Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Yes. Several times this happened. I hardly sleep.”

  “You don’t think anybody was hiding in your room or anything?” I asked.

  “I had a flashlight,” she said. “I looked under the bed, and in the closet. I was alone.”

  “I’ll take that room tonight,” I told her.

  For the first time Inga smiled at me. “Thank you, Mr. Heller.”

  “With any luck,” Evalyn said, cheerfully, “before then, Means will show up and we’ll take delivery of ‘the book’ and be well out of this funhouse.”

  But Means didn’t show.

  We spent most of the day, Evalyn and I, walking the weedy, snow-patched grounds, threading through the tall bony naked trees, following paths Evalyn’s mother had traced. Often we held hands, like kids going steady; maybe, in a way, that’s what we were.

  That afternoon, elderly, lanky, grossly mustached Gus—who chewed tobacco that he smelled just a little worse than—opened the door to the long-unused third floor. Gus claimed to have the only key, and the door seemed not to have been used in a while—and the caretaker had a hell of a hard time working the key in that rusty lock.

  There were no ghosts on the third story other than a few more pieces of sheet-covered furniture. A layer of dust coated the floor, undisturbed by footprints.

  Evalyn, standing just behind me, her fingers on my arm, said, “I must have just heard noises the wind made.”

  “Must have,” I said.

  I didn’t believe in haunted houses, of course, but then lately I’d been exposed to the likes of Edgar Cayce, Sister Sarah Sivella and Chief Yellow Feather, and I was starting to think we ought to start looking for Lindy’s kid in a magician’s top hat.

  That evening was just as cold as the previous one, and we again huddled in the kitchen, drinking coffee, wearing blankets, waiting for either Means to show up or the phone to ring or at least some goddamn ghost to materialize. Nothing did.

  Evalyn and I spent the night in the room Inga had abandoned. We sat up virtually all night, when we weren’t otherwise entertaining ourselves; Evalyn smoked a pack of cigarettes, and I ran out of Sheiks. It was a long, tiring, memorable night, but no ghosts showed, no footsteps sounded in the hall or on the stairs or on the ceiling, and nobody, flesh or vapor, pulled the covers off.

  She had fallen asleep in my arms, both of us half-sitting up, pillows behind us, blankets sheathing us. Light seeped through the cracks of the boarded-up windows. The long night was over.

  As I was getting out of bed, I heard something fall heavily to the floor; I jumped, and Evalyn jumped awake.

  “What…?” she began.

  I stood, frozen, looking at a small table against the side wall, where four or five books were in the process of tumbling to the floor, from between two secure bronze horse-head bookends.

  I looked at her.

  She looked at me.

  Our eyes would’ve been right at home in a minstrel show.

  I walked slowly over to the table. The books were on the floor, in an ungainly heap. The bookends stood alone, on the table but flush against the wall, as had been the books, before they fell. It was as if someone had shoved them on the floor; only the wall was where the books would have to have been shoved from.

  I shrugged, said it was nothing, started getting my clothes on. Evalyn nodded, shrugged, padded down the hall to her own room to dress. We said nothing more about it, not over breakfast anyway; we said almost nothing at all, actually, except to comment on what a nice sunny day it was for a change.

  Shortly after breakfast the phone jangled out in the hall and scared the hell out of all of us. The rings echoed through the big, mostly empty house, as Evalyn rushed to answer.

  She held the receiver sideways so I could stand next to her and listen.

  “Hogan speaking,” said the voice of Gaston Means. “Who is this?”

  “This is Eleven,” Evalyn said.

  “Eleven, we couldn’t get through with the book last night. We had a close call.”

  “A close call?”

  “Listen carefully: come to my home at Chevy Chase this afternoon. Be very, very careful of your movements; make certain you’re not followed. I’ll see you there at half past two.”

  And we heard the click of him hanging up.

  She looked at me, phone still in her hand. “I’m going, of course.”

  “Not alone.” I touched her shoulder, firmly. “This could be a replay of the Maude King ‘accident.’”

  “Come with me, then. He didn’t say I couldn’t bring my chauffeur.”

  So early that afternoon I put on my chauffeur’s uniform and, with her navigating, found my way to Chevy Chase, in Maryland just across the state line from the District of Columbia. The neighborhood was residential and affluent, albeit not affluent in the Evalyn Walsh McLean sense. The house at 112 Leland was a big white two-story pillared number with a spacious, sloping lawn behind a wire-mesh fence—a comfy castle with the prisonlike touch of the fence and, here and there, floodlights mounted to posts. My guess was alarms and switches were hooked up, as well—Means had invested in a considerable security system.

  The gate was open, however—we were expected, at least Evalyn was—and I stood behind her with my chauffeur’s cap in my hands as she rang the bell. A tall, slender youth of perhaps sixteen, neat as a pin in a diamond-patterned sweater and gray slacks, answered the door.

  “We’re here to see Mr. Means,” Evalyn said, smiling.

  The boy nodded; his eyes were large, brown, guileless.

  “Please come in,” he said, and we did.

  The house was as neat, as orderly, as the boy’s apparel. Well furnished, in the Early American mode. The people who lived here weren’t rich exactly, but they were clearly successful.

  “I think my father is expecting you,” the boy said.

  Means’s voice boomed down. “Hello there! Come on up!”

  We went up the staircase, leaving the boy behind, and there, on the landing, stood Means—as disheveled as his house wasn’t. His brown suit rumpled, his tie loose, his eyes bloodshot, his breath boozy, his face sweat-slick, Means ushered us into a cluttered den past a table on which was a Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of a long board with four dry-cell batteries, a big light bulb and a reflector.

  The big moon-faced bastard fell heavily into the chair behind his messy desk. “God, Eleven! What a close call we had last night.”

  “What do you mean, Means?”

  “Call me ‘Hogan,’ Eleven. I must insist. Should we talk in front of your chauffeur?”

  “I’m agent Sixteen,” I said, “remember?”

  “If you’re a police spy,” Means said enigmatically, “the Lindbergh boy will bear the burden.”

  “Tell us about your close call,” I said. I found Evalyn a chair, clearing off some letters and old newspapers. I stood, cap in hand. The cap was covering the nine millimeter in my waistband.

  “I went to the place the baby is being kept,” Means said darkly, sitting forward, hands locked prayerlike.

  “Where was it?” Evalyn asked.

  “I can’t divulge that,” Means said, with a regretful wag of his massive bald noggin. “I gave my word to the criminals I wouldn’t share their location with anyone. But I will say it’s within a hundred miles of Washington.”

  “Did you see him?” Evalyn asked, breathlessly. “Did you see Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.?”

  “Yes,” Means said, matter-of-factly, his dimples cute as a baby’s behind. “I held the boy in my arms. He had blue eyes, blond hair, was dressed in a knitted cap, buff coat, brown shoes and white stockings. The age and appearance tallied with everything I’ve seen and heard about the child.”

  Evalyn looked at me yearningly; she longed to believe this.

  “What about the close call?” I said.

  Means narrowed his eyes, cocked his head, sat forward. “Last night, sometime after midnight, we started out from the gang’s headquarters in two ca
rs. I was traveling in the lead car. The Fox, with the baby in tow, was in the second. I was to keep an eye out for police. If I saw the police were stopping cars and searching them, I was to use my invention…” He pointed to the Rube Goldberg contraption with the light bulb. “…and signal the car behind, where the Fox was with the baby. I was to flash the light three times.”

  Evalyn glanced at me; she seemed excited. She was buying this.

  “Along toward three in the morning,” Means continued, “we were nearly to Far View when I saw a car stopped by a policeman up ahead. I flashed my light three times, and the car behind me turned and went back.”

  “Back?” I asked.

  “To the hideout,” he said, melodramatically.

  This guy ought to have been on the radio.

  “Back at the hideout,” he went on, “the Fox and the rest of the boys were jittery as june bugs. The Fox said the deal was definitely off, as far as Far View being the drop point was concerned.”

  Evalyn looked at me anxiously and saw my skepticism. She turned back to Means and said, “This sounds pretty queer to me….”

  Means affected a hurt expression. Grandly, he opened a desk drawer and removed a brown-paper package fastened with red sealing wax.

  “There’s your hundred thousand, Eleven,” he said. “Take your money back, if you want to pull out.”

  Evalyn shook her head no. “I don’t want to pull out—as long as there’s the slightest chance we’ll get that baby back, I’m in.”

  He plucked a letter opener from the mess on his desk and cut the cord on the package; the paper came loose and revealed green bills on top. Then he plucked from the package a tag, which he handed toward Evalyn. She took it. Read it. Handed it to me.

  It said:

  GASTON B. MEANS

  Property of Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean

  “I put this on the package,” he said, taking back the tag, “for your protection. Should I meet my death in this endeavor, your money will be returned.”

  I knew just eyeballing it that that package wasn’t big enough to hold one hundred grand in small currency; but I would have to tell her later. And was his desk drawer the “safe” he’d told me the money was locked away in?

  “I’ll resume negotiations,” he said to her, “if you wish.”

  “Do that,” she said curtly. “I’m leaving Far View and returning to 2020. Keep me informed—we’ll work out a new drop point. But if you’re not on the level, you’ll finish your days behind bars.”

  She sounded as melodramatic as Means; but she wasn’t lying.

  “Eleven,” he said somberly, “you saw that fine boy of mine downstairs, didn’t you? The very thought of him would prevent me from doing anything wrong—that boy’s my life, now.”

  We left Means and his messy den and his neat house and fine boy and we sat in the powder-blue Lincoln, talking.

  “You think he’s lying, don’t you, Nate?”

  “I know he’s lying. The trouble is, with a con man like him, he’s probably building on some truth. He’s had a few kernels of inside information—the question is, where has he gotten it? How close is he to the actual kidnappers?”

  Her mouth was a thin determined line. “I have to follow this out to its conclusion.”

  “Why don’t you let me put the Treasury boys on this? Tracking this cellmate of his, the ‘Fox,’ if he exists, would be a snap.”

  “No! No. That might spoil everything…the child might suffer…”

  She sounded like Lindbergh now.

  “These T-men are the boys who got Capone,” I said. “They can…”

  “No. If you do, I’ll call Ogden and quash it, Nate, I really will.”

  “Ogden?”

  “Ogden Mills. Secretary of the Treasury Mills.”

  Now she really sounded like Lindbergh.

  “Okay, Evalyn. Okay. But I’m afraid this is where I get off. I’ll drive you back to Far View, but my advice to you is to turn Means over to the authorities. You might still get your money back, and some information about the kidnapping, to boot.”

  “No,” she said, firmly.

  I spoke through a strained smile. “You know what today is, Evalyn? April first. April Fool’s Day.”

  “That’s cruel.”

  “You said it yourself: it’s a cruel universe.”

  “Promise me, Nate. Promise me you won’t interfere.”

  “Evalyn—”

  “Promise me. Promise!”

  She touched my cheek; her eyes mingled hope and despair.

  “All right,” I sighed. “All right.”

  So I drove her back to Far View. We didn’t speak. We weren’t mad at each other, exactly. But we didn’t speak.

  In the second-floor room, where Evalyn and I had sat waiting for ghosts the night before, I packed my clothes and my gun and left the room to the poltergeists. As I came down the stairs, Inga said I’d had a phone message while I was away and handed me a small folded piece of paper; I slipped it in my pocket without glancing at it, as Evalyn was approaching.

  “Why don’t I drive you and Inga back to 2020?” I asked.

  “I can drive myself,” Evalyn said, without rancor. “I don’t really need a chauffeur, you know. It’s just another of the empty luxuries in my life.”

  “Evalyn—I know you mean well in this. But you’re in over your head.”

  “It’s only money, Nate. If I can save that child…”

  “Evalyn…” I looked around; we were in the kitchen, alone, waiting for Gus the caretaker to collect me and take me to the train. I gave her a long, lingering kiss.

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  She touched my face again.

  “I’ll be waiting,” she said.

  As I went out to get in Gus’s pickup truck, she stood watching me from the back doorway, like another ghost in that damn haunted house.

  In the pickup, I unfolded Inga’s message; it was from Breckinridge.

  It said: “Jafsie has heard from John.”

  20

  I sat in a comfortable chair near a crackling fire emanating from a marble fireplace in an expensive, high-ceilinged library worthy of Evalyn Walsh McLean’s Massachusetts Avenue mansion; but I was not in Washington, D.C. I was in Manhattan, in a stately graystone townhouse just off Central Park on East 72nd, the New York residence of the late Senator Morrow, Lindy’s father-in-law.

  Nearby, at a long mahogany conference table, sat Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson, the dour frick-and-frack IRS agents whose mutual round black-rimmed glasses and black suits and dark ties made them humorless mirror images. Wilson was the more clearly restless of the pair, drumming his fingers, searching his balding scalp for clues of hair. Irey was as immobile as the face on a coin. But both were worried.

  So was I.

  We were waiting.

  I’d been with Lindbergh and Breckinridge at Professor Condon’s bungalow all afternoon; Irey and Wilson had stayed away, in case the house was being watched. Final preparations were made at Condon’s, including stuffing the two cord-and-brown-paper-wrapped packages of cash—one containing fifty thousand dollars in the various denominations specified by the kidnappers, and the other containing the additional twenty thousand—into Dr. Condon’s duplicate antique ballot box, an oblong wooden affair with brass hinges and clasps. Work of a first-rate Bronx cabinetmaker or not, it didn’t hold up under the bulk of the bills: one side split. The twenty-grand packet had to be carried separately, and the box wrapped with cord.

  We were responding to the note that had arrived with Jafsie’s April Fool’s Day mail, while I was away; it read:

  Dear Sir: have the money ready by Saturday

  evening, we will inform you where

  and how to deliver it. have the money

  in one bundle we want you to put

  it in on a sertain place. Ther is

  no fear that somebody els will

  tacke it, we watch everything

  closely. Please lett us know if />
  you are agree and ready for action

  by Saturday evening.—if yes—

  put in the paper

  Yes everything O.K.

  Is a very simble delivery but we

  find out very sun if there is any trapp. after 8 houers

  you gett the adr, from

  the boy, on the place

  you finde two ladies, they are innocence.

  The message was signed with the familiar symbol.

  “If the ransom drop comes off tomorrow night,” I’d told Slim, “I’ll go with the professor.”

  We were sitting in Condon’s living room, sipping tea served by the professor’s shell-shocked wife; the pretty, pretty unfriendly daughter was lurking, too, worried about her father. Right now she was helping her papa and Breckinridge with the ransom package. The ad—saying “YES. EVERYTHING O.K. JAFSIE.”—had appeared in the morning New York American.

  “I don’t want you going along, Nate,” Lindbergh said. “They might recognize you from last time. They might know, by now, you’re a cop.”

  “You can’t let the professor handle this by himself.”

  “I won’t. I’ll go myself.”

  “Is that smart? You’re a prime kidnap target yourself.”

  “In that case, you can do me a favor, then.”

  “Yes?”

  He shrugged. “I knew Anne would be disturbed if she happened to see me leave the house with a gun.”

  “I guess she might at that.”

  “So I didn’t bring one. Can I borrow your nine millimeter?”

  “Why, sure.”

  “And shoulder holster?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Hell, Slim. I’m honored. It’ll almost be like being there.”

  He sipped his tea. He smiled slyly at me, his eyes narrow and shrewd. “Tell me, Nate. Did you work on Irey? And Wilson?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He nodded sideways toward the other room. “Those bills in there. That money. Wilson spent the morning recording all the serial numbers at J. P. Morgan and Company.”

  I grinned. “Well, that’s swell. It really is. You won’t be sorry.”

  He shook his head, sipped more tea. “I guess it took over a dozen clerks to help get the job done. Five-thousand-some items of currency, with no two numbers in sequence.”