Stolen Away (45 page)

“So that Capone could ride in on his white horse,” Wilson said, playing along, “and give us the kidnapper—Conroy—and the kid back.”

“And get his freedom. Right. Meanwhile, this weasel Fisch tries to interlope; he knows nobody’s really going after any ransom, so decides it’s his for the asking. He sends a second note, patterning it on the original.”

Wilson’s expression was openly skeptical. “How would he have access to that?”

“About three different ways, Frank. He may have been there when Wendel wrote the first note, and sneaked out a copy or an earlier draft. He may have gotten it through underworld circles—Rosner and Spitale were circulating a copy, remember? Or a tracing could have come from Violet Sharpe or Whately—the note was just stuck in Slim’s desk drawer, where the servants had easy access. Remember?”

Glumly, he nodded.

“Now, it’s also possible Wendel and Fisch were in league, in this interloping extortion effort. Since Wendel once tried to scam Capone, maybe Wendel was working for nothing, to even the slate with Snorkey. So Wendel, wanting some dough to show for his trouble, might have gone in with Fisch on the extortion scheme. Hard to say. At any rate, about this time, you and Irey come along and convince Lindbergh that Capone is bluffing, and Slim says, either way, he’s not going to deal with slime like Scarface Al—even if it means his little boy’s life. So soon it’s clear that Lindbergh won’t play—that the kidnapping has been for nothing. Capone cuts his losses, and fades.”

“Where is the child?”

“I’ll get to that. But I’ll say this much, at this point: the kid is not dead. In fact, he still isn’t.”

Wilson’s eyes clouded. I was losing him.

“Never mind that, right now. Stick with me.”

Reluctantly, Wilson nodded.

“Now that Capone is out of the picture, the way is clear for Fisch to go full throttle into his negotiations. He sends more notes. The spiritualist group, with Marinelli probably in on the game but his wife probably not, manipulates this old fool they know, Professor John Condon, into offering himself up as intermediary.”

“And how do they know Condon?”

“Why, Frank—didn’t Pat O’Rourke mention that? Jafsie attended that spiritualist church, too!”

His mouth dropped open, just a bit. He swallowed and scribbled something on his notepad.

I shrugged. “I don’t think Jafsie is a bad enough person, or smart enough person either, to be part of this extortion scheme. But he was a visible, easily manipulated blowhard—I think he may have been Marinelli and Sivella’s grade-school teacher, in Harlem—and a prime candidate to funnel information to Lindbergh, and to funnel cash back through to them. The Marinellis even gave that hotel-room séance I attended at Princeton to help prime the pump, mentioning Jafsie by name and nudging Breckinridge about a note he’d receive soon; and maybe to get some play in the press for the veracity of Sister Sarah’s psychic abilities. That was a stupid risk, and the mistake that should have cracked this thing wide open. But it didn’t.”

“You’re saying this spiritualist church group, led by Fisch, got the cemetery money. And that they never had the child?”

“Exactly.”

“What about the sleeping suit that was delivered to Jafsie?”

“That could have happened a couple ways. Jafsie slept in the nursery, the night he came to Lindbergh with the note from the ‘kidnappers.’ I caught him red-handed going through a chest. He took any number of things to use to identify the child—some of these were toys he asked for…maybe you remember the safety pins he took and showed to ‘Cemetery John’ and asked him to identify?”

Wilson nodded.

“Well, he may have taken the sleeping suit at that time, as a souvenir, or for ID purposes. But I think it’s more likely that Violet Sharpe provided the sleeping suit.”

“Violet Sharpe?”

“Yes. The child had a sizeable, unspecified number of the sleepers that were exactly the same. A good many of them were kept in the
other
nursery, at the Morrow estate at Englewood—where Violet lived and worked. Everybody wondered why the sleeper seemed freshly laundered, and why it took two days for the ‘kidnappers’ to provide Jafsie this proof.”

“Well, the answer is obvious,” Wilson said, almost testily.

“They had to go back to the woods where they’d buried the child, to remove the sleeper.”

“Do you
really
think that’s likely? Besides, these are extortionists, not kidnappers—they don’t have the kid, they never did have the kid. Didn’t you wonder why they didn’t have better proof than a fucking sleeping suit? Why not a photo, or a phone call from the tot—he could talk a little, you know.”

“If he was dead, he couldn’t talk.”

“If he was alive, and they didn’t have him, he couldn’t talk, either, not for them, anyway. But one of their inside contacts, either Violet at Englewood or Ollie at Hopewell, could take another sleeper from a drawer in either nursery—and
of course
the sleeper would seem freshly laundered. It hadn’t been worn since it was last washed!”

Wilson was thinking. I knew I’d made a dent. I let him think for a bit.

Then I pressed on. “Now the actual kidnappers, the bootleggers who worked for Hassel and Greenberg, they also know that Capone has picked up his cards and gone home. They, too, figure that there’s extortion dough for the asking. So they contact this respectable fella in Norfolk, who has some vague connections to the Lindberghs through society, a shipbuilder they know ’cause he’s repaired boats for guys in their line of work.”

“John Curtis?” Wilson said, dumbfounded.
“That
hoaxer?”

“He wasn’t a hoaxer, Frank. He was telling the truth. So pretty soon Curtis is contacting Lindbergh, and now we have two extortion groups who are active—both with inside information about the kidnapping, and neither of whom at this point possesses the baby.”

“Heller, isn’t this getting a little Byzantine?”

“This case has been Byzantine since the day I showed up in March of 1932. If you’d care to point out any one part of this case that has ever made rational sense, I’ll slip on my raincoat and go home. Right now.”

“Go on. Go on.”

“Let me touch on Gaston Means. He also has been told, by Ricca probably or maybe Hassel and Greenberg, that Capone is cutting his losses; Means has been told to stop trying to contact Lindbergh through the likes of Guggenheim and others. So what does Means do? He begins using
his
inside information, not to swindle Lindbergh, but over to one side, where Capone is unlikely to notice or care…he focuses on a soft-hearted, deep-pocketed society matron, Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean.”

Wilson made a note.

I went on. “Now the payoff in the cemetery takes place, and the kid isn’t returned, and all of a sudden it’s all over the papers; so Capone obviously now knows that somebody is interloping. Capone also knows from the papers that Lindbergh and Jafsie are trying to get back in touch with the ‘kidnappers,’ and are obviously willing to pay more money, and this thing Capone has put in motion just seems to have no end, to be completely out of fucking control. Capone and Ricca don’t necessarily know for sure that these extortionists are anybody who was really in on the kidnapping—it could be somebody from the outside entirely. Whatever the case, Capone decides to bring this farce to a halt. He has a baby planted in the woods not far from the Lindbergh estate…”

“Hold it, Heller! That baby was identified by its father, for God’s sake.”

“That baby was a pile of decomposed bones that couldn’t even be identified as to sex; the family pediatrician said he couldn’t ID that kid as the Little Eaglet if you paid him ten million bucks! Those woods were trampled over and over again by search parties and telephone linemen, and in any case, that corpse was decomposed way beyond what it should’ve, in that period of time, with weather that cold.”

“There was an identifying garment…”

“Yes, a few scraps of cloth with blue thread. It was the blue thread that Betty Gow recognized, because she’d made this makeshift garment the night of the kidnapping, with thread provided by Elsie Whately—the butler’s wife. I’m sure Capone could have reached out through his various intermediaries and procured that simple spool of thread from his accomplices among the Lindbergh servants. Or, the little shirt itself may have been within Capone’s grasp.”

“The garment was planted, you’re saying.”

“Like the little body was planted. It was an act of closure, on Capone and Ricca’s part. To shut down the extortion schemes. To put an end to this goddamn case.”

Wilson was thinking. “Capone was in Atlanta at this point.”

“Right. And optimistic about getting out via traditional avenues, such as his lawyers and bribery, not outlandish schemes like the ill-fated Lindbergh snatch. And Ricca’s on the outside, cleaning house. Ricca uses the beer war between Waxey Gordon and the New York mob as a convenient front for bumping off Hassel and Greenberg and maybe a few others involved in the conspiracy; Bob Conroy and his wife get iced about this time, too.”

“No,” Wilson said flatly. “Conroy and his wife, that was a double suicide.”

“My ass! And why in fucking hell didn’t you ever tell me you finally tracked Conroy down? I must’ve called you about Conroy half a dozen times.”

Rather meekly, he said, “You were off the case, at that point. Never occurred to me, frankly. If you’re right about all this rampant assassination, why was Gaston Means allowed to stay among the living?”

“Why kill Means? Nobody believes anything he says, anyway. Besides, I was closing in on Hassel and Greenberg, right before they got hit. I found out about them by beating their names out of Means…but before I could follow up, they got theirs in the ‘beer war.’”

“You think Means sold them out to Ricca.”

“I sure do. That allowed Means to go to court, and lay everything on Hassel and Greenberg, who were nice and dead and blameable. Meanwhile, Violet Sharpe starts coming unhinged after the little corpse in the woods turns up; however she’s been involved, to whatever extent—and she has two unexplained g’s in her bank account, remember—she certainly never counted on the baby getting killed, and of course she has no way of knowing that the baby they found wasn’t the real Lindy, Jr.”

“So she takes poison,” Wilson said.

“Or she’s murdered. No one actually saw her take poison. She was ill, taking medicine for her nerves; maybe she was poisoned by Whately.”

“He didn’t work at the Englewood estate.”

“He was there frequently. They were a close-knit ‘family’ of servants, those two estates. At any rate, she was another loose end tied off. Whately’s death strikes me as similarly suspicious. I think looking into that—seeing why a guy who was healthy all his life suddenly dies of an ulcer—would be a nice use of the taxpayers’ money. Was there an autopsy?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Even if it was natural causes, what stress exactly caused this bleeding ulcer? Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it? And wasn’t Fisch’s death convenient? Speaking of whom, I’m not precisely sure how Fisch and Wendel intersect. Wendel may or may not have been involved in the cemetery extortion; I do know that Wendel’s sister lived in back of St. Raymond’s.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Jot that down, too. At any rate, Fisch wound up with at least part of the money, and either his illness or worry about Capone or Ricca or even the cops catching up with him sent him scurrying off to Germany, leaving some cash stashed with his buddy Hauptmann.”

“So you see Hauptmann as a dupe in this,” Wilson said, with a mocking smile.

“The only thing he may be guilty of is being in on Fisch’s dope smuggling, using furs as a partial front. But I doubt even that.” I cracked my knuckles. “Anyway, that’s what I think happened. As for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., he’s salted away somewhere. I have a good idea where he was kept immediately after the kidnapping—in New Haven, Connecticut. Where he is now, I haven’t a clue. But Capone and Ricca aren’t about to bump him off—there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

Wilson raised an eyebrow, smiled tightly and put down his pencil. “Nate, this is an interesting theory, and you’ve mentioned some things that I admit I didn’t know—but you completely ignore and overlook the overwhelming evidence gathered against Bruno Hauptmann.”

I laughed. “Christ, Frank, I shouldn’t dignify that with a response. I’ve never seen such shameless tampering with, and concoction of, evidence…or so many lying witnesses from Condon to Whited and Hochmuth and even Slim Lindbergh himself.”

“You’re calling Charles Lindbergh a liar?”

“Yes. I think he was prompted into lying by police who assured him that they had the right man. Did you ever give Slim that reassurance, Frank?”

Wilson said nothing.

“I’m not suggesting there was any great police conspiracy to frame Hauptmann, or even that the Outfit sought to frame him. Hauptmann dropped himself into the fall-guy slot by being Fisch’s friend and business partner. And then forces somewhat independently rallied to ‘help’ him fit that role. You know how sloppy cops like Schwarzkopf and Welch think, Frank—they center on their suspect, led there by minimal but fairly convincing evidence, and then they proceed to fudge this, lie about that, suppress one thing, fake the other. Witnesses are made to feel with absolute certainty that they are testifying against a guilty man—the cops have assured them thus. So, to do the ‘right’ thing so that society can have retribution, and/or for the brief moment center stage in the public eye, or, hell, just to share in reward money, an otherwise honest witness tells a little lie. Distorts a piece of evidence just slightly. What harm is a little embroidery, after all, in so large and official a cloth? So a cop fudges ladder evidence, and a teller at a movie theater makes a bogus eyewitness ID, and a prosecutor withholds letters and ledgers that back up Hauptmann’s ‘Fisch story,’ and on, and on, and on.”

He was frowning. “You’re casting doubt on the reputations of a lot of fine public officials, and good citizens.”

“No, I’m not. Because there is no ‘doubt’ about this. Hauptmann was framed; he was a German carpenter who fit the psychological profile and the miniscule evidence on hand. He was perfect. Now, I do think the Outfit may have helped from the sidelines. ‘Death House’ Reilly and Sam Leibowitz, for example, who volunteered their legal services, both had strong Capone ties. So do a lot of New Jersey and New York City cops, whether you like to hear me say it or not.”