“Good evening, gentle friends,” she said, in a small, musical voice; she looked to be about twenty-two. “Please don’t get up.”
Thanks for that much.
Her husband pulled out the chair reserved for her, and, she primly sat. She drew her hands out of the long sleeves of the gown like a surgeon preparing to wash up; she placed her small, delicate hands, the nails of which were long, razor sharp and as red as a gaping wound, flat on the table. The candle wax that had dripped onto the wood was damn near the same color as her nails. This pair was good. They were worth whatever they charged.
“Thank you for your presence,” she said. Her hair, what I could see of it under the hood, was jet-black and pulled away from her face; she wore a single, circular gold earring, the one overtly gypsylike touch. “You are Mr. Breckinbridge.”
Breckinbridge, she said.
But Colonel Breckinridge did not correct her; it isn’t polite to correct a psychic.
“You are a police officer,” she said to me, smiling as sweetly as a shy schoolgirl.
“That’s right,” I said. Breckinbridge, Schmeckinbridge, if this babe said she was psychic, she was psychic by me.
“And your name?”
“Nathan Heller,” I said. Christ, she smelled good.
“Mr. Heller, will you take my hand?”
Is the Pope Catholic?
She joined hands with me, and squeezed. Yowsah.
“When my companion has induced my trance state,” she said, “please clasp hands with Mr. Breckinbridge. And Mr. Breckinbridge, please clasp hands with Martin. And Martin will take my hand, and the psychic chain will be established. Please do not break the psychic chain.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.
Marinelli slowly, pompously, removed the golden, jeweled cross from around his neck. Holding it by its chain, he began to slowly pass it before the great big beautiful brown peepers of his wife.
Wife, hell. She called him “companion,” and he introduced her as Sister Sarah Sivella, not Marinelli. If anything, they were common-law. My conscience was clear, thinking the thoughts I was thinking.
He was mumbling something; an incantation, something—it was barely audible. But she seemed to hear it. Her eyes traced the slow, sensual movement of the cross before her, and when Marinelli with his free hand snapped his fingers, click!, her eyes shut as tight as yanked-down window shades.
Then he clicked his fingers again and her eyelids rolled up the same way. Those eyes, deep brown and flecked with gold, were open wide in the stare of the dead. Her face seemed to lengthen; her expression was blankly sour. It spooked me. Breckinridge was similarly transfixed.
We both knew this was a bunch of bullshit; but the act was a good one, thanks to its fetching heroine, and we were caught up. We had all joined hands, now; in my right was the smooth delicate hand of the pretty medium, and in my left was Breckinridge’s big lawyer-soft paw.
“Who am I speaking to?” Marinelli asked.
“Ugh,” she said.
Ugh?
“Chief Yellow Feather—are you with us?”
She nodded. “Yellow Feather here.” Her voice was forced down into a male register. It sounded as ridiculous as you’re thinking.
I would’ve laughed, and on reflection did; but at that moment, I just went along with the ride. She smelled good, and I never heard a twenty-two-year-old dame with her nipples poking out of her shirt talk like an Indian before.
“Mr. Breckinbridge,” she continued, in the deep mock-male voice. What do you know? Chief Yellow Feather had the name wrong, too. “Spirits say kidnap note was left on windowsill in nursery.”
Breckinridge remained unruffled, when I glanced at him, but we both knew that this piece of information had not been released to the general public.
“Is this correct?” Marinelli asked Breckinridge.
“I’m not at liberty to confirm or deny that, sir,” the Colonel said, in a stiffly dignified manner that seemed about as silly, under the circumstances, as the voice of Chief Yellow Feather.
“Mr. Breckinbridge, you got note at your office today.”
“Note?” Breckinridge asked.
“Kidnap note.”
“No notes have been sent to my office.” He seemed relieved to be able to say that; it was, as far as I knew, the truth.
“All right,” said the girl huffily, in her big-chief voice. “Be at your office tomorrow. Nine in morning.”
“That’s pretty early.”
“Be at office!” The “chief” was firm.
“All right,” Breckinridge said, probably just to placate him. Her. Whoever.
Marinelli said, “Chief Yellow Feather—have you received any other spirit messages?”
“Yes. I see name.
“What name do you see?”
“Jafsie.”
I asked Marinelli, “Can I ask her a question?”
But Sarah answered. “You may speak to Yellow Feather,” she said, in her own voice.
“Yellow Feather, spell that name, please.”
“J-A-F-S-I-E.” This was intoned in the deep Indian voice.
“Thank you, Chief. Is the baby well?”
She shook her head slowly; her face lost its blankness and became sad.
“A baby’s body,” she said in her own voice, “will be found on the heights above Hopewell.”
Breckinridge looked at me sharply and I at him.
Marinelli snapped his fingers and she jerked awake.
She withdrew her hand from mine; we all let go of each other’s hands, sat back, relaxed. We sat quietly in the flickering candlelight, listening to the wind make like a wolf.
“Why did you bring her out of it?” I asked Marinelli.
“I can sense when the psychic strain is too much,” he said gravely. “We can arrange another sitting…”
“Not at this juncture,” Breckinridge said, shifting his chair. “But I would like the address of your church, in Harlem.”
“Certainly. Let me write it down for you.”
Marinelli rose, disappeared into the darkness.
Sarah looked tired; she slumped; her hands disappeared into her lap.
“Were we successful?” she asked quietly.
“You gave us information, child,” Breckinridge said, gently. “Whether it was helpful, well, that would be premature for me to say.”
“Do you remember what you said?” I asked her.
She smiled at me, warmly. “I go into a trance, and I say things. Later Martin tells me what I’ve said.”
“I see,” I said.
Her hand, under the table, settled on my thigh.
“You have kind eyes, Mr. Heller,” she said.
She began to stroke my thigh. I began to levitate again.
“Your eyes,” I said, “are very old, for so young a girl.”
She continued to stroke my thigh. “I’ve lived many times, Mr. Heller.”
Now she was stroking something else.
“I can tell you’ve been around,” I managed.
“Here’s the address,” Marinelli said, returning with a scrap of paper for Breckinridge.
Her hand slipped away.
“You can reach us day and night,” he said. “We live on the church premises.”
“Thank you,” Breckinridge said, rising. I kept my place, for the moment. It wasn’t that dark in the room.
“We, uh, do appreciate you clearing out of this suite,” I said. “I’m the one who’s going to be using it.”
“We will be staying the night, you understand,” she said. “Or, actually—I will. Martin is going on ahead, by car, shortly, to prepare for weekend services. I’ll be going home by train, tomorrow.”
She was giving me what I might best describe as a significant look. I’m a detective. I pick up on these things.
“Do you need any expense money?” Breckinridge said.
“No,” Marinelli said. “If what we’ve said proves helpful, we would not be advers
e to having our names in the papers. Like any Christian church, we are missionaries, spreading the word.”
I got up, “Well, thank you, both. Sorry if I was rude, earlier, Reverend.”
“All true believers begin as doubters,” he assured me, gesturing us toward the door.
“Safe journey,” she told us, and we were in the hall.
We sat in the Dusenberg at the curb for a while.
“What do you make of that?” Breckinridge asked.
“I’m not sure. Those two aren’t in the same class as Edgar Cayce, that’s for goddamn sure.”
Breckinridge nodded. “Marinelli certainly sends out mixed signals—talk of Christianity coming out of a satanic countenance, theological mumbo-jumbo that sounds more pagan than Judeo-Christian.”
“Sounds like a promising new religion to me—life after death, and psychosexuality, too.”
“But are they con artists?”
“Marinelli obviously is,” I said, shrugging. “I’m not sure about the girl.”
He nodded. “She seems to be sincere, like Cayce, believing herself to possess psychic powers. But does she?”
“I wonder. It’s interesting that when she started saying that the kid was dead, he snapped her out of it.”
Breckinridge looked grim. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. She knew one detail the general public doesn’t. She predicted a couple things—if they come true, I’m going to be suspicious.”
“I already am suspicious.” His hands settled on the steering wheel. “Are you ready?”
“No,” I said. “Let me out at the first all-night drugstore.”
“Why?”
“Where else am I going to find a package of Sheiks at this time of night?”
“What?”
“Never mind. Have somebody pick me up here around noon tomorrow—at the café on the corner, over there, will be fine.”
“What have you got in mind?”
“I’m going to do some poking around on my own,” I said.
Breckinridge, more mystified by me than by the séance we’d just witnessed, let me out at a drugstore. I made my purchase, walked back to the old four-story brick hotel and waited for Marinelli to leave.
Hoping to hell it hadn’t been some ghost feeling me up under the table.
9
My driver was a ruddy, blond, good-natured man of perhaps thirty named Willis Dixon, one of three patrolmen under the command of Hopewell Police Chief Harry Wolfe. Dixon wore a black leather jacket with a badge pinned on, a matching cap and khakis, with a black tie snugged crisply in place. A neat-looking uniform, for a local cop, but a distant second to the blue and pink costumes of the New Jersey State Police chorus boys.
“We been reduced to chauffeurin’ and other shit work,” Dixon had told me pleasantly, when he picked me up at precisely noon at the Princeton Café. I bought him lunch before we left, and heard all about how Colonel Schwarzkopf had frozen out Chief Wolfe and his staff—the first cops on the scene, after the kidnapping—from the inner circle of the investigation.
Right now we were rolling along a gravel road, cutting through the ominously lonely Sourland Hills countryside, snarled as it was with underbrush that thickened on either side into heavy, rugged, seemingly impenetrable woods.
“I’m going to pull over for a minute,” Dixon said. He had apple cheeks and a space between his front teeth, a moronic countenance that probably served him well as a cop; his eyes were dark and shrewd, and that’s what counted.
“Why’s that, Willis?”
We’d been on a first-name basis ever since I bought him lunch.
“It ain’t to take a leak,” he said, and grinned in his knowing dumb-ass way. “I think we’ll find something that just might interest you.” He pronounced it “inner rest,” which was precisely the kind of rest I could’ve used.
As he pulled over, I realized the undergrowth had been cleared up ahead, to make way for a sloping, landscaped lawn. We’d come upon the occasional farmhouse or shack, along the way; but nothing like this. Here, in the middle of this overgrown but desolate landscape, was what at first glance seemed a mansion: a gray three-story frame building with a white-pillared porch in front of which evergreens perched like obedient pets. A beautiful structure, really, of modern vintage, despite its modified Southern plantation motif.
We got out of the unmarked car and walked toward the big building, which on closer look resembled a hotel more than a private residence, but there were no signs to identify it as such or to attract business.
And it was obviously empty—though apparently such had not been the case for long. Several of its windows had been broken out, and it wore a general air of disrepair and neglect. Which was puzzling in itself: why a building of this size and worth would be abandoned made no sense at all. Had a bank foreclosed here, there’d have been at least minimal upkeep.
“Come around back,” Dixon said; he had dug a chaw of tobacco out of his jacket pocket and took a healthy bite.
Leaves and twigs under the thin frozen layer of snow crunched under our feet as we climbed the gently sloping ground, and circled around, to approach the rear of the building.
“Holy shit,” I said.
Dixon grinned at me, chewing his tobacco vigorously. “Pretty sight, ain’t it?”
The whole ass-end of the big building was blown out; two large barnlike double-doors, on the ground floor, had been torn away—one was missing entirely, another hung by a thread and a prayer. On the lower, built-up basement level, the wood walls between brick support posts had also been blown out. Lumber and refuse were piled behind the building to form a misshapen hill half as wide as the structure itself and a third as tall.
“Must have been one hell of an explosion,” I said.
“Must have been one hell of a still,” Dixon said. He spat tobacco juice.
“Is that what this place was? A moonshine distillery?”
“No! That was just a little part of the operation.”
I pushed my hat back, scratched my head; the cold air was nipping at me, and seemed as impatient as I was. “Well, it looks like a hotel. What was it, a roadhouse?”
“Kee-rect, Nate.” He smiled brownly. “Not your regulation roadhouse that dots the back roads of our beautiful land, from sea to shinin’ sea, the kind designed to pull in your tired businessmen or your thirsty pampered college kids. No sir. And it wasn’t for the Hopewell clientele, neither.”
“Willis—what the hell was this place?”
He beamed at me; a hick taking great pride in educating a city slicker. “A gangster hideaway, Nate. Where all the big shots outa New York and your other major metropolitan areas gathered to enjoy their own company in their own private whoopee parties.”
“Jesus. Including Chicago?”
He nodded. “I spotted Cook County plates ’round these parts many a time.”
“Why didn’t you ever bust this place? Oh. Sorry.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “No, no. It ain’t that. It’s not that I wouldn’t have taken a taste if it was offered me. But this is not our jurisdiction. It’s outside of city limits.”
“Whose jurisdiction is it? Oh. Sure—the state police.”
He nodded again. “Schwarzkopf’s little girls, is right.” He put his hands on his hips, spat an elegant brown stream into the pile of rubble. “Think of it, Nate. Some of the biggest wing-dings imaginable, with Broadway entertainers and whores so pretty they qualify as table food. Gamblin’ and orgies and it all took place right inside there, for the sole enjoyment of our nation’s mob chieftains.”
Capone would have been here. More than once. Just a few miles from the Lindbergh estate.
Dixon began to wander, hands on hips. “Can you picture it? How could a night of revelry pass by without those big shots making some passin’ reference to the famous Lindy and his family, so close by? I’ll lay you twenty to one that many a night they passed the time tossin’ around how much easy
dough there was that could be had by grabbing that famous kid.”
“But they never went through with it,” I said, thinking aloud. “It just stayed idle speculation, fun after-dinner talk, because the estate was too close. Suspicion would point in their direction.”
“Right! But then this big old still blew to hell and back, and a guy was killed in the explosion, one of them that ran it, and the place was closed down.”
“So protecting the roadhouse was no longer necessary.”
“Right-o,” Dixon said. “And since there never was an arrest or raid or anything out here, what sort of trail was there for anybody to follow?”
“Somebody should’ve tried,” I said. The wind sighed, rustling the trees. “Somebody should be trying right now….”
A few minutes later, we were pulling into the Lindbergh estate. As we drove around by the command-post garage, Dixon said, “Well, I’ll be damned—look who it is!”
He pointed to a trio of men standing outside the garage, milling about with expressions of impatience. One of the men was older and clearly the leader, albeit an unlikely one: a short, round bald man in a rumpled brown topcoat, a straw fedora in one hand, with which he was slapping his thigh. White-mustached, lumpy-faced, he was smoking a corncob pipe and looked like a gentleman farmer, although not much of one—gentleman or farmer. His two associates were taller and younger, and better dressed, but not much; they looked like plainclothes cops, backwoods variety.
Dixon pulled in next to another of several cars parked in the outer cement apron and turned the engine off, but left his hands on the wheel. His expression seemed weirdly glazed.
“That’s the Old Fox himself,” he said.
“Old Fox?”
“Ellis Parker. Don’t tell me you never heard of him.”
I’d heard of him, all right. That fat, bald, rumpled, apparent nonentity was Ellis Parker, a.k.a. the Old Fox, a.k.a. the Cornfield Sherlock, a.k.a. the Small-Town Detective with the Worldwide Reputation. Parker was chief of detectives of some county or other in New Jersey—I didn’t remember where—but he was widely known as one of the nation’s top investigators, and frequently was brought in on cases in East Coast cities larger than his own tiny Mount Holly, wherever the hell that was.
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