Stolen Away

39

The brick terra-cotta six-flat on Sheridan looked just the same; it might have been yesterday I stood before it, not four years. Even the day was the same: gray, cold, the air flecked with icy snow. I stood on the sidewalk, studying the six-flat like a clue I couldn’t decipher.

Only I had deciphered it.

This was Tuesday, late Tuesday morning-almost twenty-four hours to the minute from when I saw Bernice Conroy’s mug-shot picture in Frank Wilson’s office in Washington. I had taken the train in the afternoon, got into Chicago in the middle of the night, slept like a baby in my Murphy bed in my office, till about an hour ago.

On the train, I hadn’t slept a wink. I lay in my Pullman upper with my eyes wide open and staring, slowly piecing this together, instantly piecing that together, until I knew. I knew exactly what had happened.

Evalyn, I told nothing. I said only that I had a long-shot lead, from something I’d seen in Wilson’s office, and that it required me going back to Chicago to follow up. She’d wanted to come, but I said no. She tried to argue, but I wasn’t having any.

This was for me to do.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I told her.

“What do I do till then?”

“Same as Hauptmann,” I said, touching her face. “Wait, and pray.”

Interpretation was required: that’s what Marinelli had said. Not long ago I thought psychics were the bunk; and I still thought most of them, Marinelli included, were scam artists. The “fortune” in “fortune-teller” was the money those sons of bitches plucked off their marks.

But a few of these screwballs were sincere-Edgar Cayce a prime example. Even in ’32 I’d sensed that he at least thought he was for real; he, and his nice little wife and quiet little life, had impressed me, back then, though I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself.

Now, as I stood before the brick building on Sheridan Road, I knew he’d somehow tapped into something very real. But interpretation was required: he’d gotten so much right-the mill section of New Haven; the two-story shingled house on “Adams” (Chatham) Street, numbered 73; the name of the man who lived in that house, Paul Maglio, a.k.a. Paul Ricca; the brown building two-tenths of a mile from the end of Chatham, where neighborhood rumor had it Little Lindy had been baby-sat…

But the child was on Scharten Street, Cayce had said. And that brown building was on Maltby.

Interpretation: Scharten. Sounds like Scharten, sounds like Scharten…

Sheridan?

Only that baby had never been in the six-flat on Sheridan. I’d followed Bernice Rogers, a.k.a. Bernice Conroy, a twenty-month-old baby bundled in her arms, from LaSalle Street Station to this apartment building. And that baby had turned out to belong to Hymie Goldberg.

You remember-it was in all the papers.

That was the sweetest irony of all: I was picked to be the police liaison from Chicago because I’d cracked the Hymie Goldberg kidnapping. It had impressed Lindbergh himself, got me immediately into the inner circle with Breckinridge and assorted colonels and underworld types.

But had I really cracked the Goldberg kidnapping? No charges had been pressed against Bernice Rogers, after all-Hymie Goldberg, upon return of his kid, had claimed Bernice had been acting as his Jafsie. The Goldberg kidnapping may have been a sham, a front, all along.

What I most certainly had done, that fourth day of March in 1932, when I got suspicious of a hard-looking blonde and an innocent-looking baby in a Chicago train station, was royally botch the Lindbergh case.

Funny, I remembered how I’d speculated that cracking the crime of the century would send my career skyrocketing. But I was a green kid, and what did I know? Certainly not what I was doing.

That great old detective, though, my Chief of Detectives, “Old Shoes” Schoemaker, had been right on the money. We knew at the time that Bernice Rogers had adopted a boy, of a specific age, from an Evanston agency. Old Shoes had theorized that she had then gone east with the kid and set up housekeeping in some quiet neighborhood and let herself, and her charge, be seen-but not too close up. Then after the kidnapping, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was substituted for the adoption-agency kid, who was disposed of, somehow.

I now knew that the “quiet neighborhood” out east had been in New Haven, “in the region of” Dover, in an apartment over a grocery store in a brown building on Maltby Street. At the behest of “Paul Maglio,” whose shingled two-story on Chatham had briefly been used as a safe house. That adopted kid had probably been smothered or whatever, and buried in the basement on Chatham or something-possibly winding up, months later, in a shallow grave in the Sourland Mountains.

Only Paul Ricca hadn’t counted on the feds pouring into New Haven in the days immediately following the snatch, looking for suspects and babies; Ricca had no way of knowing that the construction workers on Lindbergh’s estate had largely come from New Haven, and had become immediate suspects.

So the plan was hastily changed, and Ricca had sent Bernice Rogers and her hot little package (its hair dyed black) back to Chicago, where somebody other than Bernice would take charge of the child, who would be sent deep into hiding and safekeeping.

And that was how, and where, plainclothes officer Nathan Heller of the pickpocket detail screwed up.

On the train last night, not long before it pulled into (of all places) LaSalle Street Station, the truth had come to me-only four years and several days too late.

A switch had been pulled.

Bernice Rogers had hustled her pretty ass off that train and into the train station and directly in the ladies’ room. She’d been in there less than two minutes. Not time enough to change a diaper; not time enough to take a decent pee.

But plenty of time to trade babies with another surrogate mother, waiting for her in that can.

Bernice Rogers Conroy had turned Charles Lindbergh, Jr., over to an awaiting accomplice, who had given her in return the son of a Jewish bootlegger named Goldberg.

Substituting not only another child, but another kidnapped child, would make it possible for all of Bernice’s elaborate precautions-adopting another kid, going east, shuttling home-to be written off as having been done in relation to the Goldberg kidnapping. Which probably wasn’t a kidnapping at all, of course.

What this boiled down to was, young detective Heller fucked up, major league. I should have followed that bitch into the bathroom. Grabbed her, and the kid. But I was too fucking shy-I didn’t want to wound the sensibilities of any ladies going potty.

I was the potty one. Fuck! The grief I could have saved myself, Lindbergh, Hauptmann, the world, if I’d just had the balls to go in a goddamn ladies’ room!

On such trivialities does history hinge-not to mention my sanity.

Well, that was a long time ago, and now I was back in Chicago, back on Sheridan, back in front of the apartment building I’d tracked Bernice Rogers to, once upon a time. I was older, wiser, and Bernice Rogers presumably was, too-though you’d have to add “dead” to her list.

The building janitor had a small basement apartment, shot through with pipes and scattered with dreary secondhand furniture, stacks of sleazy magazines, and pointless knickknacks. There were several pinup calendars taped to the painted cement wall, none of them the current year. The guy was a scavenger, and a pack rat. For my purposes, that was good.

“Sure I remember Mrs. Rogers,” he rasped. He was younger than thirty and older than time, a stooped lunger with four days of stubble, a sweated-out gray T-shirt and baggy blue pants with suspenders. He had a chipmunk overbite yellow as piss, no chin and eyes that were as clear and blue as a summer sky.

“She sure had a good build,” I said, and grinned.

“She sure did! She got in trouble, though.” He narrowed his inexplicably beautiful blue eyes and leaned forward, to get confidential; his breath smelled of Sen-Sen. “There was a shooting upstairs, back in ’32. She was involved in a kidnapping, I heard. But she got off.”

“Did she stick around after that?”

“A while, is all. A month, maybe. Then one night, all of a sudden, no notice or nothing, she lit out. Took her clothes, but she left the furniture. It wasn’t a furnished flat, neither.”

I imagined some of that furniture was in this very room. “Did she leave anything else behind, besides furniture? Personal effects? Like letters, for example?”

He coughed for a while; I waited. Then he said, “No, sir. But I remember, a week or so after she left, a letter did come for her. She didn’t leave no forwarding address. Sometimes people do that, you know. Move on without no forwarding address.”

“What do you do with their mail, then? Return it to the post office?”

He shook his head, no. “I keep it in a box. In case they should ever come for it.”

“I’d like to see that letter.”

“Mister, no offense, but that badge you showed me-it was a private badge, wasn’t it?”

“Right. Would you like to see some more identification?”

And I showed him a five-dollar bill.

“That’s very official-looking,” he said, taking it, grinning wolfishly, sticking it into a deep pocket. “You stay here.”

He opened a door and I caught a glimpse of the basement laundry room and storage bins for each apartment. The door stood open, but I couldn’t see him. I could hear him, rustling in there, ratlike.

He soon returned, baring his yellow overbite. He was holding a cigar box in one hand, like a church usher with a collection plate. In the other hand was a letter, which had been opened, but then so had several dozen more in the cigar box.

I reached for the letter.

He pulled it back; his mouth was tight and pouty. “I want more ‘identification.’ I could get in trouble with the landlord for this kind of thing.”

“I already gave you five bucks, pal.” I grinned at him again, but it wasn’t at all friendly. “And your landlord isn’t going to give you the kind of trouble I’m going to give you, if you don’t hand that fucker over.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, coughing some more. “I mean it. I’m taking a big risk, even talking to somebody like you. Mr. Ricca has strict rules.”

That stopped me.

“Mr. Ricca? That’s the landlord’s name?”

“Owns the building,” he said with a somber nod. “And I hear he’s connected.”

I’d heard that, too.

I gave him another five dollars.

I didn’t look at the letter until I was sitting in my car. My hands were trembling as I fished out the single page; I’m not ashamed to say so.

It was from a woman named Madge. No last name, but the envelope had a return address: M. Belliance, Three Oaks, Michigan, a rural route.

Cayce had mentioned a woman named “Belliance” as guarding the child. Son of a bitch, I was a believer. I couldn’t keep my goddamn hand from shaking, but I managed to read the letter.

Dear B.,

The boy is doing fine. He is over his cold. He and Carl are getting along famously. Carl will be a good daddy. No more boats and worry for us. This farm life is going to be a real nice change.

It’s sweet of you to ask about the boy. He is not hard to love. I can see how you got attached to him so quick. If you know what’s best, you ought to tear this up. The picture too, but I couldn’t not send one.

Madge

And there was a photo. A snapshot.

Cayce had been right again, in a roundabout way. I had found the child on “Scharten Street.” At least, this picture of a child.

A child perhaps twenty-one months old, a beautiful toddler in a little playsuit with suspenders over a T-shirt; he had light curly hair and a dimpled chin, and stood between, with his either hand held by, a thin-faced man in a cap and bib overalls, and an apple-cheeked woman in a calico print housedress; behind them seemed to be a farmhouse. The man and woman were smiling, the little boy was frowning, though he might have been squinting in the sun.

He was Charles Lindbergh, Jr.

And I was on my way to Three Oaks, Michigan.