Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  “And how do they know Condon?”

  “Why, Frank—didn’t Pat O’Rourke mention that? Jafsie attended that spiritualist church, too!”

  His mouth dropped open, just a bit. He swallowed and scribbled something on his notepad.

  I shrugged. “I don’t think Jafsie is a bad enough person, or smart enough person either, to be part of this extortion scheme. But he was a visible, easily manipulated blowhard—I think he may have been Marinelli and Sivella’s grade-school teacher, in Harlem—and a prime candidate to funnel information to Lindbergh, and to funnel cash back through to them. The Marinellis even gave that hotel-room séance I attended at Princeton to help prime the pump, mentioning Jafsie by name and nudging Breckinridge about a note he’d receive soon; and maybe to get some play in the press for the veracity of Sister Sarah’s psychic abilities. That was a stupid risk, and the mistake that should have cracked this thing wide open. But it didn’t.”

  “You’re saying this spiritualist church group, led by Fisch, got the cemetery money. And that they never had the child?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What about the sleeping suit that was delivered to Jafsie?”

  “That could have happened a couple ways. Jafsie slept in the nursery, the night he came to Lindbergh with the note from the ‘kidnappers.’ I caught him red-handed going through a chest. He took any number of things to use to identify the child—some of these were toys he asked for…maybe you remember the safety pins he took and showed to ‘Cemetery John’ and asked him to identify?”

  Wilson nodded.

  “Well, he may have taken the sleeping suit at that time, as a souvenir, or for ID purposes. But I think it’s more likely that Violet Sharpe provided the sleeping suit.”

  “Violet Sharpe?”

  “Yes. The child had a sizeable, unspecified number of the sleepers that were exactly the same. A good many of them were kept in the other nursery, at the Morrow estate at Englewood—where Violet lived and worked. Everybody wondered why the sleeper seemed freshly laundered, and why it took two days for the ‘kidnappers’ to provide Jafsie this proof.”

  “Well, the answer is obvious,” Wilson said, almost testily.

  “They had to go back to the woods where they’d buried the child, to remove the sleeper.”

  “Do you really think that’s likely? Besides, these are extortionists, not kidnappers—they don’t have the kid, they never did have the kid. Didn’t you wonder why they didn’t have better proof than a fucking sleeping suit? Why not a photo, or a phone call from the tot—he could talk a little, you know.”

  “If he was dead, he couldn’t talk.”

  “If he was alive, and they didn’t have him, he couldn’t talk, either, not for them, anyway. But one of their inside contacts, either Violet at Englewood or Ollie at Hopewell, could take another sleeper from a drawer in either nursery—and of course the sleeper would seem freshly laundered. It hadn’t been worn since it was last washed!”

  Wilson was thinking. I knew I’d made a dent. I let him think for a bit.

  Then I pressed on. “Now the actual kidnappers, the bootleggers who worked for Hassel and Greenberg, they also know that Capone has picked up his cards and gone home. They, too, figure that there’s extortion dough for the asking. So they contact this respectable fella in Norfolk, who has some vague connections to the Lindberghs through society, a shipbuilder they know ’cause he’s repaired boats for guys in their line of work.”

  “John Curtis?” Wilson said, dumbfounded. “That hoaxer?”

  “He wasn’t a hoaxer, Frank. He was telling the truth. So pretty soon Curtis is contacting Lindbergh, and now we have two extortion groups who are active—both with inside information about the kidnapping, and neither of whom at this point possesses the baby.”

  “Heller, isn’t this getting a little Byzantine?”

  “This case has been Byzantine since the day I showed up in March of 1932. If you’d care to point out any one part of this case that has ever made rational sense, I’ll slip on my raincoat and go home. Right now.”

  “Go on. Go on.”

  “Let me touch on Gaston Means. He also has been told, by Ricca probably or maybe Hassel and Greenberg, that Capone is cutting his losses; Means has been told to stop trying to contact Lindbergh through the likes of Guggenheim and others. So what does Means do? He begins using his inside information, not to swindle Lindbergh, but over to one side, where Capone is unlikely to notice or care…he focuses on a soft-hearted, deep-pocketed society matron, Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean.”

  Wilson made a note.

  I went on. “Now the payoff in the cemetery takes place, and the kid isn’t returned, and all of a sudden it’s all over the papers; so Capone obviously now knows that somebody is interloping. Capone also knows from the papers that Lindbergh and Jafsie are trying to get back in touch with the ‘kidnappers,’ and are obviously willing to pay more money, and this thing Capone has put in motion just seems to have no end, to be completely out of fucking control. Capone and Ricca don’t necessarily know for sure that these extortionists are anybody who was really in on the kidnapping—it could be somebody from the outside entirely. Whatever the case, Capone decides to bring this farce to a halt. He has a baby planted in the woods not far from the Lindbergh estate…”

  “Hold it, Heller! That baby was identified by its father, for God’s sake.”

  “That baby was a pile of decomposed bones that couldn’t even be identified as to sex; the family pediatrician said he couldn’t ID that kid as the Little Eaglet if you paid him ten million bucks! Those woods were trampled over and over again by search parties and telephone linemen, and in any case, that corpse was decomposed way beyond what it should’ve, in that period of time, with weather that cold.”

  “There was an identifying garment…”

  “Yes, a few scraps of cloth with blue thread. It was the blue thread that Betty Gow recognized, because she’d made this makeshift garment the night of the kidnapping, with thread provided by Elsie Whately—the butler’s wife. I’m sure Capone could have reached out through his various intermediaries and procured that simple spool of thread from his accomplices among the Lindbergh servants. Or, the little shirt itself may have been within Capone’s grasp.”

  “The garment was planted, you’re saying.”

  “Like the little body was planted. It was an act of closure, on Capone and Ricca’s part. To shut down the extortion schemes. To put an end to this goddamn case.”

  Wilson was thinking. “Capone was in Atlanta at this point.”

  “Right. And optimistic about getting out via traditional avenues, such as his lawyers and bribery, not outlandish schemes like the ill-fated Lindbergh snatch. And Ricca’s on the outside, cleaning house. Ricca uses the beer war between Waxey Gordon and the New York mob as a convenient front for bumping off Hassel and Greenberg and maybe a few others involved in the conspiracy; Bob Conroy and his wife get iced about this time, too.”

  “No,” Wilson said flatly. “Conroy and his wife, that was a double suicide.”

  “My ass! And why in fucking hell didn’t you ever tell me you finally tracked Conroy down? I must’ve called you about Conroy half a dozen times.”

  Rather meekly, he said, “You were off the case, at that point. Never occurred to me, frankly. If you’re right about all this rampant assassination, why was Gaston Means allowed to stay among the living?”

  “Why kill Means? Nobody believes anything he says, anyway. Besides, I was closing in on Hassel and Greenberg, right before they got hit. I found out about them by beating their names out of Means…but before I could follow up, they got theirs in the ‘beer war.’”

  “You think Means sold them out to Ricca.”

  “I sure do. That allowed Means to go to court, and lay everything on Hassel and Greenberg, who were nice and dead and blameable. Meanwhile, Violet Sharpe starts coming unhinged after the little corpse in the woods turns up; however she’s been involved, to whatever extent�
�and she has two unexplained g’s in her bank account, remember—she certainly never counted on the baby getting killed, and of course she has no way of knowing that the baby they found wasn’t the real Lindy, Jr.”

  “So she takes poison,” Wilson said.

  “Or she’s murdered. No one actually saw her take poison. She was ill, taking medicine for her nerves; maybe she was poisoned by Whately.”

  “He didn’t work at the Englewood estate.”

  “He was there frequently. They were a close-knit ‘family’ of servants, those two estates. At any rate, she was another loose end tied off. Whately’s death strikes me as similarly suspicious. I think looking into that—seeing why a guy who was healthy all his life suddenly dies of an ulcer—would be a nice use of the taxpayers’ money. Was there an autopsy?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “Even if it was natural causes, what stress exactly caused this bleeding ulcer? Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it? And wasn’t Fisch’s death convenient? Speaking of whom, I’m not precisely sure how Fisch and Wendel intersect. Wendel may or may not have been involved in the cemetery extortion; I do know that Wendel’s sister lived in back of St. Raymond’s.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Jot that down, too. At any rate, Fisch wound up with at least part of the money, and either his illness or worry about Capone or Ricca or even the cops catching up with him sent him scurrying off to Germany, leaving some cash stashed with his buddy Hauptmann.”

  “So you see Hauptmann as a dupe in this,” Wilson said, with a mocking smile.

  “The only thing he may be guilty of is being in on Fisch’s dope smuggling, using furs as a partial front. But I doubt even that.” I cracked my knuckles. “Anyway, that’s what I think happened. As for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., he’s salted away somewhere. I have a good idea where he was kept immediately after the kidnapping—in New Haven, Connecticut. Where he is now, I haven’t a clue. But Capone and Ricca aren’t about to bump him off—there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  Wilson raised an eyebrow, smiled tightly and put down his pencil. “Nate, this is an interesting theory, and you’ve mentioned some things that I admit I didn’t know—but you completely ignore and overlook the overwhelming evidence gathered against Bruno Hauptmann.”

  I laughed. “Christ, Frank, I shouldn’t dignify that with a response. I’ve never seen such shameless tampering with, and concoction of, evidence…or so many lying witnesses from Condon to Whited and Hochmuth and even Slim Lindbergh himself.”

  “You’re calling Charles Lindbergh a liar?”

  “Yes. I think he was prompted into lying by police who assured him that they had the right man. Did you ever give Slim that reassurance, Frank?”

  Wilson said nothing.

  “I’m not suggesting there was any great police conspiracy to frame Hauptmann, or even that the Outfit sought to frame him. Hauptmann dropped himself into the fall-guy slot by being Fisch’s friend and business partner. And then forces somewhat independently rallied to ‘help’ him fit that role. You know how sloppy cops like Schwarzkopf and Welch think, Frank—they center on their suspect, led there by minimal but fairly convincing evidence, and then they proceed to fudge this, lie about that, suppress one thing, fake the other. Witnesses are made to feel with absolute certainty that they are testifying against a guilty man—the cops have assured them thus. So, to do the ‘right’ thing so that society can have retribution, and/or for the brief moment center stage in the public eye, or, hell, just to share in reward money, an otherwise honest witness tells a little lie. Distorts a piece of evidence just slightly. What harm is a little embroidery, after all, in so large and official a cloth? So a cop fudges ladder evidence, and a teller at a movie theater makes a bogus eyewitness ID, and a prosecutor withholds letters and ledgers that back up Hauptmann’s ‘Fisch story,’ and on, and on, and on.”

  He was frowning. “You’re casting doubt on the reputations of a lot of fine public officials, and good citizens.”

  “No, I’m not. Because there is no ‘doubt’ about this. Hauptmann was framed; he was a German carpenter who fit the psychological profile and the miniscule evidence on hand. He was perfect. Now, I do think the Outfit may have helped from the sidelines. ‘Death House’ Reilly and Sam Leibowitz, for example, who volunteered their legal services, both had strong Capone ties. So do a lot of New Jersey and New York City cops, whether you like to hear me say it or not.”

  “You’re also casting doubt,” he said stiffly, “on the work the IRS Intelligence Unit performed. Jesus, Heller, we’re the people who put Capone away. You can’t dream that the Outfit’s influence extends to…”

  “No. That’s why I came to you. One of the reasons, anyway. You have the manpower and the skills to follow up my leads and my scenario. You can do it in a short period of time, which if we want to keep Hauptmann’s ass from getting scorched is a must. And here’s the really sweet part, Frank—you can get Capone again, big-time.”

  He raised his chin; his eyes sharpened.

  “You nailed him once, but only temporarily. He’ll be out in a few years. Imagine if you could pin a murder and kidnapping rap on him. Imagine pinning the Lindbergh kidnapping on him. You’d be more famous than J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “Fame means little to me, Heller.”

  Maybe so, but he sure was doing his best to climb the bureaucratic ladder.

  “How about the simple satisfaction of finally solving this goddamn case?” I said.

  “Heller, this case is solved.”

  “Frank, after all I’ve laid out in front of you, how can you…”

  “Look,” he said edgily, “most of these people you’re talking about are dead. Fisch, Hassel, Greenberg, Violet Sharpe, Ollie Whately…”

  “Whately’s wife Elsie is in Great Britain; she had to be at least peripherally involved. Get her!”

  “Heller, she’s dead, too.”

  “What? What…what were the circumstances?”

  “I don’t know exactly.” He shrugged. “Natural causes, I understand.”

  “Jesus! Find out! All these deaths are a little goddamn convenient, don’t you think?”

  He was shaking his head slowly, no. “If there is anything left to solve here, short of Hauptmann fingering his confederates at the last minute, there’s little chance at this point of clearing it up. Too many dead. The rest are fringe characters like Means, Wendel, Jafsie, the Marinellis. Dead ends. Red herrings.”

  I leaned forward, put my hands on his desk. “You’re one of the few people on earth, Frank, who can pick up the phone, reopen this investigation and save Hauptmann’s life.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t want to save Hauptmann’s life. Even if your ‘scenario’ is correct, and it strikes me as extremely farfetched and fanciful, I still see Hauptmann as a major figure—Fisch’s accomplice. There’s no doubt in my mind, Heller: Hauptmann is guilty, one hundred percent. He had a previous record in Germany and is, without a doubt, as cold, hard and vicious a criminal as I have ever run into.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Let me read you something,” he said, and he reached behind him and plucked the picture of Lindbergh off the wall. With a sad, proud smile, he read: “To Frank J. Wilson—if it had not been for you fellows being in on the case, Hauptmann would not have gone to trial and your organization deserves the full credit for his apprehension.’”

  I stood. “Well, jeez, Frank—I’d hate like hell to fuck up your inscribed photo with the truth.”

  He gave me a sharp look; he put the photo back on the wall, hastily, and it swung crookedly on its nail, unnoticed by him. “Heller, I gave you a fair hearing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got real work to do.”

  I leaned on his desk. “Let me just ask you something. Just one thing. You were on the Bob Conroy case, weren’t you? You and Lt. Finn from Manhattan. Did you see the crime scene? This ‘double suicide’?”

  He nodded.

  “Well,
come on, Frank—what did your nose tell you? I don’t know anything about the case, but that ‘suicide’ had to smell. It had to be Capone and Ricca tyin’ up loose ends.”

  “You want to look at the file?” he asked. And he started riffling through a stack of manila folders. “You can look at the damn file.”

  “What’s it doing on your desk?”

  “It’s a counterfeiting-related case. I told you, that’s the area I’m working in right now.”

  “Why is it counterfeiting-related?”

  “They were living in poverty, Conroy and his wife…”

  “Lying low, it sounds like.”

  He shrugged that off. “Well, they’d come up with a new scheme, it appears, ’cause they had a neat little printing press in their flop, and plates that turned out embarrassingly good counterfeit money.”

  “That doesn’t sound like somebody getting ready to commit suicide.”

  “Who knows why people kill themselves? Here. Here it is. Sit down and look at it, if you like, but I got to get back to business.”

  I started flipping through the file, and came to a mug-shot photo of a woman, an attractive, hard-looking pockmarked brunette. I froze.

  “Heller? Nate? What’s wrong with you? You look like you saw a ghost.”

  “No, uh, it’s nothing,” I said, and I sat and I quietly read the file and then I set it on Wilson’s desk, and thanked him for his time.

  “You look funny,” he said. “Don’t you feel good?”

  “See you, Frank,” I said, and went out.

  I leaned against the wall in the hall, government workers moving briskly by. Had I seen a ghost? In a way.

  The better half of the Conroy double suicide, Bob’s wife, Bernice, was someone I’d seen before. Someone I’d briefly known. She’d been a blonde, then. It had been years ago—a little over four years, but the memory of her was vivid.