Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Please.”

  Walter Lyle, the filling-station manager, came out rubbing grease off his hands with a rag. He was a somewhat stocky, pleasant-looking guy in his late thirties; he wore a cap and a coin-changer.

  “Help you?” he asked with a neutral smile.

  “My name’s Heller,” I said, and I flashed him my badge. “Doing one final follow-up investigation on the Hauptmann case.”

  He smiled. You could see in his eyes that this was a big deal in his life; he hadn’t got tired yet of people asking him about how he helped nab Hauptmann.

  “Always glad to help, Officer,” he said.

  I hadn’t said I was a cop, of course, but there was no law saying I had to correct him.

  “We understand,” I said, “that Hauptmann had some friends in the neighborhood.”

  “Still does—some of ’em live just down the block.”

  “Did you know that at the time?”

  That seemed to confuse him. “What do you mean?”

  “Was Hauptmann a regular customer? Stands to reason he might’ve stopped in here before, since he had friends just down the street.”

  “He wasn’t a regular customer, no. I might’ve seen him around.”

  “Might’ve?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think it was his first time in. I think that blue sedan of his had rolled in here now and then. First time he passed a gold certificate, though.”

  That in itself was interesting.

  “How about this guy Isidor Fisch?”

  ‘That’s the ‘Fisch story’ fella, right? I guess he did live around here.”

  “Just a few doors down the street.”

  “Maybe so, but I didn’t know him. He was poor as a church mouse, I hear, so stands to reason he wouldn’t even have a car.”

  “That’s probably right,” I said. “Well, thank you.”

  “Any time, Officer. You didn’t want to go over how I come to notice the gold certificate? We’d been told to be careful of counterfeits, so…”

  “No, that’s okay, Mr. Lyle.”

  “Oh. Well, fine.” He couldn’t hide his disappointment. “Good afternoon to you, Officer.”

  The brownstone down the block was a five-story walk-up; this was a fairly busy thoroughfare, and many of the buildings had a bottom-floor storefront, but not this one. It had obviously been an apartment house at one time, but as the neighborhood had begun to slide got converted to a rooming house, large apartments turned into modest one-and two-room suites.

  Gerta Henkel was an apple-cheeked strudel in a cream-colored sweater that showed off her finer points. Around her pale neck she wore some cheap pearls, which she toyed with as she met us at the door. Her eyes were small and dark and wide-set, and her mouth was generous if rather thin-lipped. She smiled frequently. She offered me her hand, at the door of the little flat, and her grasp was warm and soft.

  “Thank you for seeing us, Mrs. Henkel.”

  We stepped inside and she closed the door.

  “Mr. Heller,” she said, “anything I can do to help Richard, I will.”

  Her accent touched certain words—“anyt’ing”—in an appealing way.

  “This is Evalyn McLean,” I said, introducing the two women, who gave each other cold appraisals. They instinctively did not like each other, not uncommon between two women who are attractive in differing ways, but shook hands and smiled in a bad approximation of cordiality.

  She led us to a little table near a gauzily curtained window overlooking the street. Her hips were sheathed in a black skirt and she walked with a sway as compelling as the swing of a hypnotist’s watch.

  “I’ll get coffee,” she said. “Cream or sugar, anyone?”

  “Black is fine,” I said, and Evalyn asked for cream.

  Evalyn whispered to me, “Do you think Hauptmann…you know?”

  What she meant was, did Hauptmann have an affair with Gerta, as Prosecutor Wilentz had done his best to imply at the trial.

  “If he didn’t,” I said, “he’s nuts.”

  She made a face and boxed my arm.

  Gerta returned with a tray of small brimming coffee cups and some tiny, crunchy sugar cookies.

  “I’d like to speak to your husband, too, Mrs. Henke.”

  “He be gone till six, at least,” she said. “Working a job in the Bronx.”

  Henkel was a house painter. Seemed like many of Hauptmann’s friends were in the construction trades.

  “That man Wilentz,” Gerta said, nibbling a cookie with tiny white teeth, “tried to make Richard and me look bad. There was nothing bad between us, Mr. Heller. Richard was always a gentleman.”

  “You met at Hunter’s Island?”

  “Yes. We all go there for good time.”

  “But wasn’t Mrs. Hauptmann away, when you met Dick?”

  “I guess. But Anna and me become good friends. We are real good friends. I spend much time with her. I have spend time with her in Trenton; we stay at a hotel, so she can be near Richard, sometimes.”

  “Gerta…may I call you Gerta?”

  “Sure. Can I call you by your first name?”

  Evalyn drank her coffee; it had cream in it, but her expression was black.

  “Yes, please—call me Nate.”

  “You look Irish, Nate—but your name is German, isn’t it?”

  “My people came from Halle.”

  “I grew up in Leipzig. Went to school there with Fisch. That’s who you want to know about, right?”

  “Yes. He lived in this building?”

  “He had one furnished room—thirteen dollars a week; on this same floor. He moved from here, though, in the spring of ’33, to a bigger place, in Yorkville, near the brokerage office where he and Richard would go.”

  When she said “though,” it sounded like “dough.”

  “Before Fisch moved, Richard would meet him, here, at your place?”

  “Yes. This is what give Wilentz ideas about Richard and me.” She made a face; what a cutie—I couldn’t blame Wilentz for any ideas he might have about her. “Richard would stop and have coffee with me, when he come to pick up Fisch. But we were not alone together. Fisch was here, or Carl, or sometimes my sister.”

  “Gerta, frankly, it doesn’t matter to me either way, about you and Dick.”

  That made her eyes spark. She smiled. “Really?” she asked, and she nibbled a cookie.

  “What kind of fellow,” Evalyn said tightly, getting us back on track, “was this Isidor Fisch?”

  She shrugged; her breasts under the pale creamy sweater had a life of their own. “He was a liar. A sneaky little shrimp. The only thing he ever told the truth about was he really was sick. He got very run-down. He said his lungs were bad ’cause of years he spent in Frigidaire rooms dressing fur pelts.”

  “You never liked him?” I asked.

  “He got on my nerves. He always get me nervous, pacing up and down on the floor and looking out this window to see if Richard come or not. He would go away with Richard, but sometimes Richard didn’t come, and he go away alone. I say, ‘Where you go, Izzy, working or what?’ He say he go down to the stock market.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of him, would you?”

  “I do,” she said. “A snapshot from Hunter’s Island. You can take it. I don’t look so good in it, though.”

  “That’s all right,” Evalyn said, and smiled sweetly.

  Gerta got up and I watched the cheeks of her ass moving like pistons under the black skirt as she made her way across the tiny, tidy living room and Evalyn kicked me in the shins under the table.

  “Do you believe her?” Evalyn whispered.

  “About the affair?”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t matter. If every man who wanted to sleep with Gerta was a kidnapper, no baby in this country would be safe.”

  Soon Gerta was back, and the picture of Fisch revealed a dark-haired, acned, jug-eared, smirky Jew in his twenties; bow tie and tweed sportcoat. Ev
en in a still photo he looked like a cocky little smart-ass. In the photo, Gerta, cute as a button but not as cute as in real life, sat behind him and leaned forward, her hands on his shoulders.

  Evalyn was looking at the picture. “You seem friendly enough with him here.”

  “He was fun, at first. His English was the best of us all. Had a swell line of bull. But even back in the old country, as teenager, he was in the black market. And here, with his schemes, he took fifteen hundred from my Carl’s mother for this pie company that never was, and another almost three thousand from her for invest in furs.”

  “That’s a lot of dough,” I said.

  “People’s life saving,” she said bitterly. “And my mother, he get from her four thousand.”

  It sounded like “t’ousand.”

  “And he got some from Erica, too,” she said, “how much, I don’t know.”

  “Erica?” Evalyn asked.

  “My sister,” she said. “And all our friends—hundreds dollars here, thousands dollars there. But you know what? We thought he was rich—he always said he was worth thirty thousand, easy. But he had other friends, who thought he was poor! I heard that when he moved out of here, he told these other friends that he was evicted! That he had to sleep wherever he could, in Hooverville and on benches in Grand Central depot. That way he could beg off them.”

  “What a weasel,” I said.

  “I tell you how I figure out he is keeping one group of friends away from the other. When Izzy is going down to the steamship, to go to Germany, Erica and me decide to go down and say goodbye, to surprise him. We go aboard and see Izzy talking with four or five men, strangers to us, but you can tell they was friends with him. Izzy saw us and his face went white as sheet; he came over, angry, and said, ‘What the hell are you doing here, you girls?’ I say, ‘The hell with you, Izzy—we just want to surprise you, to say goodbye, you nasty little bastard!’ The nerve of him. He apologize, show us to his cabin, but then said he was busy and shooed us away fast as he could.”

  “He was conning everybody,” I said. “Getting money from your circle by playing the big-shot investor, and milking others using the poor-mouth routine.”

  “It worked,” Gerta said, shrugging. “But he was a strange one.”

  “Strange, how?” Evalyn said.

  “Well, I never see him with a woman. When I first meet him, I thought he was kind of…cute, in a way. Like a little boy. But, uh…he never seemed interested. Most men like me. I don’t mean to be bragging, but…”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “And there was this crazy religion of his.”

  “What, Judaism?”

  “No!” She grinned. “Spooks and stuff.”

  “Spooks and stuff?”

  “What do they call it? Spiritualist.”

  I sat up, knocking the table; coffee spilled. I apologized and said, “Tell me more about this.”

  She shrugged. “He belonged to this little church. Not a church, really—just a storefront, all cleared out for benches and stuff. They do silly things over there, I hear.”

  “Like what?”

  “What do they call them—séances. Did you know Izzy Fisch knew this girl Violet Sharpe?”

  Evalyn and I traded quick looks.

  “The maid Violet Sharpe, who killed herself,” she continued, “and this older man, who was supposed to be a butler for the Lindberghs, they often come to that church. I think they were members.”

  “One of the butlers was named Septimus Banks,” I said. My nerves were jumping, suddenly.

  “I don’t think that’s the name.”

  “Another was Oliver Whately.”

  “That is the name.”

  Evalyn set her coffee cup down clatteringly.

  “This is important, Gerta!” I said. “Haven’t you ever told anybody this?”

  She shrugged. “Nobody asked.” She lowered her head, embarrassed. “I didn’t want to get Richard in trouble.”

  “In trouble?”

  “If they knew his friend Fisch knew those Lindbergh people…well…Carl thought we should say nothing.”

  “But this helps confirm Hauptmann’s claims about Fisch.”

  She shook her head, sadly. “Nobody believed the ‘Fisch story.’ How could this help? It could only hurt.”

  My head was reeling. “Where was this church?”

  She drew back the curtain and pointed. “Just across the street.”

  “Across the street?”

  “Izzy always say it was very interesting. They call it the One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street Spiritualist Church…Mr. Heller? Nate?”

  I was standing; looking out the window. My heart was racing. “Is it still there?”

  “I don’t think so. I think they move it…”

  “Thank you, Gerta, you’ve been very kind.” I nodded to Evalyn, who got the point and got up. “We may be back…”

  “I’m sure Carl would be glad to talk to you,” she said, following along after us. “If you need to talk to me, alone, Nate, I’m here all day by myself, most days…’less I’m helping Anna.”

  At the door I took Gerta’ s hand and squeezed it and soon we were down on the sidewalk and Evalyn was saying, “What’s the rush? What’s going on?”

  “I could kick myself,” I said. “How could I not make the connection?”

  “What connection?”

  I got in the trunk of the Packard and opened my suitcase and fumbled for my packet of field notes from ’32. 1 thumbed through the notebook pages quickly, like a jumbled card hand I was trying to make sense of.

  “Here,” I said, my finger on the line. “The address is 164 East 127th. Damn! How could I not put this together.”

  “Put what together?”

  I got my nine millimeter out of my suitcase, slipped it in my topcoat pocket, shut the trunk back up.

  “Come on,” I said. I cut diagonally across the street, getting honked at by a cabbie, to whom I displayed my middle finger, as Evalyn hustled along behind me, doing the best she could in her heels.

  Then we were standing before a storefront; it was a shoe-repair shop. The number was 164.

  “This used to be a spiritualist church,” I said, “run by a pair called Martin Marinelli and Sarah Sivella. They were the spiritualists who, a few days after the kidnapping, made some startling ‘predictions’ about the case.”

  “Oh my. I think I remember you telling me this…”

  “They conjured up the name ‘Jafsie’ before Condon was on the scene, before Condon claimed he’d even thought of the moniker. They predicted a ransom note would be delivered to Colonel Breckinridge’s office. They even predicted the body of a baby would be found in the Sourland Mountains.”

  “Good Lord! And Isidor Fisch was in their congregation? And Violet Sharpe? And Whately?”

  I nodded. I put a hand on her shoulder. “We have to find those fakers, Evalyn. Today.”

  And I got lucky, fast: the guy behind the shoe-repair counter knew where the church had been relocated. It was called the Temple of Divine Power, now.

  “Over on 114th,” the guy said. “Near the East River.”

  “That’s not far, is it?”

  “Hell, no. You could walk it.”

  We drove.

  32

  The Temple of Divine Power announced itself in white letters against a large front window painted a vivid blue; the meeting hours were “2-6-8-10 P.M., Friday through Sunday.” The sign stuck in the window said “Closed,” with a phone number for “Personal Consultations” below, as well as the name “Rev. M. J. Marinelli.” Three steps led up to a similarly blue, painted-out door labeled in white letters, “Entrance.” The temple was only half a storefront: the other half was taken up by a small Italian deli.

  Behind a couple garbage cans was a walk-down to a basement apartment; I went down the steps and knocked on the door and got no response.

  I joined Evalyn on the sidewalk.

  “You could try the phone n
umber,” she suggested. “You could ask about them at that little food market next door.”

  “Maybe they’re in the church, closed or not,” I said, shrugging, and went up and knocked on the narrow Entrance door. Nothing. I could hear something going inside, something that sounded like a motor. I put my ear to the door and there was definitely something going on in there. I tried a second time, knocking so hard the glass rattled. Then I could hear the motor stop.

  And the door cracked open.

  “Yes?” she said.

  She was still very pretty, though she had a double chin now; the eyes were just as brown, flecked gold, the face creamy pale, the lips full and sensuous, though untouched by lip rouge at the moment.

  “Hi, Sarah,” I said.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Yes. Just a moment.” I walked down the steps to Evalyn and said, “See that little café across the street? Get yourself a cup of espresso.”

  “But Nate—Nathan!”

  “I have to handle this one alone.”

  Evalyn’s mouth formed a thin tight line; she wasn’t used to being told what to do. But she nodded, and I watched her cross the street, her heels clicking. A cabbie honked and she gave him the finger. A gloved one.

  “That’s my girl,” I said under my breath.

  I returned to Sister Sarah Sivella, watching me from the cracked-open door of her storefront temple.

  “I remember you,” she said, and her smile was very faint. “I remember that night with you.”

  I grinned at her. “I thought you might. Your husband home?”

  “No.”

  “Good. You want to talk in your apartment downstairs, or in the church?”

  Her eyes tensed. “How did you know the downstairs apartment was ours?”

  “Well, I could be psychic,” I said. “Or just a detective.”

  She let me in. Pleasantly plump now, she was wearing a simple black frock, the sort of thing Evalyn might wear, if she had only a buck ninety-eight to spend and no jewelry. A Hoover stand-up vacuum cleaner leaned against the wall—that had been the sound I’d heard through the door. The walls were stark, as blue as the painted-out window, up to the chair rail, then whitewashed above. There were half a dozen rows of hard, stiff chairs, facing a pulpit, with a blue curtain behind. It looked more than a little like the death chamber at the New Jersey state prison.