Stolen Away (26 page)

“Why, Evalyn,” I said admiringly, taking that smooth flesh in my arms. “You’re a nasty girl.”

Toward the middle of the next afternoon, uptown in the rail-and-harbor city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a powder-blue Lincoln Continental drew up along the curb of the posh Carteret Hotel. The grandly uniformed doorman moved swiftly down the red carpet in the shadow of the hotel canopy to open the rear right door for the Lincoln’s solitary passenger, beating the chauffeur to the punch. The chauffeur, however, in his neat gray wool uniform with black buttons, was there in time to help the stately lady passenger, Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, out of the backseat. She wore a black velvet dress with a large quilted black-and-white scarf tied stiffly, squarely around her neck, and a black velvet conical hat, an outfit whose festive styling clashed interestingly with its mournful coloration; but for diamond earrings and a diamond bracelet on one of her white gloves, Mrs. McLean’s jewelry was uncharacteristically absent. Her thin, pretty lips were blood-red. The chauffeur, a rather handsome young man in his twenties with reddish-brown hair, allowed the doorman to usher lithe, lovely Mrs. McLean into the hotel lobby. The chauffeur, by the way, was me.

I got our luggage out of the trunk of the Lincoln—my simple traveling bag and a big heavy leather number for Evalyn; I told her we’d only be one night, and shuddered to think what she’d bring for a weekend away. I turned our things over to the bell captain, who told me I could for a fee park in the private lot behind a nearby bank. On my way back, on foot, I cased the exterior of the hotel a bit.

The Elizabeth Carteret Hotel was a nine-story, heavily corniced brick building between a massive Presbyterian church and various storefront businesses; the Ritz Theater was diagonally across the way. Narrow alleys were at the left and right of the hotel, with a service-and-delivery-only alley in back, a side entrance with a bellman on the right-hand alley, and no outside fire escapes. An exclusive, expensive hotel, with relatively tight security. I was glad I’d come in undercover.

Evalyn was waiting in the marble-and-mahogany lobby, where businessmen and bellboys mingled with overstuffed furniture and potted plants.

“We have separate rooms,” she said quietly, handing me a key, “on the ninth floor.”

“Adjoining?” I asked.

“No. Traveling together like this, just the two of us, is dangerous. If my husband found out, it could be used against me, in court.”

“I get it.”

“But I have a suite.” Her smile was tiny and wicked. “Plenty of room for company.”

Soon I was in my own small but deluxe room on the ninth floor, getting out of my chauffeur’s uniform and into my brown suit, as well as my shoulder holster with nine-millimeter Browning. I really should have boiled the latter, after sticking it in Gaston Means’s yap, but somehow I hadn’t got around to it. I’d had my hands full since yesterday.

First they’d been full of Evalyn, of course, in her gigantic canopy bed with its pink satin sheets that matched the sprawling bedroom’s pink satin walls. Mike the Great Dane, incidentally, who I hadn’t seen much of this trip, I saw plenty of that night: he slept at the foot of her bed. He snored. I let him.

In a way, it was okay, because I had to think. I had to figure out exactly what to do about the lead Gaston Means had literally spit up.

The next morning we’d had an egg-and-bacon souffle in a breakfast nook a family of six could’ve lived in. I sipped my fresh-squeezed orange juice, and asked, “Will you stake me to a couple long-distance calls?”

She looked at me over her coffee cup, a bit surprised. “Well, certainly. Something to do with Means?”

“Yeah.”

“What should I do about that scoundrel?”

“Keep playing along with him, for the time being. Only don’t give him another red cent! I’m an inch away from having you demand your dough back, and then, when he doesn’t cough it up, call in the cops.”

“You think my money’s gone?”

“Is Hitler a stinker?”

She sighed. “It’s not the money. It’s the child. I thought we might get that child.”

“We still may. With Means, it’s hard to know the truth, even when he’s telling it. His wildest stories have twenty or thirty percent reality in them. The rub is narrowing down and identifying that percentage.”

She nodded, with a frustrated smirk. “He knows enough about the kidnapping, then, to make you think he’s had at least
some
contact with the kidnappers?”

“That would be my guess. With his government and socialite connections in D.C., and his underworld ties, he’s the ideal bagman for a job like this. Only, choosing Gaston Means to collect and deliver money really is, as we say in the Middle West, putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.”

She nodded, wearily. Then she brightened, rather unconvincingly. “Do you want to make those calls? I can have the phone brought to you.”

“Why not?”

I tried to get Elmer Irey at his temporary office in New York, but got Frank Wilson instead. Quickly, and with few details, I revealed that Gaston Bullock Means had passed himself off as a negotiator for the kidnap gang. I did not mention Evalyn’s one hundred grand. This was not quite the moment when the boom—whether federal or local—ought be lowered on Means.

“Means is the biggest damn liar,” Wilson said calmly, “on the face of the earth.”

I agreed. “But he
is
connected to half the bootleggers in the U.S.”

“That’s true enough,” Wilson said reflectively. “Back in the twenties, when he was a Justice Department man, he sold 1410-A’s right out of his office.”

Form 1410-A was a federal government permit to deal in alcohol, meant for druggists and other legitimate users.

“Well,” I said, laying it out on the table, “Means says two bootleggers engineered the kidnapping.”

“Really.” Wilson’s voice had turned as flat as last night’s beer.

“They’re both named Max. Max Greenberg and Max Hassel. Heard of ’em?”

“Waxey Gordon’s two top boys?” His sigh conveyed boredom and irritation. “I hardly think two of the biggest beer barons on the East Coast are going to mess around with kidnapping the goddamn Lindbergh baby.”

“Why not?”

His voice had a shrug in it. “They don’t need the money, Heller. They’re businessmen, and kidnapping is not their racket. Besides which, they’re up to their asses in a beer war.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Dutch Schultz and Waxey Gordon’s respective hoodlums have for several months been shooting at each other with some regularity—which as long as innocent bystanders don’t get killed, is fine with me.”

“Well, I think Greenberg and Hassel are worth looking into.”

“They already are being looked into.”

“In relation to the Lindbergh case?”

“Hell no. In relation to income-tax evasion. And we’re working on their boss Waxey, too.”

“You mean, that’s a case you’re working on personally?”

“No. I mean the Intelligence Unit of the IRS.”

I had to try one more time. “Well then, will you alert the agents handling the case that there may be a Lindbergh connection?”

There was a long pause. Finally, he said, “I appreciate your efforts, Heller. I know you feel frustrated, as do I, as does Chief Irey. And you’ve kept us informed about things that Colonel Lindbergh has unwisely kept to himself. I appreciate that. We appreciate that.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

“But…I’m not going to interfere in another agent’s ongoing case. Not on the say-so of Gaston Bullock Means, for Christsake! Heller, you’re a police liaison from Chicago. Stay out of federal business.”

“What about New Jersey business?”

“When did they move Cook County to New Jersey? Why don’t you call up Colonel Schwarzkopf? I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to hear from you. Is there anything else?”

Fucker.

“What about Capone’s boy, Bob Conroy?” I asked. “You guys were going to track him down.”

“Well, we haven’t. If he’s on the East Coast, he’s well hidden. Maybe he’s taking a swim in cement overshoes.”

Wilson was probably right on that score. “What about the spiritualist church? I would think the Marinellis—who seemed to know about Jafsie before Jafsie knew about Jafsie—would be a hell of a good lead, now that the old boy has paid fifty grand out to God knows who.”

“Heller, Pat O’Rourke joined that church, stayed undercover and joined in on their mumbo-jumbo for three weeks, but found not a damn thing.”

I didn’t know what to say. O’Rourke was a good man. Maybe there wasn’t a damn thing to find.

“So what do you suggest?” I asked Wilson.

“I suggest you think about going back to Chicago. We’ve got fifty grand in marked bills floating around out there, and that’s going to lead us to our kidnappers.”

I thanked him sarcastically and he said “you’re welcome” the same way and we both hung up. Evalyn had listened to my half of the conversation, and seemed to have gotten the drift. She was wide-eyed and astounded, whereas I just felt beaten down.

She was holding her cup up for a colored maid to fill with coffee. “I can’t believe the government won’t follow up on these two Max fellows!”

“I can. You got red tape on the one hand, and the word of Gaston Means, who makes Baron Münchhausen look like Abraham Lincoln, on the other.”

“What now?”

I made another phone call. To Colonel Schwarzkopf at the Lindbergh estate. But I didn’t say a word about the two Maxes.

“I’ve had an anonymous tip,” I told him. “About Violet Sharpe.”

“Reliable?” Schwarzkopf asked skeptically.

“Very,” I said, realizing I must have been the first man in history to refer to Gaston Means as a “very reliable” source.

“She’s apparently the inside man on the kidnapping,” I said, “though she may have been an unwitting one.”

“I’ll put Inspector Welch on it.”

“All right, but tell that son of a bitch to use a little finesse, will you?”

Schwarzkopf said nothing in reply; neither one of us chose to fill the silence with anything, and just hung the hell up.

“One more call,” I said to Evalyn, who was still breathlessly listening. I got the long-distance operator again and caught Eliot Ness at his desk at the Transportation Building back home.

“What can you tell me,” I asked, “about Max Greenberg and Max Hassel?”

“Hassel’s real name is Mendel Gassel, Russian immigrant, career rumrunner who paid a big income-tax fine six or seven years ago,” Eliot said matter-of-factly. “Greenberg is a thug from St. Louis made good. Or bad, depending on how you look at it. They’re both dangerous, but Greenberg’s got the brains.”

“Anything else pertinent?”

“Usual stuff,” he said blandly. “Our Narcotics Unit indicted Greenberg for shipping two trunkfuls of heroin to Duluth, back in ’24 or ’25. They didn’t get a conviction. He beat several arson raps, assault raps, too. Then Big Maxie ran prostitutes out of a hotel he owned in New York somewhere, till bootlegging beckoned.”

“He sounds like quite the capitalist. You guys probably would get along great—you’re both Republicans.”

“You must be doing pretty good out there, if you can afford to insult me at long-distance rates.”

“It’s not my nickel. Look, why are Waxey Gordon and Dutch Schultz mixing it up? I thought they were allies.”

“Irving Wexler and Arthur Flegenheimer,” Eliot said archly, using their real names, “are both anticipating the relatively imminent unemployment of yours truly.”

“Huh?”

“They both know beer’s going to be legal, before long, and they’ve set their beady eyes on a big, legitimate market, meaning more customers than they can supply from their present breweries. Schultz has breweries in Yonkers and Manhattan, and Waxey has ’em in Patterson, Union City and Elizabeth. Each wants the other guy’s facilities, and territory.”

“So they’re shooting holes in each other’s gang.”

“Yes. Which is good.”

“Frank Wilson would agree. Why aren’t those breweries you mentioned shut down?”

Eliot laid the sarcasm on with a trowel. “Why, Nate—they’re making
near
beer there, didn’t you know that? Brewing ’round the clock—even though only a truck or two leaves each brewery each week.”

No doubt hundreds of gallons of real beer flowed via sewer pipes to hidden bottling and barreling plants.

“Eliot, who would Capone be friendlier with, Schultz or Gordon?”

There was a pause. “Funny you should ask. I honestly don’t know if Snorkey has any ties with Wexler, though I’d be surprised if he didn’t.” Then, with studied blandness, he added, “But Flegenheimer was up to the Cook County Jail, not so long ago, visiting Al.”

That made me sit up. “What?”

“Yeah. Lucky Luciano brought the Dutchman around. I understand there was quite a shouting match. Al was serving as mediator for some East-Coast squabble—jail officials let the boys use the execution chamber for their confab…Al sat in the hot squat, like a king on his throne.”

“Jesus.” Even for Chicago, this was beyond the pale.

“Well, Snorkey isn’t going to win his final appeal,” Eliot said edgily, “and he won’t find the federal pen so accommodating. Why are you asking these questions?”

“I have reason to believe Lindbergh’s kid was snatched by Greenberg and Hassel.”

“And you were wondering if it’s within the realm of possibility that Capone’s reach could extend to them?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

There was a brief crackly silence.

Then I said, “Okay. Only now I’m not sure what I should do about it.”

“Telling Irey and Wilson is your best shot.”

“Right. Well, thanks, Eliot.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Sure. You can apologize for getting me in this shit.”

He laughed, but said, “I do apologize. You’ve been out there a hell of a long time. Maybe it’s time to come home.”

“Soon,” I said, and thanked him and hung up,

So I had decided to talk to Greenberg and Hassel myself.

Evalyn wanted me to approach them and see if I could negotiate the safe return of the baby for her. I said I had the same idea, only if the two copped to the snatch, I’d pull in the feds and we’d nail the bastards.

“No more money gets thrown away,” I said. “Grab the sons of bitches responsible, and let ’em know if their people don’t hand over the kid, they take a hard fall.”