Max Collins - Stolen Away

“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.

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.