Stolen Away

8

The Old Princeton Inn was on Nassau Street, the main thoroughfare of the college town the ancient four-story brick hotel was named after. Even at 9:00 P.M., well past business hours, the shops screamed their orange-and-black allegiance to the Princeton Tigers. This old village seemed cheerfully dependent on its young benefactors.

But this was a week night, a school night, and the streets were as empty as a phys-ed major’s mind; it was as if the looming Gothic university buildings were taking names of any collegian not home studying. The deserted street, the orange and black that dominated every storefront, conspired with the bitter March wind and a moonless, starless night to make me as uneasy as a homeowner on Halloween-and a homeowner who didn’t spring for candy treats, at that.

I was, after all, on my way to a seance.

“I’m sorry to ask you to do this,” Lindbergh had said, earlier that afternoon, sitting behind his desk in his study, “but it seems to be the only way I can get you a hotel room.”

“That’s okay,” I’d said. “But I’m starting to feel like the resident spook chaser around here.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve decided to have you do,” he said. He pointed at me forcefully. “You’re going to be my chief investigator into all things that go bump in the night.”

I sat up. “Huh? What?”

He and Breckinridge began to laugh, which was a welcome sound, even if it was at my expense. Slim had a prep-school sense of humor that, I’d been told, manifested itself in practical jokes. He had on at least two occasions hidden the baby from Anne and Betty Gow, just to get ’em both going; the night of the kidnapping, the initial reaction of both Anne and the nurse had been to think it another of Slim’s gags.

“Nate,” Lindbergh said, “you know very well that you’re our resident Chicago underworld expert. Not a spook chaser.”

“That’s a relief to hear.”

“But under the circumstances we have to hear this couple out.”

It seemed a self-proclaimed spiritualist named Martin Marinelli and his wife, who called herself Sister Sarah, had been staying at the Old Princeton Inn for days, now. Marinelli had phoned the Lindbergh estate frequently, and sent letters and telegrams, claiming to have “good news” and “important information” about the kidnapping. The troopers monitoring calls and letters in the garage command post had deflected all of this, writing Marinelli and his wife off-rightly, no doubt-as cranks.

Slim apparently spoke to the manager of the Old Princeton Inn, personally, trying to wrangle me a room. The manager had explained that the reporters had everything tied up, except for one suite taken by these two psychic characters, who’d been making it known to all concerned that they had “revelations from the spirit world” about the case.

Some of the reporters had glommed onto the pair, and the spiritualist couple had been holding psychic court for days. But now the fortune-tellers were old news. The manager had offered to talk to them for Lindbergh, to see if they would relinquish their room.

“The only way they’ll give up their suite,” Lindbergh explained with wry matter-of-factness, “is if we see them.”

“You’re not going along, too, are you?” I asked him.

“No. Too much going on here. Some promising developments.” He didn’t elaborate.

“Well,” I sighed, “anything to get a roof over my head.”

Any roof that wasn’t over the kidnapped kid’s nursery, that is.

So now Breckinridge, his usual gray, three-piece-suit self, was knocking on the door to 414 in the Old Princeton Inn; we had hung our topcoats in the lobby. The dimly lit hallway fit the Halloween mood.

The door cracked open. A thin, sallow male face peered out; bald, spade-bearded.

“Ah,” the cadaverous figure intoned, in a mellow, minister’s voice, “you would be Colonel Breckinridge.”

“Yes,” Breckinridge said. “Are you Martin Marinelli?”

Opening the door wider, the cue-ball bald, devil-bearded fellow nodded. He was wearing a flowing black robe; around his neck was a heavily jeweled gold cross on a gold chain. He turned his gaze on me, arching a plucked-for-effect eyebrow. His eyes were small and dark, but piercing, in deep sockets.

“And who would you be?”

“You’re the psychic,” I said, nicely. “You tell me.”

Breckinridge flashed me a reproving look.

Marinelli’s nostrils flared, and he stepped back, and shut the door; it clicked ominously.

I sighed. Without looking at Breckinridge, I said, “Yeah, I know. I got too smart a mouth. But I can’t take too much of this carny hokum lyin’ down.”

“Speaking of lying down,” Breckinridge said, “I already have a place to sleep tonight.”

“Good point. Knock again. I’ll behave.”

Breckinridge’s fist was poised to knock when the door swung open.

Marinelli, seeming to float in space in the long flowing robe, was haloed in soft light against darkness.

“Come in, gentlemen,” Marinelli said, gesturing theatrically. And this he directed to me: “But I would request you leave your skepticism in the hallway. If we’re to have success this evening, we will need open-minded cooperation from all participants.”

The sweet, smoky scent of sandalwood beckoned; somewhere in the darkness, incense was burning.

We were in a nicely furnished sitting room-lit, or barely lit, by a large red candle dripping wax in the middle of a wooden card table set up in the middle of the floor, with three chairs. There were several closed doorways, one of which was to a bedroom, presumably. If we could chase these fortune-tellers out, I’d have some pretty fancy digs.

“You still have not given your name,” Marinelli said to me, sternly.

I stood twisting my hat in my hand, wondering why the flickery darkness was making me so damn nervous.

“My name is Heller,” I said. “I’m a police officer assigned to the Lindbergh matter.”

“I sense you are not local,” Marinelli said.

He didn’t have to be psychic to know that; I have the flat nasal Chicago accent you’d expect. But Breckinridge seemed a little impressed.

“I’m not local,” I said, and smiled politely, and didn’t tell him a nickel’s worth more.

Marinelli gestured grandly to the candle-dripping card table, finding an extra chair for me; one of those already placed at the table seemed to be reserved.

“Gentlemen,” Marinelli said, after we’d settled into our wooden folding chairs, “I am the father of the One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street Spiritualist Church in Harlem. My wife Sister Sarah Sivella is the mother of that church. As you have already surmised, Mr. Heller, I have no great gifts of second sight, myself. But my wife has definite, even staggering, abilities in that realm.”

“Abilities,” Breckinridge said, “which she is willing to lend to the search for Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Is that correct?”

“She does not use these abilities,” he explained patiently. “They use her.”

“What do you mean?” Breckinridge asked.

Marinelli sculpted the air with his hands. “She did not seek information, on this matter, directly, consciously. She began speaking of the kidnapping during the course of a seance at the church. The seance was part of our regular church ritual, that happened to have been held one day after the tragic occurrence.”

“So you came here,” I said, “to be close to Colonel Lindbergh.”

“Yes. To try to help. Ours is a Christian church. We believe in the father-motherhood of God. Christ, the son of the father-mother God, is the light that shines through wisdom and love in the human heart.”

Great. A guy with a Satan beard in a black robe in a room lit by a blood-red candle is going to tell an agnostic Jew about Jesus. What a guy will go through to get a bed to sleep in.

“Life is governed by five cosmic laws,” he was saying. He held up five fingers and ticked them off; maybe I should’ve taken my notebook out to write these down. “Reincarnation. Cause and effect. Opportunity. Retribution. Spiritual communion…”

Wasn’t that six?

“I’m afraid I fail to see what relevance this has,” Breck in-ridge said, “to the situation at hand. Specifically, the missing Lindbergh child.”

Marinelli raised a hand as if passing a benediction; his nails were long and manicured. “Gentlemen, my wife will join us momentarily. I will begin by inducing an hypnotic trance. Then we will join hands, and I must ask you not to break the circle.”

Well, this was a far cry from Edgar Cayce and his down-home soothsaying. Here we had what looked to be a traditional phony seance-and if this snake-oil merchant thought I was going to buy his scam, he was as nutty as he looked.

“Mr. Marinelli,” I said, “I mean no offense, but I know the Chicago supply house that sells you people your glow-in-the-dark trumpets and bells. If you have something to say about the kidnapping, fine. But spare us the cheesecloth ghosts, paste-and-newspaper ectoplasm and levitating furniture.”

Marinelli’s smile was faint and condescending. “You are under a basic misapprehension, Mr. Heller. Sister Sarah is not a physical medium. You’ll hear no bell ringing, table rapping, nor experience any table tilting or other unexplained transportation of objects. Sister Sarah is a trance medium-she materializes no trumpets and summons no visible spirits. She wanders the landscape of her own mind, listening with an inner ear to spirit voices.”

“Joan of Arc got burned at the stake for that,” I reminded him.

“Ah yes,” he said, raising a forefinger heavenward. “But these are more enlightened times.”

Tell that to the Scottsboro boys.

“Sister Sarah,” he went on, “is what we call a ‘sensitive.’ She has a control, a spirit guide, who frequently speaks through her.”

“This ‘spirit guide,’” Breckinridge said, interested despite himself, “is a specific entity?”

Marinelli nodded momentously. “His name is Yellow Feather.”

“Yellow Feather?” I asked. And I looked at Breckinridge and said, again, “Yellow Feather?” How bad did I want this room, anyway?

“Yellow Feather,” the bald spiritualist continued, “was a great warrior. An Iroquois chief.”

“Dead many moons,” I said.

“That is correct,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “If you have no other questions, Mr. Heller, Mr. Breckinridge…I will summon Sister Sarah.”

“Yeah, I have one more question,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Heller?”

“Do you shave your head?”

Breckinridge kicked me under the table.

Marinelli only smiled. “No. My hair fell out when I was a youth. It was a psychic sign. It signaled my psychosexual awakening.”

“Just wondering,” I said.

Marinelli closed his eyes, bowed his head slightly. The incense-scented room was an eerie study in shadows and shapes as the wavery candlelight, and a modicum of streetlight from the sheer-curtained windows, turned the mundane hotel furnishings into Caligari-like onlookers. Those windows were rattling as the wind crept in over their sills. Maybe our medium wasn’t of the flying horn and floating disembodied head variety, but this was a seance all right.

Our host, hands folded, began to hum monotonously.

A door opened and a figure in black and crimson seemed to glide in. She was standing next to me before I knew it, a small, beautiful woman with large, dark unblinking eyes, a pale cameo of a face and full, sensuous lips made scarlet by dabs of lip rouge. Her dark eyebrows, unlike her husband’s, were thick and unplucked and somehow the effect was exotic; she was caught up in a rose-scented cloud that banished the sandalwood. She looked like a whore, and she looked like a Madonna.

And, what the hell, I have to tell you: I liked it. There was no sign that my hair was falling out, but I was having a psychosexual awakening myself.

Like her husband, she wore a floor-length flowing black robe; but she also wore a hood, lined with blood-red satin. Unlike her husband’s robe, hers was not loose; rather it was contoured to her shape, clinging as if wet to a slender, high-breasted figure. Her nipples were erect and looking right back at me. Maybe she wasn’t a physical medium, but if I didn’t cool off, this table was going to rise.

“Good evening, gentle friends,” she said, in a small, musical voice; she looked to be about twenty-two. “Please don’t get up.”

Thanks for that much.

Her husband pulled out the chair reserved for her, and, she primly sat. She drew her hands out of the long sleeves of the gown like a surgeon preparing to wash up; she placed her small, delicate hands, the nails of which were long, razor sharp and as red as a gaping wound, flat on the table. The candle wax that had dripped onto the wood was damn near the same color as her nails. This pair was good. They were worth whatever they charged.

“Thank you for your presence,” she said. Her hair, what I could see of it under the hood, was jet-black and pulled away from her face; she wore a single, circular gold earring, the one overtly gypsylike touch. “You are Mr. Breckinbridge.”

Breckinbridge, she said.

But Colonel Breckinridge did not correct her; it isn’t polite to correct a psychic.

“You are a police officer,” she said to me, smiling as sweetly as a shy schoolgirl.

“That’s right,” I said. Breckinbridge, Schmeckinbridge, if this babe said she was psychic, she was psychic by me.

“And your name?”

“Nathan Heller,” I said. Christ, she smelled good.

“Mr. Heller, will you take my hand?”

Is the Pope Catholic?

She joined hands with me, and squeezed. Yowsah.

“When my companion has induced my trance state,” she said, “please clasp hands with Mr. Breckinbridge. And Mr. Breckinbridge, please clasp hands with Martin. And Martin will take my hand, and the psychic chain will be established. Please do not break the psychic chain.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

Marinelli slowly, pompously, removed the golden, jeweled cross from around his neck. Holding it by its chain, he began to slowly pass it before the great big beautiful brown peepers of his wife.

Wife, hell. She called him “companion,” and he introduced her as Sister Sarah Sivella, not Marinelli. If anything, they were common-law. My conscience was clear, thinking the thoughts I was thinking.

He was mumbling something; an incantation, something-it was barely audible. But she seemed to hear it. Her eyes traced the slow, sensual movement of the cross before her, and when Marinelli with his free hand snapped his fingers, click! her eyes shut as tight as yanked-down window shades.

Then he clicked his fingers again and her eyelids rolled up the same way. Those eyes, deep brown and flecked with gold, were open wide in the stare of the dead. Her face seemed to lengthen; her expression was blankly sour. It spooked me. Breckinridge was similarly transfixed.

We both knew this was a bunch of bullshit; but the act was a good one, thanks to its fetching heroine, and we were caught up. We had all joined hands, now; in my right was the smooth delicate hand of the pretty medium, and in my left was Breckinridge’s big lawyer-soft paw.

“Who am I speaking to?” Marinelli asked.

“Ugh,” she said.

Ugh?

“Chief Yellow Feather-are you with us?”

She nodded. “Yellow Feather here.” Her voice was forced down into a male register. It sounded as ridiculous as you’re thinking.

I would’ve laughed, and on reflection did; but at that moment, I just went along with the ride. She smelled good, and I never heard a twenty-two-year-old dame with her nipples poking out of her shirt talk like an Indian before.

“Mr. Breckinbridge,” she continued, in the deep mock-male voice. What do you know? Chief Yellow Feather had the name wrong, too. “Spirits say kidnap note was left on windowsill in nursery.”

Breckinridge remained unruffled, when I glanced at him, but we both knew that this piece of information had not been released to the general public.

“Is this correct?” Marinelli asked Breckinridge.

“I’m not at liberty to confirm or deny that, sir,” the Colonel said, in a stiffly dignified manner that seemed about as silly, under the circumstances, as the voice of Chief Yellow Feather.

“Mr. Breckinbridge, you got note at your office today.”

“Note?” Breckinridge asked.

“Kidnap note.”

“No notes have been sent to my office.” He seemed relieved to be able to say that; it was, as far as I knew, the truth.

“All right,” said the girl huffily, in her big-chief voice. “Be at your office tomorrow. Nine in morning.”

“That’s pretty early.”

“Be at office!” The “chief” was firm.

“All right,” Breckinridge said, probably just to placate him. Her. Whoever.

Marinelli said, “Chief Yellow Feather-have you received any other spirit messages?”

“Yes. I see name.

“What name do you see?”

“Jafsie.”

I asked Marinelli, “Can I ask her a question?”

But Sarah answered. “You may speak to Yellow Feather,” she said, in her own voice.

“Yellow Feather, spell that name, please.”

“J-A-F-S-I-E.” This was intoned in the deep Indian voice.

“Thank you, Chief. Is the baby well?”

She shook her head slowly; her face lost its blankness and became sad.

“A baby’s body,” she said in her own voice, “will be found on the heights above Hopewell.”

Breckinridge looked at me sharply and I at him.

Marinelli snapped his fingers and she jerked awake.

She withdrew her hand from mine; we all let go of each other’s hands, sat back, relaxed. We sat quietly in the flickering candlelight, listening to the wind make like a wolf.

“Why did you bring her out of it?” I asked Marinelli.

“I can sense when the psychic strain is too much,” he said gravely. “We can arrange another sitting…”

“Not at this juncture,” Breckinridge said, shifting his chair. “But I would like the address of your church, in Harlem.”

“Certainly. Let me write it down for you.”

Marinelli rose, disappeared into the darkness.

Sarah looked tired; she slumped; her hands disappeared into her lap.

“Were we successful?” she asked quietly.

“You gave us information, child,” Breckinridge said, gently. “Whether it was helpful, well, that would be premature for me to say.”

“Do you remember what you said?” I asked her.

She smiled at me, warmly. “I go into a trance, and I say things. Later Martin tells me what I’ve said.”

“I see,” I said.

Her hand, under the table, settled on my thigh.

“You have kind eyes, Mr. Heller,” she said.

She began to stroke my thigh. I began to levitate again.

“Your eyes,” I said, “are very old, for so young a girl.”

She continued to stroke my thigh. “I’ve lived many times, Mr. Heller.”

Now she was stroking something else.

“I can tell you’ve been around,” I managed.

“Here’s the address,” Marinelli said, returning with a scrap of paper for Breckinridge.

Her hand slipped away.

“You can reach us day and night,” he said. “We live on the church premises.”

“Thank you,” Breckinridge said, rising. I kept my place, for the moment. It wasn’t that dark in the room.

“We, uh, do appreciate you clearing out of this suite,” I said. “I’m the one who’s going to be using it.”

“We will be staying the night, you understand,” she said. “Or, actually-I will. Martin is going on ahead, by car, shortly, to prepare for weekend services. I’ll be going home by train, tomorrow.”

She was giving me what I might best describe as a significant look. I’m a detective. I pick up on these things.

“Do you need any expense money?” Breckinridge said.

“No,” Marinelli said. “If what we’ve said proves helpful, we would not be adverse to having our names in the papers. Like any Christian church, we are missionaries, spreading the word.”

I got up, “Well, thank you, both. Sorry if I was rude, earlier, Reverend.”

“All true believers begin as doubters,” he assured me, gesturing us toward the door.

“Safe journey,” she told us, and we were in the hall.

We sat in the Dusenberg at the curb for a while.

“What do you make of that?” Breckinridge asked.

“I’m not sure. Those two aren’t in the same class as Edgar Cayce, that’s for goddamn sure.”

Breckinridge nodded. “Marinelli certainly sends out mixed signals-talk of Christianity coming out of a satanic countenance, theological mumbo-jumbo that sounds more pagan than Judeo-Christian.”

“Sounds like a promising new religion to me-life after death, and psychosexuality, too.”

“But are they con artists?”

“Marinelli obviously is,” I said, shrugging. “I’m not sure about the girl.”

He nodded. “She seems to be sincere, like Cayce, believing herself to possess psychic powers. But does she?”

“I wonder. It’s interesting that when she started saying that the kid was dead, he snapped her out of it.”

Breckinridge looked grim. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. She knew one detail the general public doesn’t. She predicted a couple things-if they come true, I’m going to be suspicious.”

“I already am suspicious.” His hands settled on the steering wheel. “Are you ready?”

“No,” I said. “Let me out at the first all-night drugstore.”

“Why?”

“Where else am I going to find a package of Sheiks at this time of night?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Have somebody pick me up here around noon tomorrow-at the cafe on the corner, over there, will be fine.”

“What have you got in mind?”

“I’m going to do some poking around on my own,” I said.

Breckinridge, more mystified by me than by the seance we’d just witnessed, let me out at a drugstore. I made my purchase, walked back to the old four-story brick hotel and waited for Marinelli to leave.

Hoping to hell it hadn’t been some ghost feeling me up under the table.