer, and Dillinger drank less than the others.