Stolen Away

1

The buxom blonde stepped down off the little silver metal stairs of the train with a baby bundled in her arms and a worried expression on her pretty, pockmarked face. A porter helped her by the fur-trimmed arm of her tan fur-collared coat, providing a wooden stool where the final step ought to have been, and she gave him a flickering smile of thanks before trundling away from the Twentieth Century Limited, the sleek streamliner that had whisked her here from New York.

Natural for a mother to be protective of her child-particularly right now, with the papers full of what was already touted as the “Crime of the Century”: the kidnapping, night before last, of the Lindbergh kid from his sheltered nursery in a country home in the wilds of New Jersey.

Why the hell that should make a mother nervous in Chicago, Illinois, went beyond logic, but not beyond human nature, which of course has not a damn thing to do with logic. What mother wouldn’t identify with the unlucky Lindys? What mother wouldn’t read those horrible headlines and hear those hysterical radio commentators and not clutch her sweet infant closer to her bosom, which in this case was an enviable place to get clutched.

The catch was: I didn’t figure she was the kid’s mother.

As a matter of fact, I was ready to lay odds that this was Lindy, Jr., himself, and not her own precious little flesh and blood.

Only not so little: the child was big for a babe in arms-the Lindbergh child was, after all, twenty months old. And this kid was wearing Dr. Denton’s-like Little Lindy when he got yanked from his crib-and was wrapped up in blankets, rather than the snowsuit and cap you’d expect for a toddler.

True, I’d spotted dark curly hair on the child, rather than the missing boy’s famous blond locks. But, hell-I didn’t buy the dame’s hair color, either.

I was sitting on one of three chairs at an unenclosed shoeshine stand against the wall facing the tracks in the train shed of LaSalle Street Station. This particular chair was damn near home to me when I pulled duty here; the shoeshine boy, Cletus, a lad of seventy or so, didn’t mind-as long as I got up and wandered off and let him make a living, when the station got busy.

Which was what I needed to do anyway, about now, prowl around and keep an eye out for single-o dips, moll whizzers and cannon mobs. Besides, it was winter, and warmer in the train station itself, rather than out here on the noisy, windy platform.

I was a plainclothes detective on the pickpocket detail, under Lt. Louis Sapperstein, and it was my job to hang around train stations and bus depots and the like, just me and the perverts, looking to get lucky.

And maybe I had gotten real lucky, this afternoon-lucky as Lindy when he made it across the Atlantic. I was already the youngest plainclothes dick on the department; maybe I could be its youngest lieutenant.

We’d been handed a circular this morning, sent around by Chief of Detectives Schoemaker to every division in town, showing a brunette, attractive, hard-faced woman named Bernice Rogers, who was an “associate” of one Joseph Bonelli, “reputed New Jersey kidnap-ring chieftain.” Schoemaker considered both Bonelli and his moll likely candidates for the Lindbergh snatch. This was not so farfetched: most of the country had either Chicago’s Capone crowd or Detroit’s Purple Gang pegged as the culprits.

As if to ward off that suspicion, Capone himself-locked up in Cook County Jail, after his recent tax-evasion conviction-was filling the papers full of indignation, concern and reward offers for the return of the kid. Hell, Big Al was a parent, too, wasn’t he?

I wasn’t specifically keeping an eye out for Bernice Rogers. But a pickpocket dick’s duties include observing good-looking women, and making sure they aren’t crooked, as some good-looking women are known on occasion to be; I collared many a beautiful moll whizzer in my time.

Anyway, as I sat peering over my racing form at her as she approached, my gaze fixed upon that harshly pretty mug of hers, I unobtrusively slipped out Schoemaker’s circular from my topcoat pocket to compare the brunette on paper to the blonde in the flesh.

But I barely had the sheet out of my pocket when she walked briskly by, seamed silk stockings flashing. Apparently she had no luggage, other than that precious parcel in swaddling.

So there I sat, as the blonde barreled by, charging through the doors into the train station like she was a quarterback carrying the ball. That woke the kid up, finally, and it began to howl; well, it was alive, anyway.

I hopped down, leaving my racing form on the chair, and nodded to Cletus, who nodded back, as he slapped the shoe leather of some real customer; and I strolled, counterfeit casual, out into the big square airy waiting room.

And she was gone.

The stairs down to street level were directly in front of me; had she taken them? Was she already stepping into a cab at the curb? I looked beyond the stairwell, to the sprawling central newsstand, slow-scanning the half-filled waiting-room pews at left and right. No sign of her. The room was filled with filtered light, from a huge circular window so high it reached up and caught some sky above the el tracks that fronted the station; people bustled through the gauzy midday unreality, ghosts hurrying through the dust-mote-speckled streaks of sun, but none of those people was the blonde.

And then I heard the echoing howl of a kid and there she was: heading with her bundle back to the women’s restroom.

I weaved through passengers coming and going, found my way to one of the wooden pews facing where she’d gone in, and settled myself down.

I glanced over at the bank of phone booths. Should I call in? No backup from the detail was available anyway; even Sapperstein, the boss, was out in the field, over at Dearborn Station. I looked up at the silver-metal futuristic clock that loomed like a benignly neglectful God over the station’s sprawling waiting-room world: four-fifteen. Sapperstein would be heading back to the Detective Bureau soon.

Didn’t matter. I wanted this collar for myself, and right now. If it panned out, I didn’t want to share the glory. If it was a false alarm, then nobody need know. Should I go in the ladies’ room and grab her while she was changing a diaper? But what if it wasn’t her? Or worse, what if it was, and a bunch of innocent ladies got shot to shit with their scanties down around their ankles?

A Trib had been left on the pew next to me; I picked it up and pretended to read it. Even the inside pages were full of Lindbergh news. Dopes like me who thought they spotted the kid everywhere from Duluth to Timbuktu.

In less than two minutes, she exited the restroom as quickly as she’d entered.

I folded the paper, tossed it on the pew, yawned, and sauntered after her. She was headed for the stairwell.

Despite her armload, she bolted recklessly down the stairs toward street level like she was being pursued; which she was, only I hoped she didn’t know it. I followed her at an easy pace, buttoning my topcoat and snugging my fedora as I went. She had taken the stairs at the right. I took the ones at the left. I wanted to ease up behind her and slip on the cuffs.

When I got to the landing where the two stairways met, she was already gone. And when I took three steps at a time down to street level, hand sliding along the curving stainless-steel banister, I found she was still way ahead of me. I pressed through people huddled around the newsstand by the doors, and stepped outside, into an afternoon as gray as the city itself, icy snow flecking my face, Chicago’s famous wind earning its reputation. My breath rose before me like a wraith. The el tracks and station looming before me made the world darker and gloomier still. Where was she?

Stepping into a waiting taxi, down to my left.

I headed to the right and picked out another cab. I climbed in, just as the Checker Cab, bearing the babe with the babe, glided by like a memory.

“Follow that car,” I said.

And the cabbie, a rumpled-faced Hunky with a shabby green cap and a wide space between his front teeth, glanced back and grinned. “Figured some day somebody’d ask that.”

“That’s peachy,” I said. “Here’s your fare in advance.”

I showed him my badge, and his cheerfulness faded.

“Might be a fin in it,” I allowed, “if you don’t lose ’em, and they don’t make you.”

“They won’t,” he said, relieved there was maybe a buck in this after all, and wheeled his Yellow out onto Van Buren.

This Bernice Rogers was about thirty, with a record that included prostitution and petty theft. A few months back she had adopted a boy from the Cradle, an Evanston agency; she’d been fussy about the age-had to be less than two years, older than one.

Chief of Detectives Schoemaker, a.k.a. “Old Shoes,” a canny old copper, figured the adopted kid was a front. In which case, it would have gone something like this….

The adopted child is looked after by a woman member of the Bonelli gang (presumably Bernice Rogers) for a number of months. People seeing Rogers with the kid assume it’s hers. In the meantime, the kidnap gang executes a snatch on a specific kid (presumably Charles Lindbergh, Jr.); the woman then substitutes the snatched kid for the adopted one-while the latter is abandoned or otherwise disposed of.

And when Bernice Rogers is seen with the kidnapped child, suspicion is nil because that child is mistaken for the one she’s been seen with previously. You seen one baby, you seen ’em all.

But if that had been the plan, why was Bernice Rogers turning back up in Chicago? Schoemaker figured she’d been out east of late, living rather conspicuously as the mother of a small infant. Were things too hot out there? Was somebody in the gang crumbling under the pressure? Was a double-cross in the works?

I smiled and sat back in the cab and relished the thought of answering some of those questions by busting Bernice Rogers. Savoring the idea of being the cop who single-handedly cracked the Lindbergh case, half a continent away. Not bad for a kid, which is what I was: twenty-six years old and enjoying a relatively easy life in undoubtedly hard times.

As for making the collar itself, I was eager, not apprehensive. I knew molls like Bernice could be dangerous, but on the pickpocket detail, you get physical with crooks every day. Hardly a week went by, I didn’t take a gun off some punk.

And I had a gun of my own under my arm, besides-a nine-millimeter Browning-and was not afraid to use it.

Not that I was trigger-happy. In fact I carried this specific weapon, rather than the usual revolver most cops carry, partly because I preferred automatics, and partly because this was the gun my father shot himself with.

My father, whose bookstore on the West Side had run to radical literature, was an old union guy who hated the idea that I became a cop. He specifically hated it when he found out, or figured out, that some money I’d given him, to renew the lease on his store, was a payoff I got for testifying in the Jake Lingle murder trial.

The cops and Capone had a patsy lined up to take the fall for that killing, and I was the witness that swung it. It was no big deal: the patsy was a willing participant, getting well paid for his prison stay. And my cooperation got me a promotion to plainclothes and an envelope with a grand in it. But my Papa could not understand that I was just trying to get ahead, trying to land a better job, playing by the rules of the Chicago game.

Well, really, he did understand. What he could not do was condone it. He put this very gun to his head and blew his brains out; that had been last year. And I carried the gun with me to make sure I never forgot that. I wouldn’t hesitate to use it, but I wouldn’t use it carelessly. It was the only conscience I had.

I was still not above taking a little honest graft-you didn’t take a job this dirty and this dangerous for the piddling paycheck alone.

But I owed it to Papa not to abuse the policeman’s power. That’s what he hated about us: billy-club-swinging, trigger-happy bastards is what we were, to that old communist.

Maybe Papa would be up there watching this afternoon, when I did something worthwhile, did the kind of thing a cop is supposed to do. Righted a wrong like Nick Carter or Sherlock Holmes in the books I read as a kid. Restored a missing child to his distraught parents. Papa would like that, up in heaven. Only Papa didn’t believe in heaven and neither did I.

“Not so close,” I cautioned the cabbie. “Keep two or three cars behind.”

He nodded and backed off. We were on Lake Shore Drive, following the Checker Cab up the Gold Coast-aristocratic brownstone mansions hobnobbing with modern high-rise apartments, fronting an unimpressed, choppy white-and-gray Lake Michigan. One of these days I had to look into finding a flat in this neighborhood-hell, they started at a mere three-hundred-fifty a month.

The Checker pulled off at Irving Park and so did we, moving into an area that had once been an exclusive section of town itself, before the money moved north. Which was a boon for criminals-a whole gang, particularly one on the lam, could move into one of these sprawling six-room numbers, and live a life of ease, with the nightlife of Uptown nearby. If I had a crook’s money, I might move in here myself.

Now the Checker swung right on Sheridan Road, where the cab soon pulled up in front of a big brick terra-cotta-trimmed six-flat apartment house-one of many such that stood shoulder-to-shoulder on this street-and let the blonde with the baby out.

My cab rolled on by, and when I looked back and saw the blonde disappear into the six-flat, I said, “Right here.”

The cabbie pulled over and craned around and showed me his gap-toothed grin again. “How’d I do?”

“Swell,” I said, and I took out a sawbuck, tore it in two and handed him half.

His eyes got wide; he wasn’t sure whether he should be pissed off or pleased. “What’s this?”

I was already getting out. “You get the other half by hanging around. Pull around the corner, there, and wait-but first find a phone and call Lt. Sapperstein at the Detective Bureau. Tell him I trailed Bernice Rogers to 4072 Sheridan, and want some backup.”

“Okay. Who’s the message from?”

“Heller.”

“Okay, Officer Heller.”

“Repeat all the names.”

“Uh-Lt. Sapperstein at the Detective Bureau. Bernice Rogers. Heller.”

“And the address?”

“4072 Sheridan.”

Now I gave him a smile. “Good man.”

The snow had stopped, but there was enough wind to blow it around some, a fine white mist that felt good on my face. My heart was starting to race and I breathed slow as I walked, calming myself. Across from the six-flat in question was one of the elaborate neighborhood movie palaces Chicago was so rich in. Arrowsmith was playing, with Ronald Colman. I hadn’t caught that one yet.

Same was true of the blonde, of course; hadn’t caught her yet, either. Inside the claustrophobic vestibule were half a dozen mailboxes and as many buzzers. All but one of the buzzers had a name underneath; neither “Bernice” nor “Rogers” was one of them. I pressed them all, except the nameless one-4-B-and waited for somebody to buzz the inner door open.

Somebody did.

The central stairway stopped at each floor for a small landing and a couple of apartment doors, then jogged on up to the next landing. The janitor had a basement apartment, and I could’ve checked with him, but he might warn his tenant a cop was on the way. Instead, I went up to the first landing, knocked on the door of Apartment 1-A, and waited.

A cutie about twenty with Clara Bow curls peeked around the door at my upheld badge. She frowned.

“You’re new,” she said. Betty Boop with a bad attitude and a cigarette.

“Pardon?”

“I paid already this month. I’m not made of money.”

“Miss, I’m just here for some information. I don’t want your money.”

“Oh,” she said, warming. She opened the door wider. Her slender little shape was wrapped up in a blue-and-pink floral kimono. She looked as easy as ticktacktoe, but her timing was lousy.

“How can I help you, cowboy?”

“Do you know if any new tenants moved into this building recently?”

“Why, no.”

“Well, then-any apartments empty right now, that you know off?”

“No. I don’t think so.” She blew a smoke ring. “Didn’t you check with the janitor?”

I gave her my best suave smile. “Maybe I’d rather talk to you.”

Ronald Colman had nothing to worry about, but she bought it just the same, a sultry smirk making the cigarette in her lips erect.

“I’ve been here over a year, cowboy, and nobody’s moved in or out in all that time.”

I thought about that. Then I took out the circular and folded it so that all she could see was Bernice Rogers’s picture.

“Know her?”

“Sure,” she said. “That’s Bernice Smith. She lives upstairs in 4-B.”

The one buzzer without a name.

“She got a kid?”

“Yes.”

“Baby?”

She thought I was calling her “baby” for a second. Then she figured it out and said, “Uh, yes-year-and-a-half old or so.”

“What color is the baby’s hair?”

“Blond, I think.”

“And Bernice?”

“Well, like that picture-brunette.”

Interesting.

“If you’re looking for her,” she said, exhaling blue smoke, “I don’t think she’s around.”

“Yeah?”

“She’s on vacation. Over a month already. Her brother’s staying in her place while she’s gone.”

“Thank you, miss,” I said, tucking the circular away.

“My name’s Marie.”

“Thanks, Marie.”

“Got a name, cowboy?”

“Nate,” I said.

Her cupid lips formed a kiss of a smile. “Careful, Nate.”

She liked me. On the other hand, I had a feeling all that was required out of me was a pulse. And five dollars.

I nodded and went on up; halfway up the stairs, I heard her close the door. I unbuttoned my topcoat as I climbed. Then I unbuttoned my suit coat and got the automatic out from its shoulder holster. I’d had both my suits tailored on Maxwell Street to hide the Browning. I slipped my right hand with the gun in it in my topcoat pocket.

And now I was on the fourth landing, looking at 4-B.

I stared at the door, at the brass number and letter. I had no backup. I was trembling a little, my body mixing a fear and adrenaline cocktail. Should I wait? Should I kick the door in, or knock?

I knocked.

The door cracked open. The harsh, pockmarked pretty face glared at me suspiciously.

“What do you want?”

I showed her the badge, and said-nothing. She pushed the door shut before I could.

Inside, she was yelling, “Coppers!”

Gun-in-hand still in my topcoat pocket, I lifted my foot and kicked that fucking door. It sprung open first try.

I rushed in to see two boys in shoulder holsters, white shirts, suspenders, loosened bow ties and unshaven faces standing up hastily from a round table where a gin rummy game had been in progress. Both were smoking cigarettes and a blue haze hung in the room like bad weather. One boy was razor thin with a razor-thin mustache and slicked-back Valentino hair. He wore a revolver in a shoulder holster. The other was big and fat and sloppy and a half-eaten sandwich and several bottles of beer were before him at the table, and so was a revolver, which he went for, and I shot him twice. Once in the chest, once in the head. Shot right through my damn coat. Damn!

The woman began to scream. She was standing in a doorway to what appeared to be the kitchen. The child was not in sight.

The razor-thin guy overturned the table and began to fire at me from behind it. I ducked back out in the hall, to put a wall between us, while his slugs flew through the open door and chewed the wood of the door across the way.

“Give it up!” I said, my back to the wall. The smell of gunpowder scorched the air. “Place is surrounded. You want out alive, it’s with your hands the hell up!”

The gunfire subsided.

“Slide your rod out in the hall,” I said, my gun out from my coat pocket now. “Don’t throw it, slide it!”

After a moment or two of hesitation, the guy pitched it. It clunked against the baseboard of the floor at my left, harder than I liked but it didn’t go off; the barrel was still trailing smoke.

“Playing it smart, finally,” I said, stepping back inside, where I saw that he was indeed playing it smart-his version.

He held the small, black-haired, angelic-faced baby around its waist with one hard forearm; the child was asleep, or doped. The blonde was against a wall over at my left; her eyes were round and wet, her hard face distorted with fear, a knuckled hand up against one cheek. She wore a simple blue frock that hugged her curves. Behind her on the wall, crooked, hung a peaceful Maxfield Parrish print.

The razor-thin man had small eyes, but they looked large, the white showing all round. He looked crazed and quite capable of squeezing the trigger of the small automatic pressed to the unconscious child’s head.

“Let me pass,” he said. His voice was as thin as his mustache.

“No,” I said. “Put the kid down.”

“You kidding? He’s my ticket.”

To hell.

“What’s your name?”

“What do you care, copper?”

“What’s your name?”

The blonde said, breathlessly, “Eddie.”

I didn’t know whether she was answering my question, or talking to him. And I didn’t care.

“Put the kid down, Eddie, and I won’t mention you took a hostage. I’ll even lay the resisting arrest off on your dead pal, here.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” he said, and laughed. He moved forward a step, holding his tiny hostage tight, keeping the nose of the gun against the kid’s temple.

I shot Eddie between the eyes.

Not as impressive a shot as it sounds, close as he was to me; what was more impressive was the dive I made toward him as he dropped the kid. I caught the sleeping baby like a touchdown pass.

I sat on the floor, cradling the slumbering kid in my arms, the smoking gun still in one hand, the corpse of the thin guy at my feet, the other corpse between me and the blonde, who was stuck to the wall like a fly. I had just killed two men, and it would hit me later, but right now I felt good.

“You…you shot Eddie,” the blonde said. She was shaking her head, disagreeing with reality.

“No kidding,” I said. Rocking the child as I eased back onto my feet.

“How could you risk it? He had his finger on the trigger…”

“A shot in the head kills all reflex action, lady.”

“Am I…under arrest?”

“You’re under arrest.”

“What…what charge?”

“Kidnapping.”

She sighed. Nodded.

“This is the Lindbergh baby, isn’t it?”

She cocked her head, like she hadn’t understood me. Her Master’s Voice.

“Well?” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“Mister,” she said, “that’s Hymie Goldberg’s kid.”

“Hymie Goldberg?”

“The bootlegger. In Peoria. He’s loaded. We were gonna get five grand for the little bastard.”

My boss burst in the open door, then. Lou Sapperstein, a sturdy, balding cop of about forty seasoned years. He took off his hat, eyes wide behind wire-framed glasses; snow dusted his topcoat like dandruff. He had a.38 in one hand.

“What the hell are you up to, Nate?”

“I just cracked the Hymie Goldberg kidnapping,” I said.

And I handed him the baby.