“Heller!” Lindbergh called. “Where are you going?”
“Chicago,” I said, over my shoulder. “We got a more normal brand of insanity back there.”
“Wait. Wait!”
I stopped and he walked up beside me, the dog frisking at his heels.
“I’ll talk to Irey,” he said. “But no promises.”
“Okay.”
“I’d like you to stick around a while longer.”
“Why?”
“There are gangsters in this, obviously. They may be Capone people.”
“You’ve got Irey and Wilson on the case; they know Capone better than I do.”
“They’re not from Chicago. And they’re not street cops. They don’t know the breed of crook Capone uses, like you do. Nate, we need your expertise.”
I was flattered. I couldn’t help it. Lindy was behaving stupidly in many respects, but he was still Lindy. Saying no to him was like saying no to Uncle Sam.
“No,” I said.
His cheek twitched; his eyes were desperate. “Will you at least stay till we play out the Condon hand? Just that long?”
I sighed. “Sure. Why not. It beats chasing pickpockets around LaSalle Street Station.”
He offered me a hand to shake and I shook it. Wahgoosh growled at me.
The bronze Tiffany clock chimed seven-thirty just thirty seconds before the doorbell rang.
“This is it,” Breckinridge said, standing. His eyes were hard and tight.
“Perhaps I should answer it,” Condon said, standing. His eyes were soft and loose,
“There’s an idea,” I said.
Condon moved quickly for his size and age, and I was on his heels, Breckinridge on mine. The nine millimeter under my arm kept us all company.
The old professor threw open the door, like a ham actor in a bad play, and on his front porch were two spear-carriers in our little melodrama.
“Hiya, doc,” the older of the two men said. “We thought we’d drop around and find out what’s new on the case.”
“Yeah,” the younger, shorter, one asked. “Any word?”
It was Max Rosenhain the restaurateur, and Milton Gaglio the clothier, respectively, the professor’s two pals.
“Ah, my friends!” Condon said, spreading his arms. “How wonderful to see you. Please do step in.”
And step in they did, hats in hand, nervous smiles taking their faces upon seeing me. I shut the door, damn near slamming it.
“Gentlemen,” Colonel Breckinridge said, “we’re grateful to you for your concern, and interest, but…”
“But get the hell out of here,” I said.
“Mr. Heller!” Condon said. “I will not countenance your foul language and rude behavior in my house!”
“Shut up,” I said to him. To the other two, I said, “We’re waiting to hear from the kidnappers, you jack-offs. What do you think this is, a radio show?”
The two men swallowed and exchanged embarrassed glances.
Condon was glaring at me. “Really, Detective Heller. Your conduct is unconscionable.”
We were in the Bronx, so I gave him his city’s namesake cheer. Then I said to his dumb-ass pals, “If the kidnappers are watching this house, as I suspect they are, waiting for the right moment to make their move, then you two clowns may have just scared ’em off.”
“We didn’t mean any harm…” Gaglio began.
“We didn’t think…” Rosenhain said.
“Right,” I said, and the doorbell rang.
We stood there looking wild-eyed at each other, clustered as if in a football huddle, only there was no quarterback.
So I called the play. In a harsh whisper, I said, “Everybody but the professor, get into the living room. Go. Now. But quietly.”
To their credit, they did just that.
Condon looked at me, his eyes sharper than usual. I put my back to the wall, to the left of the door, and got the nine millimeter in hand; I nodded to him. He nodded back, swallowed, and opened the door.
“You Dr. Condon?”
Peering around the edge, I could see a man standing in the doorway: a little guy with round wire-rim glasses and a ferret face; he wore the cap and coat of a cabbie.
“I am Dr. Condon.”
“Here you go, pal.”
And the cabbie, if that’s what he was, handed an envelope to the professor; the envelope bore the bold, childlike block printing and numerals we’d seen before.
The apparent cabbie was still standing there, waiting for a tip, I guess.
With my left hand, I reached out and grabbed him by the lapel of his uniform and pulled him into the entryway and kicked the door shut. I shoved him up against the nearest wall, his back to me, and patted him down with one hand, keeping the nine millimeter in the other.
“Hey!” he said. “Hey! What’s the big idea?”
“You ain’t heeled,” I said. “That’s a start. Turn around and put your hands up. Colonel!”
Breckinridge came in, his eyes bugging a bit as he saw me holding the gun on the little cabbie.
“Usher our caller into the living room,” I said. “He seems clean.” To the cabbie, I said, “What’s your name?”
“Perrone,” he said, loudly, almost proudly. His voice was indignant, but his eyes were scared shitless.
“Put your hands down, Mr. Perrone, and behave yourself.”
Wordlessly, Breckinridge led the cabbie into the dining room.
Condon was standing there stupidly with the letter in his hands, looking at the thing as if afraid of it. I took the envelope from him, tore it open and read to myself.
Mr. Condon.
We trust you, but we will note come in your Haus it is to danger, even you cane not know if Police or secret servise is watching you follow this instunction. Take a car and drive to the last supway station from Jerome Ave line. 100 feet from the last station on the left seide is a empty frank-further-stand with a big open Porch around, you will find a notise in senter of the porch underneath a stone, this notise will tell you where to find us.
Here, in the right margin, the by-now familiar interlocking-circles signature appeared, and the note continued:
Act accordingly.
after ¾ of a houer be
on the place, bring the mony with you.
“May I read that?” Condon asked, and I handed it to him. It was his mail, after all.
He read it over several times and looked at me with worry in his watery blue eyes. “Bring the money?”
“That’s what it says.”
We joined Breckinridge in the living room. Mrs. Condon had left the room and the cabbie was seated on the couch between Gaglio and Rosenhain. Breckinridge was pacing. He grabbed for the note like a starving man for a crust of bread.
“Bring the money!” he read. “Judas Priest! We haven’t got the damn money…”
“What do we do?” Condon asked desperately. “I assumed we would work out the details for the ransom exchange, but now…”
“What’s important now is to make contact,” I said. “Explain that the money really will be ready soon. Make the best of it.”
Condon was shaking his head; he seemed confused, disoriented.
Hell with him. I turned to the cabbie, bookended on the couch by Condon’s two cronies.
“What was your name again?” I asked him.
“Joe Perrone. Joseph.”
“Where did you get that letter?”
“Guy hailed me and handed it to me over on Gun Hill Road at Knox Place.”
“How far is that from here?”
“Don’t you know?” the cabbie asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m not from here. I’m a tourist. With a gun.”
“It’s about a mile from here.”
“What did the guy say? What did he look like?”
The little cabbie shrugged. “He asked me if I knew where Decatur Avenue was, where twenty-nine seventy-four would be. I said sure, I know that neighborhood. Then he looked around, over this sh
oulder and that shoulder, and stuck his hand in his pocket and gave me this envelope and a buck.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. He was wearing a brown topcoat and a brown felt hat.”
“Any physical characteristics about the guy that were noticeable?”
“No. I didn’t pay any attention.”
“Nothing about the man that fixes itself in your mind?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t know him again if you saw him?”
“No. I was looking at the buck he gave me. George Washington, him I can identify. What’s this all about, anyway?”
Breckinridge chimed in. “I’m afraid we can’t tell you that just now, Mr. Perrone. Rest assured it’s most important.”
“Let me see your badge,” I said.
“Sure.” He unpinned it from his uniform coat.
I wrote the number down in my notebook. Then I wrote it down on a separate page which I tore out and handed to Gaglio.
“Make yourself useful,” I said. “Go out to that cab parked in front and check this number against the ID card in the backseat. Then write down the license plate number, too.”
Gaglio, glad to be of help, nodded, got up, took the sheet of paper and scurried out.
“What now?” Breckinridge asked.
“The professor keeps his appointment,” I said. “I’ll drive.”
“There were to be no police,” Condon said.
“I’m not a cop in New York State,” I said. “Just a patriotic concerned citizen.”
“With a gun,” the cabbie said.
“Right,” I said. “We’ll take my flivver.”
By “my flivver,” of course, I meant the one Lindy loaned me.
Gaglio came back in and said, “It checks out.”
“Good,” I said. I turned to Perrone. “You go on about your business. You may be hearing from the cops.”
“What should I say?”
Condon covered his heart like a school kid pledging allegiance. “Tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
“Except for my pulling a gun on you,” I said.
“Right,” he said, and he was up and out.
“What about our friends Max and Milton?” Condon asked.
“They stay here,” I said. “And they’re not my fucking friends.”
The night was nobody’s friend. The sky was black and the city was gray. A cold wind blew leaves and rubbish and scraps of paper across the all-but-deserted streets of the most beautiful borough in the world.
As I got behind the wheel, and Condon slid his big frame into the rider’s seat, I said, “I’m a stranger to this part of the world, Professor—you’ll have to navigate.”
“I can do that ably,” he said cheerily. Then, turning suddenly somber, he said, “I trust, despite our differences, we can join forces in this just cause.”
“We’ll do fine, Professor. I’m just here to back you up.”
Placated, Condon folded his hands on his lap and I pulled away from the curb, heading west.
Eight solitary blocks later, he said, “Turn north on Jerome Avenue—just up ahead.”
I turned onto the all-but-deserted thoroughfare, gloomy and gray under the subdued glow of the street lights. Condon pointed out the last subway station on Jerome Avenue, and I slowed.
“There’s the hot-dog stand,” I said.
On the left side of the street was the sagging, deteriorating shack, a summertime operation that had missed a couple summers. The sad little booth was fronted by an equally sad, sagging porch. I pulled a U-turn and stopped before it.
“Allow me,” Condon said, and got out.
He climbed several steps to the porch, each step giving and groaning under his weight. In the middle of the porch was a big flat rock, which I could see Condon stoop to lift. He returned quickly, an envelope in hand.
We were almost directly under a street lamp. He tore the envelope open and read the note aloud to me: “‘Cross the street and follow the fence from the cemetery direction to Two Hundred Thirty-Third Street. I will meet you.’”
“How far is that, Professor?”
“About a mile. The fence mentioned is the one enclosing Woodlawn Cemetery to the north—Two Hundred Thirty-Third Street runs east-west and intersects Jerome Avenue about a mile north of this frankfurter stand. It forms the northern border of the cemetery.”
“Which means?”
“You’ll have to swing the car around again.”
I pulled another U-turn. We couldn’t have had less traffic if the world ended yesterday. On our one side was the rolling wooded acreage of a park, on the other a sprawling, iron-fenced cemetery.
“That’s Woodlawn,” Condon explained. “And that park is Van Cortlandt.”
“You’d be better off if that cab driver had driven you.”
“Perhaps, Detective Heller—but if pressed I’ll admit I like having you, and your gun, around.”
We kept going along Jerome, parallel to the cemetery, stopping about fifty feet short of the 233rd Street intersection. Ahead was a triangular plaza that was the entrance to Woodlawn Cemetery, with heavy iron gates, shut and undoubtedly locked.
I pulled over. “Go on up and stand by that gate.”
“You think that’s the location the kidnappers meant?”
“Yes. Go on. I’ll cover you.”
“I suppose that’s wise. They’ll not contact me unless I’m alone.”
“I’m here if you need me.”
He nodded and strode over to the plaza, looking around brazenly. Inconspicuous he was not.
But that was okay. We wanted the kidnappers to see him.
He paced. He dug the note out of his pocket and read and reread it—in an apparent attempt to signal any representative of the kidnap gang who might be watching. Nothing. He paced some more.
Ten minutes of this went by before he came marching back to the car. He got in.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said. “There’s no one out there. Were we on time?”
“It’s nine-fifteen,” I said. “Maybe we’re early. It’s warmer in here. Sit for a few minutes.”
We sat. The wind out there did all the talking.
Then Condon said, “There’s someone!”
A short, swarthy man in a cap and with a handkerchief covering his face was walking toward us along Jerome Avenue.
Condon got out of the car, quickly. He walked toward the man. The man walked toward him.
And passed the professor by.
Condon turned and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, scratching his head, watching the guy walk away. The old man looked in my direction, shrugged, and headed back for the area by the iron gates, where he again began to pace.
At nine-thirty, I was getting restless. I was beginning to think nothing was going to happen—perhaps because I was along. I was also wondering where Wilson’s man was hiding himself; I assumed Wilson had put a man, or men, on Condon’s house, and that we’d been trailed here. But the shadow man must have been goddamn good. Because I felt alone. Just me, Condon, the night, the wind and half the corpses in the Bronx.
Condon, rocking on his heels, was standing, with his back to the iron gate.
And, now, like something in a haunted-house movie, a hand was extending itself through the iron gates toward the professor.
I sat forward, about to call out, but the professor began to pace again. He moved well away from the extending ghostlike hand, looking everywhere but in that direction.
And now the hand withdrew, only to return seconds later, with something white in it. The white thing began to flutter like a bird. A handkerchief, waving. Whoever it was, in the cemetery, was trying desperately to signal the professor, without calling out to him.
Finally Condon noticed it, and moved quickly to the gates, where he began to speak to somebody on the other side. I rolled my window down, and the window on the other side, as well, but I could hear nothing but the wind.
They spoke for perhaps two minutes, and then Condon abruptly backed away.
“No!” I heard him say.
I reached for my gun.
Then I saw a figure, a man in a dark topcoat and hat, climb up, over and down the gate and land almost at Condon’s feet. For a split second the two men faced each other, the one who’d jumped remaining in a catlike crouch.
“It’s too dangerous!” the man said, and began to run.
The guy, who was about a head shorter than Condon, ran across the street, diagonally—right in front of me, though I got no sort of look at him at all, his dark felt hat brim pulled down, obscuring his face.
A cemetery security guard had appeared at the gate—his presence, apparently, had spooked the man in the dark topcoat—and was shouting, “Hey! What’s going on?”
But Condon was ignoring that. The old boy was hoofing it across the street after the man. I had them both in sight. And I could have joined in the chase. But the professor was doing all right, at the moment. I stayed a spectator—for now.
The man ran north into the park; Condon followed, calling out to him: “Hey! Come back here! Don’t be a coward!”
The guy slowed, and turned, and waited for Condon. They were only a few hundred feet into the park. The cemetery security guard hadn’t even bothered to come out; he’d stayed inside to protect the dead. Condon and his companion were standing by a clump of trees near a small groundskeeper’s hut with a park bench in front of it.
Condon gestured to the bench and the guy thought about it, and sat. And then so did Condon.
They sat and they talked. For a long, long time.
I thought about getting out of the car and finding my way to those trees and bushes and eavesdropping. But the guy’s compatriots might be watching me, and I might queer the whole deal. And I could see both Condon and the man in the dark topcoat just fine. I could be there in seconds if trouble developed.
But it didn’t. They just sat and talked.
While I sat stewing, my gun in my lap, looking around for signs of anybody else, kidnappers, T-men, innocent bystanders, anybody. Tonight the Bronx was as dead as Woodlawn Cemetery.
Finally, after an eternity, they stood.
And shook hands.
The man in the dark topcoat turned away and walked north, disappearing into the wooded park. Condon watched him go, then walked slowly toward my car. He was smiling.
Stolen Away Page 17
