Stolen Away (41 page)

Tonight was Thursday, my second night at Friendship. The Norfolk trip had taken all day Wednesday, setting out from New York in the morning and meeting with Curtis in the afternoon and driving back to Washington, D.C., in the evening, so we could have our meeting with Means at St. Elizabeth’s today. I had my own room at Friendship, and the same was true for the night we spent in New York, at the St. Moritz. Evalyn and I were getting along famously, but not intimately.

We sprawled in overstuffed chairs that were angled toward a fireplace over which a framed oil painting of her husband’s father hung and in which a fire lazily crackled, casting an orangish glow over this large sitting room. The room had pale plaster walls, part of the recent remodeling, and new, expensive furnishings, running to dark wood and floral upholstery, and was littered with end tables with lavish lamps and framed family photos; a much more modern feel to it than any room at 2020, despite a vast, decidedly old-fashioned Oriental carpet.

Everything we’d learned, at least anything that I thought to be of importance, we’d conveyed to Governor Hoffman by phone. Today we’d gotten news from the governor: Robert Hicks, his criminologist (actually, Evalyn’s, as she was paying the bill), had confirmed—through chemical analysis and paint scrapings—my theory about the shelf in the Hauptmanns’ kitchen closet.

“You’ve done well, Nathan,” she said, sipping a glass of wine. She was wearing black lounging pajamas and high-heel black slippers.

I was working on a Bacardi cocktail; my second. “We’ve made some progress, but nothing yet that will carry enough weight to buy Hauptmann another reprieve, let alone a new trial.”

She smiled and shook her head in supportive disagreement. “You’ve connected Fisch to those Harlem spiritualists, and Ollie Whately and Violet Sharpe, too. Not to mention Jafsie.”

“It’s thin,” I said, shaking my head back at her. “Gerta Henkel will be dismissed as Hauptmann’s lying kraut girlfriend. Who knows what the Marinellis will say, if they haven’t skipped town already. Whately and Sharpe are dead, and Jafsie’s dead from the neck up. Talking to Curtis leads me to believe most if not all of his story is true—but there’s nothing solid to back it up; and some of what Means told us today tallies with Curtis and other facts at our disposal. But again—what good does that do us? Means is a pathological liar in the loony bin. What we’ve most clearly found is police tampering with, and creating, evidence—and that’s not going to make us popular in New Jersey.”

“What’s it going to take?”

I laughed and it echoed off the plaster walls. “Maybe what I told the Governor: sitting Lindy’s kid down on Hoffman’s Statehouse desk.”

“You really think that child is alive?”

“I think it’s a possibility.”

“Then why aren’t we searching for it?”

“How exactly would we do that, Evalyn?”

She shook her head, smirked humorlessly. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe we should ask one of those damn psychics.”

I laughed again. “Maybe we should’ve stopped in on ol’ Edgar Cayce, at Virginia Beach, while we were in his neck of the woods, yesterday.”

“Edgar Cayce?”

“Yeah. He’s this hick soothsayer who did a ‘reading’ on the kidnapping, way back in the first week or so of the case.”

She was sitting up. “Nate, Edgar Cayce is a very
famous
psychic. I’ve read a good deal about him. He’s no charlatan like the Marinellis.”

I gestured with an open hand. “Evalyn, you got to understand that some of these people are well intentioned. I don’t think Sister Sarah Sivella Marinelli Indian Princess Shit Feather knows she’s a fake. But her husband is, and he feeds her stuff, hypnotizes her maybe, and she winds up thinking she’s got a pipeline to the past, future and God almighty.”

She seemed to be only half-listening to my diatribe. “You met Cayce?” she asked.

“Yeah, I was there.”

“During the reading?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“What happened?”

I shrugged. “He gave his version of where the kid was taken, including a bunch of street names. It was supposed to be in some section of New Haven, Connecticut, only the feds checked up on it and none of those street names, or even that part of town, was there.”

Her eyes had narrowed. “Do you have your field notes on the Cayce readings?”

“Sure. They’re up in my room, in my bag.”

“Can I see them?”

“Sure. I’ll bring ’em down tomorrow morning; we’ll have a look at ’em over breakfast.”

“No, Nate—I mean, now.”

“Evalyn, I’m tired, and I’m working on getting drunk. Can’t this wait?”

“The clock is ticking for Hauptmann.”

“Oh, fuck, spare me the violins. I’ve about had my fill of this screwball tragedy for one day and night, and maybe for one lifetime. It can fucking wait.”

She said nothing for a while. That was fine with me.

Then she said, “You know, people close to me over the years say that I am fey.”

“Fey? What does that mean, you like to sleep with girls, now?”

“No, you silly son of a bitch. It means…visionary. In the psychic sense.”

“Oh. So you believe in this spook stuff, too.”

“You asked Means about those supernatural doings at Far View, didn’t you? That happened a long time ago, to still be lingering in your mind.”

“There was nothing supernatural about any of that. Means was sneaking around in his socks doing a number on us. He all but admitted as much this afternoon.”

“That’s not the way I took it. Nate, there have been psychic elements in this case from the beginning.”

“A big case like Lindbergh attracts screwballs like shit attracts flies.”

“How elegantly said.” She sat forward, her hands folded in her lap, a demure posture for a woman in black pj’s. “In my life I’ve had premonitions, Nate, that have come to pass. It simply happens to me, from time to time that, without being able to say how exactly, I know that death impends for someone in my circle…”

“That’s bunk, Evalyn.”

“I had that feeling the weekend my son died. I heard the inner voice but I didn’t listen, and went off on a trip, and my precious boy died while I was away…. Ned and I at Churchill Downs, to watch the running of the Kentucky Derby. For which I never will forgive myself.”

She covered her face with a hand.

I went over to her, knelt by her, gave her my handkerchief, patted her knee. “I’m sorry, Evalyn. It hurts. I know it hurts.”

“If that child is still alive,” she said, and for a moment I thought she meant her own son but she meant instead the Lindbergh boy, “we should try to find him.”

“You want those notes? I’ll get those notes. Will that make you feel better, baby?”

She nodded.

I went up and got the notes.

When I came down she was standing in the black pool that was the discarded lounging pajamas; she wore nothing but the high-heel black slippers. The orange glow of the fire made her body look like something in a painting. A very sensual painting by an artist who wasn’t fey, if you get my drift.

She must’ve been in her mid-forties by now, but she had the body of a woman ten years younger, slender, smooth, the large breasts drooping a bit but so lovely, and waiting to be lifted.

“Come here, big boy,” she said. She held her arms out gently. “Come to mama.”

I fucked her on the Oriental carpet with my trousers down around my ankles; her stark naked, me half-dressed, there was something very nasty about it, and at the same time sweet. She made a lot of noise. I made some myself.

Then I was a puddle of flesh on her pajamas, half-unconscious, as tired as if I’d run a mile, while she was sitting, nude as a grape, in her overstuffed chair, lighting up a cigarette as she read the Cayce field notes in the firelight.

After a while, I started to put my clothes back on. She looked up from her reading and said, very businesslike, “Don’t get dressed. What’s the point? Why don’t you take the rest of your things off.”

“You mean, just sit here naked on the floor…”

“The servants have retired to their quarters. We won’t be disturbed. Now get your clothes off.” She returned to her reading.

I must’ve slept a little.

Then, having rolled over on my back, I looked up and she was standing over me. The exaggeration of the angle made her figure look more naked than naked, like looking at a living statue representing everything that made a man want a woman; I wanted to worship her and dominate her and be dominated and worshiped all at once. She smiled down at me over enormous breasts, her shape sharply outlined, the fireplace at her back. My dick stood to attention and she sat on me, easing herself down on me, with a subtle, shimmering motion.

This time we made love; fucking was part of it, but this time was far less urgent, far more sweet, and not at all nasty, churning to a slow, gradual, mutual release that lasted forever but not near long enough.

“Should I have used something?” I panted, after a while, as we lay entangled in each other’s nakedness.

“I’m not menopausal just yet, Nathan Heller.”

“Then maybe I should’ve used something.”

“Nate, if you made a baby tonight, he’s a rich little bastard. So don’t worry about it.”

“I won’t,” I said, and smiled. “Is that bodyguard, chauffeur, security chief-type job still open?”

Her smile crinkled her chin. “It’s not fair to ask me right now.”

“If it’s still open, I accept.”

“Can I get back to you on that?”

“Sure.”

I put my pants on and she put her pajamas on and I had another cocktail and she had another glass of wine and sat in my lap in one of the big overstuffed chairs while we drank.

“Those notes,” she said.

“Hmmm?” I said.

“Those field notes about Edgar Cayce. I think we should go to New Haven. I think we should look for ourselves. Follow his clues.”

“They’re not clues, they’re ramblings, delusional goddamn bullshit.”

“Cayce is not a charlatan. He’s the genuine article.”

“There’s no such thing, baby, and besides, the feds checked it out, and found nothing.”

“How much confidence do you have in the ‘feds’?”

“Well…”

She had a point. Irey had sent a man to infiltrate the Marinelli church, way back when, and that undercover ace had either not come up with the Fisch/Whately/Sharpe/Jafsie connection, or had suppressed it.

“Let’s go take a look,” she said.

I shook my head, no. “I have to go see Ellis Parker tomorrow. That’s a genuine lead. Hoffman says Parker has a real suspect.”

“It would only take a day.”

“Hauptmann doesn’t have very many of those. Besides, I looked at a New Haven map myself, back then. Those streets aren’t there. There’s no Adams Street, no Scharten Street. The section called, what?”

“Cordova.”

“There’s no Cordova section in New Haven.”

She shrugged, tossed her head. “Maybe some of these street names are inexact. Maybe they’re phonetic. Maybe they’re phonetic and a bit off, and some interpretation is required.”

“What did you say?”

She shrugged. “Maybe some interpretation is required.”

What had Marinelli said to me the other day? When I was asking his wife why she’d seen a dead baby on a hillside, in one vision, and then a child on a farm, in another?
We can’t always know the meaning of what a medium says in a trance—interpretation is required.

“I tell you what, Evalyn,” I said, stroking her smooth back. “If you want to check out this ‘lead’—this stale, improbable lead—you can. You’ve got more than one car?”

“Certainly,” she said, as if everyone did.

“Got someone you can take with you? Some big lug who can share the driving and look out for you? That butler, Garboni, can he handle himself?”

“Why, yes.”

I touched her arm. “Then check it out yourself. Take my field notes. It shouldn’t take more than a day, as you’ve said. Give it a try. And we’ll meet back here either Friday night or Saturday, whenever we’re both done.”

She was smiling. I don’t remember seeing her happier.

“Thank you, Nathan. What can I ever do to repay you?”

I sipped my Bacardi. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

Mount Holly, New Jersey, was a sleepy little village at the base of the holly-covered hill from which it took its name. Despite some modern stores, the effect was of a place where time had frozen toward the middle of the previous century; along the broad, tree-lined streets were the simple square two-and three-story brick homes erected by the village’s early Quaker residents—solid-wood shutters and wrought-iron fences and rails. On this cheerless, chill March afternoon, the smell of smoke from old-fashioned wood-burning stoves singed the air.

I parked the Packard on Main Street right in front of the old courthouse where Ellis Parker had kept his office for over forty years. The courthouse was a two-story yellow-brick structure with green shutters, white trim and a stately bell tower—wearing the date it was built like a badge: 1796. Moving across a patterned brick sidewalk over a small flat lawn to the front door—a vast oak slab with a colonial lantern nearby and the coat of arms of New Jersey in granite just above it—I felt I’d taken a left turn into another era.

Parker was in the second-floor rear office, in back of a bustling reception area where his deputies and his secretary had desks. The secretary, a dark-haired, bespectacled matronly woman, ushered me into Parker’s presence.

The Old Fox, sitting in a swivel chair at a cluttered desk, was in shirtsleeves and suspenders, a food-flecked tie loose around his unbuttoned collar. He was as I remembered him: paunchy, bald, what little remained of his hair white, his mustache and eyebrows salt-and-pepper. His eyes were wide-set and drowsy. He was puffing a corncob pipe and looked like a farmer halfheartedly dressed for church.

The office was as quaint as a Currier and Ives print, only not near as cute: the desk littered with correspondence, reports, case histories and memos; a windowsill precariously balancing numerous telephones and directories; baskets and boxes in corners teeming with books, trial-exhibit photographs and maps; bulletin boards papered with police-department circulars, some boldly inscribed “Captured” and “Convicted” in black grease pencil; and sitting in one corner, on a chair, wearing a hat, a human skeleton.

“The Chicago man,” he said, smiling with the natural condescension of the rural for the urban. “Have a seat, young fella.”

I pulled up a hardwood chair. “I’m surprised you remembered me,” I said, as we shook hands.

He snorted, holding onto the corncob pipe with his other hand; the tobacco smelled like damp leaves burning. “Couldn’t forget the feller who ran interference for me—got me in to see Colonel Lindbergh, when that son of a bitch Schwarzkopf was set on keeping me out.”

“As I recall,” I said, “getting in to see Lindbergh didn’t do you much good.”

He shook his head, no. “He’d been poisoned against me. Politics. It’s all politics.” He smiled privately. “But he’ll listen to me now.”

“It’ll have to be by wireless,” I said. “He lives in England these days, you know.”

“He’ll come back for this,” Parker said confidently. “It’s gonna be a whole new ball game, when this hits the fan.”

“What is ‘this’?”

He ignored the question. “You said on the phone you’re working for the Governor.”

I nodded. “You realize, of course, that Governor Hoffman is concerned about this investigation of yours.”

“And here I thought I had his blessing.”

“You’ve got his blessing, as I understand it, but he’d like to know what the hell you’re up to. Time is running out for Richard Hauptmann.”

The smile disappeared from around the corncob pipe. “That poor unfortunate son of a bitch. Sitting in the death house waiting to be executed for a crime he’s completely innocent of.”

“I think he’s innocent myself,” I said. “Why do you feel that way?”

“Nathan…mind if I call you Nathan? Nathan, you’re the kidnapper of this baby, you’re the master criminal of this century, you plan the crime of the century and you execute it. If you’re such a genius do you take a piece of wood from your own attic to make a ladder and then leave it behind as a clue?”

“Probably not.”

“Never. Especially not if you’re Hauptmann, who has all kinds of lumber in his garage and his yard. That was contrived evidence, I know that from my friends in the State Police. It’s bullshit.”

“Well, you’re right.”

“Let me ask you something, Nathan. If you had the brains to collect this ransom, would you go to a gas station with your own car, your own face, your own license plate, and give the guy a gold note and add insult to injury and tell him you got more like it at home?”

“I guess not.” I shifted in the hard chair. “No offense, Ellis—you don’t mind if I call you Ellis? Ellis, this is all old news to me. I didn’t drive up here from Washington, D.C., to sit around the pickle barrel and chew the fat.”

His mouth twitched around the pipe. “Do you know that that little corpse found on that mountainside probably wasn’t the Lindbergh baby?”

“I suspect it.”

He sat forward and his jaw jutted like the prow of a ship. “Yes, but do you
know
it? I’m not talking about the unlikelihood of them bones going undetected when the woods had been searched by everybody from the New Jersey State Police to the Boy Scouts of America. I’m talking about talking to pathologists about the rate of decomposition. I’m talking about looking up the weather records for that region in those three months.”

“Weather records?”

He leaned back, smiling like a fisherman who’d just made a big, easy catch. “Ever build a compost heap, Nathan?”

“I’m a city boy, Ellis. I don’t know shit about compost.”

He laughed. “In a compost heap, even tiny leaves take more than three months to decompose and you’re doin’ everything humanly possible to make ’em decompose faster, you’re adding manure and such to make it break down as quick as you can. And it still takes months. This body they want us to believe was the Lindbergh baby, it decomposed way too fast to have been out there in that cold, cold weather for three months.”

“That’s interesting,” I admitted, and it was. I was even writing it down. “Is that it?”

The sleepy blue eyes woke up. “You’re not impressed, city boy? You want to know what I
know
that you
don’t
?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” he said, and I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t hook a thumb in his suspenders, “I know who the real kidnapper is.”

“Oh, really. Who?” I pointed to the skeleton in the hat in the chair. “Him?”

“No. This is the feller.” He was searching in the papers on his desk; finally he withdrew a mug shot and passed it to me.

I looked at the front and side views of a bucket-headed man with inexpertly slicked-back gray hair, dark eyebrows, a lumpy drink-dissipated nose, a fleshy face that looked pasty even in a black-and-white photo. His mouth was a crinkly line, a bow tie bumping a saggy double chin. He could have been fifty, he could have been seventy. His eyes had the dull, sullen look of a man who cared about nothing, except maybe himself. I wouldn’t have trusted him for the time.

“His name is Paul H. Wendel,” Parker said. “Known him all his life.”

That didn’t quite seem possible. “How old
is
he?”

“About forty-two, forty-three, I’d say.”

Jesus. This guy was decomposing faster than the little Sourlands corpse.

“Knew his father before him,” Parker was saying, “knew the boy since he was born. His daddy was a Lutheran minister, and tried to push his son into following in his footsteps. Didn’t take.”

“Looks like he’s been around.”

“He practiced pharmacy at one time. But when he was in that business he perpetrated a holdup against himself to collect the insurance money. He was saving up for night classes. Studying law.”

“Law?”

Parker nodded, grinned around the corncob pipe. “So before you know it, he become a lawyer. And as a young lawyer, he embezzled clients’ funds and was convicted and went to the pokey. Yours truly, as a friend of his old Bible-beating daddy, helped him get a parole. I tried to get him reinstated with the Bar Association but I didn’t pull ’er off.”

I studied Wendel’s battered face. “And you think this guy is the Lindbergh kidnapper?”

“I
know
he is. The man has a brilliant mind—studied medicine for a while, too, you know. Medicine, the law, the ministry, pharmacy—that’s Paul Wendel.”

“It sounds like you’re…friends.”

“We are, or we were, before he committed this crime. Smartest man I ever met, Paul Wendel, but a failure in so many ways, and bitter about it. He felt that all the things he’d tried to accomplish came to nothing, that nothing good had ever happened to him; that he never got a break.”

“Was this self-pity occasional, like when he was in his cups, or…”

“It was constant. He’d say, The world has always mistreated me, Ellis, but one day I’ll do something that will make the world sit up and take notice.’”

“And you think he finally did.”

Parker’s mouth was tight, but his eyes smiled, as he nodded. “Not long before the kidnapping, Paul was getting himself into trouble writing bad checks. There were warrants out for him in New Jersey. He came to me and asked if I could help, and I said I would try, but in the meantime he should go away someplace.”

“When was this, exactly?”

“Several months before the kidnapping. He began living in New York, in various cheap hotels, but his wife and his daughter and son stayed behind in Trenton—he’d sneak home and visit ’em from time to time, when the coast was clear.”

“It wasn’t like there was a big manhunt out for him.”

“Not at all. He just had warrants on him for this bad paper he passed. Anyway, after the kidnapping, I made a statement to the press and the radio that if the kidnapper would just come forward and talk to me, I would do all in my power to see that he was not punished. All I wanted to do was get that baby back safe.”

“Figuring with your reputation, it might just draw the kidnapper out.”

“Such was my thinking, yes. Hell, pretty soon I had bags of mail, phone calls from here to hell and back. My secretary would screen these calls. She’d only have me listen in on the more promising ones. And one of these calls was from Wendel—trying to disguise his voice.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“Positive. I know Paul Wendel’s voice, for Christ’s sake; heard it for forty-some years. He calls disguising his voice, and even my secretary recognizes it, so she puts him on the line with me, and he’s saying he knows who has the baby, and he’d like to come in and talk to me about it. I pretended not to recognize who it was, and invited him in.”

“Did he come?”

“Yup. But he didn’t even mention having called. Just announced that he’d had contact with the people who had the Lindbergh baby, and how he wanted to work with me to get that baby back. I told him, why, go ahead; see what you can do. But nothing come of it.”

“Sounds like he was just a blowhard. Maybe trying to pressure you into getting those bad-check warrants pulled off his back.”

“I would’ve thought so, too, but I kept remembering something Wendel had said to me, not long before the kidnapping. He was sitting in this office, in that very chair you’re sitting in, having coffee…oh, do you want some coffee, Nathan?”

“No, that’s okay. I’d rather have the rest of the story…black.”

“Right. Anyway, he said, ‘You know, Ellis, I’m getting damned tired of trying to save some money, a five-dollar bill here, a ten-dollar bill there. I want some real money.’ So I asked him, ‘What do you consider “real” money, Paul?’ And Wendel says, ‘I want to make fifty thousand dollars at one time. Fifty thousand, fifty thousand.’ He kept going on about it.”

“And when you heard about the fifty-thousand-dollar ransom, then you suspected Wendel?”

“When I put it together with his story about having ‘friends’ who had the baby, you bet I did.”

I sighed. “You’ve been reading your own press clippings, Ellis. That’s the thinnest piece of deduction I’ve heard this side of the radio.”

He didn’t like that. He shook the pipe at me. “My instincts have never done me wrong, not in over forty years in this game, you young pup.”

“Really? Well, I’ve been a detective since, what, ’31? And this is the first time I’ve been called a ‘young pup.’”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about! And you don’t know Paul Wendel! Remember, he thought the world had mistreated him.” He hunched his shoulders, gesturing with both hands. “This man is a psychotic, a very brilliant man with a criminal twist to his mind. The world was always against him. So what does he decide to do? Strike at the world’s biggest hero. Kidnap the baby of this international hero, this Lucky Lindy. And that way, he could be more famous than Lindy, and yet anonymous at the same time. In his mind, he’d know he was better than Lindbergh; in his mind, he was a bigger hero.”

“If he did this, why would he come to you with this cock-and-bull story about ‘friends’ of his who had the baby? You’re a cop, and a famous one. That’s inviting hell in a handbasket….”

He threw up his hands. “It’s the key, Nathan! Wendel did something that he believes
proves
he is bigger than Lindbergh. But he couldn’t be a ‘hero,’ and not let somebody know! He can’t be the man who planned and executed the crime of the century and then remain
silent
about it.”

“And he was acquainted with you, the ‘barnyard Sherlock Holmes,’ a world-famous detective, who could appreciate his accomplishment.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m not. And if this is all you have, I don’t think you have much of a suspect at all.”

He snorted. “You think that’s all I have? When my instincts kick in, that’s when I start digging. On this and on any case. So I began investigating my dear old friend. Would you like to hear some of what I discovered?”

“Why not.” The day was shot to hell, anyway.

“For openers, in the weeks before the kidnapping, Wendel was frequenting a candy store in Hopewell, for sweets and cigarettes; I have a deposition to that effect from the female proprietor.”