Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Mrs. McLean, it’s an honor,” he said, warmly—in fact, his voice was at that moment as warm as I think I ever heard it. “I’m so pleased you’ve come.”

  “The honor and the pleasure are mine,” she said, with dignity, extending a gloved hand rather regally, which he briefly took. “It was kind of you to suggest we meet.”

  That seemed to embarrass him a little.

  “Nate,” he said, acknowledging me with a nod and smile. And to us both, with a stiff gesture, said, “Let’s go inside.”

  He took her by the arm, and I trailed after.

  We moved through the servants’ sitting room; the desk Schwarzkopf had set up out there, making it an informal office, was empty. I asked Lindbergh where the state police colonel had gone, and was told Trenton—Schwarzkopf was spending less and less time here. In the kitchen, we found homely Elsie Whately chopping vegetables with a sharp knife, preparing to do her reverse magic on perfectly edible provisions; she portioned out one minimally civil nod for us all to share, as we passed through.

  In the large living room, Anne Lindbergh—wearing a simple dark-blue frock with a lace collar, looking like a schoolgirl, albeit a five-month pregnant one—rose and moved toward Evalyn with a warm, wide smile and an arm extended for a handshake in a manner about as dainty as a longshoreman’s. The brown-and-white terrier, Wahgoosh, who’d been asleep on the couch, uncoiled like a cobra and began barking with his trademark hysteria.

  Lindbergh spoke sharply to the mutt, silencing him, but Evalyn, still shaking hands with the grateful Anne, merely said, “I like dogs—please don’t scold him on my account.”

  Hell, in Evalyn’s house, Wahgoosh would’ve been wearing the Star of India.

  Anne was clasping Evalyn’s gloved hand, holding it with both of her bare ones as if it were something precious.

  “You’ve done so much,” Anne said. “You’ve tried so hard.”

  Evalyn swallowed. “And accomplished so little, I’m afraid.”

  Anne’s smile was tight yet soft; her eyes were tired, but they sparkled—with tears, perhaps. “You’re a wonderful person, Mrs. McLean. I’m aware that you…lost your own little boy. And so, I do understand, and I do appreciate, all you’ve done. All you’ve tried to do.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  Anne released Evalyn’s hand, but stood very near her. What Lindbergh’s wife said next was spoken softly, and not meant for anyone’s ears but her guest’s. Detective that I am, I heard every word.

  “I think,” Anne said, “analyzing it, that women take sadness…and conquer it…differently from men. Don’t you?”

  Evalyn said nothing.

  “Women take it willingly, with open arms. Men try to lose themselves, in effort. Would you care to walk with me? The dogwoods are blooming, and you can see the occasional wild cherry tree….”

  They exited arm-in-arm, Anne playing gracious hostess and tour guide, and Lindy said to me, “Someone you should see.”

  “Oh?”

  He didn’t explain—just led the way.

  In the library, with Breckinridge seated near the desk, Commodore John Hughes Curtis stood straight as a ship’s mast, hands locked behind him. His two previous companions—Reverend Dobson-Peacock and Admiral Burrage—were conspicuously absent. He remained an impressive, immaculately attired Southern gentleman, well over six foot, his hair iron-gray, features regular and tanned.

  “Commodore,” Lindbergh said, “you remember Nate Heller, with the Chicago Police Department?”

  “Yes,” Curtis said, with a big, affable smile, offering a bear’s-paw hand for me to shake. “The Capone mob expert.”

  “That may be stretching it,” I said. “But none of us can deny that bootleggers seem to be all over this case.”

  Curtis nodded, solemn now, and Slim said, settling himself behind the desk, “Since you saw him last, Nate, the Commodore has had much more contact with his group of bootleggers and rumrunners. Commodore, would you mind repeating your story for Detective Heller?”

  “Not at all,” Curtis said, reasonably, and as I found a seat, he finally sat, too. Breckinridge and I had already exchanged small smiles and nods of greeting; the gray, loyal attorney and I had come to share a measure of respect and even friendship.

  “Several weeks ago,” Curtis said, fixing his steady gaze on me, “I was approached again by ‘Sam’—that rumrunning, fleeting acquaintance of mine, whose ‘fishing smack’ I repaired once or twice….”

  “I don’t remember you describing ‘Sam’ in much detail,” I said, noncommittally.

  “Well, he’s a big, lumbering individual…usually wears flashy clothes, like some gangster in a moving picture. He’s decidedly Jewish in appearance, his English broken.”

  Being half-Jew myself, I wondered how anybody’s appearance could be “decidedly Jewish,” but I decided to let it pass.

  “At any rate,” Curtis continued, “he called me, several weeks ago, and asked if I could meet with him in Manhattan, the next day. With some urgency in his voice, he suggested we meet at a cafeteria near Forty-First Street, at one A.M. Sunday morning.”

  Admiral Burrage had arranged for a Navy pilot to fly Curtis to New York, where he checked in at the Governor Clinton Hotel under an assumed name.

  “I walked uptown, in the middle of the night, to the cafeteria. Only one side of the room was in use, porters already at work cleaning the other side for the early morning trade. Chairs were piled high, the floor was being swabbed.”

  “Commodore,” I said. I was tiring of people who savored melodrama. “Could you get to the point?”

  “Detective Heller, I found only one other customer in the cafeteria: Sam, who was sitting at the very last table eating a plate of wheat cakes with some relish.”

  Pickle relish, maybe. God, these people.

  “Sam claimed the boy was with a German nurse—that he himself had never seen the child. But that he could get her, the nurse, to write out a description for me to give the Colonel. I told him that that was okay, but that I wanted proof, personally, for my own satisfaction, that his crowd really stole the child.”

  “And what,” I asked, “did Sam say to that?”

  Curtis smiled. “He offered to take me to meet the rest of his gang—to which I immediately said, ‘Let’s go, then!’ But he made me wait two more days—and the night of the second day we met again. I was told to follow Sam’s vehicle through the Holland Tunnel…then to the Hudson-Manhattan train station in Newark. And that was where I came face-to-face with the four men who, if they’re to be believed, masterminded this kidnapping.”

  Well, the melodrama of that did have some effect, even on me.

  “They were waiting there, on the train platform. No one else was around; the lighting was minimal. One of the men I’d seen before, in the Norfolk shipyard, though this was the first I’d heard his name: George Olaf Larsen. He’s in his early forties, medium height, drab-colored hair combed straight back from his forehead. Sam always addresses him as ‘boss.’”

  The second man, Curtis said, was introduced simply as Nils—a Scandinavian in his early thirties, blond, with a florid complexion. The third man was called Eric, another blond but in his mid-forties.

  The fourth man was named John.

  “He’s a handsome man,” Curtis said, “with the physique of a physical culturist. From his accent, I’d say he was either Norwegian or Dutch.”

  I glanced significantly at Lindbergh and then at Breckinridge; Lindy flicked an eyebrow up, while Breckinridge maintained a lawyer’s poker face.

  But we all knew the same thing: while a New York Times reporter had, last week, identified Professor Condon as “Jafsie,” and Jafsie as the Lindbergh ransom negotiator, the story of “Cemetery John” was not yet public knowledge.

  All five of the gang had piled into Curtis’s car and headed for Larsen’s house in Cape May, at the southern tip of New Jersey.

  “Along the way, John said, ‘Sam, he says you want some proof we d
o this job.’” Curtis was imitating the man’s Norwegian accent; it was pretty hammy. “‘Suppose I tell you exactly how we do it. One night, about one month before kidnapping, I go to some party with a girl friend of mine, a German trained nurse, at roadhouse outside Trenton.’”

  The cadence reminded me a bit of the ransom notes Lindbergh and Condon had received.

  “‘At roadhouse I meet a member of Lindbergh and Morrow household,’” Curtis continued, still mimicking “John.” Then he interrupted himself to say: “John didn’t say which servant. But he said he recruited this person—he wasn’t even specific about the gender—and promised ‘plenty good money for the trouble.’”

  “My servants,” Lindy broke in, rather coldly, “are above suspicion.”

  I bit my tongue; I wondered idly how Schwarzkopf and Inspector Welch were faring with the Means tip about Violet Sharpe—which Curtis seemed to be substantiating.

  “I’m just telling you what I was told,” Curtis said, quietly defensive. “John’s story was interrupted by our arrival at the Cape May cottage. A woman named Hilda—identified as Larsen’s wife—met us and led us into a brightly lit dining room. We sat around a table, and John finished his story.”

  The night of the kidnapping, Nils, Eric, the German nurse and John had driven a green Hudson sedan and parked three hundred feet or so away from Featherbed Lane. Sam had followed in another car, and parked farther away still, on a high spot near the main road, where he could signal if another car pulled into the lane. Nils and John, with a three-sectioned ladder, went to the nursery window. They climbed through the window, with a blanket, a rag and some chloroform. Because the ladder was so unsteady, they exited with their human parcel via the front door.

  “The front door?” I asked.

  “They knew the layout of the house,” Curtis explained. “They showed me a map, a huge floor plan, which judging from my two visits here would seem to tally. They knew how to lock the pantry door, to keep everyone in the kitchen and the servants’ quarters away from the front hall, if anybody heard anything. There was a key on a nail for them to use—the servant they bribed had told them where to find it.”

  I looked at Slim.

  “That key does exist,” Lindbergh admitted.

  Curtis said, “They had a letter for Colonel Lindbergh, describing the child. I didn’t read it, but I saw it—it seemed to be sort of half-printed, half-written.”

  The notes Lindbergh and Jafsie received did mingle printing with cursive, somewhat.

  “I was of course ecstatic that they’d finally provided the proof of identification the Colonel sought. And I suggested that one of them accompany me, that very moment, here to Hopewell, to present the letter to Colonel Lindbergh.”

  “But they refused,” I said.

  “Quite the contrary,” Curtis said. “Larsen went with me. We drove through the night. At Trenton, the next morning, first thing, I attempted to call Colonel Lindbergh, and finally did get through to him, but was unable to arrange the meeting—the Colonel had a pressing engagement.”

  I glanced at Lindbergh, finding it hard to believe that he’d decline a chance to meet with Curtis and someone who claimed to be one of the kidnappers.

  Lindbergh shrugged. “That was the day you and I went out in the Lockheed-Vega, Nate.”

  The second day of searching for the “boad” Nelly. No wonder Curtis and his possible kidnapper fell through the cracks.

  “Larsen was pretty jumpy,” Curtis said. “He insisted I drive him back.”

  “What about the letter,” I asked, “with the physical description of the kid?”

  “He wouldn’t hand it over to me; he hung onto it.”

  “Why in hell?”

  “He was angry with Colonel Lindbergh, and suspicious.”

  “Have you had any contact with Sam or John and company, since?”

  He nodded. “Yes. There has been one subsequent meeting.”

  After the papers had been filled with lists of serial numbers and speculative stories about “Jafsie,” Curtis was contacted by Sam for another meeting at the Newark train station. He found all of the self-proclaimed kidnappers but Larsen squeezed into Sam’s car, and was told to join them. He did, and was driven to a three-story house in the Scandinavian section of Newark. In a small, sloppy one-flat serving as a bedroom, dining room and sitting room, the men found chairs and Curtis asked John about Jafsie.

  Curtis continued his impression of John’s accent. “He said, ‘Sure, I did the work with Condon. That was the idea all along—to chisel this Lindbergh through Condon, then turn the boy in through you. That’s why we were willing to let the kid go cheap to you.’ I told him I didn’t call twenty-five thousand dollars ‘cheap,’ but John said the Lindberghs were ‘rolling in dough.’”

  Curtis asked for the letter, describing the boy, and John bragged that he’d torn it up—“Do you think we’re fool enough to keep something that hot around?”

  “I was getting skeptical,” Curtis admitted. “So I demanded hard proof. They gave it to me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They showed me some of the ransom money.”

  I looked sharply at Lindbergh and Breckinridge.

  “Fifteen hundred in fives, tens and twenties,” Curtis continued. “They gave me a list of the bills, in a newspaper clipping, and I checked several against it.” He took a breath and nodded, once. “These are the men who have the Colonel’s money, all right.”

  Silence hung in the room like humidity.

  Then Lindbergh, clearly sold, said, “I think we can proceed with depositing that twenty-five thousand and arranging the safe return of my son.”

  Curtis sighed in relief “Thank God, Colonel. Of course, you know I’m at your service.”

  Lindbergh rose. “I need a few moments, in private, with my attorney and my police consultant. If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Curtis said, heartily, rising.

  “I would like you to stay for supper, of course, and we’ll talk this evening.” Lindy reached his hand across the desk.

  Curtis, beaming, shook Lindbergh’s hand, then did the same with Breckinridge and myself, as we stood briefly, politely, till he was out the door.

  “What do you think, Nate?” Slim asked, sitting back down.

  “Much of what he says does jibe with things that the man on the street couldn’t know.”

  Breckinridge, who’d been quiet, said, “Much of it jibes with Condon.”

  “And even with Gaston Means,” I said. “And Curtis—despite a flair for theater that rivals the Great Jafsie—seems a reliable go-between. Did you check up on his financial standing?”

  I was asking Lindy, but Breckinridge answered. “His shipping firm has had its ups and downs, in these hard times. But he appears solvent. And his social standing is unquestioned.”

  Lindbergh was nodding. “And his fellow go-betweens Dobson-Peacock and, of course, Admiral Burrage are unimpeachable.”

  “Well, then,” I said, “play out the hand—but, of course, you’ll bring in Irey and Wilson.”

  “What do you mean?” Lindbergh asked, as if the concept I’d suggested were arcane.

  “Slim—if we’ve learned anything from Condon, not to mention Gaston Means, it’s that we can’t play by the rules in a game set up by cheaters. Curtis is running around with these ‘kidnappers’ like a freshman on a fraternity hazing. You need to have the authorities in on this—carefully, secretly, without Curtis’s knowledge—but in on it. He has to be shadowed, and when the ransom payment is made, you follow the fucker who gets the money to wherever he goes and…”

  “No,” Lindbergh said, shaking his head vigorously. “Nate, no. We play it straight.”

  I looked at him the way you look at a driver who signals right and turns left. “What do you mean, ‘straight’?”

  “Curtis is honest, and reliable. I trust him. I think he can get Charlie back.”

  “That isn’t the point!” I was on my feet now, leaning
my hands on his desk. “If these are in fact the same sons of bitches who took that fifty grand from Condon, then they’ve already screwed you, once! And if they’re just some interloping extortionist gang, then you’re going to just throw more goddamn dough out the window.” I took my hands off his desk; I was shaking my head, frustrated, disgusted. “You can’t be serious, Slim—you have to have learned something from the Condon experience….”

  His face was stone.

  Breckinridge seemed sympathetic to my stance, or at least his expression said so, even if he didn’t.

  I backed away from the desk. I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. Summoned a sense of calm and crawled inside. “Well, then, that’s it, Slim. This is where I get off.”

  “I’d like you to stay.” His voice was earnest; his eyes were hurt. “We’re still dealing with bootleggers, rumrunners…we can’t rule out the Capone connection.”

  “I don’t rule that out. But I can’t be party to this any longer. It just goes against my grain as a cop. All due respect.”

  “If that’s how you feel…”

  “It’s how I feel.”

  He stood. “I do understand, Nate.” His words were cordial, but his tone was tense. “I…respect what you’re saying. But you know how I feel about getting my son back.”

  “I know,” I said, trying to sound at least a little conciliatory. “My point is, you’ve been going about it all wrong.”

  A frown grazed his face—nobody talked to him that way—but it was gone as he came out from around the desk. “Then, uh…you’ll be heading back for Chicago soon?”

  “I’ll drive Mrs. McLean back to Washington, tonight. I’ll catch the train there, tomorrow.”

  “Fine.” He dug in his pocket. “Here’s some expense money.” He peeled off five twenties.

  I had a hunch I was supposed to feel insulted. Maybe I did feel a little insulted. But I put the money in my pocket.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’ll stay for supper?” he asked.