Stolen Away (29 page)

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.

“Yes. And we’ll have to talk to Evalyn, about Means.”

“The Means information was a dead end?”

He didn’t know how dead.

“Slim, Means is a completely unreliable go-between. Don’t ask how I know, but any lines of communication he may have had with the kidnappers have been severed.”

He wondered about that, but I’d asked him not to ask how I knew, and he was goddamn good about playing by the rules some other asshole imposed on him.

“What I’d like you to do,” I said, “as a favor to me if nothing else, is encourage Mrs. McLean not to pursue Means as a go-between, any longer. To encourage her to have the son of a bitch arrested, which after all might uncover some worthwhile information. She’s inclined to do that herself already. But she needs to hear it from you.”

“That’s why you suggested I invite her here?” “Yes. That, and I think she deserved to meet you and your wife. To hear you thank her. I think she’s got that much coming, for her hundred grand, rich though she is.” Lindbergh, chagrined, nodded his agreement.

During dinner, amidst my social betters talking about politics and coming-out parties and yachts, I noticed something odd. We were having the usual dreadful English cooking, courtesy of Elsie Whately—mystery stew, tough bread, murky coffee and cardboard pie—and butler Ollie, Elsie’s better half, was serving us. But he seemed very ill at ease. The presence of either Curtis or Evalyn or the both of them seemed to get on his nerves. The table service, which Ollie had set, was missing the knives. Anne Lindbergh herself got up and provided them.

Why in hell would a servant trained in household duties since he was knee-high to a fetus forget so ordinary a piece of table service as a knife?

After dinner, Slim did indeed encourage Evalyn to cut Means loose, turn him in and do her best to get her money back.

It was perhaps eight-thirty when we walked out into a cool, overcast night, Evalyn and I followed by Slim and his pretty Anne, who held hands like young lovers. They looked like the perfect American couple they’d been, not so long ago, the circles under their eyes, the redness of those eyes, the lines worry was etching in their faces, smoothed by the night’s cool half-light.

That was my last image of them, their smiles slight and shining, like slices of the moon, Anne delicate and waving from the hip, her other hand resting gently on the rise of her tummy, where a new child grew, Slim raising a hand in goodbye, shy, modest, his stubbornness not showing.

As we drove away, the ruts of Featherbed Lane challenging even the Lincoln’s suspension, Evalyn seemed at peace; even happy.

“They’re wonderful people,” she said. “Wonderful.”

“They’re nice,” I agreed. “Damn shame.”

“So in love.”

“Definitely.”

We were moving through the dark woods, moonlight filtering through the trees, when Evalyn said, “Pull over. Pull off.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

I did as I was told, the Lincoln’s wheels crunching leaves and twigs as we rolled to a stop. I shut the car off and looked at her; for a woman who’d had a big meal recently, she sure looked hungry. She was unbuttoning the white silk blouse, breathing heavily, her breasts heaving. The fox stole was curled up between us on the seat as if asleep, the black jacket of her suit draped over it like she’d covered it, to keep it warm.

“Fuck me,” she said.

I love it when rich women talk dirty.

Then we were in the backseat, her black dress hiked up, my trousers around my ankles, her silk stockings rubbing smoothly against my bare legs, the sounds of animals outside the car counterpoising the sounds of animals within.

Later, as I drove, she slept much of the time, cuddled up against me. She smelled good; her jasmine perfume was mingling with a natural muskiness from our coupling.

At one point, half-asleep, she said, “How would you like a full-time job?”

“Huh?”

“I really could use a sort of bodyguard, chauffeur, security chief…it would pay nicely, Nate.”

“Well, uh…”

“There’d be fringe benefits.”

“Gee, Evalyn.”

“Double your salary,” she said, and began to snore.

I thought about it all the way to Washington, D.C. Was she serious? After all, I had a career. Hell, I wasn’t some male concubine. I was a cop, I was a detective; not a kept man!

“Evalyn,” I said, the next morning, in her mammoth breakfast nook, drinking coffee from a china cup worth more than any single possession of mine, “I accept.”

“You accept what, Nate?”

“Your offer. I’d love to come to work for you.”

She smiled sadly; she looked older this morning—pretty, but every year her age. She wore a pink silk robe—not her dowdy plaid number. And the Hope diamond was around her neck; it winked mockingly at me. She was sipping tea.

“That, I’m afraid, was just wishful thinking on my part. I can’t have you around. You’re too dangerous.”

“Don’t judge me by the other day,” I said, nibbling buttery toast. “I hardly ever get in shoot-outs.”

“It’s not that.” She had a tiny, bittersweet half-smile. “Frightening as that was, I will treasure the memory. The fear will fade, the romance will sustain.”

“Evalyn, I’ll go back to Chicago if you tell me to.”

“Go back to Chicago, Nate.”

“Oh. Well. Sure.”

Her eyes glistened with regret. “Nate—my husband wants my children. And my children are the most important thing in my life. If Ned found out about us, about you and me, he could use it against me, and could have them. He could win them. And I can’t have that.” She shook her head, with a look of unmistakable finality. “We mustn’t see each other again.”

She reached across the table and touched my cheek.

“It’s been wonderful,” she said. “A real adventure. But it’s over.”

I got up and went over and gave her a kiss; a nice fat buttery smooch.

“Let me know if you ever need me,” I said.

Then I wiped off my face with a fancy napkin, went upstairs, got my bag, caught a cab and hopped a westbound train. The only thing this detective hoped to find, right now, was Chicago, Illinois.

I witnessed the rest of it long-distance, via the newspapers and an occasional on-the-qt call from Colonel Henry Breckinridge, who had come to agree with me that Slim’s no-cops-allowed approach was (as Breckinridge put it) “counterproductive.”

The only other difference, this time around, was that Colonel Schwarzkopf was kept abreast of the Norfolk ransom negotiations (though the Virginia authorities weren’t). Not that it mattered much: Schwarzkopf and his spiffy state police continued to obey the Lone Eagle’s hands-off orders and stayed well away from Curtis and the supposed kidnap gang he was dealing with.

For the rest of April and well into May, Lindbergh followed Commodore Curtis’s lead and boarded first a small rented vessel, then the yacht
Marcan
, belonging to a hotel-owner pal of Curtis’s, and finally the eighty-five-foot ketch, the
Cachalot
, belonging to another Curtis crony, for various attempted sea rendezvous with the kidnappers. Raging storms, rough sea and dense fog seemed to conspire with heavy boating traffic to keep any meeting from occurring. Between outings, Curtis—all by his lonesome—would rush ashore for phone calls and meetings with Hilda, Larsen and sundry others of the kidnap gang members, who seemed eager to return the little boy to his weary parents. Detailed descriptions of several boats the kidnappers were using were provided by Curtis, as were various specific rendezvous points.

On May fifth, while Lindy and Curtis and crew were searching for kidnappers off the coast of Virginia, Gaston Bullock Means was getting arrested by the FBI on an embezzlement charge—specifically, “larceny after trust.” Immediately after I suggested it, and Lindbergh himself okayed it, Evalyn had first fired Means, demanding the return of her money, and then—after Means gave a typically wild excuse for not being able to do so—she tipped the feds to him.

But the crime having been committed in the District of Columbia meant Means had to be arrested in D.C. And his home in Chevy Chase was just over the Maryland state line. The feds shadowed him till he drove those few blocks into federal territory, got pulled rudely over and found himself deposited in the office of old J. Edgar himself, who despised former-agent Means for the black eye he’d given the bureau.

And to Hoover, Gaston Bullock Means told a story which he had already tried (unsuccessfully) out on Evalyn and her lawyers.

It seemed when Mrs. McLean requested the return of her one hundred thousand dollars, Means had picked up the money in his brother’s home in Concord, North Carolina, and was on his way to Washington to hand it over when, just outside of Alexandria, a man waving a red lantern flagged him down. This fellow (who Means hadn’t seen all that well) had put a foot on Means’s running board and said, “Hello, Hogan—Eleven told me to take the package from you, here.”

And of course Means had turned the money over to this stranger, because, after all, the stranger knew Means’s code name and Evalyn’s code number.

Later, it came as a devastating shock to Means to discover that the stranger had not really been a representative of Mrs. McLean’s; that her money had never been returned to her.

Unfortunately, nobody questioned Means about this story with the aid of a Chicago lie detector.

And so, naturally, Means pleaded not guilty, and served six days in the red-brick D.C. jail before a bondsman put up the $100,000 bail—a fitting amount, I thought.

The afternoon of the day Means got out of jail—May 12—a colored driver hauling a load of timber pulled his truck alongside a narrow, muddy back road between Princeton and Hopewell and wandered into the underbrush, braving a steady rain, to take a leak. But before he could, he noticed something half-buried in dirt and leaves.

A small, decayed corpse.

Colonel Lindbergh was at the time on the
Cachalot
, just off the New Jersey coast, trying to make contact with another boat, called (Curtis said) the
Mary B. Moss.
Curtis was ashore trying to make contact with the kidnappers through “Hilda.” The yacht eased into Cape May Harbor that evening, after another day of miserable weather, though prospects for a better day were imminent. Lindbergh remained aboard ship, where he’d been sleeping nights of late; hopeful that tomorrow the rendezvous would finally be made.

But a naval officer and a Curtis associate boarded the ketch and discovered that the news that had already been on the radio and in headlines had not reached the storm-tossed ship. Gingerly, they told Lindbergh, but I’m told that Slim knew at once from their faces that his son was dead.

The next afternoon—Friday the thirteenth—Lindbergh spent three minutes in the morgue identifying the decomposed body as his son. Anne stayed home.

A few days later, Commodore Curtis—who’d failed to provide either Treasury Agent Frank Wilson or Schwarzkopf and Inspector Welch with any conclusive proof of the existence of Sam, John, Hilda, Larsen, et al.—confessed that it had all been a hoax. Investigators said Curtis’s business was in trouble, and that the year before he’d had a nervous breakdown; also, in the thick of his “negotiations” with the “kidnappers,” he’d signed with the New York
Herald-Tribune
to tell his story.

The yacht-club commodore was tried for obstructing justice and fined a grand and sentenced to a year in the pokey, though the latter was suspended.

Gaston Means got fifteen years. Nobody could find Evalyn’s hundred thousand (actually one hundred and four thousand, including Means’s “expense account”), though feds ransacked his Chevy Chase home and checked several safety deposit boxes.

The feds also checked the safety deposit boxes of the late Max Hassel and Max Greenberg, who Means in court fingered as the real kidnappers. Nearly a quarter of a mil in cash was found in Hassel’s safety deposit box, but the denominations were fifties and up, whereas both Evalyn and Lindbergh had paid out fives, tens and twenties.

Meanwhile, the “Fox” turned out to be a disbarred lawyer named Norman Whitaker who had indeed been Means’s cellmate; he claimed never to have laid eyes on the Lindbergh boy, that he had assumed the role of “mastermind kidnapper” to help out his old swindler pal. He was in fact in jail at the time of the actual kidnapping. And now he would be in jail again, for two years.

Evalyn wasted no time finding a new cause. In June of ’32, to the dismay of her socialite friends, she began championing and funding the “Bonus Army,” the depression-racked World War veterans who were seeking aid from the government; the government, of course, responded with tear gas and terrorism. But God bless Evalyn and her good heart for trying to help. And the Bonus Army was a hell of a lot better place for her to spend her money than Gaston Bullock Means.

As for the Means tip about Violet Sharpe, Inspector Welch followed up on it, all right. Welch had already been suspicious, as Violet’s stories had continued to shift—the movie theater she said she’d attended March first evolving into a roadhouse called the Peanut Grill, the boyfriend’s name finally coming back to her—Ernie—but leading to her falsely identifying a cabbie named Brinkert when the real “Ernie” was a beau of hers named Miller.

Not surprisingly, Welch questioned Violet repeatedly, particularly in the month following the discovery of the corpse of a child, and on June 10—the day after a particularly pointed interrogation—Violet reacted with panic and anger to the news that Welch was on his way back for another round. At Englewood, she apparently poisoned herself, rather than be questioned by the persistent Welch again. Cyanide.

I felt a little bad about that. I’d helped focus Welch—a thick-headed third-degree artist if ever I met one—on the girl. Not that I figured she was blameless; but so much information died with her.

Professor Condon was considered a suspect, grilled by the cops, humiliated by the public (one letter promised Condon a look at a picture of the child’s kidnapper, and the enclosure was a small mirror); but he held up far better than Violet Sharpe. And much of the press attention he seemed to thrive on, pontificating at the drop of a hint.

Betty Gow’s beau, Red Johnson, was deported; Betty herself, when the Hopewell household broke up, went back to Scotland. The Whatelys stayed on, maintaining the estate for the eventual return of the Lindberghs, who had moved “temporarily” to Next Day Hill, the Morrow estate at Englewood, shortly after the discovery of the little body less than two miles from their Hopewell house.

But butler Ollie took sick—he became increasingly nervous, and troubled by internal pains; he survived an emergency operation for a perforated ulcer, then died four days later. His widow stayed in the Lindberghs’ employ, though her employers forever abandoned the unlucky Hopewell house, donating it to be a welfare center for children.

In mid-August, Anne Lindbergh gave her husband a second son. Lindy beseeched the press and public to allow the boy to “grow up normally”; at the Englewood estate, the cranky fox terrier Wahgoosh was made second-in-command to a surly police dog named Thor, who was known to shred the clothing and flesh of intruders. Kidnap threats against the infant were an everyday occurrence, the notes now requesting money to
prevent
a kidnapping; in one case kidnap notes and a ransom drop led to the arrest of two suspects—both of whom had alibis in the previous kidnapping, however.

There was something else, which struck me as very strange: when the name of the boy was finally released to the press, it turned out Anne and Charles had christened him “Jon.”

Even without the “h” out, that seemed a hell of a choice.

I quit the force and went into business for myself in December 1932. The Lindbergh case had long since become something I followed in the papers, like everybody else. I began to wonder if they’d ever find the kidnappers. If Capone had really been behind it—he was in the Atlanta pen, now, as Eliot predicted—I didn’t figure they ever would.

On the other hand, that ransom money was out there, and in 1933, the country went off the gold standard, meaning anybody with gold certificates had to turn them in by May first or face the legal consequences. That, thanks to Frank Wilson and Elmer Irey’s insistence on paying out the ransom in gold notes, ought to flush out the kidnappers.

Or the extortionists.

I continued to think it might have been an interloping group with inside info that had contacted Jafsie; with that kid buried in so half-ass a fashion, so near the estate, in woods that had been searched time and again, the kidnappers themselves seemed unlikely to risk going after any dough. They had fucked up that night, accidentally killing the kid maybe when the ladder broke, or when they were fleeing the house, and faded into the night and history.

At least, that was my theory. And when the gold notes were tracked, I’d be proven right or wrong.

A New York City dick named James Finn, a lieutenant, had been keeping in his Manhattan precinct office a large city map charting the path of the surfacing gold notes for over a year, when the gold-standard situation started crowding his map with pins.

I had never met Finn, but apparently he was in touch with Schwarzkopf and even Lindbergh in the early days—just another cop being kept at arm’s length.

Anyway, it was Finn who made the bust. September 19, 1933.

They only got one guy: a German carpenter in the Bronx. Following it from Chicago, in the papers, I figured Finn and the feds would soon shake the rest of the gang out of this Hauptmann guy.

The papers claimed he was Jafsie’s “Cemetery John.”

I had thought about calling Slim with my condolences, when I first heard about the body of his little boy turning up in those woods; but I figured I was the last person he’d want to hear from. I’d got very drunk, sitting by the phone, making my mind up, and got a little weepy, which was the rum talking.

Lindbergh called me, but better than two years later. Not long after they caught the kraut, in fact. A long-distance call so crackly it might have been from another planet, not New Jersey. On the other hand, my experiences in New Jersey led me to believe it just might be another planet.

“Nate,” Slim said, “I’ve been negligent in thanking you.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I wish I could have done more.”

“You wanted to. Sometimes…I wonder how things might be different, if I’d listened to you.”

“Not much. Frankly…if you’ll forgive my bluntness, Colonel, it’s obvious your son died the night of the kidnapping. Nothing we could have done differently would change that.”

“Those evil bastards would be in jail now.”

“Maybe. But this clown Hauptmann will cough up his accomplices. Wait and see.”

I heard him sigh. Then he said: “That’s what we’re counting on. I understand you’re in private practice, now.”

“That’s right. A-l Detective Agency. I’m the president. Also the janitor.”

He laughed. “Same old Nate. If I ever need a detective, I know who to call.”

“Right,” I said. “Frank Wilson.”

He laughed again, wished me well, and I wished him and Anne and their new son the same. And that was that.

It felt strange, sitting on the sidelines, after having been in the midst of this famous affair, early on. Not that I minded. Sometimes I thought about Lindbergh; fairly frequently I thought about Evalyn. Bittersweet memories.

Nonetheless, it was reassuring knowing that this case was behind me—that it was, in fact, virtually solved.