Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  She shut the door; locked it. “I didn’t expect to ever see you again.”

  “Working the same old case,” I said, hat in my hands.

  Her unplucked eyebrows met in thought. “The Lindbergh kidnapping…?”

  ‘That’s right. Let’s sit down, shall we?”

  Rather tentatively, she did, pulling up one of the chairs. I pulled mine around so I could face her.

  “But the man who did that is in jail,” she said.

  “Is he?”

  She moved her head to one side, to avert my gaze. “Actually—in the trance state, Martin says I’ve said otherwise.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I’ve said, in a trance, that this German is not the kidnapper. That there were many persons in this plot. Four who did the kidnapping. One of them a woman. One of them dead.”

  “Is it the woman who’s dead?”

  She shrugged shyly; her long dark hair bounced on her shoulders. “That’s all I know. I only know what Martin tells me. I have no memory of what I say, in that state.”

  “Well, you could’ve meant Violet Sharpe.”

  Her eyes flickered. She said nothing.

  “Violet was in your congregation, wasn’t she?”

  She swallowed.

  I reached out and squeezed her arm; not quite hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make a point. “Wasn’t she?”

  She nodded.

  “Sometimes she came to services,” she said. “I’m not sure she was a member.”

  “Who else?”

  “So many people.”

  I stamped my foot on the floor. The chairs bounced. So did she.

  “Who else, Sarah?”

  She swallowed again, shook her head. “That funny-looking little man, Fisch. He was a member.”

  “Don’t stop now, Sarah. You’re getting hot.”

  “There was a man named Whately. A butler, I think.”

  “A butler, you think. Anyone else? Think hard, now.”

  She shook her head, no. “I don’t think so.”

  “Remember back in that hotel room, in Princeton? You mentioned a name.”

  “I don’t remember what I said in the trance state…”

  “You said ‘Jafsie.’ You said you saw the letters J-A-F-S-I-E.”

  “I remember Martin told me I said that.”

  “Was Professor John Condon a member of the One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street church?”

  “No…no.”

  “No?”

  “But…”

  “But what, Sarah?”

  “But…he did attend a few times.”

  I felt myself trembling; I smiled at her—it must’ve been a terrible smile. “Tell me about it, Sarah. Tell me about Jafsie….”

  A resonant male voice behind me said, “He was only an occasional visitor.”

  I turned and Martin Marinelli, wearing a black turtleneck and black slacks, looking like a priest who lost his collar if not quite his calling, had entered through the curtain behind the pulpit. His head was as bald as ever, though his eyebrows had grown out and were wild and woolly, not plucked for effect; he still wore a devil beard. He had a small paper bag tucked under one arm.

  He walked slowly to us and handed the paper bag to Sarah, who appeared on the verge of tears. “Here are the supplies you requested, my dear.”

  I could see as she set it on a nearby chair that in the bag were various cleaning products, cleanser, disinfectant, soap flakes.

  Marinelli pulled a chair up and made it a threesome. “We’re the janitors of this building, Mr. Heller. That’s how we keep our rent down.”

  “You remember my name,” I said. “I’m impressed, Reverend.”

  “I’ve had to keep an eye on the Lindbergh case,” he said, with a little flourish of a gesture. “We’ve been harassed so many times, it’s become a necessity to be well informed.”

  “I like to be well informed, myself. Tell me more about this star-studded congregation of yours.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. As far as Dr. Condon is concerned, he’s a philosophy instructor, with quite an avid interest in spiritualism. I’m sure we’re not the only spiritualist church he’s visited.”

  “Condon taught school in Harlem,” I said. “Either one of you happen to attend Old Public School Number Thirty-Eight?”

  Sarah closed her eyes; she began to rock back and forth slowly.

  Marinelli put his hands on his knees; they were powerful-looking hands. “I don’t see that our schooling has anything to do with anything, Mr. Heller.”

  “Then let’s change the subject. Tell me about Isidor Fisch, and Violet Sharpe, and Ollie Whately. They were in your congregation, Reverend. Surely you must’ve got to know them on a personal basis.”

  “We had many parishioners on One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street in those years. That was a larger church. People walked in off the street all the time. One night we had a Chinaman!”

  “I’m not interested in the Chinaman, Rev. How did Violet and Whately wind up in your church?”

  He shrugged. ‘They found their way to me. I never ask my flock about their pasts, unless they offer it. But one, or both of them, had been interested in spiritualism before coming to this country.”

  “One of ’em, at least, had been involved in a spiritualist church in England?”

  “Yes. I believe it was Whately. I think Violet had lost her parents, and had hoped to contact them, through the spirit world. We helped her do that.”

  “Did you. You and Sarah and old, what was that Injun’s name? Chief Yellow Feather?”

  Sarah, eyes shut tight, twitched.

  “As for Fisch,” Marinelli said, ignoring me, “he lived across the street and down, in a rooming house. He wandered in off the street one night, curious, and became interested in what we do.”

  “And what is it you do, exactly? I’ve never been able to tell.”

  “We are dedicated to the cause of spiritualism, Mr. Heller, whether you believe that or not. We’ve not gotten wealthy, as you can see.”

  “You’re doing all right. Better than most in these times, I’d say.”

  “Now that I’ve answered your questions, Mr. Heller,” Marinelli said, folding his arms, “I would appreciate it if you would leave.”

  “What about Bruno Richard Hauptmann? Was he in your church?”

  “No. He never set foot there.”

  “Still, Rev—I think the cops might be very interested in knowing that, back in ’32, your church on One Twenty-Seventh was a veritable hotbed of people associated with the Lindbergh case.”

  Marineili shrugged. “They already know,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We were arrested in January 1934, Mr. Heller. On a fortune-telling charge. But we were questioned at length about the Lindbergh case, and we held nothing back. While we were indisposed, our lodgings were ransacked, an address book was stolen and so on. Typical police behavior.”

  Sister Sarah was stone quiet, and motionless; eyes shut tight.

  “What’s with her?” I said.

  “You scared her,” he said, matter-of-factly. “She withdrew into the trance state.”

  “Aw, baloney.”

  “Mr. Heller, my wife is a genuine psychic.”

  I got the nine millimeter out of my topcoat.

  He stood and backed up, knocking over several chairs; she remained still as death.

  “Izzy Fisch and Violet Sharpe and Ollie Whately,” I said, rising, “have a lot in common, don’t they? They’re all members of your church—and they’re all dead. Maybe we can have a little informal séance, and conjure ’em up.”

  “What…what do you want from me, Heller? What do you want me to do?”

  I inched forward, gun in hand. “Spill, you phony bastard. Spill it all or I’ll start spilling you…”

  He was backing up; backing into the pulpit. “I don’t know anything!”

  “Ugh,” someone said.

  I turned and looked at Sarah.


  She had begun to speak. “Who seeks Yellow Feather?”

  “Aw, fuck,” I said, moving toward her. “I’m going to slap her silly…”

  “No!” he said, moving forward. He touched my arm. “No. Whatever I am, Mr. Heller, Sarah is an innocent. And truly is genuinely psychic…”

  “I can see a child,” she said, her voice a register lower than normal. “He is in a high place. There is a small house, low, with a high barn behind. The child is in the house. On the second floor. There is a bald-headed man, with pouches under his eyes. He is looking down at the child. There is a woman in the house, too. The house is on a hill.”

  She shuddered, and her eyes popped open. It made me jump.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, quietly. “Did I fall asleep?”

  He went to her, touched her shoulder, gently. “You were in a trance, my dear.” He told her what she’d said.

  “How can you see the baby,” I said, sarcasm hanging on my words like a week’s worth of wash, “when you already ‘predicted,’ accurately, its dead body on the heights over Hopewell?”

  “She never said it was the Lindbergh baby’s body,” Marinelli said, his arm around his wife’s shoulder.

  “First, she sees a dead baby in the heights, four years ago. And now she sees it alive, only now it’s a ‘child,’ not a baby, and it’s in some farmhouse?”

  “It may not be the same child,” Marinelli said. “We can’t always know the meaning of what a medium says in a trance—interpretation is required, Mr. Heller. Will you put your gun away, please?”

  He was standing there protecting his wife, who looked small and pitiful and, hell, I’d screwed her once upon a time, so maybe I owed them this one.

  “All right,” I said. And I put the gun away. “Will you cooperate, if I need you to talk to somebody?”

  “Certainly,” Marinelli said, summoning his dignity. “Who?”

  “Governor Hoffinan of New Jersey,” I said.

  He nodded solemnly.

  I went to the door.

  “Goodbye, Nate,” she said, quietly.

  “So long, Sarah,” I said, shaking my head, and I went down to the sidewalk and stood there and shook my head some more and sighed. Evalyn, watching from the cafe across the street, came over and joined me.

  “What did you find?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it,” I said, “on the way.”

  “On the way where?”

  “We have one more stop this afternoon….”

  The neat, trim two-story white clapboard in the Bronx was unchanged; so was the quiet residential street it was perched along. The lawn was brown, but evergreens hugged the porch.

  I told Evalyn to stay in the car; she didn’t like it, but I made her understand.

  “If there’s a witness,” I said, “this guy is liable not to say anything.”

  The attractive dark-haired woman who answered the door did not recognize me at first.

  “Yes?” she said, warily, the door only a third of the way open.

  “Is Professor Condon in? Tell him an old friend’s dropped by.”

  Her face had tightened. “Detective Heller,” she said.

  “Hiya, Myra.”

  The door shut suddenly—not quite a slam.

  I glanced back at Evalyn, sitting in the Packard, and smiled and shrugged. She looked at me curiously, wondering if this interview was over before it began.

  The door opened again and there he stood, in white shirtsleeves and vest and pocket watch, in all his walrus-mustached glory.

  “Long time no see, Professor.”

  “Detective Heller,” Dr. John F. Condon said stiffly. He extended his hand and I shook it; he squeezed to impress me with his strength, as usual. “I hope you’ve been well.”

  “I’ve been okay. You’re nice and tan.”

  “I have just returned from Panama.”

  “So I hear. You took off, day before Hauptmann’s case came up before the Court of Pardons.”

  He snorted. “That’s true. Though it is of no particular significance.”

  “Isn’t it? Didn’t the Governor of New Jersey request that you stick around? And help clear up a few discrepancies in your various versions of various events?”

  He raised his head. Looked down his nose at me with his vague watery blue eyes. “I had full permission of Attorney General Wilentz to depart on my holiday.”

  “I’m sure you did.” I smiled blandly at him. “You might be wondering why I’m still interested in this case, after all these years.”

  “Frankly, sir, I am.”

  “Well, I’m working for Governor Hoffman now.”

  He backed away, stepping into the entrance hall; I half expected him to hold up a cross, as if I were a vampire.

  “Sir,” he said, pompously, “during my stay in Panama, I followed all reported developments in the Lindbergh case, and this man Hoffman seems bound and determined to maliciously impugn my character, my motives, my behavior.”

  “Really,” I said.

  He took a step forward and shook a fist in the air. “I would like to face this Governor Hoffman! I would like to nail these lies of his. I know he would have a good many men there, stronger than I—but even at my age, I can put up a good fight, Detective Heller! I can still handle myself.”

  “Come along then. I’ll drive you there.”

  His fist dissolved into loose fingers, which he used to wave me off. “Ah, I said I would like to. But my womenfolk wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Then why don’t you ask me in, and I’ll put the Governor’s questions to you, myself.”

  “Detective Heller, I’m afraid I must decline, though I am willing to answer the Governor’s questions.”

  “You are?”

  “Certainly. If they’re submitted in writing.”

  “In writing?”

  “Yes—and I will of course submit my answers in the same fashion.”

  “I see. How about answering just a couple of little questions for me, not in writing? For old times’ sake?”

  He smiled in what I’m sure he imagined was a devilish manner. “Perhaps I’ll answer. Go ahead and pose your questions, young man.”

  “Did you ever meet Isidor Fisch, when you were hanging around that spiritualist church on One-Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street in Harlem?”

  His eyes bugged. He stepped back.

  “Or maybe Violet Sharpe, or Ollie Whately? Maybe all four of you sat at the same séance table, one night. By the way, the Marinellis wouldn’t happen to have been students of yours, would they?”

  The door slammed in my face.

  “Yeah, Jafsie,” I said, “you can still handle yourself,” and joined Evalyn in the car.

  33

  Ghent was a tree-shaded residential section of Norfolk, just off the downtown, its narrow brick streets lined with old two-and three-story brick houses, some shoulder-to-shoulder and hugging the sidewalk, others with shamrock-green lawns moist from sheltering boxwood, magnolia and winter-barren crape myrtle. Piercing Ghent was the Hague, a small horseshoe-shaped body of water where skiffs and pleasure craft were moored. Nothing larger could navigate the pondlike harbor. Presumably it connected to the nearby Elizabeth River, but from the rubbery dock where Evalyn and I stood, you couldn’t tell; the funnels and masts of the busy bay were obscured by a bastion of riverfront buildings. The day was cool, the sky overcast, the water, indeed the world, a peaceful but chill gray-blue.

  The sign on the central of several white-frame, green-roofed shambling dockside structures said “J. H. Curtis Boat and Engine Corporation.” Not a small operation, but not a large one, either—an obvious step down from the owner’s previous shipbuilding company, which had had among its many customers the German government. It was in that central building, in a modest, glassed-in office (no secretary, no receptionist) looking out on a big cement work area where several boatmen were sanding down the hull of a small racing craft, that we met with Commodore John H. Curtis.

&nbs
p; “Mrs. McLean,” Curtis said, standing from a swivel chair at an obsessively neat rolltop desk, grasping the hand she’d extended, “it’s a great pleasure to meet you at last.”

  “Thank you, Commodore,” she said. Evalyn wore another black frock, this one trimmed in white and gray, with a white-and-gray pillbox hat; she looked neat enough for a department-store window. “You’re looking well.”

  “I feel well,” he said, with a nod of his large head, “all things considered.” And he looked pretty good at that: tall, tanned, rather stout; in his light-brown business suit, his brown-and-yellow tie, he could have stood next to Evalyn in that department-store window. Only the lines around his eyes gave away the stress.

  “Thank you for seeing us at such short notice,” I said, and shook hands with the Commodore. He’d put two wood chairs with cushioned seats out, in anticipation of our arrival, and he gestured to them, and we sat, and so did he.

  “We seem to have mutual interests, Mr. Heller,” he said, with a friendly but serious smile. Looking at Evalyn, he said, “I feel we have much in common, Mrs. McLean.”

  “I believe we do, Commodore,” she said. “I feel we both suffered a certain public…humiliation…as a result of our sincere desire to do good in the Lindbergh tragedy.”

  “I’ve been fortunate,” he said, swaying a bit in the swivel chair, “having my family stand behind me. My wife…well, without her, perhaps I would have been lost. But my business is going well, and my personal reputation, here in the Norfolk area, and in the shipping trade in general, remains untarnished.”

  “I would assume that means, Commodore,” I said, “that you’d like to put this mess behind you, and get on with your life.”

  “I’m getting on with my life quite nicely,” he said, sitting forward, his lips tightening, “but I don’t intend to allow the indignities done to me to stand unredressed.”

  “You were accused of being a hoaxer, at first,” I said, “but were tried and convicted for obstructing justice—the state arguing that you aided and abetted the kidnap gang.”

  “Yes,” Curtis said, with a mirthless smirk, “by failing to give ‘accurate information’ about them to the authorities.”