Stolen Away (22 page)

“Please come in,” he said, and we did.

The house was as neat, as orderly, as the boy’s apparel. Well furnished, in the Early American mode. The people who lived here weren’t rich exactly, but they were clearly successful.

“I think my father is expecting you,” the boy said.

Means’s voice boomed down. “Hello there! Come on up!”

We went up the staircase, leaving the boy behind, and there, on the landing, stood Means—as disheveled as his house wasn’t. His brown suit rumpled, his tie loose, his eyes bloodshot, his breath boozy, his face sweat-slick, Means ushered us into a cluttered den past a table on which was a Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of a long board with four dry-cell batteries, a big light bulb and a reflector.

The big moon-faced bastard fell heavily into the chair behind his messy desk. “God, Eleven! What a close call we had last night.”

“What do you mean, Means?”

“Call me ‘Hogan,’ Eleven. I must insist. Should we talk in front of your chauffeur?”

“I’m agent Sixteen,” I said, “remember?”

“If you’re a police spy,” Means said enigmatically, “the Lindbergh boy will bear the burden.”

“Tell us about your close call,” I said. I found Evalyn a chair, clearing off some letters and old newspapers. I stood, cap in hand. The cap was covering the nine millimeter in my waistband.

“I went to the place the baby is being kept,” Means said darkly, sitting forward, hands locked prayerlike.

“Where was it?” Evalyn asked.

“I can’t divulge that,” Means said, with a regretful wag of his massive bald noggin. “I gave my word to the criminals I wouldn’t share their location with anyone. But I will say it’s within a hundred miles of Washington.”

“Did you see him?” Evalyn asked, breathlessly. “Did you see Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.?”

“Yes,” Means said, matter-of-factly, his dimples cute as a baby’s behind. “I held the boy in my arms. He had blue eyes, blond hair, was dressed in a knitted cap, buff coat, brown shoes and white stockings. The age and appearance tallied with everything I’ve seen and heard about the child.”

Evalyn looked at me yearningly; she longed to believe this.

“What about the close call?” I said.

Means narrowed his eyes, cocked his head, sat forward. “Last night, sometime after midnight, we started out from the gang’s headquarters in two cars. I was traveling in the lead car. The Fox, with the baby in tow, was in the second. I was to keep an eye out for police. If I saw the police were stopping cars and searching them, I was to use my invention…” He pointed to the Rube Goldberg contraption with the light bulb. “…and signal the car behind, where the Fox was with the baby. I was to flash the light three times.”

Evalyn glanced at me; she seemed excited. She was buying this.

“Along toward three in the morning,” Means continued, “we were nearly to Far View when I saw a car stopped by a policeman up ahead. I flashed my light three times, and the car behind me turned and went back.”

“Back?” I asked.

“To the hideout,” he said, melodramatically.

This guy ought to have been on the radio.

“Back at the hideout,” he went on, “the Fox and the rest of the boys were jittery as june bugs. The Fox said the deal was definitely off, as far as Far View being the drop point was concerned.”

Evalyn looked at me anxiously and saw my skepticism. She turned back to Means and said, “This sounds pretty queer to me….”

Means affected a hurt expression. Grandly, he opened a desk drawer and removed a brown-paper package fastened with red sealing wax.

“There’s your hundred thousand, Eleven,” he said. “Take your money back, if you want to pull out.”

Evalyn shook her head no. “I don’t want to pull out—as long as there’s the slightest chance we’ll get that baby back, I’m in.”

He plucked a letter opener from the mess on his desk and cut the cord on the package; the paper came loose and revealed green bills on top. Then he plucked from the package a tag, which he handed toward Evalyn. She took it. Read it. Handed it to me.

It said:

“I put this on the package,” he said, taking back the tag, “for your protection. Should I meet my death in this endeavor, your money will be returned.”

I knew just eyeballing it that that package wasn’t big enough to hold one hundred grand in small currency; but I would have to tell her later. And was his desk drawer the “safe” he’d told me the money was locked away in?

“I’ll resume negotiations,” he said to her, “if you wish.”

“Do that,” she said curtly. “I’m leaving Far View and returning to 2020. Keep me informed—we’ll work out a new drop point. But if you’re not on the level, you’ll finish your days behind bars.”

She sounded as melodramatic as Means; but she wasn’t lying.

“Eleven,” he said somberly, “you saw that fine boy of mine downstairs, didn’t you? The very thought of him would prevent me from doing anything wrong—that boy’s my life, now.”

We left Means and his messy den and his neat house and fine boy and we sat in the powder-blue Lincoln, talking.

“You think he’s lying, don’t you, Nate?”

“I know he’s lying. The trouble is, with a con man like him, he’s probably building on
some
truth. He’s had a few kernels of inside information—the question is, where has he gotten it? How close is he to the actual kidnappers?”

Her mouth was a thin determined line. “I have to follow this out to its conclusion.”

“Why don’t you let me put the Treasury boys on this? Tracking this cellmate of his, the ‘Fox,’ if he exists, would be a snap.”

“No! No. That might spoil everything…the child might suffer…”

She sounded like Lindbergh now.

“These T-men are the boys who got Capone,” I said. “They can…”

“No. If you do, I’ll call Ogden and quash it, Nate, I really will.”

“Ogden?”

“Ogden Mills. Secretary of the Treasury Mills.”

Now she really sounded like Lindbergh.

“Okay, Evalyn. Okay. But I’m afraid this is where I get off. I’ll drive you back to Far View, but my advice to you is to turn Means over to the authorities. You might still get your money back, and some information about the kidnapping, to boot.”

“No,” she said, firmly.

I spoke through a strained smile. “You know what today is, Evalyn? April first. April Fool’s Day.”

“That’s cruel.”

“You said it yourself: it’s a cruel universe.”

“Promise me, Nate. Promise me you won’t interfere.”

“Evalyn—”

“Promise me. Promise!”

She touched my cheek; her eyes mingled hope and despair.

“All right,” I sighed. “All right.”

So I drove her back to Far View. We didn’t speak. We weren’t mad at each other, exactly. But we didn’t speak.

In the second-floor room, where Evalyn and I had sat waiting for ghosts the night before, I packed my clothes and my gun and left the room to the poltergeists. As I came down the stairs, Inga said I’d had a phone message while I was away and handed me a small folded piece of paper; I slipped it in my pocket without glancing at it, as Evalyn was approaching.

“Why don’t I drive you and Inga back to 2020?” I asked.

“I can drive myself,” Evalyn said, without rancor. “I don’t really need a chauffeur, you know. It’s just another of the empty luxuries in my life.”

“Evalyn—I know you mean well in this. But you’re in over your head.”

“It’s only money, Nate. If I can save that child…”

“Evalyn…” I looked around; we were in the kitchen, alone, waiting for Gus the caretaker to collect me and take me to the train. I gave her a long, lingering kiss.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

She touched my face again.

“I’ll be waiting,” she said.

As I went out to get in Gus’s pickup truck, she stood watching me from the back doorway, like another ghost in that damn haunted house.

In the pickup, I unfolded Inga’s message; it was from Breckinridge.

It said: “Jafsie has heard from John.”

I sat in a comfortable chair near a crackling fire emanating from a marble fireplace in an expensive, high-ceilinged library worthy of Evalyn Walsh McLean’s Massachusetts Avenue mansion; but I was not in Washington, D.C. I was in Manhattan, in a stately graystone townhouse just off Central Park on East 72nd, the New York residence of the late Senator Morrow, Lindy’s father-in-law.

Nearby, at a long mahogany conference table, sat Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson, the dour frick-and-frack IRS agents whose mutual round black-rimmed glasses and black suits and dark ties made them humorless mirror images. Wilson was the more clearly restless of the pair, drumming his fingers, searching his balding scalp for clues of hair. Irey was as immobile as the face on a coin. But both were worried.

So was I.

We were waiting.

I’d been with Lindbergh and Breckinridge at Professor Condon’s bungalow all afternoon; Irey and Wilson had stayed away, in case the house was being watched. Final preparations were made at Condon’s, including stuffing the two cord-and-brown-paper-wrapped packages of cash—one containing fifty thousand dollars in the various denominations specified by the kidnappers, and the other containing the additional twenty thousand—into Dr. Condon’s duplicate antique ballot box, an oblong wooden affair with brass hinges and clasps. Work of a first-rate Bronx cabinetmaker or not, it didn’t hold up under the bulk of the bills: one side split. The twenty-grand packet had to be carried separately, and the box wrapped with cord.

We were responding to the note that had arrived with Jafsie’s April Fool’s Day mail, while I was away; it read:

The message was signed with the familiar symbol.

“If the ransom drop comes off tomorrow night,” I’d told Slim, “I’ll go with the professor.”

We were sitting in Condon’s living room, sipping tea served by the professor’s shell-shocked wife; the pretty, pretty unfriendly daughter was lurking, too, worried about her father. Right now she was helping her papa and Breckinridge with the ransom package. The ad—saying “YES. EVERYTHING O.K. JAFSIE.”—had appeared in the morning New York
American.

“I don’t want you going along, Nate,” Lindbergh said. “They might recognize you from last time. They might know, by now, you’re a cop.”

“You can’t let the professor handle this by himself.”

“I won’t. I’ll go myself.”

“Is that smart? You’re a prime kidnap target yourself.”

“In that case, you can do me a favor, then.”

“Yes?”

He shrugged. “I knew Anne would be disturbed if she happened to see me leave the house with a gun.”

“I guess she might at that.”

“So I didn’t bring one. Can I borrow your nine millimeter?”

“Why, sure.”

“And shoulder holster?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Hell, Slim. I’m honored. It’ll almost be like being there.”

He sipped his tea. He smiled slyly at me, his eyes narrow and shrewd. “Tell me, Nate. Did you work on Irey? And Wilson?”

“What do you mean?”

He nodded sideways toward the other room. “Those bills in there. That money. Wilson spent the morning recording all the serial numbers at J. P. Morgan and Company.”

I grinned. “Well, that’s swell. It really is. You won’t be sorry.”

He shook his head, sipped more tea. “I guess it took over a dozen clerks to help get the job done. Five-thousand-some items of currency, with no two numbers in sequence.”

“Don’t look at me, Slim—I didn’t put the pressure on Irey. He’s capable all by himself of figuring out that recording those bills is the thing to do. But what made you change
your
mind?”

Lindbergh’s mouth twitched. “Irey,” he said, and then added, admiringly: “He’s a hard-nosed bastard.”

I didn’t push him, and Slim didn’t elaborate further, but that evening, as I waited with the two IRS agents in the Morrows’ vast library, I asked Irey how he’d convinced Lindbergh.

“He gave me some noble malarkey,” Irey said, “about wanting to keep his promises to the kidnappers, to encourage them to keep their promises to him.”

“Slim doesn’t know much about crooks, I’m afraid.”

“When it comes to being a detective,” Irey said, “Lindbergh makes a damn fine airmail-pilot. At any rate, I told him that unless he allowed us to record the serial numbers of the bills, the Treasury Department would play no part in the case.”

“But what about his pull with your boss?”

Irey’s smile was as thin as a stiletto blade. “Even the Secretary of the Treasury knows that his department damn well better not compound a felony. Which is what we’d have been guilty of, if we allowed those bills to go out unrecorded.”

“And that sold Slim.”

“Not immediately,” Irey said, with a shake of his head. “We withdrew—from his home and from the case—and didn’t hear from him till this morning.”

“He must have checked with Secretary Mills, after all.”

“Maybe. But it didn’t do him any good. He gave us the go-ahead.”

“Mills?”

“Lindbergh. And that second packet, the one with twenty thousand in it, is strictly gold certificates.”

“Gold certificates?”

“Yes. Fifty-dollar ones. Four hundred of them. Those will be child’s play for bank tellers to spot.”

“Nice thinking, Elmer.”

“Thank you, Mr. Heller—but the gold-certificate notion was Frank’s work. The smaller-denomination bills are mostly gold certificates, as well.”

I nodded and smiled at Wilson, who nodded and smiled back at me. We were one big happy family—three cops sitting in a posh townhouse library, while an eccentric professor and a stunt flyer were off in the night somewhere with seventy grand to turn over to some self-proclaimed kidnappers.

Earlier that afternoon, when Lindbergh and I had spoken about the marked bills, I’d attempted to make another point, with considerably less success.

“Why don’t you,” I’d suggested, “let Irey and maybe the New York cops follow you to wherever the ransom drop is, then pull in undercover men to throw a net over the area?”

He shook his head sternly, no. “That’s out of the question. That would be much too dangerous….”

“No it wouldn’t. You’d have cops acting as cabbies, drunks, truck drivers, washerwomen, priests…undercover cops do that kind of thing all the time, and well.”

“The kidnappers wouldn’t be that easily fooled, Nate. They’ll go into this thing suspicious as hell.”

“Slim, it’s not suspicious to be passed on the street by a milk wagon or a bunch of college whoopee boys…it’s natural to have people on the streets, even at night, especially at night, when this ransom drop will probably come off.”

But he wouldn’t hear of it.

Later Irey confirmed that he’d made a similar plea to Lindbergh to no avail; and in this case, the word from above was to stay out of Lindy’s way.

So those of us who were thinking like cops were one for two—and batting .500 in the Lindbergh game was a goddamn good average.

I’d been at Condon’s most of the day and into the evening, when the doorbell rang around a quarter to eight; the daughter, Myra, answered the door and a cabbie—she described him as young, thin, dark—handed her an envelope and scurried back to his cab and was gone before any of us could stop him or even get his license number.

Lindbergh tore open the envelope, read the note, with Condon and Breckinridge looking on.

When I made a move to look at it, Slim’s boyish face was cold; he shook his head, no.

“You’re not part of this, Nate,” he said. “We’ll take the professor’s car. You drive into mid-Manhattan and join the IRS boys. And wait.”

I sighed, irritably. “You don’t usually order me around, Slim. I’m not sure I like it much.”

He lifted a hand, as if about to place it on my shoulder, then saw from my expression that it wouldn’t be appreciated.

He said, “I know you don’t approve of how I’m going about this. But you’re just a consultant—you’re not really part of the police, here. I don’t want you knowing where we’re going…” He was clutching the note, wadding it a bit. “…and I don’t want you following us.”

“What good would it do me? You’ve got my gun.”

He smiled shyly, embarrassed, and went ahead and put the hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Promise me, Nate.”

People kept asking me to make promises I didn’t feel like keeping. But I nodded anyway.

“Thank you.” He looked at Breckinridge. “Would you stay here, with the professor’s family, Henry?”

Breckinridge nodded in his sad, dignified way.

Condon’s daughter brought her father his coat and hat and helped him into them, telling him to be careful. The professor, bug-eyed, red-faced, calm as a walrus in heat, said, “Allow me to handle the parcel,” and grabbed up the cord-wound, split-apart, jam-packed ballot box, as well as the separate package with the twenty grand in gold notes.

That was fine with Lindbergh, who viewed the money with disinterest and even disdain, and the two men hurried out to the Ford coupe and, Lindbergh behind the wheel, Jafsie with the loot on his lap, disappeared down the street and turned south.

Now it was almost midnight; four hours later, in the Morrow library, and no sign of Lindbergh or the professor.

“They could be dead in a ditch somewhere,” I suggested.

“If they are,” Wilson said, “it won’t be our fault.”

“Tell that to the press,” Irey said glumy.

“Success, gentlemen!”

The booming, overly well-modulated voice belonged to none other than Professor John F. Condon, who entered the chamber with his arms outspread as if looking for someone to embrace. I wasn’t volunteering.

Lindbergh and Breckinridge came in on the professor’s heels; all three men were still in their topcoats and hats, except for Slim who was hatless to begin with. Two Morrow butlers hurried after the men, who had burst into the apartment without any of the usual amenities, and began collecting coats and hats.

“We delivered the ransom,” Lindbergh said, digging in his jacket pocket, “and we have been given directions.” He smiled, and the smile mingled joy with desperation. “We can find Charlie if we follow this.”

He placed a small note on the conference table, and we all gathered round. It said:

It lacked the usual circles, and holes signature, but the handwriting was as before.

“I’ve already called for an amphibian,” Lindbergh said, eyes bright as glowing coals, “and as soon as it’s light, we’ll take off.”

“Sit down, gentlemen, please,” Irey said, gesturing to the table, looking first at Lindy, the professor and Breckinridge, but at myself and Wilson, too. We all gathered around the table, and sat.

Lindbergh and Condon told the story, the former doing most of the talking, but the latter taking over at the points when center stage of the melodrama became his.

The note the cabbie had delivered directed them to follow Tremont Avenue east until they reached 3225, a nursery, J. A. Bergen Greenhouse and Florist. There they would find a table outside the florist shop entrance, and underneath the table would be a letter covered by a stone. The letter directed them to cross the street, walk to the next corner and follow Whittemore Avenue to the south. They were to bring the money. Condon was to come alone. He would be met.

“As we approached Whittemore Avenue,” Condon said, leaning forward, his eyes rheumy but intense, “I realized that these wily kidnappers were duplicating their precautions from the previous meeting.”

“Why is that?” Irey asked.

Wilson was taking notes.

“Whittemore Avenue,” Lindbergh said, “is a dirt road running parallel to St. Raymond’s Cemetery.”

Another graveyard.

The professor raised a finger in the air like a Bible-beating preacher making a point about heaven, or hell. “For the second time,” he said, “our meeting was on a Saturday night. And for the second time, our rendezvous took place…” He looked at each of us significantly; his expression, in the orange reflection of the nearby fireplace, was that of a senile scoutmaster telling a singularly unscary ghost story around a campfire. “…in the city of the dead.”

And me without any marshmallows to roast.

“As I told the Colonel,” Condon confided, winking at Irey, who acknowledged the wink not at all, “I have heard that Italian gangsters frequently frequent graveyards….”

Frequently frequent? What was this clown a professor of, anyway? Redundancy?

“And our pair of cemetery conferences,” Condon continued, “would tend to confirm my belief that the gang is a mixture of Mafia members and the Scandinavian, ‘John.’”

Lindbergh, thankfully, picked up the story at that point.

Condon had stood outside the car, reading the note by flashlight, hoping to attract the attention of any lookout that the kidnap gang might have posted. A man in a brown suit approached, brim of his brown felt hat pulled down; he walked with a decided stoop. When he passed the car, he covered the bottom half of his face with a handkerchief, eyeballing the two men.