Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

“Where are they?”

  “That’s something you can’t know, Nate. Something you can’t ever know.”

  “Frank. I can’t let Hauptmann fry. He’s a fucking patsy, and I can stop it, now, all I gotta do is sit that kid on the Governor’s desk, and…”

  “Don’t get yourself worked up. You’ll start bleeding or something.”

  “I got to get out of here, I got to stop them, if I don’t…”

  “Hauptmann’s dead.”

  “Exactly!”

  “No. I mean: Hauptmann’s dead.”

  “What? He’s…what?”

  “Executed couple nights ago,” Nitti said, matter-of-factly. “By the State of New Jersey.”

  “What the fuck day is this?”

  “Monday.”

  “What date?”

  “April sixth.”

  “Jesus. Jesus.”

  “You were hurt bad, Nate. We brought you back here, but you lost a lot of blood.”

  “Fuck! You want me to believe I was in a coma or something. Bullshit, Frank. You kept me doped up! You kept me out of commission, out of the game.”

  “This is a hospital, Nate. Don’t say foolish things.”

  “Hell. You run this fucking place.”

  He shrugged. “What’s the difference? You’re alive, and Hauptmann isn’t. I’d suggest you go along about your business.”

  “They…must’ve given him a few days’ reprieve. He was supposed to go at the end of March.”

  Nitti was nodding. “Yeah. Right at the last minute, that hick detective Ellis Parker had Wendel arrested for confessing; it even went before a grand jury. They had to give Hauptmann a temporary stay.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Wilentz and Wendel got together and repudiated the confession. Wendel told tales of getting the shit beat out of him in basements and so on. Ellis Parker and a bunch of his boys are under arrest, now.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised. Goddamn!”

  “Easy, now. Take it easy.”

  “What about the Lindbergh kid?”

  “They found that baby dead a long time ago.”

  I tried to sit up but couldn’t. “You expect me to keep quiet about…”

  “Yes.”

  Rage and frustration bubbled in me; if I hadn’t been so goddamn weak, so fucking tired, I might have screamed or even grabbed the little bastard. But all I could manage was, “Or I’m fish food, Frank?”

  He stood; he patted my arm, like a father soothing an infant. “Be a good boy, Nate. You think I let Hauptmann die? I didn’t let him die. Your pal Lindbergh did. You think that phony son of a bitch deserves his son? The only thing I’d like about that kid turning up is the embarrassment that phony flyboy would suffer. Any time anybody suggests to him his son might still be alive, he bites their goddamn head off. That boy is with a family who loves him. He’ll have a good home, a good upbringing, out of the public eye. What’s wrong with that?”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. The image of the little boy clinging to Carl Belliance, saying “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” popped into my brain. The little boy loved the father he had, the father he knew. Would it be such a wonderful thing to yank him away from that? Hadn’t once been enough?

  But the thought passed as quickly as it came. “That’s a bunch of bullshit, Frank, and you damn well know it.”

  “You go looking for that boy, Nate, and you probably are going to have a dead kid on your conscience.”

  “Why…what…?”

  His lip curled ever so slightly; it was almost a sneer. “You think Paul and Al are gonna let this come out? You saw what the Waiter was gonna do; you were part of what he was gonna do. You go public, or you go looking, you’d be giving the Belliances a death sentence, and probably the boy, too. You want that on your conscience, Nate? You go ahead. You go look for ’em. I won’t be able to protect them, then. Or you.”

  I thought about that. Finally I said, “What about you and Ricca?”

  His smile was faint but it was there. “Now I have something, now I know something, something I can use, where Paul and Al are concerned. Now I’m not so worried about Al getting out, or Paul moving up.”

  “Ricca could go looking for the Belliances and the boy…”

  “Not without crossing me. Paul’s not ready to openly defy me just yet. And by the time he ever does, this will be ancient history.”

  I shook my head, smiled mirthlessly. “You would never have let this come back on the Outfit, would you, Frank?”

  “Never,” he admitted.

  Hauptmann wasn’t the only patsy in this case.

  Now I was worried. “Maybe you’re right that Ricca won’t go after the Belliances and their ‘son.’ But he sent those fuckers to kill me, too, Frank. What’s going to keep him from doing that again?”

  He patted my arm. “Me, Nate. And you. Our respective reputations. I told Paul you were took care of. You been paid off. He’s heard about you, about the Lingle case; he knows you’re…discreet.”

  I laughed harshly; it made my side hurt. “He figures I’m for sale. Maybe I am, at that. So what’s this worth to you, Frank? How much am I gonna get for keeping quiet about the ‘crime of the century’? It ought to be worth a lot.”

  “Oh, it is. And I think you’re gonna like what you get.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You get to wake up tomorrow, Nate.”

  “Oh.” I tasted my tongue again. “Well. That is fair.”

  “I’m even throwin’ in picking up your hospital bill.”

  I was shaking my head. “Frank, there are people who are going to want explanations from me. Governor Hoffman, for one….”

  He gestured with an open palm. “You came to Chicago to follow up a lead. You got shot up by some nasty fellows who didn’t like you. You wound up in the hospital. But the lead didn’t pan out. End of story.”

  “I got no choice in this at all, do I, Frank?”

  “Nate, every man has free will. Every man can choose his destiny. This is America. In America, a man can do whatever he thinks is right.”

  I might’ve cracked wise, but he believed that shit; he was an immigrant who made good.

  “Well,” I said. “That family loves that little boy. And he loves them. And you’re telling me, they’re protected, they’re off somewhere raising that little boy, living a nice quiet life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. I guess I can live with that.”

  “My point exactly,” Nitti said, and patted my arm and went out.

  A few days later I was back in my office, trying to pick up the pieces of my life, my health and my business. I was calling a list of my regular credit-check customers on the phone when the damn thing rang under my hand and scared the hell out of me.

  “A-1 Detective Agency,” I said. “Nathan Heller speaking.” “Nate,” a voice said. A familiar, throaty female voice, conveyed in that one word a world of disappointment. “Evalyn,” I said.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I was going to call tonight,” I lied. I did intend to call her, but I wasn’t near ready. Governor Hoffman I intended to write, refunding the balance of my retainer minus the days I’d worked and my somewhat padded expenses.

  “What happened, Nate?”

  “I just got out of the hospital. I was following up a lead, and stepped on the wrong toes. I got shot in the side, actually.”

  “I see,” she said.

  It was an odd reaction: I thought when she heard I’d been shot, I might buy myself some sympathy. For Evalyn Walsh McLean, her response was uncharacteristically cold.

  “By the time I woke up,” I said, “it was too late. Hauptmann was already dead. The cause was already a lost one. I’m sorry, Evalyn.”

  “You disappoint me, Nathan.”

  Now I was feeling tired; just plain tired. “Why is that, Evalyn?”

  “You’re not the only private detective in the world, you know.”

  “What�
�s that supposed to mean, exactly, Evalyn?”

  “I was worried about you.” Now I could hear emotion in her voice. “I hired someone to look for you, to see if you were all right, to see if you were in trouble….”

  Oh shit.

  “Well, that was sweet, Evalyn, but…”

  “Sweet! The first thing the operative discovered was that you’d made a phone call from my house to a number in Chicago. The number was that of a business, a ‘cigar stand,’ owned by a certain Mr. Campagna, who is a Chicago mobster, as you well know.”

  “Evalyn.”

  The husky voice sounded strangely brittle, now. “You lied to me. You were reporting back to them, weren’t you?”

  “This isn’t anything you should pursue, Evalyn. It could be dangerous for you, if you did.”

  “Are you threatening me, now?”

  “No! Hell, no…I just don’t want you to get yourself in trouble.”

  “You were in the hospital, all right. And I know it was a gunshot wound, and I was concerned, I am concerned, and maybe there’s a good explanation, maybe you can make me feel good about you again, but can you answer one thing?”

  I sighed. “What’s that, Evalyn?”

  “Why were you in a hospital where the chief of surgery is the in-law of some top gangster?”

  “Your private detective found this out, did he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Evalyn, those ‘gangsters’ run Chicago. It’s just a coincidence. Don’t make it something it’s not.”

  “Do they run you?”

  “Sometimes, yes. When they want to. And when I want to keep breathing. I sometimes accommodate them.”

  “Bruno Richard Hauptmann is dead.”

  “So I hear. What exactly can I do about that at this juncture?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  “Evalyn. Evalyn, are you crying?”

  “Fuck you, Heller! Fuck you, Heller.”

  Most women get around to saying that to me, eventually. Even the toney ones.

  “I’m sorry, Evalyn. I’m sorry I’m not what you’d like me to be.”

  “You still could be. I know you’re a good man, underneath it all.”

  “Oh, really? Does that mean the chauffeur’s position is still open?”

  “Now you’re being cruel,” she said, and I’d hurt her. I’d meant to, but I was sorry.

  I told her so.

  The earnestness of her voice would’ve broken my heart, if I’d let it. “Nate, that little boy is out there somewhere…I just know he is. If we can find him, we can clear Richard Hauptmann’s name.”

  “A posthumous pardon will leave him just as dead as he is now. Maybe history will clear the poor bastard; but I’m not going to. Besides, I’m not so convinced that kid is alive.”

  “I’m going to keep looking, Nate. I’ll never stop.”

  “Yes, you will, Evalyn. You’ll find some new cause. There’s always another cause to support, just like there’s always another diamond to buy.”

  “You are cruel.”

  “Sometimes. But not foolish. Goodbye, Evalyn.”

  And I hung up.

  I just sat there for a while, and then I slammed my fist on the desk, and the phone jumped, and I split a fucking stitch. It hurt like hell. I unbuttoned my shirt and there was blood on the bandage. I’d have to go back to the hospital for a little outpatient number. God, it hurt. I started to cry.

  I cried like a baby for several minutes.

  I told myself it was the wound. But there are all kinds of those.

  EPILOGUE

  1936–1990

  42

  I never saw Evalyn again.

  She continued investigating the case, and wrote a series of articles about her experiences for Liberty magazine in 1938; but eventually her obsession subsided. Her husband died in an insane asylum in 1941. In 1946, Evalyn’s daughter—who shared her mother’s first name—took an overdose of sleeping pills and never woke up; Evalyn was heartbroken and died, technically of pneumonia, the next year. Sad as that sounds, there was a typically madcap aspect to Evalyn’s last hours: her bedside was surrounded with as many famous friends and relatives as one of her star-studded dinner parties.

  Many of the people in the case I never saw again. My uneasy “friendship” with Frank Nitti, on the other hand, continued no matter what I did to try to stop it, until he stopped it himself, with his suicide-under-suspicious-circumstances in 1943.

  He and Ricca and Campagna and a few others had just been indicted in the Hollywood movie-union extortion case; the general belief was that Nitti couldn’t face going back to prison. In fact, the recent death of his beloved wife Anna had depressed Nitti, and finally allowed the forceful Ricca to make his move. It was a peaceful overthrow, the force of Ricca’s personality compared to that of the faltering Nitti bringing the Boys over to the Waiter’s side.

  Nitti’s suicide was an act of defiance toward Ricca, whose reign as Chicago crime lord began with a prison sentence.

  The ruthless Waiter, as Nitti predicted, eventually did learn a lesson about fathers and sons. His own son became a drug addict and Ricca, during his rule, banned the Outfit from narcotics trafficking. Ricca became inclined toward concentrating on victimless crimes, like gambling. He spent his declining years using legal tactics to avoid deportation, and died in his sleep in 1972 at the age of seventy-four.

  Capone, of course, never did make his comeback; syphilis caught up with him, and after his stay in Alcatraz, he died a near-vegetable in 1947.

  Some of the minor crooks, like Rosner, Spitale and Bitz, I never had contact with again; no idea what became of them. Some of the cops I ran into now and then, of course.

  Eliot Ness fought syphilis in a different way from Capone—he was the government’s top vice cop during World War II. But Eliot’s glory days faded in the postwar years, after he lost a mayoral bid in Cleveland, where he’d once been so successful as Director of Public Safety. He died an unsuccessful businessman in 1957, right before his autobiography The Untouchables made him posthumously a legend.

  Elmer Irey became the coordinator of the Treasury Department’s law-enforcement agencies, not only the Intelligence Unit but the Secret Service and agents of the Alcohol Tax Unit, Customs, Narcotics Unit and Coast Guard Intelligence. His integrity was unquestioned, and he attacked various investigations regardless of their political implications; because he’d put away Missouri’s political boss Tom Pendergast, he retired in 1946 rather than tangle with the in-coming Truman administration. He died a little over a year later.

  Frank J. Wilson did become the head of the Secret Service, later in 1936, and remained such till 1947. His major accomplishment in that office was cracking down on counterfeiters. After retiring he became security consultant for the Atomic Energy Commission. He died in 1970 at age eighty-three.

  Schwarzkopf was fired by Governor Hoffman in June of 1936. The ex-floorwalker rebounded in an unexpected way: Phillips H. Lord, the radio producer, hired Schwarzkopf at the same rate as his old state-police salary to be an “official police announcer” on Lord’s famous show Gangbusters. During the same period, Schwarzkopf became a trucking executive in New Jersey; good research for a guy working on Gangbusters, I’d say. Like a number of Lindbergh cronies, Schwarzkopf served in unspecified ways overseas during World War II, in Italy and Germany—possibly in the OSS. Anyway, he became, of all things, the chief of police of Iran for five postwar years; doing more OSS/CIA-type stuff? Who knows.

  Ultimately, Schwarzkopf wound up back in New Jersey, heading a newly created law-enforcement agency investigating financial irregularities in state government. Schwarzkopf’s first major investigation was into the Unemployment Compensation Committee, and he soon discovered that the committee’s director had been embezzling. The director’s name? Former Governor Harold Hoffman.

  Hoffman, it seemed, had been embezzling for years, starting with a bank he’d been president of in South Amboy long before he became governor. He
’d lost his reelection bid in ’37, tried again in ’40 and ’46, losing both times, the Wendel case coming back to haunt him. During World War II, he managed to join the ranks of the many Lindbergh-case colonels, serving in the Army Transport Command.

  Harold Hoffinan was a dedicated public servant in many respects, and he threw his career away on Bruno Richard Hauptmann, either because he was gambling on the fame he’d win if he managed to clear the guy; or because he sincerely felt Hauptmann was innocent. He liked wine, women and song, too well apparently, and died in a hotel room in 1954 while under investigation by the man who brought him down—Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf.

  Schwarzkopf died in 1958 of a stomach ailment.

  The Wendel case also brought Ellis Parker down, of course. He and his “deputies” all went to jail. The new “Lindbergh kidnapping law” got ’em. Both father and son went to the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Parker never changed his tune about Wendel’s guilt, and the Cornfield Sherlock’s supporters were lobbying for a presidential pardon when he died in the prison hospital of a brain tumor in 1940. I hear his son died a few years ago.

  Wendel himself had a burst of fame: for one national magazine, he went into a photo studio with actors and posed melodramatic reenactments of the tortures he claimed to have endured. He published a book about his captivity and became something of a celebrity, even a hero. Then he faded into obscurity and I don’t know what the hell became of him.

  Gaston Means, in a prison hospital in 1938 after a heart attack, found FBI agents at his bedside, sent by J. Edgar Hoover to inquire once again about Evalyn’s money. Means smiled his puckish smile at them, winked and passed away.

  John H. Curtis tried for years to have his conviction overturned, but was turned down by the New Jersey Supreme Court. He remained in the boat-building and marine business and was quietly successful. In 1957 he supervised the construction of three replicas of colonial-period British warships that sailed at a major Norfolk festival. He died in 1962, a respected citizen of his community.

  Another prominent Norfolk citizen, Admiral Burrage, never again spoke publicly of the Lindbergh case; he died in 1954. Reverend Dobson-Peacock died in England in 1959.