Stolen Away (47 page)

I caught Lake Shore Drive and headed to the South Side, cutting through the industrial southeastern side of the city, till the steel mills of Chicago gave way to those of Gary, Indiana. Soon the sooty scent of free enterprise was replaced by the clear, fresh air of the country, and I guided my sporty ’32 Auburn along the shore road that curved around Lake Michigan, and before long sand dunes were rising around me like a mirage of the desert. I drove quickly, but I didn’t speed, pressing forward with the single-mindedness of a hungry animal. The village of New Buffalo, in southwestern Michigan, in the heart of a summer-camp and resort area, was known as the gateway to that state. It was in that village that I stopped at a hardware store and bought a hunting knife, a coil of rope and a wide roll of electrical tape. They also sold ammunition, but I’d brought some from home.

It wasn’t far to Three Oaks, another quaint village, where a gas-station attendant gave me directions to the Belliance farm. I turned right at the traffic light on North Elm Street and at a junction with a macadam road turned left; I passed Warren Woods, a vast acreage of virgin beech and maple, a state bird and game sanctuary. I made a left and a right, on gravel roads, passing through an area of orchards alternating with empty fields, and there it was.

Basking in afternoon sunshine, bucolic as a feed-store lithograph, the Belliance farm rested on a gentle slope, even some green amidst the grass—whether that was because spring was coming, or the lake was relatively close, I was too citified to know. The farmhouse was a small, white, two-story clapboard, with a large red barn behind and to one side. Sarah Sivella had seen such a place, last week, in that trance she’d fallen into at the Temple of Divine Power. I swung into the drive; it was gravel, but the earth that fell to ditches on either side had a reddish cast. Edgar Cayce had said there was “red dirt on the pavement” near the house where the child was kept. I was beginning to wonder if I should trade my nine millimeter in on a crystal ball.

For now, however, I’d stick to the nine millimeter, which I’d already slipped into the pocket of my raincoat. The wide roll of electrical tape was in the other pocket. And I had looped the coil of rope around my belt, and the hunting knife, in a leather sheath, was stuck through my belt as well; neither would show under the bulky, lined raincoat.

I was ready to call on the Belliance family.

Chickens scurrying noisily out of my way, I pulled the Auburn up around the side of the house, where the gravel near a fenced-in area was already accommodating a pickup truck, a late-model Chevy and a green, new-looking tractor. In addition to the recently painted, bright red barn, several other structures huddled, including a toolshed and a windmill.

The sun slid under a cloud and reminded me how cold it still was; but there was no snow on the frozen ground. I walked to the front porch and knocked. There was a swing; the breeze was making it sway, some.

A woman answered—the woman I’d seen in the photograph inserted in the letter to Bernice Rogers Conroy; she was in her early forties, wearing a crisp pink-and-white checked housedress with a white apron, on which she was drying her hands. She was dark blonde, apple-cheeked, and had blue eyes almost as lovely as the janitor’s back in the Sheridan six-flat.

“Can I help you, young man?” Her smile was pleasant, her tone sincere.

“Excuse me for bothering, but I’m having some car trouble. Is your husband home?”

“Why, yes. He’s out back. I can get him…?”

“Would you please? I’m sorry to be such a bother.”

“Step in, step in.”

I did. She went away, still wiping her hands on the apron; I heard the back door open. I slipped my hand in my raincoat pocket, gripped the nine millimeter. I put my back to the wall just inside the door, so that I could see the front door as well as where she’d gone into the kitchen. A stairway rose before me. The house was simple and wellkept, wood floors, floral wallpaper. The furnishings were not expensive, but they were relatively new; there was a spinet piano in the living room. In the midst of the depression, these people had been set up out here on the farm with nice, new things.

A scarecrow of a man in coveralls came in through the kitchen, his wife following dutifully behind him; he was wiping grease from his hands with a rag. In his mid-forties, he was bald with pouches under his eyes—like Sarah Sivella had said. His somewhat weathered face was that of the man I’d seen in the photo.

He extended his freshly cleaned hand and smiled. “I’m Carl Belliance. I understand you’ve got a little problem.”

“No,” I said, and I showed him the nine millimeter. “You’ve got the problem.”

His face tightened and I thought he was going to jump me but I caught his eyes and shook my head, no. He sighed, got off the balls of his feet, and went limp, arms dangling, head lowered. He backed up a pace. His wife had raised a hand to her mouth.

“What do you want, mister?” he said. “We got no money in the house.”

“Can it. I’m here for the boy.”

They glanced at each other; she seemed near tears. He shook his head, as if to say,
It’s no use.

“I figured it would catch up with us someday,” Belliance said softly.

“Why? Who do you figure I am?”

He smiled with one side of his face and it wasn’t really a smile. “Does it matter? You’re either a cop, or you’re not a cop. And if you’re not a cop, somebody’s decided to take everything away from us.” His mouth tightened into something bitter. “We’ve done what we were told. We never made a peep. But I suppose it was hoping for too much just to live our damn lives in peace.”

“Who
are
you, Carl?”

His eyes twitched. “I’m nobody. I’m just a farmer.”

“Well, if you don’t want to tell me, I’ll tell you. You used to be a rumrunner for the Outfit. Repeal was on the way and you’d be out of work, soon. But you were a good man. Trustworthy. So somebody big—somebody named Capone maybe, or maybe somebody named Ricca—asked if you wanted to go straight. Go into farming. Drop out of that life.”

He looked at me blankly, but there was respect in his eyes. “You’re pretty good, mister.
Are
you a cop?”

“Of sorts. Let me guess something else, while I’m at it. You two are a childless couple. You’ve been married for maybe twenty years, maybe twenty-five, but there was never an off-spring. You wanted a family. With your background, adoption was tricky. But then, finally, like a miracle—somebody gave you a son.”

He took a small step back and slipped his arm around his wife’s shoulder; she pressed close to him, weeping quietly. “That’s right,” he said. “And we love our son, mister. And he loves us.”

“That’s just swell. You do know who the boy is?”

“Yes, we do. He’s Carl Belliance, Jr.”

“You got the ‘junior’ right, anyway.”

Madge Belliance, lip trembling, said, “We’ve never said that…never said that name. Never spoken it.”

I raised an eyebrow, the gun still trained carefully on them. “Charles Lindbergh, Jr., you mean? Where is he?”

“He’s at school,” she said. She was trying to summon some defiance, but it wasn’t playing.

“When does he get home?”

“You’re not going to hurt him…” she wondered, gripping her husband’s shirt; he patted her.

“Hell no, lady. I’m giving him back to his real parents. When does he get home?”

“It’s a long walk,” she said. She licked her lips. “In half an hour, maybe. We never did anything wrong, mister.”

“Ever hear of a guy named Hauptmann?”

“Yes,” Belliance said, and he raised his chin. “We hear he was a goddamn extortionist and is getting what he deserves.”

“Oh, is that what they told you? That’s a good one. You got a hired hand?”

“Not now,” he said. “Some of the year I do.”

I glanced quickly around the place. “You seem to be faring pretty well, here, despite hard times. What are you raising on this farm, besides a stolen kid? Berries? Corn? Never mind—I don’t really care. Here.”

With my left hand, I extended the roll of electrical tape toward Madge Belliance. She took it, with reluctance and confusion.

“Use some of that to tie your husband’s wrists behind his back. Do it now.”

“But…”

“Now
, I said. Let’s get this done before Junior gets home, and that’ll lessen the chance anything bad does happen.”

She exchanged glances with her husband; he looked at her gravely, and nodded, and she sighed heavily and nodded back. He turned his back to her, put his wrists behind him and she bound him with the tape.

When she was done, she held the tape out to me. I took it and told her to turn around and put her wrists behind her. With the nine millimeter held in the crotch of my left arm, I quickly wound the black tape around her wrists. Then I nudged her forward. I told them to turn and face me again, and they did.

“Let’s go to the cellar,” I said.

They led me there; the double storm-cellar doors were along the side of the house where I was parked. They went down the half-flight of wooden steps ahead of me. The basement was hard-packed dirt. It had that same reddish cast.

“Sit against that wall,” I said. “I don’t want to have to knock anybody out.”

They sat. Keeping back from them, the gun tucked under my arm, I used the hunting knife to cut the rope. I bound both their ankles, and added a length of rope to the wrists of each. Then I had them sit back to back against a support beam and tied them together, around the chest and waist, the beam between them. Nobody said anything through any of this.

Her apron I cut into strips with the knife and gagged them that way; that was kinder than using the electrical tape, which had been my original plan. When you’re pulling a kidnapping, you have to be flexible.

I stood before them. “I don’t want you to make a sound,” I said. “Don’t alert that boy you’re down here.”

Belliance’s eyes were hard; his wife’s were soft.

“You behave yourselves,” I said, “and maybe I won’t turn you in. All I want is to put that boy back with his rightful parents. Understood?”

They just looked at me.

“Understood?” I repeated.

The father nodded curtly; then, hesitantly, his wife nodded, too, several times.

I put my gun in my shoulder holster, not in my raincoat pocket, and left them in the cellar with the dirt and some rakes and a wall of jarred preserves.

Then I climbed from the cellar to the cool fresh air and walked around and sat on the front-porch swing and waited for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., to come home from school.

It wasn’t a long wait. Less than fifteen minutes.

From my vantage point on the porch of the hillside farmhouse, I could see down on the gravel road where half a dozen kids of various ages were walking, kicking up a little dust as they did. He was the youngest—what would he be, now? Six? Almost six. This was either his first or second year of school.

He came up the gravel lane all alone, a tiny figure in a brown coat and gray slacks; his hat—it made something catch in my throat to see it—was an aviation-style helmet with decorative goggles that the kids had been wearing the last couple years. He had mittens. No schoolbooks—too young for that yet, I guessed. He walked up the lane like a little soldier. A little man. And the closer he got, the more that face was Slim’s.

He hesitated when he saw me, then he moved confidently toward the porch and said, “Who are you, mister?”

I got up off the swing. I smiled. “I’m a friend of your parents. Come on up here, Carl.”

He thought about that. The dimpled chin, the baby face, were so familiar. Was he hesitating, because somewhere in his memory he remembered getting pulled here and there by strange people?

“Where are Mom and Dad?”

“They had to go away, suddenly. They asked me to pick you up after school, and take you to them.”

The little eyes narrowed. “I’m supposed to go with you?”

“That’s right. I’m going to take you to your folks, real soon.”

“Well. Okay. But I’m hungry.”

“Let’s see if we can find you something in the kitchen,” I said.

A pie was cooling on the kitchen table. Other food was still in various stages of preparation; some chicken Madge had been about to roll in breading sat naked on the counter. Peeled potatoes were in the sink. But the little boy didn’t put it together.

“Can I have a piece pie?” he asked. He was taking off his coat and hat and putting them neatly on a chair; his mittens were already off.

“Sure,” I said. “Then later we’ll stop for a hamburger on the way to see your folks, okay?”

“Okay.”

So I cut him a “piece pie.” Dutch apple. I had a big slice myself; I’d worked up an appetite. Delicious.

I gave him a napkin and he wiped off his cute little Lindy mug and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Okay,” I said.

I followed him upstairs. He asked me to undo his pants and I did. But he went in by himself and did what he had to. I stood by the closed door and listened as he flushed the toilet and ran the water and washed his hands.

He was drying them on his pants as he came out.

“Let’s go in your room,” I said, bending to button the pants back up, “and get some of your things, and then we’ll go. If you have some special toys you want to take with you, pick ’em out. We can’t take everything.”

“Why do you keep your raincoat on in the house?”

“Because we’re going, real soon. Now, let’s get your things.”

He was picking some toys out of a chest by the window, while from a dresser I was getting a few of his clothes, which I was in the process of stuffing in a pillowcase, when I heard something outside. Something like gravel stirring. I went to the window.

A car was pulling in, next to mine. It was a black Ford, brand shiny new. Two men got quickly out.

“Jesus,” I said.

“What’s wrong, mister?”

“We’re going to play a game, Carl,” I said, bending down again, taking him by his little shoulders and looking him straight in his dark-blue eyes. “It’s like hide-and-go-seek. I want you to hide under your bed, and I don’t want you to say a word or make a sound, okay? Until you hear me say, olly olly oxen free.”