Free Jelly's Gold by David Housewright Page A

Edgecumbe Court Apartments with the St. Paul Tennis Club and Linwood Elementary School just down the block—all three of them had nearly identical redbrick facades and similarly constructed windows, although Edgecumbe Court seemed better kept up. Four apartments were located in the basement, with six more on the first floor and another half dozen on the second floor. The building had a security door with a telephone system that I doubt had been in operation seventy-five years earlier. I parked the Audi. Nina and I got out and circled the building. I thought Heavenly’s acquaintances might try to pick me up at Rickie’s, but they were nowhere to be seen, and I had been watching carefully.
    “What are we looking at?” Nina asked.
    I didn’t have a specific answer for her. Instead, I told her the story as well as I knew it.

    May 29, 1931
    Jimmy Keating and Tommy Holden took turns hugging Frank Nash and slapping him on the back.
    “Man, what are you doing here?” they wanted to know.
    “After I walked away from Leavenworth—”
    “Walked away, I don’t fucking believe it,” Keating said.
    “I took a vacation down in Hot Springs until I got a call from Jack Peifer. He said that the heat was off up here, that I should come on up. I’ve been staying at the Senator Hotel in Minneapolis.”
    “The hell with that,” said Holden. “You’re staying here. We’ll put you up.”
    “Now, boys, I wouldn’t want to impose.”
    “I don’t even know what that means, impose,” said Holden. “You’re staying here. This is a good deal. Best furnished apartments in the city, only eighty-five a month. Quiet. No one to bother you. Kids down the street will wash and wax your car for a buck. The owner, old man Reed, has his head up his ass, doesn’t know anything. Whaddaya say?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Frank, we owe you more than we can repay for helping to bust us out,” Keating said. “You gotta let us put you up. At least until you start earning again.”
    “You know, Jimmy and me, we have some jobs lined up if you’re interested,” Holden said. “We could always use a good hand. Any advice you want to give us …”
    Both Keating and Holden were pleasant, intelligent, friendly, well-behaved high livers who dressed well and spent freely—just his kind of people—so Nash relented and moved into the Edgecumbe Court Apartments under the name Frank Harrison. Despite his initial misgivings—he never cared for the language his new partners used—he relished his stay there. He even struck up a friendship with the owner,a retired banker named Henry Reed, congratulating him on how well he kept up the apartment building and telling him that he enjoyed living there very much.
    Meanwhile, Nash did indeed earn, pulling several profitable jobs with Keating and Holden, as well as a few of his own. He also fell in love with a comely cook from Aurora, Minnesota, named Frances Mikulich. Life was good—until Keating and Holden were arrested and ratted him out…

    “It’s a place he knew,” I said. “He could have hidden his gold here.”
    Nina shook her head slowly, almost sadly. “What is it they say?” she said. “You can never go home again.”
    “I don’t know if I agree with that. On the other hand, there’s no garage.”
    “So?”
    “For Nash to have returned his car to the dealership by eight sixteen, he would have had to unload it in broad daylight. This was a high-traffic neighborhood, even then. How could he get thirty-two heavy bars of gold inside the apartment building without being noticed?”
    “Disguise it as something else.”
    “That’s possible,” I agreed—but unlikely.
    204 Vernon Street
    It was a nondescript two-story house now covered with powder blue vinyl in the heart of an area we called Tangletown because of its confusing, meandering streets. There was a porch in front, yet somehow I couldn’t imagine the Barker-Karpis gang sitting there, watching the sun go down and calling out