Stolen Away (42 page)

“Next you’ll tell me Hochmuth and Whited saw him in Hopewell, too.”

“Nathan, this woman does not have cataracts, and she does not live in a hillbilly shack. Here’s another little fact you may enjoy…Wendel’s sister lives in back of St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.”

I blinked. “What?”

“His sister.” He was grinning, but his eyes were dead serious. “St. Raymond’s is where this lying fool Condon paid off the fifty thousand—and Wendel would not have had far to go to hide out afterwards, would he?”

This, too, I wrote down. I was getting interested.

“I’m jumping around a bit, Nathan—hope you can follow me. Now, when Wendel was still a practicing attorney in Trenton, he got one of his clients off on a narcotics rap. You know what that client’s name was, Nathan?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Ellis?”

“Why, sure, Nathan. It was Isidor Fisch.”

I just looked at him; I had about as much to say at that moment as the skeleton.

“With their lawyer-client relationship,” Parker said casually, “I figure maybe Wendel turned the fifty thousand in marked ransom bills over to Fisch, who some people say was a ‘hot-money’ fence.”

I was sitting forward. “Ellis, this may be important. You have my apologies for doubting you.”

“Well, thank you, young man.” He relit the corncob pipe, shook the match out. “Now I’ll tell you about Paul Wendel and Al Capone.”

He was showing off, but it was working. I felt like I’d been poleaxed.

“Al Capone?” I asked. Because it was clear that he wouldn’t continue until I did ask.

He nodded smugly. “Paul Wendel tried to work a confidence game on Al Capone some years ago, around 1929 or ’30. I have an affidavit to that effect from a Frank Cristano, who has had some contact with underworld figures, from time to time. To make a long story short, Wendel convinced both Cristano and Capone that he could turn common tar into alcohol for four cents a gallon. At some point, however, the scam unraveled and Capone said if Wendel—who had come to visit Capone at the Lexington Hotel in your fair city—ever darkened his door again he’d get taken for what I believe you Chicago boys refer to as a ‘ride.’”

“I don’t think that term is unknown on the East Coast, either, Ellis.”

“What’s really interesting, Nathan, is that Wendel approached Cristano again, in early 1932—with a scheme to get Al Capone out of his income-tax troubles by kidnapping—and then arranging for Capone to be a hero by returning—the Lindbergh baby.”

There it was.

I said, “Did this Cristano say he delivered the message?”

“No. He threw Paul Wendel out on his ass. But don’t you suppose Wendel found a way to get that message to Capone?”

I nodded. “So maybe you do have a hell of a suspect in Wendel.”

“I think so.”

“But there isn’t much time to develop any of this. You have him under surveillance, I suppose?”

“Why, Nathan,” Ellis Parker said innocently, removing the corncob pipe. “I have him under wraps over at the local insane asylum. Care to meet him?”

Ellis Parker was my passenger as, at his direction, I guided the Packard sixteen peacefully rural miles to the New Lisbon Colony, a state hospital for the insane. I seemed to be making a habit of dropping in at nuthouses; but nothing could have prepared me for the insanity of what I heard along the way.

The Cornfield Sherlock, wearing a bulky brown topcoat and a formless gray fedora, had left his corncob pipe behind. Settling himself in the passenger seat, he began the journey by using a pocketknife to cut the tip off a cigar. He fired up the stogie, and cracked a window; ventilation or not, the smell made me long for the corncob.

“Got an extry, if you want, Nathan,” he said, gesturing with the cigar, embers flying. I brushed them from Evalyn’s upholstery.

“No thanks. Care to tell me why your suspect is in custody at a madhouse?”

“I didn’t say he was in custody. I said we had him under wraps. You could call it a kind of protective custody.”

“You don’t have enough to arrest him formally, yet?”

“We need a confession,” Parker allowed. “Of course, we’ve got several from him already—just not quite the right one yet.”

“He’s confessed? More than once?”

“Keep your eye on the road, son. You don’t know this country.” He blew a formidable smoke ring; it wreathed his head—he smiled, like a partly shaven, not entirely benign Santa Claus. “Early this year, I sent some deputies of mine to New York to keep an eye on Wendel. He was living in the Stanford Hotel at the time. They took a room at the Martinique next door, watched his movements with binoculars and so on. My son Ellis, Jr., was in charge.”

“I didn’t know your son was in your line of work.”

“Well, he is, and I’m damn proud of him. I needed him there to ramrod the group. Those other deputies weren’t professional lawmen by any means. They were just…contacts of mine.”

“Contacts?”

He shrugged. “I’ve got my network of snitches and such in New Jersey and New York alike.”

That probably meant they were gamblers and minor-league hustlers. Nice class of “deputy.”

“How did the surveillance pan out?” I asked.

“Not well. By the middle of February, with time running out for Bruno Hauptmann, I figured we should move.”

“Move?”

He nodded, eyes narrowed, jaw jutting, cigar clamped in one corner of his mouth. “I got Ellis, Jr., outa there, ’cause Wendel would recognize him, and the other three waited till Wendel was coming out of the hotel, told him they were cops, put a gun in his ribs and drove him to Brooklyn.”

I about hit the brakes. “That’s kidnapping, Ellis.”

“Horseshit, son. Didn’t you ever break a rule to crack a case? Didn’t you ever bust a window to go in and pick up a clue? Anyway, the fellas took Wendel to a house belonging to one of their fathers; all arranged in advance. They kept him in the basement, blindfolded at first.”

“For how long?” I managed.

“Eight days,” he said, shrugging.

I didn’t know what to say. I could barely keep my eyes focused on the road. Parker just sat puffing his cigar, telling his story, proud of himself.

“I told my deputies, you tell Wendel you’re not really cops, what you are is mobsters. Tell him because of what he did—kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, which from inside sources you know that he done—he’s made things hot for the ‘Boys.’ I said, tell him the police know Hauptmann didn’t do it and they won’t get off the Boys’ backs till they find the men who did.”

“Your deputies,” I said softly, “pretended to be gangsters, holding him hostage?”

Parker nodded, smiling. “They used Italian names, and acted tough, threatened to put him in cement and dump him in the river.”

“Did they beat him?”

“Hell no! What do you think I am, Nathan? A damn torturer? My deputies let him take baths, fed him, even gave him a cot to sleep on, and a radio so’s he could listen to music.”

“They tie him up?”

“No, sir. Somebody was guarding him all the time; he was down in the basement, with the windows boarded up. He wasn’t going nowhere. Somebody was always listening, waiting for him to break down.”

“How were they going to do that, Ellis, without feeding him the goldfish?”

He snorted a laugh. “My deputies wondered the same thing. They said, Ellis, this man is sitting there and he’s eating and sleeping, he’s listening to music, he bathes every day and he shaves, but he doesn’t tell us anything. And I said, don’t worry—one day, when you least expect it, this man will break down and tell you the whole story. For one thing, this man is dying to tell the story to somebody, and I figured he would tell them because he took ’em to be criminals and he’d want them to know how he was this master criminal who did this big crime.”

“That’s one thing,” I said. “What’s the other?”

“Wendel’s a drinking man,” Ellis said, with a little shrug. “I had ’em make it clear to Wendel that the only way he could get a drink was by way of giving a full confession.”

“Jesus, Ellis,” I said, finally betraying my feelings. “A confession a drunk gives in exchange for a drink isn’t worth the empty glass. And keeping a guy in a dark cellar for eight days makes the rubber-hose treatment seem like kid gloves.”

Parker’s smile had disappeared. He looked at me hard. “We don’t have time for social niceties in this case, Nathan. The New York cops beat up Hauptmann, didn’t they? That bastard Welch third-degreed Violet Sharpe into a bottle of poison. That fella Curtis from Norfolk got the crap kicked out of him. If that’s the rules of the game, and we want to play the game, maybe even
win
it, well, by God, those are the rules we’ll play by.”

I shook my head. “Can’t argue with logic like that.”

“Anyway, Wendel did break down, on the sixth day,” Parker said, defensively. “Bawled like a baby and tells his story from beginning to end.”

“What exactly was in his confession?”

“How he made those three interlocking ladders himself with wood he took from a church being constructed in Trenton. Put stockings over his shoes and a laundry bag around his neck, and gloves on his hands. When he went up the ladder, he broke a rung, big fella that he was, and knew he couldn’t come back down with the baby around his neck like he planned. The baby was fast asleep in its crib and he rubbed paregoric on the baby’s lips to keep it sleeping. Then he put it in the laundry bag, sneaked downstairs and out the front door.”

“No inside help? What about Violet Sharpe, or Whately the butler?”

“Didn’t mention ’em. I think the Sharpe girl was involved, myself, but so far he hasn’t said so. Anyway, he took the child to his house in Trenton where his wife and two children helped care for the kid. But he says a week later, the kid fell out of its crib and fractured its skull. So he took the baby back and buried it in the woods just a few miles from its home.”

“That’s it? That’s the confession?”

“Well, it’s far more detailed, of course.”

“It’s bullshit, Ellis!”

“Eyes on the road, son.”

“Eyes on the road, my ass. Wendel’s done everything he can to conform to the state’s ridiculous lone-wolf theory—which the state never believed in, in the first place. And what about your own theory that that kid in the woods wasn’t Baby Lindbergh?”

“I know,” Parker admitted, “I know. That’s why we’re working to get a better confession.”

“Oh, Jesus. Ellis, you’ve outsmarted yourself. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, Wendel really is guilty. Really did mastermind the kidnapping, and either sold Capone on the idea, or was put up to it, by Capone. Wendel had to think your deputies were mobsters looking for a fall guy to make a phony confession! A fall guy willing to go along with the scam, to keep himself out of cement overshoes.”

Parker was looking out the window at passing farmland. “Wendel’s father was German, you know.”

“Oh, really. That’s pretty goddamn incriminating. So was my father. Where was I, March first, 1932?”

“He says in his confession, he wrote the ransom note trying to sound like an illiterate or a foreigner. So of course, with his German heritage, the notes ended up sounding German. Those symbols he signed the notes with, by the by, were off the cover of a law book.”

We were approaching the rolling grounds of the insane asylum. I was ready to check in.

We pulled up to one of several free-standing bungalows, away from the main institutional buildings. A chill wind whistled through skeletal trees. Lonely figures in sweaters and slacks walked the grounds aimlessly; male nurses in parkas were keeping an eye on the mental children. We walked up a gentle slope.

“Ellis, how long have you been keeping Wendel here?”

He paused to relight his cigar. “Near three weeks. He’s here of his own free will. He signed a paper to that effect.”

“Right. How did he end up here, Ellis?”

He began to walk again; it was just cold enough for the smoke of his breath to mingle with that of the stogie. “Well…after he wrote his confession, the first one, that is, my deputies asked if there was somebody he could trust, somebody he could send the confession to. And of course Wendel chose me.”

“You knew him well enough to know he’d do that?”

“I predicted his psychology every step of the way. Then my men waited a couple of days and dropped him in Mount Holly and he came up to my house and rang the bell. He told me about the mobsters who’d held him and I told him we’d better hide him out for a while. I suggested New Lisbon as a good, safe place. Like I said, he’s here of his own free will.”

“Well, perhaps I’m mistaken,” I said, pointing to the uniformed guard in front of the small frame bungalow, “but isn’t that an armed deputy?”

“Sure is,” Parker said. “Wendel’s been under armed guard since the first night. You see, I broke it to him early on, that after I read the confession the ‘mobsters’ got out of him, I believed he
had
committed the crime.”

“But that as his friend, you’d help him as best you could.”

“That’s the God’s honest truth,” he said, with no irony, and no sign of recognizing my sarcasm. “Shall we go in and meet him?”

I touched Parker’s arm. “I’m just along as an observer. You can say I’m from Governor Hoffman’s office, but if you mention my name, I’ll put your cigar out where the sun don’t shine.”

He smiled at me, but the smile disappeared when he saw I wasn’t kidding.

At the bungalow, the armed deputy grinned at us, revealing a space between his teeth; he was an apple-cheeked bumpkin.

“Well, Nate Heller,” he said.

“Pardon me?”

The deputy thrust out one hand, jerking the thumb of the other to his chest. “Willis Dixon! Remember me? I used to be on the Hopewell Police Department, such as it was.”

“Well, Willis,” I said, recognizing him finally, shaking his hand, “it’s good to see you.”

“Remember, I said I’d applied to work at Mount Holly with Chief Parker.” He pointed at the badge on his chest. “Finally made the grade.”

“I guess you did.”

Parker said, “Let me go in and prepare Paul for company.”

Dixon unlocked the door and Parker went in.

The deputy beamed, shaking his head. “Is the old boy something, or what?”

“He’s something.”

“Do you believe after all these years, we’re still workin’ the Lindbergh case? And finally cracked it, by God.”

“Think you got the real kidnapper, here, do you?”

“Sure. Ellis Parker is the greatest detective alive. It’s an honor serving him.”

“How’s Wendel being treated?”

“Fine. He’s a guest…except for being held under lock and key.”

Small detail.

Parker stuck his head out the door. “Come on in, Nathan.”

I went to him and plucked the cigar out of his mouth. I held it up. “My name stays out here, Ellis. Remember?”

He scowled, but he nodded, and I tossed the cigar away and followed him in.

Paul Wendel was a big, gray, woeful man in a baggy brown suit and no tie. His eyes were dead. His nose was a lumpy, vein-shot thing that would have given W. C. Fields a start. He was sitting on a couch in the small, sparsely furnished parlor; the walls were painted a pale institutional green. There was a bedroom and a bath; no kitchen.

“This is the officer I was telling you about, Paul,” Parker said, pointing a thumb at me.

“Ellis says the Governor will treat me right,” Wendel said to me. His voice was a baritone, lawyer-rich but soggy with self-pity.

“I’m sure he will,” I said.

Parker sat next to Wendel on the couch; Wendel looked at him with the mournful eyes of a basset hound.

“You know, Paul,” the grizzled chief of detectives said, “you could make a lot of money off a confession. You just write a full and frank statement—without them shadings of truth you did for those mobsters’ benefit—and say you were out of your mind at the time, but that now, having regained your proper senses, you realize you did a terrible thing, and you want to make a clean breast of it.”

“Temporary insanity as a defense,” Wendel said, thinking about it.

“You could make a million dollars off the true story of what happened. You and your family could be on easy street for the rest of your life. And you’d be famous.”

“A kidnapping charge I could abide,” Wendel said. “But not murder.”

Parker placed a hand on Wendel’s shoulder. “Paul, I know what you’ve been through. I’m going to try to protect your family, do everything I can in my power, through friends and contacts, to see that your wife and son and daughter are not involved…even though they’re conspirators in the case.”

“They are? Why?”

“’Cause they helped you tend the baby.”

“I need law books. I need to brush up.”

“Well, all right, Paul. We’ll get you some. But you know time is running short. You don’t want the life of this fellow Hauptmann on your conscience.”

Wendel was looking at me. He was a big, sad man with eyes that stuck to you like gum on your shoe.

“What’s your name?” he asked me.

“That’s not important,” I said.

The eyes widened; then narrowed. “You’re from Chicago.”

The accent.

He turned to Parker. Agitated. “He’s from Chicago!”