Stolen Away (24 page)

For the mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, this was a small drawing room—almost intimate, its several couches grouped around another of the omnipresent gold-veined marble fireplaces, in which a fire was lazily crackling. The room had a sunken effect, an open stairway along one wall leading up to a balcony that looked down on us from four sides.

Evalyn was draped against one end of one couch, as if posing for a portrait in the classical style, only she was wearing the simple brown-and-yellow plaid bathrobe she’d worn the first time I saw her. The Hope diamond was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Mike the dog was wearing it; he was nowhere to be seen, either. In the shadows of the reflecting fire, her face was lovely, but she looked tired, and sad—or anyway melancholy, which is the wealthy’s way of feeling sad.

I was sitting nearby, enjoying her company, morose though it might at the moment be. Despite her eccentricities, I liked this woman. She was a good person with a good heart, and she smelled good, too. She had large, firm breasts and was very, very rich. What wasn’t to like?

But her melancholia was catching. I had the nagging sense that all of us—from Lindbergh to Breckinridge to Schwarzkopf to Condon to Agents Irey and Wilson to Commodore Curtis to Evalyn Walsh McLean to Chicago P.D. liaison Nathan Heller—were on a fool’s errand. I simply could not feel that child’s presence out there. After a month and a week, the idea of getting that kid back safely seemed about as likely as Charles Augustus Lindbergh listening to reason.

I had gone up in the sky with Lindbergh again, at daybreak Monday, on the heels of the unfruitful Sikorsky search Sunday; smoothly guiding a Lockheed-Vega monoplane, the Lone Eagle combed the coastal waters of the Atlantic, and the Lone Passenger—me—helped him look. I was no longer bothered by flying—or maybe it was that Slim was taking it so much easier, not swooping down so suddenly, or skimming the sea’s skin so recklessly. He brought with him another blanket and a small suitcase of Charlie’s clothes; no milk this time. We flew over the Elizabeth Islands and Martha’s Vineyard, Coast Guard cutters still patrolling the Sound, the surface of which was as dark blue that day as Evalyn’s famous bauble.

No craft resembling the
Nelly
turned up, and by noon Lindy’s face had taken on a stony despondence. He didn’t say so, but I knew he was thinking of Commodore Curtis and the Norfolk contingent when, as afternoon blurred into evening, he swung as far south as Virginia.

The night before, Slim had come home to Hopewell empty-handed to comfort his waiting wife in the doorway; this night, the house again blazing with light, the nursery once more waiting for its tiny charge, Lindbergh met Anne in the doorway and fell into her arms. The tiny woman was patting the tall man’s stooped back like a child when I slipped silently away, feeling an intruder, finding the flivver I’d been given to use and heading to my suite at the Old Princeton Inn, knowing that this was over, but also knowing no one was quite ready, or able, to admit it. Certainly not Slim Lindbergh.

In the days that followed, Lindbergh allowed Condon to place another ad (“What is wrong? Have you crossed me? Please, better directions—Jafsie”) that brought no response. I spent several evenings at Condon’s, with Breckinridge, waiting for nothing. The professor’s spirits were low.

Condon had made a positive contribution, it seemed, by leading a federal agent to a shoe impression in the dirt of a freshly covered grave at St. Raymond’s, where “John” had jumped a fence along the cemetery’s access road. A moulage impression was made, waiting for eventual comparison to any captured suspects.

As the week wore on, Elmer Irey asked, and got, Lindbergh’s permission to distribute to banks a fifty-seven-page booklet listing the serial numbers of the 4,750 bills Jafsie had paid John. This seemed to me relatively pointless: bank tellers aren’t in the habit of noting the serial numbers of the bills they handle, and the booklet made no mention of the Lindbergh kidnapping.

A few days later, however, a bank teller in Newark figured out the booklet’s purpose, proposed his theory to a reporter and it was soon all over the wire services. Now that the list of numbers was labeled “Lindbergh” and published in the papers, shopkeepers started posting it near their cash registers. The first bill spotted, a twenty, turned up at a pastry shop in Greenwich, Connecticut.

“Now we’ve had it,” Lindbergh had said glumly, the day the wire services ID’ed the serial numbers list. “The kidnappers will never resume negotiations.”

“Slim,” I said. “They got their dough. Days ago, There aren’t going to
be
any more negotiations.” We were sitting in the kitchen of the house, both of us covered with soot and smelling of smoke. My morning as a detective had been spent helping Lindbergh, a dozen or so troopers, and butler Ollie Whately beat out a brushfire. We were alone—the smoke had sent the women of the house retreating to the Morrow house in Englewood. I was drinking a cold-sweating bottle of bootleg beer. Slim was drinking ice water.

“Besides,” I continued, “these may not even
be
the kidnappers—this could be an extortion scheme, plain and simple.”

“You saw the sleeping suit yourself, Nate….”

“Right! You got sent a standard-issue pair of kid’s pajamas to prove Charlie’s identity. Why not a photo? Or a lock of hair? Or something with your boy’s fingerprints on it?”

“We’ve been through that,” he said softly, unsurely.

I sighed heavily, sat forward; the backs of my hands were black. “Do you remember why I’m here? The name Al Capone ring a bell? You wouldn’t play Capone’s game, remember? And now he’s sitting back in Cook County Jail, waiting for his last appeal to be turned down.”

Face smudged with soot, Lindbergh gave me a testy look. “What’s your point?”

I spread my white-palmed black hands like Jolson singing “Mammy.” “If Capone took your boy, using his East-Coast bootleg gang connections to do so, he had to figure out
long
ago that he fucked up.”

His eyes were slits. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, if the initial idea was, ‘Snatch Lindy’s kid and deal myself outa stir,’ Capone knew
weeks
ago he failed. So none of these so-called kidnap gangs—not Jafsie’s, or the Commodore’s, or goddamn Gaston Means’s—may have your kid. All Jafsie’s ‘kidnappers’ most likely have is somebody on the inside—some servant who’s feeding them information, a sleeping suit, a copy of the first note that Capone’s kidnappers left behind…which gave ’em something to pattern the later notes on, and which got ’em fifty grand from you. And now Jafsie’s ‘kidnappers’ are as gone as your dough.”

“I don’t believe any of that.”

I shrugged. “It’s just a theory. But it’s as good as any.”

“If you’re right, Charlie is…” He couldn’t say it.

I patted the air, gently. “He could be. He could be. On the other hand, suppose Capone had Charlie snatched, then faded when he saw his get-outa-jail plan go south. He’s not going to…excuse me for even bringing this up…but he’s not going to murder your boy and have a capital rap hanging over him.”

“So where would that leave Charlie?”

“Well, maybe with the people Capone contracted to do the kidnapping. Some bootleg bunch really might have the boy. They might be playing out the ransom hand, too.”

“In that case,” Lindbergh said, perking up, “maybe the real gang
is
trying to contact me…through Commodore Curtis, or even Means!”

I swigged the beer. “Anything’s possible in this crazy enterprise.”

He nodded, raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve been in contact with Commodore Curtis. And
he
says he’s in contact with his bootlegger friend, ‘Sam.’”

“You want me to check Curtis out? Not to mention Sam.”

He shook his head curtly. “No. I’ll follow that lead myself. All I’d like from you is to get a bead on this son-of-a-bitch Means. What about Mrs. McLean?”

“I’ve been calling her home. She’s away on a trip somewhere—due back late tonight or early tomorrow. The butler wouldn’t say, of course, but my hunch is Means has her chasing her tail.”

“I feel terrible about her hundred thousand dollars.”

“How do you feel about your fifty?”

He smiled a little, like a mischievous kid. “Worse than I do about her hundred thousand. Would you go down and see her?”

So here I was again, in Washington, D.C., in the pleasant if quirky company of Evalyn Walsh McLean.

“I know I look like hell,” she said, sitting up. She lit herself a cigarette from a gold box on a nearby glass-and-mahogany coffee table; she used a matching gold decorative lighter. Exhaling smoke grandly, she said, “Forgive the robe. Even though I was expecting you—and you
know
how pleased I am to see you again—I just couldn’t make myself spruce up, somehow. Nate, I’ve been through the mill.”

“What mill, exactly?” I sipped a Bacardi I’d made myself. “Where
have
you been, Evalyn?”

Her smile was self-mockingly thin. “To hell and Texas, and various purgatories between. After Far View was deemed inappropriate by the ‘kidnap gang’—as I’m sure you’ll recall, darling—Means arranged for a new ‘drop point,’ at Aiken.”

“Aiken?”

“It’s not a condition, dear. It’s a town in South Carolina. I have a place down there—it’s where my son Ned is in school. Means told me the gang was willing to attempt a delivery of the ‘book’ there, so I went down with Inga and, not wanting my son to walk in on this Gaston Means-directed tragicomedy, rented a little cottage. Means came down and had a look around, seemed to approve of the setup, said he’d let the gang know I was there. The next morning he reappeared, and informed me dramatically that one of the kidnappers wanted to meet with me—that very afternoon!”

I had gotten up and gone to the liquor cart and was pouring her some sherry. “Face-to-face with one of the kidnappers, huh?”

She arched an eyebrow ironically. “Not just any kidnapper—the mastermind himself: the ‘Fox.’ At two o’clock that afternoon, a car stopped in front of the cottage—Means walked in, all smiles, followed by a stranger right out of
Little Caesar
.”

I gave her the sherry. “How so?”

She painted an image in the air. “He was tall, thin, wore his hat low over his forehead, wore an expensive-looking camel-hair overcoat. He kept that coat on all the while—hands jammed in his pockets, as if he had a gun in either pocket. But he
spoke
well—he seemed to be an individual of some polish and education.” Her face looked angular and lovely in the fire’s shadowy flickering. “The Fox said he wanted to look through the place, make sure there were no hidden microphones. Means and Inga stayed in the living room, while I showed our guest around. He looked in closets, under beds, wiping off everything he touched with a handkerchief. Odd.”

“What made that odd?”

“He was wearing thick gray suede gloves at that time.”

“Oh.”

She inhaled smoke; let it out. “After he’d searched the house, the Fox asked if he might have a look around the grounds; I consented, sent him off alone. When he returned, he told Means that he was satisfied I was playing it straight with the gang. Then the Fox turned to me and said that within forty-eight hours, the ‘book’ would be handed over to me, personally, on a side street not far from the cottage.”

“Yet somehow it never happened.”

She smiled ruefully. “The arrangements were typically Means-baroque. Four automobiles would be waiting, two on one side of the street, two on the other, the child would be handed over in the middle, with machine guns trained on me from every car.”

I had to smile. “Means does like his melodrama.”

“I do wish you’d been there, Nate. I wish you’d stayed with me through all this.”

“So do I. I would’ve grabbed that goddamn Fox and skinned him. Then we’d be somewhere.”

She nodded, putting out one cigarette, getting another going. “Well, the Fox may have spoken like an educated man, but he was as big a scoundrel as Means. Before he left, the blackguard made a veiled threat about my children, should I ‘cross’ him. Then he left, and Means left with him.”

“And what happened, to prevent the ‘drop’ from taking place, machine guns and all?”

“Means arrived the next day, and said it was all off. Things were in an awful mess, he said. The gang members were quarreling amongst themselves. Lindbergh had apparently paid ‘fifty grand’ through that other negotiator…”

I sat up. “What? What’s this?”

She raised both eyebrows in casual surprise. “Didn’t I ever mention that? Means said, oh, weeks ago, that Lindbergh was working through another negotiator, when of course Gaston
Means
was the only appropriate negotiator….”

Jesus. Had Means known about Jafsie, weeks ago? And had he known about the ransom payment in St. Raymond’s Cemetery, before the papers guessed it?

Her expression sharpened, now, in response to my reaction. “From, what I’m seeing in the press,” she said, “about lists of marked bills, that much of his story is true, isn’t it? There
was
a ransom payment, through another negotiator?”

I nodded.

“Means claims the gang was arguing about whether to turn the baby over to Lindbergh, through this other negotiator, or to me, through Means. Making matters worse, they were squabbling over how exactly to divide the spoils.”

“Where was the baby supposed to be, at this point? Aiken?”

“Not specifically. The boy could have been brought there, easily enough, Means said. He said the child was now being kept on a boat, at sea.”

“A boat? At sea?”

“Yes. Means claimed a fast launch was keeping the kidnappers informed as to what was going on, on land. He felt the boat was in the vicinity of Norfolk. Nate—what’s wrong? You’re white as a ghost.”

I was shaking my head. “Means knows too much. He knows about things he should have no way of knowing.”

Was there
really
a “boad
Nelly
”? Was Commodore Curtis, of Norfolk, really in touch with the kidnap gang, via the rumrunner “Sam”?