Part 50 (1/2)

Oh Willie.Oh.

He tugs his earlobe. Shakes his head. Cracks a half smile.

It's not exactly like your grandmother, he says. But it'll do. It will do, Kate. G.o.dspeed kid.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Sutton.

TWENTY-FOUR.

The clerk at the front desk gives him a goofy smile. What brings you down to Florida?

I'm a reporter. Writing about Willie Sutton.

Oh right. I heard. Sad.

The clerk hands Reporter the room key and explains about the free breakfast.

Reporter finds his room, just off the pool, throws his suitcase and briefcase on the bed. He turns up the AC, closes the drapes, clicks open the briefcase. The old files spill out. Nothing brings back that Christmas Day eleven years ago like the old files. Somehow they still smell of Chesterfields.

Sutton's memoirs fall out too, both of them. Highlighted, underlined, filled with Reporter's Post-its. The first, Smooth and Deadly, was published in 1953. Reporter didn't even know of its existence until 1976, when the second one appeared. Where the Money Was. Sutton decided to write that one after publishers rejected the novel he wrote in prison.

Reporter teased Sutton often about the t.i.tle. Mr. Sutton, he said-that's a total sellout.

Sutton chuckled. Kid I'm now going to say something to you I've never said before in my life. Guilty.

Reporter sits on the hotel bed. He thinks about the front desk clerk. Oh right. I heard. Sad. Yes, sad, except that Sutton lived eleven years longer than anyone expected, eleven years longer than he led doctors and reporters and the parole board-and himself-to think he had left. Sutton's final elusiveness, his crowning trickery-to live and live and live. In fact his will to live was one of the primary reasons that, despite everything, despite professional instincts and personal wariness, Reporter became fond of Sutton through the years.

Before they could become friends, Reporter had to forgive Sutton for stealing the newspaper's Polara that first Christmas. Upon filing his story, dictating it from a coffee shop near Schuster's house, Reporter tracked Sutton and the Polara back to the Plaza. Sutton, sitting at the hotel bar, nursing a Jameson, apologized profusely, telling Reporter that he just couldn't face his guilt over Schuster. Reporter accepted this explanation and they shook hands.

How's Bad Cop doing? Sutton asked.

I won't lie to you, Mr. Sutton. You shouldn't expect a Christmas card next year.

They both had a laugh about that.

In the eleven years that followed, Reporter and Sutton spoke every now and then on the phone, and they always got together for dinner when Sutton came through Manhattan. After dinner they would retire to P. J. Clarke's for a nightcap. Reporter enjoyed installing Sutton, America's most prolific bank robber, among the bankers and Wall Streeters along the bar at Clarke's. It was there, one autumn night in 1970, that Sutton, full of Jameson, loudly mused: I think America is the way it is, kid, because it's the only country ever founded over a beef about money. It strikes Reporter now, cranking up the AC, that Sutton at the end was a walking embodiment of America. Underneath all the delusion, all the bl.u.s.ter, all the wrongdoing, admitted and denied, there was something intractably good. Eternally salvageable.

And resolutely optimistic. Though filled with regret, Sutton always emphasized the positive, always expressed a touching grat.i.tude that he was living out his final years in freedom and peace. Still, Reporter now recalls one dark phone conversation. September 1971, the night of the b.l.o.o.d.y riots at Attica. Sutton knew many of the forty-three people killed, and he claimed to have known the riots were coming. I saw it kid, he kept saying, I knew it was going to happen. And if f.u.c.kin Rockefeller hadn't let me out when he did, I'd have died with those men, facedown in D Yard. I just know it.

How do you know it?

The way I always know things. In my gut.

After they hung up Reporter couldn't sleep. There was something odd in Sutton's voice. He wasn't merely shaken by his close brush with death, or sad for the men who died in D Yard. He was also deeply troubled to owe a debt of grat.i.tude to a Rockefeller.

Two years before Sutton died, Reporter met him at a midtown TV studio, where he was taping a segment of The d.i.c.k Cavett Show. Sutton wore a beautiful gray suit with a red tie knotted in a full Windsor. Standing behind him in the dressing room, watching the makeup artist powder his nose, Reporter noted how relaxed Sutton seemed, as if he'd done this all his life. Reporter then stood backstage and watched the interview. Sutton was witty, eloquent, remarkably cool. More than once Reporter thought: he's dressed like a banker, but he's every bit the actor.

After the show Reporter and Sutton got on the elevator with Zsa Zsa Gabor, who'd also been a guest. Gabor wore a necklace of chestnut-size diamonds. She made a point of nervously covering the necklace with her hands and darting glances at Sutton. When the elevator reached the lobby Sutton held the door for Gabor. Ever the gentleman. But as she walked past he said, Honey you can take your hands off your jewels. I'm retired.

As Sutton's celebrity grew, so did his audacity. Reporter thinks about the first time he saw Sutton's face materialize on the TV screen during a Yankees game. A commercial for, of all things, the New Britain Bank and Trust Company of New Britain, Connecticut. It was funny, of course, but also strangely disillusioning to see Sutton endorsing a new kind of charge card, with the cardholder's photo embossed on the front. A new weapon against ident.i.ty theft.

Cut to Sutton smiling for the camera.

Now, when I say I'm Willie Sutton, people believe me!

Cue announcer urging folks to bring their money down to the bank.

Tell them Willie Sutton sent you.

The commercial made Reporter almost angry. Not that Reporter wanted to see Sutton robbing banks again. But he hated like h.e.l.l to see Sutton s.h.i.+lling for them.

Sutton insisted to Reporter that he had no compunction about shooting that commercial. Willie's got expenses kid-you know what a pack of Chesterfields costs these days? He wouldn't even admit to feeling the slightest pang of guilt in 1979 when the housing market collapsed and the stock market crashed and the Fed warned about bank failures. Thousands of people wiped out by unchecked greed. Again. That's where the money was-the apocryphal Suttonism is now invoked every day by some journalist or economist, professor or politician, not to explain the motive of a Depression-era bank robber, but to explain generic human avarice. People do things, all kinds of things, because that's where the money is.

The financial crisis is the only reason Reporter's editor agreed to send him to Florida now, late December 1980, seven weeks after Sutton died from emphysema. Reporter's editor is several years younger than Reporter, and he doesn't remember Willie Sutton. But the economy is on everyone's mind and he liked Reporter's pitch. An old bank robber who once spent Christmas with our paper?

It's kitschy, the editor said. Give me two thousand words.

Reporter eats dinner at a steak house in the little town where Sutton spent his last days, Spring Hill, a pleasant nowhere nestled in a notch along Florida's west coast. The waitress is blond, sun-burnished, squeezed into skintight bell-bottoms. Reporter is no longer with the woman he was dating when he met Sutton. Or the woman who came after her, or the woman who came after her. When the waitress brings his salmon Reporter asks if Willie Sutton used to come here.

Willie? Sure. He was a regular. Sweet old dude. Always ordered the porterhouse. With a gla.s.s of milk-always.

Reporter is about to ask if Sutton was a big tipper, if any tips ever went missing. He can't get the words out before the waitress is called away.

He phones Sutton's sister, hoping to see a copy of Sutton's letters or journals. Or the novel. It was called The Statue in the Park, Sutton once said. The hero was a banker whose life is a lie. Reporter asked to see a copy, many times, but Sutton always demurred. Now the sister won't return Reporter's calls. And he can't locate Sutton's daughter. Elusiveness-it runs in the family.

After two days in Florida, two days visiting the local libraries and the local banks and the local bars, Reporter is due to leave tomorrow. But he's not ready. He can't shake the sense that he's missed something, that he's failed to find the thing he came down here to find, though he can't say exactly what that thing is. Some clue, some sign. Surely a man who escaped three maximum-security prisons would be unable to resist the challenge of sending word from the Other Side. A kind of h.e.l.lo. A posthumous wink.

Reporter admits to himself, driving from the steak house back to the hotel, that it's a ridiculous hope. But no more ridiculous than being fond of a hardened, unrepentant felon. Then he corrects himself. He wasn't fond in the usual sense of the word. He wouldn't want to live in a world full of Willie Suttons. He's simply not sure that he'd want to live in a world with no Willie Suttons.

Reporter lies on the hotel bed, rereads a few pages of Sutton's second memoir. He laughs. Sutton must be the only person ever in the history of literature to write two memoirs that directly contradict each other, even on basic biographical facts. In one memoir, for instance, Sutton says that before breaking out of Sing Sing with Egan, he'd arranged to have an empty getaway car waiting outside the prison. In the other memoir Sutton says the mother of his daughter drove the getaway car. And yet Reporter can still hear Sutton, more than once, describing the way Bess looked at the wheel as he and Egan came running up the hill.

In one memoir Sutton meticulously describes robbing the Manufacturers Trust of Queens. In the other memoir he swears he didn't do it. And so on.

How many of the contradictions in Sutton's memoirs, or in his mind, were willful, and how many were dementia, Reporter doesn't know. His current theory is that Sutton lived three separate lives. The one he remembered, the one he told people about, the one that really happened. Where those lives overlapped, no one can say, and G.o.d help anyone who tries. More than likely, Sutton himself didn't know.

Reporter has looked everywhere for Bess Endner, but she's vanished. He's searched high and low for Margaret-again, no trace. He's obtained hundreds of doc.u.ments from the FBI, pored through scores of old newspapers and magazines and court transcripts, rooted through long-lost police files on Arnold Schuster, files he found rotting in the attic of a retired police sergeant. It all leads nowhere. FBI files contradict newspaper clips, newspaper clips contradict police files, and Sutton's two self-negating memoirs refute everything. The more Reporter digs, the less he knows, until it seems that he spent Christmas eleven years ago with a shadow of a phantom.

Among the hundreds of FBI doc.u.ments is one headed: Interesting Narrative. A summary of Sutton's psyche, it was written by an agent in 1950, when Sutton was the nation's most wanted fugitive: RELIGION: Sutton was a Roman Catholic but his belief was destroyed through reading.