“Think you got the real kidnapper, here, do you?”
“Sure. Ellis Parker is the greatest detective alive. It’s an honor serving him.”
“How’s Wendel being treated?”
“Fine. He’s a guest…except for being held under lock and key.”
Small detail.
Parker stuck his head out the door. “Come on in, Nathan.”
I went to him and plucked the cigar out of his mouth. I held it up. “My name stays out here, Ellis. Remember?”
He scowled, but he nodded, and I tossed the cigar away and followed him in.
Paul Wendel was a big, gray, woeful man in a baggy brown suit and no tie. His eyes were dead. His nose was a lumpy, vein-shot thing that would have given W. C. Fields a start. He was sitting on a couch in the small, sparsely furnished parlor; the walls were painted a pale institutional green. There was a bedroom and a bath; no kitchen.
“This is the officer I was telling you about, Paul,” Parker said, pointing a thumb at me.
“Ellis says the Governor will treat me right,” Wendel said to me. His voice was a baritone, lawyer-rich but soggy with self-pity.
“I’m sure he will,” I said.
Parker sat next to Wendel on the couch; Wendel looked at him with the mournful eyes of a basset hound.
“You know, Paul,” the grizzled chief of detectives said, “you could make a lot of money off a confession. You just write a full and frank statement—without them shadings of truth you did for those mobsters’ benefit—and say you were out of your mind at the time, but that now, having regained your proper senses, you realize you did a terrible thing, and you want to make a clean breast of it.”
“Temporary insanity as a defense,” Wendel said, thinking about it.
“You could make a million dollars off the true story of what happened. You and your family could be on easy street for the rest of your life. And you’d be famous.”
“A kidnapping charge I could abide,” Wendel said. “But not murder.”
Parker placed a hand on Wendel’s shoulder. “Paul, I know what you’ve been through. I’m going to try to protect your family, do everything I can in my power, through friends and contacts, to see that your wife and son and daughter are not involved…even though they’re conspirators in the case.”
“They are? Why?”
“’Cause they helped you tend the baby.”
“I need law books. I need to brush up.”
“Well, all right, Paul. We’ll get you some. But you know time is running short. You don’t want the life of this fellow Hauptmann on your conscience.”
Wendel was looking at me. He was a big, sad man with eyes that stuck to you like gum on your shoe.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“That’s not important,” I said.
The eyes widened; then narrowed. “You’re from Chicago.”
The accent.
He turned to Parker. Agitated. “He’s from Chicago!”
I moved closer. “What is it about Chicago that makes you nervous, Mr. Wendel? Al Capone isn’t in Chicago, anymore.”
Wendel raised a palm, as if bestowing a blessing—or saying stop. “I want him to leave, Ellis.”
“Of course, Frank Nitti is still there,” I said. “And Paul Ricca.”
“I want him to leave!”
Parker, confused by this, got up, and escorted me out.
Wendel had never risen off that couch.
In the cool air, Parker said, “You got him riled up. Those names spooked him. Nitti’s a Capone boy, ain’t he?”
“That’s right. Ellis, I’m going to drive you back now. Go get in the car.”
“Who in hell are you ordering around?”
“You. Get in the goddamn car.” He trundled off, muttering. I turned to Deputy Dixon, who was taking this in with wide, confused eyes. “I was never here.”
“Pardon?”
“You didn’t see me today, Willis. Understood?”
“Sure, Nate.” He didn’t really understand, but he knew I meant it.
In the Packard, without turning the engine over, I whirled to Parker. “You blew this one, Ellis. You blew this one big.”
“Did I? I’ll have a confession out of Paul H. Wendel that’ll hold water, before you can say Jack Robinson.”
“You don’t have shit. You ever hear of something called the Lindbergh law? You have put your foot in a great big federal cowpie, Ellis. You’ve kidnapped that son of a bitch; you took him across a state line, you hick bastard.”
“I did nothing of the kind.”
“Your cronies did. Your ‘deputies.’ The pity of it is, I think that psycho back there maybe did have some role in the crime. But you’ll never prove it now.”
“I’ll prove it.”
“Ellis, I’m not reporting to Governor Hoffman on this.”
“You’re not?”
“No. You tell him what you want, when you want. I dropped by the office, but I didn’t see Wendel. You didn’t even tell me you had him ‘under wraps.’”
“What in hell are you up to?”
“I’m up to having no part of this. If Hoffman wants to play your crazy game, that’s up to him. I have no interest in being your accomplice or co-conspirator or any such thing. You mention my name, and I’ll make a career out of testifying against you. Goddamn you! I’ve had your ‘Jersey justice’ up to here. You and Schwarzkopf and Wilentz and all the rest…torture and abduction and fabrication…”
He scowled; it was as nasty a look as I ever got, and I’ve gotten my share. “Then go back to Chicago, why don’t you? You goddamn pantywaist.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “At least there, we stop at rubber hoses. Get out.”
We were at the courthouse in Mount Holly, where the rampant Americana now made me a little sick.
He climbed out and then bent down and peeked in and said, “You’ll be singing a different tune, ’fore long. You’ll be telling your grandchildren you knew Ellis Parker.”
“Maybe I will,” I said. “And you probably were a hell of a detective, before it went to your head. But unless you’re even cagier than I think you are, old man, you’ll likely die in jail.”
He was pondering that as I pulled away.
37
For an estate like Friendship, the study was almost cozy; lots of books, a fireplace, prints and paintings of race horses. A dark, masculine room that hadn’t been used much, or at all, since Evalyn’s husband moved out. I sat at a mahogany desk about the size of the Packard and used the phone. It was a long-distance call, but I figured Evalyn could afford it.
I couldn’t get Frank Nitti right away, of course. The number I had on a small slip of paper in my billfold was that of Louis Campagna, the cold-eyed, putty-faced Capone enforcer who since his mentor’s incarceration had become Nitti’s right-hand man. Actually, I had to go through somebody who answered that number, gave me another number, which got me to Campagna, who had me give him the number I was at, and finally Nitti called me, five minutes later.
“So what do you have, Nate?”
“Not a lot,” I said. I felt uneasy. I always felt uneasy talking to Nitti. “I just thought I should touch base.”
“I know you, Nate. You wouldn’t call unless you thought you had something.”
“Well, Frank,” I said, feeling awkward calling him that, “I been nosing around, talking to people, and it’s pretty clear this Hauptmann character is a patsy. For one thing, the lawyer the Hearst people provided him was a guy named Reilly, who…”
“Yeah, yeah, the Bull of Brooklyn, Frankie Yale’s old mouthpiece. ‘Death House’ Reilly. That I know.”
“Well, it smells, wouldn’t you say? And none other than Capone’s old lawyer Sam Leibowitz also offered his services to Hauptmann; telling the world his client was guilty seemed to be his idea of fair representation…”
“Sure, sure. All this I know. Nate, tell me something I don’t know.”
Getti
ng off to a swell start: Nitti aggravated with me already.
“Well,” I went on, “the late Isidor Fisch was clearly some kind of small-time hustler—smuggling furs, probably smuggling dope, too, for Luciano, working out of East Harlem, which is Luciano’s turf, after all. Also a petty con man and maybe a hot-money fence. Hauptmann was his pal, maybe even his accomplice in fur and dope smuggling—maybe—but not in the kidnapping or extortion or anything.”
“So Fisch was just a fence who bought some marked bills?”
“No, that’s not my reading of it at all. I think Fisch plays a bigger role in this than that. Fisch seems involved in the extortion itself and maybe the kidnapping. He and two of the Lindbergh servants, including the dame who supposedly killed herself, belonged to a spiritualist church right across the street from Fisch’s apartment house.”
There was a pause.
Then Nitti said: “I can’t see Al getting Luciano or Madden or Costello or any of the East-Coast guys involved in this. They’re too smart. Dutch Schultz, maybe. If this little Fisch is the only connection to the people we do business with…”
“No. There’s also a guy named Wendel.”
“Wendel?”
“He’s a disbarred lawyer. A half-nuts con man who tried to scam Capone a few years back.”
“Paul Wendel?”
Nitti knowing the name made my skin crawl.
“That’s him. There’s a story I haven’t confirmed yet that Wendel approached Capone with the kidnap plan. At the moment, some hick cops have got Wendel under lock-and-key and armed guard, out in the boonies, squeezing worthless confessions out of him like popping pimples.”
There was urgency in his voice; whether this news made him happy, angry, worried or what, I could not read. “Is this going to come back to Al? Or the Waiter?”
“Ricca’s name has not come up,” I said. “Wendel, and the inimitable Gaston Means, who I also talked to, are bad witnesses. They are both such fucking liars and con men that if they do tell the truth, no one will be able to tell. Both of ’em are being held in the nuthouse, by the way. Well, two different nuthouses.”
“Their testimony would be worthless?”
“Unless somebody checked out their stories, and came up with better witnesses. And time is goddamn short for that; Hauptmann sits down in a couple weeks, you know. How well do you know Gaston Means?”
“Know of him, is all.”
“It occurs to me that enlisting the likes of Wendel and Means, unreliable as they are, would be a stroke of genius on somebody’s part—whether Capone or Ricca.”
“How the hell do you figure that?”
“Well, even lunatics like Wendel and Means know enough not to cross Capone, or Ricca. Means likes his skin too much, and Wendel had an instructive close call with Capone back around ’30. Yet in their way, these guys are savvy crooks, with connections in the underworld and elsewhere. They also both got more balls than sense. So they could get the job done. But suppose the kidnapping goes awry? Capone and Ricca had to know this thing was risky at best, that it might just blow up in everybody’s face.”
“I wouldn’t trust screwballs like Wendel or Means with the garbage.”
“Ah, but Frank, that’s the beauty part. Even if Means or Wendel decide to talk, were dumb enough to finger Capone and Ricca—who would believe them? With their records, with their individual eccentricities, they make the perfect fall guys.”
There was a pause; I let him think. Then he said: “So what’s going to happen?”
“I’m working to try to clear Hauptmann. That’s what Governor Hoffman’s paying me to do. I’m finding a lot out, but so far I don’t see any of it doing any good.”
“You don’t see this coming back to Chicago. You don’t see this landing in the Outfit’s lap.”
“No. Not yet, anyway.” The hell of it was, I didn’t know whether Nitti wanted it to, or not.
“Okay,” Nitti said. “Okay. Appreciate you checkin’ in, Nate. You’re a good boy.”
The phone clicked dead.
I hung up.
“Who were you talking to, Nate?”
I turned in the chair and saw Evalyn standing in the doorway of the study. How long she’d been there, I didn’t know. She looked a trifle confused. She was wearing flowing wide-legged black slacks and a black cashmere sweater with pearls; and looked sporty and stylish, but a tad frazzled. It had been a long day for her, too.
I stood, smiled, approached her; put my hands on her tiny waist. “Contact of mine in Chicago,” I said. “Bouncing a few ideas back and forth.”
“Oh,” she said, vaguely troubled. Then that look transformed itself into a girlish smile. “Nate, I have exciting news. The New Haven trip was a success!”
“Huh?” I’d damn near forgotten that was what she’d been up to today: trying to follow the “lead” of the long-ago Edgar Cayce reading. This would be rich.
“You’re going to be proud of me. I don’t even want to freshen up. Let’s go in the other room and talk.”
Once again that fireplace was aglow, in a room otherwise dim, and she led me before it, where she curled up catlike on the Oriental carpet to bask in the warmth of the fire. It painted her a lush orange. I stood over her and suggested I get us some drinks from the nearby liquor cart; she agreed, requesting champagne (“To celebrate”), studying the fire, smiling enigmatically, looking at once as sophisticated as a Vogue cover girl and as naive as a Girl Scout wishing she had a wienie to roast.
She sipped her wine and, sitting Indian-style next to her, I sipped my Bacardi.
She said, “Was your day eventful?”
I had already decided not to tell her about Wendel’s captivity; it could only get her in trouble. I gave her a brief rundown of what Parker had told me about his suspect, and left it at that.
“Do you think this Wendel fellow might be the kidnapper, or at least involved in the kidnapping somehow?”
“It’s possible. But Parker’s pursuing that angle. We have to look elsewhere. Now, Evalyn, I know you’re dying to tell me what you’ve discovered. And I,” I lied, “am dying to hear all about it.”
She sat up, striking a more serious posture: “In your notes, Nate, you wrote that Edgar Cayce spoke of a house in a ‘mill section’ on the east side of New Haven. In the region of ‘Cordova,’ he said.”
“Only there is no Cordova.”
She smiled; her eyes sparkled like the champagne in her glass. “But there is a Dover section. Some interpretation is required, remember? A man in a trance pronounces things indistinctly; he gathers information from the haze, after all.”
“I guess,” I said, somewhat impressed by the Cordova/Dover notion, but not bowled over.
“Garboni and I,” she said, “were able to locate a densely built-up mill section in East New Haven. We stopped at a filling station there, inquiring about an area called ‘Cordova,’ and were informed that just across the Quinnipiac River from New Haven there was a Dover section.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Then I asked if he knew of an Adams Street. That was the street that Cayce said led to Scharten Street.”
“Right.” This was truly idiotic. I was embarrassed to be having this conversation. I sipped my Bacardi. Maybe I’d get laid, later, if I could keep a straight face through all this horse-doodle.
She was as serious as the portrait of her husband’s daddy over the fireplace. “The gas-station man didn’t know of an Adams Street, so I asked him if he knew of a street that might sound similar to ‘Adams.’ He suggested Chatham Street.”
Well, that was pretty close.
“We went to Chatham Street, Garboni and I, and we followed Cayce’s directions. The child, according to Cayce in his trance, was supposed to have been taken first to a two-story shingled house, then moved to another house nearby—a brown house—that was two-tenths of a mile from the end of ‘Adams’ Street.”
“Right. I remember, more or less.”
She grinned. “The h
ouse number Cayce gave was Seventy-Three. And do you know what we found at Seventy-Three Chatham Street? A two-story shingled house.”
“No kidding.” Those must be scarcer than hens’ teeth.
“Next we turned right from a point two-tenths of a mile from the waterfront end of Chatham, and found a brown store building.”
“What was the name of the street?”
“Not Scharten,” she admitted. “Maltby.”
“Evalyn, that’s not even close, phonetically or backwards or sideways.”
“I know. Maybe it used to be Scharten or something closer. Anyway, the brown building was there: an apartment over a neighborhood grocery store. We went into the store, but the manager wasn’t there, so we kept asking around the neighborhood, if anybody knew who’d been the tenant in the apartment over that store, back in 1932. We were referred to a local gossip, in a candy store, a few blocks away.”
All in all, this was sounding like a trip I was glad I didn’t make.
“We went into the candy store and it was indeed run by a very talkative old woman. We asked her if she’d ever heard any rumors about the Lindbergh baby being in the area.”
“Christ, that was subtle, Evalyn.”
She frowned defensively. “Well, she had! And Nate, I hadn’t even mentioned the apartment over the grocery store to her. But out of the blue, she said there was a rumor that, for a short time, a couple was caring for the Lindbergh baby, in that very apartment! That there was a house-to-house search of the neighborhood, in the early weeks or maybe even days after the kidnapping, and the couple took off. The house search made a big impression on her, and everybody in the neighborhood. She called it, ‘King Herod time.’”
“Why?”
Evalyn shrugged, smiled. “Seems the police were taking the diapers off every baby around, to check the sex.”
I tried to express my skepticism gently. “You know, Evalyn, I remember hearing about a New Haven search, because some of the construction workers who built Lindbergh’s house were from there, and were early suspects—so that could naturally give rise to a rumor like that. It doesn’t mean…”
“Nate, there’s something else. There was a name in Cayce’s notes. An Italian name, remember? The man who Cayce said was the leader of the kidnap gang.”
Stolen Away Page 46
