Stolen Away

38

The Treasury Building was on Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood; the White House was across the street. The many-pillared granite-and-sandstone structure loomed imposingly on this cold, rain-spitting Monday morning, an illusion of a perfect government, an American Athens. If the dollar were as sound as the Treasury Building looked, maybe I wouldn’t have to sleep in my office.

I went in the Fifteenth Street entrance, where amidst the bustle of bureaucrats I soon found the central office corridor, and the room number I was seeking. At the far end of a large, busy bullpen, Frank J. Wilson sat in a glassed-in office, burrowed in at a work-cluttered desk.

There was no secretary. I knocked and Wilson looked up and smiled indifferently and waved me in. He was sitting sideways, working at a typewriter on a stand. Like the army of accountants in the large room beyond, he worked in his suit and tie; the tie wasn’t even loosened.

Frank Wilson had changed only marginally since 1932-he wore wire-rim glasses, now, not black-rims, and his face was fleshier, his thinning hair grayer. I’d seen Wilson on several occasions since the early phase of the Lindbergh case. Just last year we’d bumped into each other in Louisiana. We’d grown guardedly friendly; warily respectful.

“Thanks for seeing me, Frank,” I said. I hung my raincoat and hat next to his on a coat tree.

“Nice to see you again, Heller,” he said. He hadn’t stopped typing yet. “Be with you in a moment.”

I found a chair.

The small office had several filing cabinets; on the wall behind him were framed photos of himself and various dignitaries, including President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau and Charles Lindbergh.

“Sorry,” he said, with a tight smile, as he turned and sat facing me at the desk; huge piles of manila case folders were on either side of the central blotter. “I’m hip deep in procedural recommendations.”

“Oh really,” I said, not terribly interested.

“There’s been a big influx of counterfeiting,” he said, “and Secretary Morgenthau has asked me to recommend methods of bringing it under control.”

“Isn’t that the job of the Secret Service?”

“Well, yes, but the Secretary has asked me, as a favor, to do a survey of the investigative and administrative procedures of the Service.” He said this casually, but I knew he was bragging.

“That’s why your office isn’t in the wing with the Intelligence Unit, anymore.”

“Right. Temporary quarters, these. You see, Moran is going to retire soon, so some changes are going to be made, obviously. I’m just doing a little advance work.”

William H. Moran was the longtime head of the Secret Service; this was Wilson’s way of telling me he was being groomed for the job.

“Well, gee, Frank, it sounds like things are going well for you, busy as you are.”

“Yes. Not too busy to see you, of course. You say you have new information about the Lindbergh case?” He smiled doubtfully. “At this late date, Heller? If it was anybody but you, I’d have dismissed it as a crank call.”

“I didn’t know who else to turn to-you and Irey are the only real possibilities, and Irey’s up so high in the government now, I don’t know if I could get to him.”

His brow was knit, the eyes behind the wire-frames were tight. “Nate, I know you well enough to know you’re not in this out of altruism. No offense, but surely there’s a client in the woodpile.”

“There is. I’m working for Governor Harold Hoffman.”

He bristled. Shifting in his chair, his mouth a thin line, he said, “I’m disappointed to hear that, Nate. Hoffman is a publicity hound; he’s exploiting the Lindbergh case, using it as a political football.”

“Frank, no offense to you, either-but that’s bullshit. I don’t see how being on Hauptmann’s side would be politically advantageous to anybody.”

“Hoffman’s got his eye on the Republican nomination for Vice President,” Wilson said, squinting. “If he could embarrass the Democrats in his state, if he could crack the Lindbergh case, well…”

“If he could crack the Lindbergh case,” I said, “I’d think you’d approve.”

“Damn it, Heller, the case was cracked!”

“Then I may be wasting my time, here, Frank, not to mention yours. Perhaps you don’t care to hear about what I’ve uncovered….”

He grimaced, impatient-whether with me or himself, I can’t say. Then he smiled politely and said, “Nonsense. If you’ve come up with something new, I want to know about it.”

“I thought so. After all, you were never a big proponent of the ‘lone wolf’ theory.”

“No. But I am of the theory that Hauptmann’ll spill his guts before he goes to the chair. Only, as long as bleeding hearts like Hoffman keep the case open, and keep his false hopes up, Bruno’s not about to finger his accomplices.”

“Well, maybe we can find those ‘accomplices’ without his help. But Frank-my opinion is, Hauptmann’s a minor figure in the case at best, and probably a flat-out patsy.”

Wilson sighed. He shook his head wearily. “Out of respect to you, Nate, I’ll hear you out.”

“All right. Now in some instances, I can’t tell you how I’ve been made privy to information. You’ll have to view at least some of what I’m going to tell you the way you’d view a tip from a good informant.”

He accepted that with a nod.

“What I’d like to present is my scenario for how the kidnapping and the extortion may have happened. This isn’t the only way it could have played. There are several variant ways you could interpret the things I’ve learned; but I think I’ve put the puzzle together. I spent the weekend going over old field notes, working it out.”

He had to smile. “Nate Heller devotes his weekend to solving the case that has mystified the world for over four years. That was damn white of you.”

I grinned. “Okay-I deserve that. Anyway, my explanation, or theory if you will, is a hell of a lot more likely than the one Wilentz got Hauptmann convicted on.”

Wilson nodded again. “One thing I’ll grant you-it always bothered me that Wilentz in his opening statement to the jury said he was going to prove the child died dropping to the ground, fracturing its skull, when the ladder rung broke. Then in his closing argument, Wilentz stated flatly that Hauptmann bludgeoned the boy in his crib, with the chisel. Wilentz is lucky that blunder didn’t get the conviction overturned.”

“Especially,” I said, “since neither version of the child’s death is supported by any evidence. No impression of the child’s body in the soft ground below, from falling; and no blood or other matter splattered in the crib, from a bludgeoning.”

Wilson was nodding again, which made me feel better.

I began by telling him about Paul Wendel. He had never heard of Wendel, and wrote the name down on a notepad. I, of course, didn’t mention that Wendel was in Ellis Parker’s illegal custody-just that Parker was investigating Wendel.

“Paul Wendel concocts this plan to kidnap the baby,” I said, “and sells Capone on it. It’s too dangerous and loony a plan for Capone to share with Frank Nitti, who is comparatively conservative in such matters; and it’s unlikely something this wild would interest Luciano, Madden or any of the others.”

“Dutch Schultz might have been that crazy,” Wilson said.

I had to restrain myself from telling him that Nitti had said the same thing.

“But that’s a case in point,” I said. “Not so long ago, Schultz had his own crazy idea-kill Tom Dewey. And we both know how that wound up.”

When Dutch Schultz wanted to hit Dewey the star prosecutor, it was vetoed by Luciano, Meyer Lansky and the boys; when Schultz bridled, he got lead poisoning in a Newark restaurant.

“Now I’m not sure whether Capone or Wendel approaches them,” I said, “but Max Hassel and Max Greenberg are recruited to engineer the snatch. Why would they go along with such a thing? Probably because they, and possibly their boss Waxey Gordon, want to curry Capone’s favor. A beer war seems to be abrewing, shall we say, and the more powerful elements on the East Coast-Luciano, Schultz and so on-are in a position to crush the Hassel and Greenberg operation. It doesn’t hurt them to do a favor for Capone, and make some money at the same time. Besides, Hassel and Greenberg won’t get their hands dirty-they can dispatch some of their minor bootlegger, rumrunner minions to take the risks and provide the insulation.”

Wilson was listening intently.

“Let me interrupt myself to ask you a question, Frank-who was Capone’s most frequent contact on the East Coast in ’32?”

“Well, Frankie Yale was dead by this point,” Wilson said, thoughtfully. “Our intelligence back then indicated that the guy doing the Outfit’s courier work, and the general Capone contact man with East-Coast mobsters, was Ricca. Paul Ricca-the Waiter.”

“Right on the money, Mr. Wilson,” I said, with a smile. “Ricca is unfailingly loyal to Capone. If Capone wanted to launch something that Frank Nitti and Jake Guzik and the rest of the Outfit hierarchy would reject-and after debacles like the Jake Lingle murder and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, these business-oriented types are hardly likely to embrace kidnapping the goddamn Lindbergh baby-who would Capone go to? Who was ruthless enough, and loyal enough?”

“Ricca, of course,” Wilson said. Nodding. Going along with me for the ride.

I drove on. “I think Ricca may have enlisted Gaston Means to be the intermediary between the underworld and the upperworld. Con man, ex-government agent, Means was clever and connected with everybody from bootleggers to congressmen to high society.”

“Why the hell would Capone resort to unreliable rabble like this Wendel character and, of all people, Gaston Means?”

I gave him the same explanation I’d given Nitti: they were smart, savvy crooks, who were probably smart enough not to cross Capone, and who would make perfect fall guys. They could call out Capone’s name in court and everybody would just laugh.

“Means didn’t contact Evalyn McLean at first, you know,” I said. “He contacted Colonel M. Robert Guggenheim, and a prominent judge-this was in the earliest days of the case. He seems likely to have been truly attempting to become the intermediary, at the bidding of Capone. He’s a hell of a lot more likely go-between than Jafsie Condon!”

Wilson smiled.

“Now as for the kidnapping itself, disbarred lawyer Wendel-as I mentioned-has a client named Isidor Fisch. Fisch is a con man, fence and probable dope-smuggler…”

“Nate, pardon me, but we checked Fisch a hundred different ways. He was a harmless Jewish boy suffering from tuberculosis.”

“Frank, maybe you should’ve checked one hundred and one ways.” It was time to get tough. “I know you had a man in that spiritualist church of Marinelli’s…”

“One of the best undercover agents in the Unit. Pat O’Rourke.”

“I know O’Rourke, and he is a good man. But this time he didn’t do a good job. Are you aware that Fisch lived across the street from that spiritualist church?”

“Certainly,” he said, and shrugged dismissively.

That surprised me. “You did? Didn’t you find that significant?”

“Not particularly,” he said. “Fisch didn’t even meet Hauptmann until two years after the kidnapping. Just one of the many coincidental red herrings we were always running into on the case.”

I hardly knew how to respond to that brilliant piece of deductive thinking.

“Frank, you’re operating from the premise that Hauptmann is guilty,” I said, trying to maintain control, and stay reasonable. “Assuming that Hauptmann may not be guilty, then his not having met Fisch until two years after the crime speaks only of Hauptmann’s innocence.”

He made a small dismissive wave. “Well, for the sake of argument…but I can’t accept your characterizing Pat O’Rourke’s undercover work as anything but exceptional.”

“Oh, really? Then did you know Isidor Fisch was a member of that spiritualist church?”

His face remained impassive, but his eyes flickered.

“So was Oliver Whately. So was Violet Sharpe.”

He sat forward. “Are you certain?”

“I have witnesses who say so. And if you send some of these famous Washington G-men or T-men into the field checking, I think you’ll come up with a lot more witnesses. Can I continue my scenario?”

He nodded; his expression was grave.

“Paul Wendel uses his client Fisch to arrange for Violet and Ollie to help, in various ways. I think Violet’s a dupe, actually, providing inside information possibly through a boyfriend, while Ollie is, on the other hand, an active participant in the scheme. He is, in fact, the prime inside accomplice. The night of the kidnapping, he probably handed the baby either down the ladder or out the front door to one of Hassel and Greenberg’s cronies. There’s a possibility these bootleggers have a connection to the servants that can be traced, even at this late date, because I understand deliveries of beer and booze were made to Whately and others.”

Wilson wore a faint humorless smirk. “I suppose Whately’s role explains why the dog didn’t bark.”

“Oh, yes and then some-you see, Whately looked after Wahgoosh. He in fact brought the dog into the household, raised it, trained it. There’s no way around it, Frank, it has to be said…”

“Oh, Heller, please don’t.”

I shrugged and smiled. “The butler did it.”

“You had to say it.”

“I was born to say it. Frank, the child was spirited away by these bootleggers, Hassel and Greenberg’s boys, and possibly along for the ride was a Capone representative.”

“Surely not Ricca.”

“No. But I have a hunch this is where Bob Conroy was positioned; he’d been on the outs with Capone, and maybe was willing to do almost anything to get back into the boss’s good graces…setting himself up, unwittingly of course, to be Capone’s fall guy.”

“Conroy is the guy that Capone was offering up, all right,” Wilson admitted. “Go on.”

“The first note, planted in the nursery, was written by Wendel; his background, incidentally, is German, although he’s apparently at least second-generation. The note was not really for ransom purposes, but merely to lead Lindbergh and the authorities into thinking the kidnapping was for real.”

“So that Capone could ride in on his white horse,” Wilson said, playing along, “and give us the kidnapper-Conroy-and the kid back.”

“And get his freedom. Right. Meanwhile, this weasel Fisch tries to interlope; he knows nobody’s really going after any ransom, so decides it’s his for the asking. He sends a second note, patterning it on the original.”

Wilson’s expression was openly skeptical. “How would he have access to that?”

“About three different ways, Frank. He may have been there when Wendel wrote the first note, and sneaked out a copy or an earlier draft. He may have gotten it through underworld circles-Rosner and Spitale were circulating a copy, remember? Or a tracing could have come from Violet Sharpe or Whately-the note was just stuck in Slim’s desk drawer, where the servants had easy access. Remember?”

Glumly, he nodded.

“Now, it’s also possible Wendel and Fisch were in league, in this interloping extortion effort. Since Wendel once tried to scam Capone, maybe Wendel was working for nothing, to even the slate with Snorkey. So Wendel, wanting some dough to show for his trouble, might have gone in with Fisch on the extortion scheme. Hard to say. At any rate, about this time, you and Irey come along and convince Lindbergh that Capone is bluffing, and Slim says, either way, he’s not going to deal with slime like Scarface Al-even if it means his little boy’s life. So soon it’s clear that Lindbergh won’t play-that the kidnapping has been for nothing. Capone cuts his losses, and fades.”

“Where is the child?”

“I’ll get to that. But I’ll say this much, at this point: the kid is not dead. In fact, he still isn’t.”

Wilson’s eyes clouded. I was losing him.

“Never mind that, right now. Stick with me.”

Reluctantly, Wilson nodded.

“Now that Capone is out of the picture, the way is clear for Fisch to go full throttle into his negotiations. He sends more notes. The spiritualist group, with Marinelli probably in on the game but his wife probably not, manipulates this old fool they know, Professor John Condon, into offering himself up as intermediary.”

“And how do they know Condon?”

“Why, Frank-didn’t Pat O’Rourke mention that? Jafsie attended that spiritualist church, too!”

His mouth dropped open, just a bit. He swallowed and scribbled something on his notepad.

I shrugged. “I don’t think Jafsie is a bad enough person, or smart enough person either, to be part of this extortion scheme. But he was a visible, easily manipulated blowhard-I think he may have been Marinelli and Sivella’s grade-school teacher, in Harlem-and a prime candidate to funnel information to Lindbergh, and to funnel cash back through to them. The Marinellis even gave that hotel-room seance I attended at Princeton to help prime the pump, mentioning Jafsie by name and nudging Breckinridge about a note he’d receive soon; and maybe to get some play in the press for the veracity of Sister Sarah’s psychic abilities. That was a stupid risk, and the mistake that should have cracked this thing wide open. But it didn’t.”

“You’re saying this spiritualist church group, led by Fisch, got the cemetery money. And that they never had the child?”

“Exactly.”

“What about the sleeping suit that was delivered to Jafsie?”

“That could have happened a couple ways. Jafsie slept in the nursery, the night he came to Lindbergh with the note from the ‘kidnappers.’ I caught him red-handed going through a chest. He took any number of things to use to identify the child-some of these were toys he asked for…maybe you remember the safety pins he took and showed to ‘Cemetery John’ and asked him to identify?”

Wilson nodded.

“Well, he may have taken the sleeping suit at that time, as a souvenir, or for ID purposes. But I think it’s more likely that Violet Sharpe provided the sleeping suit.”

“Violet Sharpe?”

“Yes. The child had a sizeable, unspecified number of the sleepers that were exactly the same. A good many of them were kept in the other nursery, at the Morrow estate at Englewood-where Violet lived and worked. Everybody wondered why the sleeper seemed freshly laundered, and why it took two days for the ‘kidnappers’ to provide Jafsie this proof.”

“Well, the answer is obvious,” Wilson said, almost testily.

“They had to go back to the woods where they’d buried the child, to remove the sleeper.”

“Do you really think that’s likely? Besides, these are extortionists, not kidnappers-they don’t have the kid, they never did have the kid. Didn’t you wonder why they didn’t have better proof than a fucking sleeping suit? Why not a photo, or a phone call from the tot-he could talk a little, you know.”

“If he was dead, he couldn’t talk.”

“If he was alive, and they didn’t have him, he couldn’t talk, either, not for them, anyway. But one of their inside contacts, either Violet at Englewood or Ollie at Hopewell, could take another sleeper from a drawer in either nursery-and of course the sleeper would seem freshly laundered. It hadn’t been worn since it was last washed!”

Wilson was thinking. I knew I’d made a dent. I let him think for a bit.

Then I pressed on. “Now the actual kidnappers, the bootleggers who worked for Hassel and Greenberg, they also know that Capone has picked up his cards and gone home. They, too, figure that there’s extortion dough for the asking. So they contact this respectable fella in Norfolk, who has some vague connections to the Lindberghs through society, a shipbuilder they know ’cause he’s repaired boats for guys in their line of work.”

“John Curtis?” Wilson said, dumbfounded. “That hoaxer?”

“He wasn’t a hoaxer, Frank. He was telling the truth. So pretty soon Curtis is contacting Lindbergh, and now we have two extortion groups who are active-both with inside information about the kidnapping, and neither of whom at this point possesses the baby.”

“Heller, isn’t this getting a little Byzantine?”

“This case has been Byzantine since the day I showed up in March of 1932. If you’d care to point out any one part of this case that has ever made rational sense, I’ll slip on my raincoat and go home. Right now.”

“Go on. Go on.”

“Let me touch on Gaston Means. He also has been told, by Ricca probably or maybe Hassel and Greenberg, that Capone is cutting his losses; Means has been told to stop trying to contact Lindbergh through the likes of Guggenheim and others. So what does Means do? He begins using his inside information, not to swindle Lindbergh, but over to one side, where Capone is unlikely to notice or care…he focuses on a soft-hearted, deep-pocketed society matron, Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean.”

Wilson made a note.

I went on. “Now the payoff in the cemetery takes place, and the kid isn’t returned, and all of a sudden it’s all over the papers; so Capone obviously now knows that somebody is interloping. Capone also knows from the papers that Lindbergh and Jafsie are trying to get back in touch with the ‘kidnappers,’ and are obviously willing to pay more money, and this thing Capone has put in motion just seems to have no end, to be completely out of fucking control. Capone and Ricca don’t necessarily know for sure that these extortionists are anybody who was really in on the kidnapping-it could be somebody from the outside entirely. Whatever the case, Capone decides to bring this farce to a halt. He has a baby planted in the woods not far from the Lindbergh estate…”

“Hold it, Heller! That baby was identified by its father, for God’s sake.”

“That baby was a pile of decomposed bones that couldn’t even be identified as to sex; the family pediatrician said he couldn’t ID that kid as the Little Eaglet if you paid him ten million bucks! Those woods were trampled over and over again by search parties and telephone linemen, and in any case, that corpse was decomposed way beyond what it should’ve, in that period of time, with weather that cold.”

“There was an identifying garment…”

“Yes, a few scraps of cloth with blue thread. It was the blue thread that Betty Gow recognized, because she’d made this makeshift garment the night of the kidnapping, with thread provided by Elsie Whately-the butler’s wife. I’m sure Capone could have reached out through his various intermediaries and procured that simple spool of thread from his accomplices among the Lindbergh servants. Or, the little shirt itself may have been within Capone’s grasp.”

“The garment was planted, you’re saying.”

“Like the little body was planted. It was an act of closure, on Capone and Ricca’s part. To shut down the extortion schemes. To put an end to this goddamn case.”

Wilson was thinking. “Capone was in Atlanta at this point.”

“Right. And optimistic about getting out via traditional avenues, such as his lawyers and bribery, not outlandish schemes like the ill-fated Lindbergh snatch. And Ricca’s on the outside, cleaning house. Ricca uses the beer war between Waxey Gordon and the New York mob as a convenient front for bumping off Hassel and Greenberg and maybe a few others involved in the conspiracy; Bob Conroy and his wife get iced about this time, too.”

“No,” Wilson said flatly. “Conroy and his wife, that was a double suicide.”

“My ass! And why in fucking hell didn’t you ever tell me you finally tracked Conroy down? I must’ve called you about Conroy half a dozen times.”

Rather meekly, he said, “You were off the case, at that point. Never occurred to me, frankly. If you’re right about all this rampant assassination, why was Gaston Means allowed to stay among the living?”

“Why kill Means? Nobody believes anything he says, anyway. Besides, I was closing in on Hassel and Greenberg, right before they got hit. I found out about them by beating their names out of Means…but before I could follow up, they got theirs in the ‘beer war.’”

“You think Means sold them out to Ricca.”

“I sure do. That allowed Means to go to court, and lay everything on Hassel and Greenberg, who were nice and dead and blameable. Meanwhile, Violet Sharpe starts coming unhinged after the little corpse in the woods turns up; however she’s been involved, to whatever extent-and she has two unexplained g’s in her bank account, remember-she certainly never counted on the baby getting killed, and of course she has no way of knowing that the baby they found wasn’t the real Lindy, Jr.”

“So she takes poison,” Wilson said.

“Or she’s murdered. No one actually saw her take poison. She was ill, taking medicine for her nerves; maybe she was poisoned by Whately.”

“He didn’t work at the Englewood estate.”

“He was there frequently. They were a close-knit ‘family’ of servants, those two estates. At any rate, she was another loose end tied off. Whately’s death strikes me as similarly suspicious. I think looking into that-seeing why a guy who was healthy all his life suddenly dies of an ulcer-would be a nice use of the taxpayers’ money. Was there an autopsy?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Even if it was natural causes, what stress exactly caused this bleeding ulcer? Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it? And wasn’t Fisch’s death convenient? Speaking of whom, I’m not precisely sure how Fisch and Wendel intersect. Wendel may or may not have been involved in the cemetery extortion; I do know that Wendel’s sister lived in back of St. Raymond’s.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Jot that down, too. At any rate, Fisch wound up with at least part of the money, and either his illness or worry about Capone or Ricca or even the cops catching up with him sent him scurrying off to Germany, leaving some cash stashed with his buddy Hauptmann.”

“So you see Hauptmann as a dupe in this,” Wilson said, with a mocking smile.

“The only thing he may be guilty of is being in on Fisch’s dope smuggling, using furs as a partial front. But I doubt even that.” I cracked my knuckles. “Anyway, that’s what I think happened. As for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., he’s salted away somewhere. I have a good idea where he was kept immediately after the kidnapping-in New Haven, Connecticut. Where he is now, I haven’t a clue. But Capone and Ricca aren’t about to bump him off-there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

Wilson raised an eyebrow, smiled tightly and put down his pencil. “Nate, this is an interesting theory, and you’ve mentioned some things that I admit I didn’t know-but you completely ignore and overlook the overwhelming evidence gathered against Bruno Hauptmann.”

I laughed. “Christ, Frank, I shouldn’t dignify that with a response. I’ve never seen such shameless tampering with, and concoction of, evidence…or so many lying witnesses from Condon to Whited and Hochmuth and even Slim Lindbergh himself.”

“You’re calling Charles Lindbergh a liar?”

“Yes. I think he was prompted into lying by police who assured him that they had the right man. Did you ever give Slim that reassurance, Frank?”

Wilson said nothing.

“I’m not suggesting there was any great police conspiracy to frame Hauptmann, or even that the Outfit sought to frame him. Hauptmann dropped himself into the fall-guy slot by being Fisch’s friend and business partner. And then forces somewhat independently rallied to ‘help’ him fit that role. You know how sloppy cops like Schwarzkopf and Welch think, Frank-they center on their suspect, led there by minimal but fairly convincing evidence, and then they proceed to fudge this, lie about that, suppress one thing, fake the other. Witnesses are made to feel with absolute certainty that they are testifying against a guilty man-the cops have assured them thus. So, to do the ‘right’ thing so that society can have retribution, and/or for the brief moment center stage in the public eye, or, hell, just to share in reward money, an otherwise honest witness tells a little lie. Distorts a piece of evidence just slightly. What harm is a little embroidery, after all, in so large and official a cloth? So a cop fudges ladder evidence, and a teller at a movie theater makes a bogus eyewitness ID, and a prosecutor withholds letters and ledgers that back up Hauptmann’s ‘Fisch story,’ and on, and on, and on.”

He was frowning. “You’re casting doubt on the reputations of a lot of fine public officials, and good citizens.”

“No, I’m not. Because there is no ‘doubt’ about this. Hauptmann was framed; he was a German carpenter who fit the psychological profile and the miniscule evidence on hand. He was perfect. Now, I do think the Outfit may have helped from the sidelines. ‘Death House’ Reilly and Sam Leibowitz, for example, who volunteered their legal services, both had strong Capone ties. So do a lot of New Jersey and New York City cops, whether you like to hear me say it or not.”

“You’re also casting doubt,” he said stiffly, “on the work the IRS Intelligence Unit performed. Jesus, Heller, we’re the people who put Capone away. You can’t dream that the Outfit’s influence extends to…”

“No. That’s why I came to you. One of the reasons, anyway. You have the manpower and the skills to follow up my leads and my scenario. You can do it in a short period of time, which if we want to keep Hauptmann’s ass from getting scorched is a must. And here’s the really sweet part, Frank-you can get Capone again, big-time.”

He raised his chin; his eyes sharpened.

“You nailed him once, but only temporarily. He’ll be out in a few years. Imagine if you could pin a murder and kidnapping rap on him. Imagine pinning the Lindbergh kidnapping on him. You’d be more famous than J. Edgar Hoover.”

“Fame means little to me, Heller.”

Maybe so, but he sure was doing his best to climb the bureaucratic ladder.

“How about the simple satisfaction of finally solving this goddamn case?” I said.

“Heller, this case is solved.”

“Frank, after all I’ve laid out in front of you, how can you…”

“Look,” he said edgily, “most of these people you’re talking about are dead. Fisch, Hassel, Greenberg, Violet Sharpe, Ollie Whately…”

“Whately’s wife Elsie is in Great Britain; she had to be at least peripherally involved. Get her!”

“Heller, she’s dead, too.”

“What? What…what were the circumstances?”

“I don’t know exactly.” He shrugged. “Natural causes, I understand.”

“Jesus! Find out! All these deaths are a little goddamn convenient, don’t you think?”

He was shaking his head slowly, no. “If there is anything left to solve here, short of Hauptmann fingering his confederates at the last minute, there’s little chance at this point of clearing it up. Too many dead. The rest are fringe characters like Means, Wendel, Jafsie, the Marinellis. Dead ends. Red herrings.”

I leaned forward, put my hands on his desk. “You’re one of the few people on earth, Frank, who can pick up the phone, reopen this investigation and save Hauptmann’s life.”

He shrugged. “I don’t want to save Hauptmann’s life. Even if your ‘scenario’ is correct, and it strikes me as extremely farfetched and fanciful, I still see Hauptmann as a major figure-Fisch’s accomplice. There’s no doubt in my mind, Heller: Hauptmann is guilty, one hundred percent. He had a previous record in Germany and is, without a doubt, as cold, hard and vicious a criminal as I have ever run into.”

I just looked at him.

“Let me read you something,” he said, and he reached behind him and plucked the picture of Lindbergh off the wall. With a sad, proud smile, he read: “To Frank J. Wilson-if it had not been for you fellows being in on the case, Hauptmann would not have gone to trial and your organization deserves the full credit for his apprehension.’”

I stood. “Well, jeez, Frank-I’d hate like hell to fuck up your inscribed photo with the truth.”

He gave me a sharp look; he put the photo back on the wall, hastily, and it swung crookedly on its nail, unnoticed by him. “Heller, I gave you a fair hearing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got real work to do.”

I leaned on his desk. “Let me just ask you something. Just one thing. You were on the Bob Conroy case, weren’t you? You and Lt. Finn from Manhattan. Did you see the crime scene? This ‘double suicide’?”

He nodded.

“Well, come on, Frank-what did your nose tell you? I don’t know anything about the case, but that ‘suicide’ had to smell. It had to be Capone and Ricca tyin’ up loose ends.”

“You want to look at the file?” he asked. And he started riffling through a stack of manila folders. “You can look at the damn file.”

“What’s it doing on your desk?”

“It’s a counterfeiting-related case. I told you, that’s the area I’m working in right now.”

“Why is it counterfeiting-related?”

“They were living in poverty, Conroy and his wife…”

“Lying low, it sounds like.”

He shrugged that off. “Well, they’d come up with a new scheme, it appears, ’cause they had a neat little printing press in their flop, and plates that turned out embarrassingly good counterfeit money.”

“That doesn’t sound like somebody getting ready to commit suicide.”

“Who knows why people kill themselves? Here. Here it is. Sit down and look at it, if you like, but I got to get back to business.”

I started flipping through the file, and came to a mug-shot photo of a woman, an attractive, hard-looking pockmarked brunette. I froze.

“Heller? Nate? What’s wrong with you? You look like you saw a ghost.”

“No, uh, it’s nothing,” I said, and I sat and I quietly read the file and then I set it on Wilson’s desk, and thanked him for his time.

“You look funny,” he said. “Don’t you feel good?”

“See you, Frank,” I said, and went out.

I leaned against the wall in the hall, government workers moving briskly by. Had I seen a ghost? In a way.

The better half of the Conroy double suicide, Bob’s wife, Bernice, was someone I’d seen before. Someone I’d briefly known. She’d been a blonde, then. It had been years ago-a little over four years, but the memory of her was vivid.

I’d seen her in Chicago, in LaSalle Street Station, where she stepped down off the Twentieth Century Limited.

With a baby in her arms.