Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  I’d lived in Snorkey’s kingdom for many years, and it was unnerving approaching the monarch’s throne room, even if it was concrete and steel.

  Capone—who wore not a jailhouse-gray uniform, but a blue flannel suit with a tan shirt and no tie—sat playing cards at a table with the only other prisoner in the cell, a small, pretty young man of perhaps nineteen. On the way up in the elevator Dohmann had mentioned that Capone had been allowed the cellmate to help him pass the time with handball and cards. Looking at this kid gave the term “handball” new implications.

  “Ness!” Capone said, and stood, walking over with a huge paw thrust forward.

  Eliot wore the faintest ironic smile as he accepted the hand through the bars and shook it.

  “No hard feelings between us, right?” Capone said, with a disarming grin.

  “None,” said Eliot.

  Capone wasn’t as big a man as you might think, and—like his adversary Eliot Ness—was much younger than the public thought of him, perhaps thirty-two or-three. His shoulders were broader than any fullback’s, however, and his head was as round as a pumpkin. His full face was deceptive, as he was not fat.

  What really struck me, though, were his eyes: greenish-gray, small and round and glittering, half-lidded under black bushy eyebrows that met between them like conspirators.

  When he placed his big, veined hands on the bars, it was like a strong man about to bend them for a stunt; but his feet were small, almost dainty, in expensive black leather shoes with pointed toes.

  “Is there any news?” Capone asked, earnestly.

  “About what, Al?” Ness asked.

  “The kid!”

  “Nothing.”

  Capone sighed sadly.

  I stood by the seated guard, back a ways. Eliot never made a move to introduce me and Capone hardly gave me a glance; I was just another nameless Ness man, accompanying the chief. Why insinuate myself into this conversation between old friends?

  Besides, I kind of savored the irony of having Capone mistake me for an Untouchable.

  “Understand this, Mr. Ness—I don’t want no favors. If I ain’t able to do anything for that baby, lock me the hell back up.”

  “Looks like you are locked up, Al.”

  “Look. I know how you feel about me. But if they’ll only let me out of here, I’ll give ’em any bond they need. If they’re interested in getting that child back!”

  Capone was trying to sound sincere in his concern for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., but what he conveyed was menace.

  “You accompany me yourself, Ness. I will spend every hour of the night and day with you at my side, till we get that kid back.”

  “Just the two of us, huh, Al?”

  “And I’ll send my younger brother to stay here in the jail and take my place till I get back. You don’t think I’d double-cross my own brother and leave him in here, do you? Even if I could make my getaway from the great Eliot Ness! Hah?”

  Ness said nothing; his faint ironic smile said it all.

  Capone’s gray complexion began to redden. The lids had lifted off the gray-green eyes. In the jail cell, the pretty gunsel was playing solitaire, paying no attention to any of us. Sunlight through the barred windows made patterns on the floor.

  Capone tried to channel his anger into earnestness. “Let me have a chance to show what I can do! I would know in twenty-four hours whether the child’s in the possession of any regular mob, or some single-o working his own racket. Anybody that knows anything in the underworld knows he can trust me. There is no mob going that wouldn’t count on me to make the payoff, if the family of the kid wants to go the ransom.”

  “And what do you want from the federal government, Al, if you manage to pull off this trick?”

  He cut the air with his hands, like an umpire calling somebody safe. “It’s no trick. If I can’t do any good for you, then I come back here, and let justice go on with her racket.”

  “You didn’t answer my question, Al. What do you want if you succeed?”

  His hands clenched into softball-size fists. A vein in his forehead began to throb; his scar turned white on his fleshy cheek. His expression was like a very pissed-off bull studying a red cape.

  “What the hell do you think, Ness? I want out! I want this goddamn sentence set aside! What in fucking hell do you think I want? I was railroaded! I was double-crossed!”

  Capone had worked out a plea bargain that would allow him to pay off his tax debt and get a two-and-a-half-year sentence, which with good behavior he could have done in a walk. But Judge Wilkerson had not been party to the deal, and sentenced him to eleven years in federal prison.

  “You guys want me to cough up three hundred thirty-six thousand dollars! I don’t know where you get these figures, ’less it’s the moon! You never proved I ever received one dollar—maybe you proved I spent some money, but that don’t prove I have any income. What I spent might’ve been given me by admiring friends. And you guys can’t tax gifts!”

  “Al, like the man says—tell it to the judge.”

  “The judge! That son of a bitch won’t even let me out on bail! Other people convicted on income-tax raps get set free, till the highest court passes on their appeal. Not Capone! They leave me to rot in stir. They make me pay expenses of the trial—they don’t do that with no others. Fifty fuckin’ grand I paid!”

  Ness stood with folded arms; his smile was gone. So, I gathered, was his patience.

  Snorkey sensed that, too.

  “I just don’t understand you guys,” he said, trying to sound reasonable, but damn near whining. “When I came to Chicago eleven years ago, I had only forty bucks in my pocket. I went in a business that didn’t do nobody no harm. They talk about the unemployed. Well, I give work to the unemployed. At least three hundred young men are getting from one hundred fifty dollars to two hundred dollars a week from me, in the harmless beer racket. Put me out of business, and all my men lose their jobs—they have families and little houses. What do you think they’ll do? Go on the streets and beg? No. These are men I’ve taken out of the holdup and bank-robbery business and worse and gave real jobs. Where will they go, and what will they do, when you put me out of business?”

  “We’ll find cells for them, too, Al.”

  His eyes blazed. “You’re so high and fuckin’ mighty! Sharing in a bootlegger’s profits by way of income tax, you’re aiding and abetting after the goddamn fact. It’s like the G was demanding its percentage of a bank burglar’s haul!”

  “Old news, Snorkey. Very old news.”

  The rage was bubbling in Capone, but he restrained himself.

  “Look, look,” he said, patting the air in a peacemaking gesture, “never mind that. Never mind any of that. I just want to help, here. There isn’t a man in America that wouldn’t like to return that child to its folks, whatever it cost him personally.”

  He pointed to a picture of his young son gilt-framed by his bed in the cell.

  “I can imagine,” he said, gray-green eyes glistening in the sorrowful mask of his round face, “how Colonel Lindbergh feels. I weep for him and his lovely wife.”

  “Do you really?”

  Capone’s lip began to curl in a sneer, but he pulled back, and meekly said, “They’ll listen to you, Ness. You tell them.”

  “Then tell me something you didn’t tell anybody else. You’ve run this vaudeville routine past Captain Stege, and Callahan of the Secret Service…but if you want to convince me, tell me something new. Tell me why you really think you can get that little boy back.”

  Silence hung in the air like a noose.

  Capone licked his fat lips and, mustering all the earnestness he could, said, “There’s a possibility a guy who did some work for me, once, did this awful thing. He is not in my employ now. Understood? But if he did it, and I can find him—and I can find him—we can get that kid back.”

  “Who is it, Al? Give me a name.”

  “Why in hell should I tell you?”

  “Becaus
e you care about that kid. Because you cry yourself to sleep at night, over this ‘awful thing.’”

  Capone lifted his head, looked down at Ness suspiciously. “If I tell you, you’d take it as a show of…sincerity?”

  “I might.”

  The glittering eyes narrowed to slits. “Conroy,” he said.

  “Bob Conroy?”

  The big head nodded once.

  Eliot thought about that. Then he said, almost to himself, “Conroy lammed it out of Chicago years ago.”

  Conroy was said to be one of the shooters in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Word was he’d gone east, when the heat got turned up after that noisy little affair.

  Capone clutched the bars. “I can find Conroy. Get me out of here. Let me help.”

  Ness smiled blandly at Capone. “I wouldn’t let you out of that cell to save a hundred kids.”

  The round face filled with blood.

  “So long, Snorkey.”

  “Only my friends call me that,” the gangster said ominously. “You son of a bitch…who the hell do you think you are…”

  “I’m Eliot Ness,” Eliot Ness said pleasantly. “And you—you’re right where you belong.”

  From behind us, as the deputy was unlocking the big steel door for us, Capone called out, “I’m going to the papers with this! Lindbergh’s going to hear about my offer!”

  Going down in the elevator, Eliot said, “Lindy already has heard, obviously. That’s why Irey and Wilson are going up there. To advise him.”

  “Do you take Capone seriously?”

  “Well, this morning, President Hoover and his cabinet discussed his offer.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The Attorney General suggested exploring whether Capone’s proposal would have to be referred to the Circuit Court of Appeals.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Eliot. Capone’s just trying any desperate measure to get out of stir…”

  “Right. But how desperate is he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Desperate enough to engineer this kidnapping himself, so he can ‘solve’ it, and earn his freedom?”

  The elevator clanked to a stop.

  “What do you think, Eliot?”

  “I think with Capone,” he said, “any evil thing is possible.”

  3

  The road to the Lindbergh estate was called Featherbed Lane; but the winding, rutted dirt path was hardly rest-inducing. In fact, it woke me out of a sound sleep I’d been enjoying since shortly after leaving Grand Central Station, at 10:00 A.M., where the Twentieth Century Limited had deposited me into the care of a stuffy, well-stuffed Britisher named Oliver Whately.

  Tall, rawboned yet fleshy looking, dark hair thinning and slicked back, Whately was Colonel Lindbergh’s butler, not a chauffeur, and he seemed to resent the duty. I’d tried to make conversation, and got back a combination of stiff upper lip and cold shoulder, so I buttoned my lip, settled my shoulder against the door of the tan Franklin sedan, and began sawing logs.

  I needed the sleep. I’d been up much of the night, moving from the smoking car to the dining car, drinking too heavily for my own good. The Chicago P.D. had predictably seen fit to buy me the cheapest accommodations possible—frankly, I counted myself lucky I wasn’t in the baggage compartment—and I had slept only fitfully, in my Pullman upper.

  But it wasn’t the accommodations, really. It was me. I was nervous. I’d never been east before, and certainly never met anybody as famous as Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh—except maybe Al Capone, and we hadn’t really met, had we? Besides which, Lindbergh was one of the few men on this disreputable planet that a Chicago cynic like yours truly couldn’t help but admire.

  Only a few years older than me, Lindbergh was, of course, one of the most famous and admired men in the world. Five short years ago he’d piloted his tiny, single-engine plane—the Spirit of St. Louis—across the Atlantic Ocean; this 3,610-mile jaunt—the first solo nonstop flight from New York to Paris—had made the gangling, unassuming youth (twenty-five years old at the time) an immediate international celebrity. Without meaning to, he won hundreds of awards and medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor. Judging by the papers and newsreels, he was a quiet, even shy midwestern boy who’d managed to give Americans a hero in an age of immorality and corruption.

  I didn’t believe in heroes, yet Lindbergh was a hero to me, too. I felt strangely embarrassed about this, and oddly uncomfortable about going to meet him; and uneasy about encountering him at such a sad, desperate point in his life.

  “Sour land,” Whately said, suddenly, in a bass voice that rattled the windows of the sedan, and shook me from half-awake to fully.

  “What?”

  Whately repeated himself, and it turned out to be one word, not two: “Sourland—sometimes known as the ‘lost land.’” The butler, dressed in funereal black, sitting back regally from the wheel, nodded his big head toward his window at the tangled thickness of woods through which the long black-mud private lane had been cut.

  “They say,” he said, “that Hessian soldiers fell prey to the maze of these woods, and, giving up, settled here.” He looked at me ominously. “They mixed their blood with Indians’.”

  He said this as if he were referring to a laboratory experiment, not some good-natured redskin nookie.

  “Later, runaway slaves hid in the Sourland Mountains,” he added, darkly.

  I made a clicking sound in my cheek. “I bet some more blood got mixed, too.”

  Whately nodded, his expression grave. “The descendants of the Hessians and their interbred rabble live in tar-paper shacks and caves in these hills and mountains.”

  “Funny neighborhood to stick a fancy house in,” I offered.

  “The Colonel chose the location from the air,” Whately said, shifting gears on the sedan and the conversation. He sounded matter-of-fact, dismissing from consideration the wild bands of mixed-blood hillbillies he’d summoned up. He lifted one large hand off the wheel and painted in the air. “Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh chose the crest of a knoll, higher than fog could disrupt.”

  “He has a landing strip, then?”

  Whately nodded. “Even this dirt road itself discourages travelers and sightseers. The Colonel likes his privacy. A remote estate is a necessity for the Lindberghs.”

  “And a liability.”

  He turned his head slowly and looked at me down his long nose, which was quite a trip. “Pardon?”

  “Stuck out in the middle of nowhere, they’re an easy target. For cutthroat mix-breed hillbillies, say—or a kidnapper.”

  Whately snorted and turned his attention back to driving.

  Autos and ambulances swarmed the roadsides by the whitewashed stone wall with wrought-iron gate. Some of the cars bore the cachet of a particular news service, while the ambulances were an old press trick: they’d been converted to mobile photo labs—retaining their sirens, of course, to ensure getting where they needed to as fast as possible. Standing out in the bitter March air, mixing cigar and cigarette smoke with that of their breaths, were hundreds of reporters and photographers and newsreel cameramen, gathered like flies at a dead animal. An abandoned ramshackle farmhouse, well outside the gate but in sight of it, was providing shelter for dozens of newshounds.

  Several New Jersey troopers stood on guard at the gate. They looked as crisp as the Sourland weather, light-blue uniform jackets, leather-visored caps, yellow-striped riding britches.

  “They look like chorus boys in The Student Prince,” I said.

  Whately arched an eyebrow in what seemed to be agreement, as they passed us through.

  More than a house, less than a mansion, the Lindbergh home, standing alone on a patch of ground cleared out of the dense woods, was a rambling, twin-gabled, two-and-a-half-story structure facing the forests and hills of the Sourland. Featherbed Lane came up behind the whitewashed fieldstone house, like an intruder; then the lane opened into a wide court and swung around its
west side, into a smaller paved court cluttered with automobiles. A picket fence halfheartedly surrounded the sprawling, French-manor-style house and gave it a homey, civilized touch, as did the windmill that spun sporadically in the bitter breeze; but none of it quite compensated for the loneliness of the wilderness-surrounded site.

  The place looked unfinished. Other than the landing strip beyond what would be the front yard, no landscaping had yet been done—the grounds were a barren patchwork of snow and weeds and dirt. And the windows, most of them, lacked curtains.

  “When did the Lindberghs move in?” I asked Whately, as he pulled the sedan to a stop.

  “They’ve only been spending weekends here,” he said.

  “For how long?” I didn’t figure this place had been habitable longer than a month or two.

  Whately confirmed that: “Since January.”

  “Where do they spend the rest of their time?”

  Whately frowned, as one might when a child asks repetitious and pointless questions. “Next Day Hill.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Morrow estate. At Englewood. If you’ll just come with me.”

  He got out of the sedan and so did I. The day was gray and cold and I was glad I’d brought my gloves. Whately got my traveling bag out of the back of the sedan and handed it to me. I thought maybe he’d carry it, but then he wasn’t my butler, was he?

  I followed the tall, fleshy Britisher to the three-car garage, one door of which he swung open to reveal a herd of cops at work in a makeshift command post. It was Sunday afternoon, but nobody had the day off. A trooper at a switchboard was frantically transferring calls to a nearby picnic table of plain-clothesmen working a bank of phones, while at two other picnic tables, uniformed troopers sorted mail into various piles, with the discards going into already well-filled barrels. A pair of teletype machines chattered, spewing paper onto a cement floor crawling with snakes of telephone wires and electrical cords; the smell of cigarette and cigar smoke mingled with that of steaming hot coffee.

  “This, sir,” Whately said to me, infusing “sir” with more disrespect than one syllable ought to be able to convey, “is where police personnel congregate.”