Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  Schwarzkopf seemed stumped by the forthrightness of the suspect. He looked at Welch, who said, “Mind if I take over?”

  I knew what that would amount to—rubber-hose roulette. So I said, “Excuse me, Colonel. Could I ask Mr. Johnson a few questions?”

  Schwarzkopf, rather stiffly, said, “Certainly. Johnson, this is Detective Heller of the Chicago Police.”

  “Hi, Red,” I said.

  “Hello.”

  “You smoke?”

  “Yah.”

  I looked at Welch. “Get this man a smoke, would you?”

  Welch dug out his own Camels and reluctantly lit the sailor up. The boy sucked the smoke in eagerly.

  I just stood there, letting him smoke and relax.

  Then I said, “How much did you spend on that long-distance call, Red?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You called from a public phone?”

  “Yah.”

  “From Englewood to Hopewell. How much money did you feed the pay phone?”

  “Was thirty-five cents.”

  I looked at Welch, who was standing there like a fireplug, and looking just about as intelligent. I made a writing motion with my finger and he looked at me blankly for a moment, then nodded, and took out his notebook and wrote down what Johnson had just said.

  “What movie did you see, Red?”

  “Saw two. Don’t remember names. Sorry.”

  “Who was in the first one? What was it about?”

  “Uh, funny movie. That fat guy and skinny guy.”

  “Laurel and Hardy?”

  He nodded vigorously.

  “What about the second feature?”

  “Fighter and little kid. Sad picture.”

  I looked at Welch. “The Champ.”

  Welch smirked and scribbled.

  “You know where that ice-cream parlor is?”

  Johnson nodded and reeled off the address; Welch wrote it down.

  “What about this milk bottle they found in your car?”

  He shrugged. “What ’bout it?”

  “What was it doing there?”

  “I guess I forgot to throw it out.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “I bought bottle of milk on my way up to Hartford, Wednesday morning.”

  “Where?”

  “Can’t remember exactly. Guess it was somewhere along the road, near Englewood.”

  “What was the idea of buying a bottle of milk? Somehow I picture you drinking something a little stronger, Red.”

  “No, no. My stomach bad. Doctor told me drink lots of milk.”

  “What doctor?”

  “Morrow family doctor, in Englewood. Forget his name.”

  Welch stepped in. “Now listen, Johnson—where is that baby?”

  “So help me God, I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about it!”

  “You know Betty Gow pretty well?” pressed Welch.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Where’d you meet her?”

  “Up in Maine, over year ago.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I work for Mr. Lamont, and his estate was near Morrow summer place.”

  “When d’you see Betty last?”

  “Sunday. No—Monday night.”

  Welch straight-armed him. “Which—Sunday or Monday?”

  “Both!” Johnson winced with pain.

  “Where did you see her?”

  “In Englewood.”

  Welch grabbed his shirt front, wadding it in a tight fist. “Why did you call her and ask about the baby, the night of the kidnapping?”

  “Because it was on account of baby that she broke her date with me! Naturally, I ask about baby.”

  “Ever been in Lindbergh’s home?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  “Two…three times, I think.”

  “When were you there last?”

  “Maybe two weeks ago.”

  “Know the layout of the place pretty well, do you?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Ever been in the nursery?”

  “No, never.”

  “Ever been on the second floor?”

  “Yah.”

  “Where on the second floor?”

  “In Betty’s room. That where she can have visitor after working hours.”

  “Where’s that from the nursery?”

  “Next to it, I think.”

  Johnson was answering the questions as fast as Welch could fire them; the sailor was holding up under it.

  Welch let go of the sailor’s shirt and turned to Schwarzkopf and said, quietly, “Clear this shack out—leave me alone with him, and I’ll get you the truth.”

  Schwarzkopf nodded; that seemed to sound good to him.

  “Colonel,” I said, “Inspector…let’s step outside a second, fellas, what say.”

  We stood outside the shack; nearby were the stone walls of the front gate, beyond which reporters milled like ants in search of a picnic. They were dying to know what was going on in our glorified outhouse.

  “Why beat a confession out of him at this point?” I asked. “First of all, he’s a sailor and probably pretty tough—it would be hard to get him to confess to anything, without hurting him to where it would show.”

  Welch bristled. “Are you telling us how to do our job?”

  “God forbid. I’m convinced when it comes to beating worthless confessions out of innocent suspects, you’re the guy to call.”

  “Fuck you, Heller.”

  “Take a number, Welch. Colonel, why don’t you check up on Red’s alibi, before your inspector starts wearing out rubber hoses on Johnson’s thick Swedish skull.”

  “He’s Norwegian,” Schwarzkopf said. But he was thinking. “If those facts check out—the cost of the long-distance call, the movies he says were playing, the ice-cream parlor, the doctor prescribing milk—we may have an innocent man on our hands.”

  “I know,” I said. “And it’s a pity—when he talks, he sounds just like those goddamn ransom notes.”

  8

  The Old Princeton Inn was on Nassau Street, the main thoroughfare of the college town the ancient four-story brick hotel was named after. Even at 9:00 P.M., well past business hours, the shops screamed their orange-and-black allegiance to the Princeton Tigers. This old village seemed cheerfully dependent on its young benefactors.

  But this was a week night, a school night, and the streets were as empty as a phys-ed major’s mind; it was as if the looming Gothic university buildings were taking names of any collegian not home studying. The deserted street, the orange and black that dominated every storefront, conspired with the bitter March wind and a moonless, starless night to make me as uneasy as a homeowner on Halloween—and a homeowner who didn’t spring for candy treats, at that.

  I was, after all, on my way to a séance.

  “I’m sorry to ask you to do this,” Lindbergh had said, earlier that afternoon, sitting behind his desk in his study, “but it seems to be the only way I can get you a hotel room.”

  “That’s okay,” I’d said. “But I’m starting to feel like the resident spook chaser around here.”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve decided to have you do,” he said. He pointed at me forcefully. “You’re going to be my chief investigator into all things that go bump in the night.”

  I sat up. “Huh? What?”

  He and Breckinridge began to laugh, which was a welcome sound, even if it was at my expense. Slim had a prep-school sense of humor that, I’d been told, manifested itself in practical jokes. He had on at least two occasions hidden the baby from Anne and Betty Gow, just to get ’em both going; the night of the kidnapping, the initial reaction of both Anne and the nurse had been to think it another of Slim’s gags.

  “Nate,” Lindbergh said, “you know very well that you’re our resident Chicago underworld expert. Not a spook chaser.”

  “That’s a relief to hear.”

  “But unde
r the circumstances we have to hear this couple out.”

  It seemed a self-proclaimed spiritualist named Martin Marinelli and his wife, who called herself Sister Sarah, had been staying at the Old Princeton Inn for days, now. Marinelli had phoned the Lindbergh estate frequently, and sent letters and telegrams, claiming to have “good news” and “important information” about the kidnapping. The troopers monitoring calls and letters in the garage command post had deflected all of this, writing Marinelli and his wife off—rightly, no doubt—as cranks.

  Slim apparently spoke to the manager of the Old Princeton Inn, personally, trying to wrangle me a room. The manager had explained that the reporters had everything tied up, except for one suite taken by these two psychic characters, who’d been making it known to all concerned that they had “revelations from the spirit world” about the case.

  Some of the reporters had glommed onto the pair, and the spiritualist couple had been holding psychic court for days. But now the fortune-tellers were old news. The manager had offered to talk to them for Lindbergh, to see if they would relinquish their room.

  “The only way they’ll give up their suite,” Lindbergh explained with wry matter-of-factness, “is if we see them.”

  “You’re not going along, too, are you?” I asked him.

  “No. Too much going on here. Some promising developments.” He didn’t elaborate.

  “Well,” I sighed, “anything to get a roof over my head.”

  Any roof that wasn’t over the kidnapped kid’s nursery, that is.

  So now Breckinridge, his usual gray, three-piece-suit self, was knocking on the door to 414 in the Old Princeton Inn; we had hung our topcoats in the lobby. The dimly lit hallway fit the Halloween mood.

  The door cracked open. A thin, sallow male face peered out; bald, spade-bearded.

  “Ah,” the cadaverous figure intoned, in a mellow, minister’s voice, “you would be Colonel Breckinridge.”

  “Yes,” Breckinridge said. “Are you Martin Marinelli?”

  Opening the door wider, the cue-ball bald, devil-bearded fellow nodded. He was wearing a flowing black robe; around his neck was a heavily jeweled gold cross on a gold chain. He turned his gaze on me, arching a plucked-for-effect eyebrow. His eyes were small and dark, but piercing, in deep sockets.

  “And who would you be?”

  “You’re the psychic,” I said, nicely. “You tell me.”

  Breckinridge flashed me a reproving look.

  Marinelli’s nostrils flared, and he stepped back, and shut the door; it clicked ominously.

  I sighed. Without looking at Breckinridge, I said, “Yeah, I know. I got too smart a mouth. But I can’t take too much of this carny hokum lyin’ down.”

  “Speaking of lying down,” Breckinridge said, “I already have a place to sleep tonight.”

  “Good point. Knock again. I’ll behave.”

  Breckinridge’s fist was poised to knock when the door swung open.

  Marinelli, seeming to float in space in the long flowing robe, was haloed in soft light against darkness.

  “Come in, gentlemen,” Marinelli said, gesturing theatrically. And this he directed to me: “But I would request you leave your skepticism in the hallway. If we’re to have success this evening, we will need open-minded cooperation from all participants.”

  The sweet, smoky scent of sandalwood beckoned; somewhere in the darkness, incense was burning.

  We were in a nicely furnished sitting room—lit, or barely lit, by a large red candle dripping wax in the middle of a wooden card table set up in the middle of the floor, with three chairs. There were several closed doorways, one of which was to a bedroom, presumably. If we could chase these fortune-tellers out, I’d have some pretty fancy digs.

  “You still have not given your name,” Marinelli said to me, sternly.

  I stood twisting my hat in my hand, wondering why the flickery darkness was making me so damn nervous.

  “My name is Heller,” I said. “I’m a police officer assigned to the Lindbergh matter.”

  “I sense you are not local,” Marinelli said.

  He didn’t have to be psychic to know that; I have the flat nasal Chicago accent you’d expect. But Breckinridge seemed a little impressed.

  “I’m not local,” I said, and smiled politely, and didn’t tell him a nickel’s worth more.

  Marinelli gestured grandly to the candle-dripping card table, finding an extra chair for me; one of those already placed at the table seemed to be reserved.

  “Gentlemen,” Marinelli said, after we’d settled into our wooden folding chairs, “I am the father of the One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street Spiritualist Church in Harlem. My wife Sister Sarah Sivella is the mother of that church. As you have already surmised, Mr. Heller, I have no great gifts of second sight, myself. But my wife has definite, even staggering, abilities in that realm.”

  “Abilities,” Breckinridge said, “which she is willing to lend to the search for Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Is that correct?”

  “She does not use these abilities,” he explained patiently. “They use her.”

  “What do you mean?” Breckinridge asked.

  Marinelli sculpted the air with his hands. “She did not seek information, on this matter, directly, consciously. She began speaking of the kidnapping during the course of a séance at the church. The séance was part of our regular church ritual, that happened to have been held one day after the tragic occurrence.”

  “So you came here,” I said, “to be close to Colonel Lindbergh.”

  “Yes. To try to help. Ours is a Christian church. We believe in the father-motherhood of God. Christ, the son of the father-mother God, is the light that shines through wisdom and love in the human heart.”

  Great. A guy with a Satan beard in a black robe in a room lit by a blood-red candle is going to tell an agnostic Jew about Jesus. What a guy will go through to get a bed to sleep in.

  “Life is governed by five cosmic laws,” he was saying. He held up five fingers and ticked them off; maybe I should’ve taken my notebook out to write these down. “Reincarnation. Cause and effect. Opportunity. Retribution. Spiritual communion…”

  Wasn’t that six?

  “I’m afraid I fail to see what relevance this has,” Breck in-ridge said, “to the situation at hand. Specifically, the missing Lindbergh child.”

  Marinelli raised a hand as if passing a benediction; his nails were long and manicured. “Gentlemen, my wife will join us momentarily. I will begin by inducing an hypnotic trance. Then we will join hands, and I must ask you not to break the circle.”

  Well, this was a far cry from Edgar Cayce and his down-home soothsaying. Here we had what looked to be a traditional phony séance—and if this snake-oil merchant thought I was going to buy his scam, he was as nutty as he looked.

  “Mr. Marinelli,” I said, “I mean no offense, but I know the Chicago supply house that sells you people your glow-in-the-dark trumpets and bells. If you have something to say about the kidnapping, fine. But spare us the cheesecloth ghosts, paste-and-newspaper ectoplasm and levitating furniture.”

  Marinelli’s smile was faint and condescending. “You are under a basic misapprehension, Mr. Heller. Sister Sarah is not a physical medium. You’ll hear no bell ringing, table rapping, nor experience any table tilting or other unexplained transportation of objects. Sister Sarah is a trance medium—she materializes no trumpets and summons no visible spirits. She wanders the landscape of her own mind, listening with an inner ear to spirit voices.”

  “Joan of Arc got burned at the stake for that,” I reminded him.

  “Ah yes,” he said, raising a forefinger heavenward. “But these are more enlightened times.”

  Tell that to the Scottsboro boys.

  “Sister Sarah,” he went on, “is what we call a ‘sensitive.’ She has a control, a spirit guide, who frequently speaks through her.”

  “This ‘spirit guide,’” Breckinridge said, interested despite himself, “is a specific e
ntity?”

  Marinelli nodded momentously. “His name is Yellow Feather.”

  “Yellow Feather?” I asked. And I looked at Breckinridge and said, again, “Yellow Feather?” How bad did I want this room, anyway?

  “Yellow Feather,” the bald spiritualist continued, “was a great warrior. An Iroquois chief.”

  “Dead many moons,” I said.

  “That is correct,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “If you have no other questions, Mr. Heller, Mr. Breckinridge…I will summon Sister Sarah.”

  “Yeah, I have one more question,” I said.

  “Yes, Mr. Heller?”

  “Do you shave your head?”

  Breckinridge kicked me under the table.

  Marinelli only smiled. “No. My hair fell out when I was a youth. It was a psychic sign. It signaled my psychosexual awakening.”

  “Just wondering,” I said.

  Marinelli closed his eyes, bowed his head slightly. The incense-scented room was an eerie study in shadows and shapes as the wavery candlelight, and a modicum of streetlight from the sheer-curtained windows, turned the mundane hotel furnishings into Caligari-like onlookers. Those windows were rattling as the wind crept in over their sills. Maybe our medium wasn’t of the flying horn and floating disembodied head variety, but this was a séance all right.

  Our host, hands folded, began to hum monotonously.

  A door opened and a figure in black and crimson seemed to glide in. She was standing next to me before I knew it, a small, beautiful woman with large, dark unblinking eyes, a pale cameo of a face and full, sensuous lips made scarlet by dabs of lip rouge. Her dark eyebrows, unlike her husband’s, were thick and unplucked and somehow the effect was exotic; she was caught up in a rose-scented cloud that banished the sandalwood. She looked like a whore, and she looked like a Madonna.

  And, what the hell, I have to tell you: I liked it. There was no sign that my hair was falling out, but I was having a psychosexual awakening myself.

  Like her husband, she wore a floor-length flowing black robe; but she also wore a hood, lined with blood-red satin. Unlike her husband’s robe, hers was not loose; rather it was contoured to her shape, clinging as if wet to a slender, high-breasted figure. Her nipples were erect and looking right back at me. Maybe she wasn’t a physical medium, but if I didn’t cool off, this table was going to rise.