I have found her since, and talked with her. There wasn’t much detective work involved. I’m sure Omaha seemed like a metropolis to Henry and Shannon, but in 1922 it was really just a larger-than-average Midwestern town with city pretensions. Victoria Hallett is a respectable married woman with three children now, but in the fall of 1922, she was Victoria Stevenson: young, curious, rebellious, six months pregnant, and very fond of Sweet Caporals. She was happy enough to take one of Henry’s when he offered her the pack.

“Take another couple for later,” he invited.

She laughed. “I’d have to be a ding-dong to do that! The sisters search our bags and pull our pockets inside-out when we come back. I’ll have to chew three sticks of Black Jack just to get the smell of this one fag off my breath.” She patted her bulging tummy with amusement and defiance. “I’m in trouble, as I guess you can see. Bad girl! And my sweetie ran off. Bad boy, but the world don’t care about that! So then the dapper stuck me in a jail with penguins for guards-”

“I don’t get you.”

“Jeez! The dapper’s my dad! And penguins is what we call the sisters!” She laughed. “You’re some country palooka, all right! And how! Anyway, the jail where I’m doing time’s called-”

“St. Eusebia’s.”

“Now you’re cooking with gas, Jackson.” She puffed her cig, narrowed her eyes. “Say, I bet I know who you are-Shan Cotterie’s boyfriend.”

“Give that girl a Kewpie doll,” Hank said.

“Well, I wouldn’t get within two blocks of our place, that’s my advice. The cops have got your description.” She laughed cheerily. “Yours and half a dozen other Lonesome Lennies, but none of ’em green-eyed clodhoppers like you, and none with gals as good-looking as Shannon. She’s a real Sheba! Yow!”

“Why do you think I’m here instead of there?”

“I’ll bite-why are you here?”

“I want to get in touch, but I don’t want to get caught doing it. I’ll give you 2 bucks to take a note to her.”

Victoria’s eyes went wide. “Buddy, for a 2-spot, I’d tuck a bugle under my arm and take a message to Garcia-that’s how tapped out I am. Hand it over!”

“And another 2 if you keep your mouth shut about it. Now and later.”

“For that you don’t have to pay extra,” she said. “I love pulling the business on those holier-than-thou bitches. Why, they smack your hand if you try to take an extra dinner roll! It’s like Gulliver Twist!”

He gave her the note, and Victoria gave it to Shannon. It was in her little bag of things when the police finally caught up with her and Henry in Elko, Nevada, and I have seen a police photograph of it. But Arlette told me what it said long before then, and the actual item matched word for word.

I’ll wait from midnight to dawn behind yr place every night for 2 weeks, the note said. If you don’t show up, I’ll know it’s over between us amp; go back to Hemingford amp; never bother you again even tho’ I will go on loving you forever. We are young but we could lie about our ages amp; start a good life in another place (California). I have some money amp; know how to get more. Victoria knows how to find me if you want to send me a note, but only once. More would not be safe.

I suppose Harlan and Sallie Cotterie might have that note. If so, they have seen that my son signed his name in a heart. I wonder if that was what convinced Shannon. I wonder if she even needed convincing. It’s possible that all she wanted on earth was to keep (and legitimize) a baby she had already fallen in love with. That’s a question Arlette’s terrible whispering voice never addressed. Probably she didn’t care one way or the other.

Henry returned to the mouth of the alley every day after that meeting. I’m sure he knew that the cops might arrive instead of Victoria, but felt he had no choice. On the third day of his vigil, she came. “Shan wrote back right away, but I couldn’t get out any sooner,” she said. “Some goofy-weed showed up in that hole they have the nerve to call a music room, and the penguins have been on the warpath ever since.”

Henry held out his hand for the note, which Victoria gave over in exchange for a Sweet Caporal. There were only four words: Tomorrow morning. 2 o’clock.

Henry threw his arms around Victoria and kissed her. She laughed with excitement, eyes sparkling. “Gosh! Some girls get all the luck.”

They undoubtedly do. But when you consider that Victoria ended up with a husband, three kids, and a nice home on Maple Street in the best part of Omaha, and Shannon Cotterie didn’t live out that curse of a year… which of them would you say struck lucky?

I have some money amp; know how to get more, Henry had written, and he did. Only hours after kissing the saucy Victoria (who took the message He says he’ll be there with bells on back to Shannon), a young man with a flat cap pulled low on his forehead and a bandanna over his mouth and nose robbed the First National Bank of Omaha. This time the robber got 800 dollars, which was a fine haul. But the guard was younger and more enthusiastic about his responsibilities, which was not so fine. The thief had to shoot him in the thigh in order to effect his escape, and although Charles Griner lived, an infection set in (I could sympathize), and he lost the leg. When I met with him at his parents’ house in the spring of 1925, Griner was philosophical about it.

“I’m lucky to be alive at all,” he said. “By the time they got a tourniquet on my leg, I was lying in a pool of blood damn near an inch deep. I bet it took a whole box of Dreft to get that mess up.”

When I tried to apologize for my son, he waved it away.

“I never should have approached him. The cap was pulled low and the bandanna was yanked high, but I could see his eyes all right. I should have known he wasn’t going to stop unless he was shot down, and I never had a chance to pull my gun. It was in his eyes, see. But I was young myself. I’m older now. Older’s something your son never got a chance to get. I’m sorry for your loss.”

After that job, Henry had more than enough money to buy a car-a nice one, a tourer-but he knew better. (Writing that, I again feel that sense of pride: low but undeniable.) A kid who looked like he only started shaving a week or two before, waving around enough wampum to buy an almost-new Olds? That would have brought John Law down on him for sure.

So instead of buying a car, he stole one. Not a touring car, either; he plumped for a nice, nondescript Ford coupe. That was the car he parked behind St. Eusebia’s, and that was the one Shannon climbed into, after sneaking out of her room, creeping downstairs with her traveling bag in her hand, and wriggling through the window of the washroom adjacent to the kitchen. They had time to exchange a single kiss-Arlette didn’t say so, but I still have my imagination-and then Henry pointed the Ford west. By dawn they were on the Omaha-Lincoln Highway. They must have passed close to his old home-and hers-around 3 that afternoon. They might have looked in that direction, but I doubt if Henry slowed; he would not want to stop for the night in an area where they might be recognized.

Their life as fugitives had begun.

Arlette whispered more about that life than I wished to know, and I don’t have the heart to put more than the bare details down here. If you want to know more, write to the Omaha Public Library. For a fee, they will send you hectograph copies of stories having to do with the Sweetheart Bandits, as they became known (and as they called themselves). You may even be able to find stories from your own paper, if you do not live in Omaha; the conclusion of the tale was deemed heartrending enough to warrant national coverage.

Handsome Hank and Sweet Shannon, the World-Herald called them. In the photographs, they looked impossibly young. (And of course they were.) I didn’t want to look at those photographs, but I did. There’s more than one way to be bitten by rats, isn’t there?