“Don’t you remember me?” Nelson asked Zappas.

  “You’re Jimmy,” Zappas said.

  “Haven’t I changed a lot?” Nelson asked.

  “Not very much,” Zappas said.

  After lunch Nelson sent Perkins to the post office to see whether their wanted posters were displayed; to his relief, they weren’t. He sent Negri into San Francisco to fetch his old bootlegging foreman, Soap Mareno. Mareno reluctantly agreed to drive up to El Verano, arriving around midnight. During a walk around the darkened hotel grounds, Nelson asked whether Mareno could arrange a hideout for the gang, preferably an isolated ranch. After an hour Mareno returned to San Francisco, leaving Nelson bitterly disappointed. “Can you believe that?” he told Negri. “Soap won’t do a thing for me.”

  Any hopes Nelson had of hiding at the inn were dashed the next day after lunch. As they were leaving the dining room, someone yelled, “Hey, Fatso!” Negri turned and saw David Dillon, an officer with the San Francisco Police, eating with his wife. Negri stepped over to chat. “Who was that?” Nelson demanded when Negri returned. Negri explained that Dillon was a friend; he wouldn’t say anything. Nelson was irate. He walked straight to the front desk and checked out.1

  Nelson lingered in the wine country while trying to coax a hiding place out of old friends. The next night, after dinner in the town of Agua Caliente, he had the first of two meetings with Louis “Bones” Tambini, a bootlegger up from San Francisco; Tambini also said Nelson was “too hot” to hide. That night the Nelsons camped in a field, while Negri went to a hotel in Napa. Homesick, he walked to a pool hall and called his mother.

  The next morning, Negri mentioned the call and Nelson became irate. “Haven’t I told you never to use a telephone or write to anyone that you know?” he demanded. Nelson told Negri to go home to his mother and watch the Chicago Tribune classifieds; if they needed him, they would place an ad containing the word “Nondo.”

  His old haunts closed to him, Nelson stayed on the move, flitting between tourist camps in towns all across Northern California, in Caspar, Scotia, Eureka, Weaverville, and Sacramento, before heading south, staying in motels outside Salinas and Stockton.2 Nelson saw that too many sets of eyes were seeing them at too many places; they needed a spot to settle down, even if it meant camping.

  That’s what it meant. Crossing into Nevada the morning of August 9, Nelson’s band pulled up beside the Fallon Mercantile Store in Fallon, Nevada, east of Reno. Nelson stayed in the car while Perkins and the others shopped. They bought a $5.95 Coleman camping stove, a $5.95 Coleman lantern, an $18 Range Tent, camping utensils, groceries, and a Winchester rifle. Perkins paid for everything from a fat roll of one-dollar bills then, politely declining the owner’s offer to help, used a hand truck to wheel the gear out to the cars, where he piled it onto a trailer they had bought in Reno.3

  The following day Nelson found their new home, the Mount Grant Lodge, fourteen miles south of Hawthorne, Nevada, on the shores of Lake Walker. It was little more than a sprinkling of cabins, but it had running water and electricity, and for the first few days that was all Nelson felt they needed. The problem was Johnny Chase. He was the only single man in the group, and he was, for lack of a better word, lovesick. He pined for his girlfriend, a San Francisco newsstand clerk named Sally Backman, and nagged Nelson to let her join them in the desert. Everyone was against it. Nelson didn’t trust new faces and said so, loudly.

  Chase would not be dissuaded. One night he drove into San Francisco and arranged to see Backman. Negri picked her up at her newsstand by the Sausalito Ferry and drove her to a beach where Chase was waiting. They stayed that night in a hotel on Mission Street. In the quiet of their room, Chase explained he was traveling with someone who was “hot”; if Backman came with him, he couldn’t guarantee her safety. She asked for time to think about it. Chase returned to the desert. Two weeks passed.

  The longer they remained in Nevada, the more Chase missed Backman. Finally, tired of his friend’s carping, Nelson relented. On Thursday, August 16, Chase got in his car and drove to San Francisco to get his girl. It was the worst decision Baby Face Nelson ever made.

  On Wednesday, August 15, Ed Guinane, the San Francisco SAC, took a call from an Oakland detective who said he had a tip on Nelson. Guinane drove across the bay to hear it.dv The detective’s wife was Louis Parente’s niece. The previous night Parente told the detective that Nelson had been at his inn three weeks before.

  The next morning, Guinane convened a conference of FBI agents and detectives from the Oakland and San Francisco police departments. After briefings the group proceeded to the El Verano Inn to interview Louis Parente. Parente and his manager told them everything they knew. They identified Fatso Negri—the first time the FBI learned of him—and described Chase and the Perkins family. They also described Nelson’s Hudson, though they hadn’t noted the license plate number.

  By Friday afternoon, Ed Guinane was dictating a memo to Hoover, laying out details of Nelson’s stay in Napa County. The Teletype crossed Hoover’s desk the next morning. “Take up with Cowley & I suggest he send by plane 4 or 5 agents familiar with Nelson to San Francisco,” Hoover scrawled on it. Five men from the Dillinger Squad boarded a flight to San Francisco that night.dw

  Working with the San Francisco and Sausalito police, the new men quickly hit pay dirt. An informant reported that Chase had a girlfriend named Sally Backman. She had disappeared.4

  On Saturday, August 18, the day the new FBI agents arrived in San Francisco, Chase drove up to the cabins on Walker Lake with Fatso Negri and Sally Backman. The desert heat was approaching one hundred degrees as Chase introduced Backman to everyone, giving only first names: Jack and Grace and their little boy, Jackie, and Helen, a quiet girl in a gingham house dress. Backman took an immediate dislike to the slender, cocky blond Chase introduced as “Jimmy,” and Nelson made no effort to hide his distaste for her: he made snide comments about how everyone should work hard to ensure that Backman was “comfortable.” The lodge’s owner, John Benedict, noticed the friction between the two. He found Nelson “surly” but liked the others. When Benedict remarked that Backman seemed ill at ease, Chase told him she was a “city girl” unaccustomed to desert camping.5

  The gang occupied three cabins, the Nelsons in one, the Perkins family in another, Chase and Backman in the third. Negri slept on a cot in the open air. They were the camp’s only guests. Days they spent in idle pursuits. The women swam. Nelson slept for long periods. Sometimes he and Chase fished, though they rarely caught anything. Nelson, typically attired in faded tan corduroys and a wrinkled open-necked white shirt, liked to shoot rabbits and squirrels with his .22 rifle.

  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 blast from Brown’s sawed-off shotgun knocked Van Meter two feet in the air, slamming his body into the brick wall of a garage. He struggled to stand, but all four men opened fire, riddling his body with fifty bullets. Homer Van Meter, who always said he didn’t want to die in some filthy alley, did just that.

  When the news reached Washington an hour later, Hoover was incensed. “The Director is very upset over the fact that that thing could take place in St. Paul without our knowing about it,” a St. Paul agent noted the next day. No one mentioned the obvious: the local police were excluding the FBI just as it had famously excluded the Chicago police from Dillinger’s death. “I think our St. Paul office has shown utter lack of aggressiveness,” Hoover scribbled on a memo.

  Picked up several days later, Mickey Conforti told the FBI Van Meter had been carrying $6,000. The St. Paul police reported finding only $923. If Tom Brown took Van Meter’s $5,077, there was an eerie symmetry at work: when Alvin Karpis and the Barker brothers read of Brown’s involvement the next day, they unanimously decided to keep his $5,000 share of the Bremer ransom. The next day Homer Van Meter’s body was taken to his hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. No one but an undertaker and a handful of reporters awaited its arrival. He was buried without event in Fort Wayne’s Lindenwood Cemetery.

  The morning after Van Meter’s death, Baby Face Nelson sent Fatso Negri into town for newspapers. Like the Barkers, Nelson was stunned to read of Tom Brown’s involvement. “The son of a bitch,” Nelson said. “He’s the fella that we paid a thousand dollars.”6

  Nelson announced they were leaving for Chicago. They packed the trailer with five-gallon cans of gasoline and oil; Nelson wanted to travel without stopping at service stations. They left a pile of cleaned trout for the cabins’ owners, then drove across Nevada to Colorado and on into Kansas. Nelson allowed the group to sleep in auto camps, but was careful never to approach one before eleven at night.

  Negri and the Perkins family rode in Negri’s Plymouth, while Johnny Chase and Sally Backman sat in the backseat of Nelson’s car. Packed into the tight confines of the Hudson, the simmering tensions between Backman and Nelson burst into the open. Nelson was a wild driver, the Hudson fishtailing across the dirt roads, and Backman asked him to slow down. He ignored her, starting in with comments about her “being scared” and asking if she was “comfortable.” In time Nelson became even more aggressive, telling Chase in front of Backman that he should leave her, that she would tire of him in six months and go home.

  According to a story Negri told a detective magazine in 1941, the ill will between Nelson and Backman came to a head at a roadside stop somewhere in Nebraska. Helen had made lunch on their camp stove and was cleaning up when Nelson snapped at Backman, “Why don’t you get in there and help cook and clean up?”

  “You go straight to hell!” Backman said. Negri described what he called “an electric shock” that passed through the rest of the group when they realized someone had openly challenged Nelson, something no one else, not even Dillinger, had ever done.

  According to Negri, Nelson stared at Backman, then walked off. They drove that afternoon in silence, stopping after nightfall outside another Nebraska town. Everyone but Nelson decided to drive in to a restaurant; according to Negri, Nelson asked him to stay behind. When they were alone, Nelson said, “I’m going to hit Sally.”7

  Negri was struck by Nelson’s choice of words. “It was the deadliest word Nelson could use against Sally,” he recalled seven years later. “There was something about that word ‘hit’ when Nelson used it that struck me as the worst word any human being could utter against another. It was as cold as he was.”

  “What for?” Negri asked.

  “She knows too much. I’m afraid of her . . . She looks queer to me.” Nelson studied Negri’s reaction.

  “Jimmy, this is an awful tough spot,” Negri said. “You know, Johnny would object. He’s nuts about her.” The gang, Negri suggested, would split apart. Chase knew too much to be an enemy.

  Nelson thought a moment. “Well, if I hit her, I’ll hit Johnny too,” he said.

  Negri was flabbergasted. “Jimmy, you wouldn’t kill a swell guy like Johnny over a girl, would you?” he asked. “She and Johnny are going together now, but that won’t last long. You and Johnny have been together a long time. He’s the loyalest guy on earth. You can’t find another [like him].” Negri went on, repeating himself for emphasis.

  “Well,” Nelson said, “I’ll talk to Johnny about it.”

  When the others returned later that night, it was clear Chase had told Backman to make amends. She took Nelson a tray of food. “Here, Jimmy, is some swell food for you,” she said.

  Without a word Nelson kicked the tray out of her hand. Food and dishes fell to the ground. Chase stepped forward, startled.

  “What’s the argument?” he asked.

  “I don’t want nothing off that bum,” Nelson said, meaning Backman.

  “I don’t talk to your wife that way,” Chase said.

  According to Negri, who was known to inflate his stories, Chase and Nelson each drew guns. Nobody moved. Finally Helen reached a hand toward Nelson, as if to mediate. “Get away from here,” Nelson snapped. “We’ll settle this.” For several long moments the two men stood facing each other, guns drawn. And then it passed. They lowered their guns, walked off into the darkness, and talked. The next day Backman and Chase rode across Iowa in Negri’s car.

  That night, Wednesday, August 29, the group crossed the Mississippi River, stopping at East Burlington, Illinois; the Perkins family was anxious to get home and drove on to Chicago, taking Negri with them. For the next three days Nelson wandered Chicago’s western suburbs, stopping at road-houses to look up old friends, gauging the “heat” and sending out feelers to trusted contacts.

  On Sunday afternoon, September 2, a hard rain was falling when Nelson pulled up in front of Hobart Hermanson’s tavern in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; Nelson had spent several weeks that spring living in a cottage at Hermanson’s Lake Como Lodge, and wanted to do so again that autumn. Chase ran inside, returning a minute later to say they could probably find Hermanson or his handyman, Eddie Duffy, at Hermanson’s home outside town. They drove through the rain to Hermanson’s house. Duffy was home and welcomed them. Helen walked to the icebox and took out enough chicken for everyone. Nelson seemed relieved.

  The tension between Nelson and Sally Backman remained, however, and Backman finally told Chase she couldn’t take it anymore. If he stayed with Nelson, she was going back to San Francisco. Chase talked it over with Nelson, and the two couples decided to split up. That night, Tuesday, September 4, Nelson dropped Chase and Backman on a corner in Elgin, Illinois. For three days the two young lovers slept till noon; at night they took the train into Chicago to dance. On the fourth day Nelson dropped by, handed Chase $3,500 in cash, and told how to reach him via a coded classified advertisement in the Reno paper. Chase promised Backman he would never work with Nelson again.

  Despite the hysteria over Dillinger that summer, the Bureau continued its efforts to solve the mystery of the Kansas City Massacre. In March the belated identification of Adam Richetti’s fingerprint on a beer bottle found in Verne Miller’s basement had redirected the hunt for answers toward Pretty Boy Floyd. Sightings came in from every corner of the country: Montana, New Mexico, Miami, New York, New Orleans. Floyd’s estranged wife, Ruby, was touring off and on with a vaudeville show, Crime Doesn’t Pay. Agents bugged her hotel rooms but could find no evidence she was in touch with her husband.