Stolen Away

“Along the way, John said, ‘Sam, he says you want some proof we do this job.’” Curtis was imitating the man’s Norwegian accent; it was pretty hammy. “‘Suppose I tell you exactly how we do it. One night, about one month before kidnapping, I go to some party with a girl friend of mine, a German trained nurse, at roadhouse outside Trenton.’”

The cadence reminded me a bit of the ransom notes Lindbergh and Condon had received.

“‘At roadhouse I meet a member of Lindbergh and Morrow household,’” Curtis continued, still mimicking “John.” Then he interrupted himself to say: “John didn’t say which servant. But he said he recruited this person—he wasn’t even specific about the gender—and promised ‘plenty good money for the trouble.’”

“My servants,” Lindy broke in, rather coldly, “are above suspicion.”

I bit my tongue; I wondered idly how Schwarzkopf and Inspector Welch were faring with the Means tip about Violet Sharpe—which Curtis seemed to be substantiating.

“I’m just telling you what I was told,” Curtis said, quietly defensive. “John’s story was interrupted by our arrival at the Cape May cottage. A woman named Hilda—identified as Larsen’s wife—met us and led us into a brightly lit dining room. We sat around a table, and John finished his story.”

The night of the kidnapping, Nils, Eric, the German nurse and John had driven a green Hudson sedan and parked three hundred feet or so away from Featherbed Lane. Sam had followed in another car, and parked farther away still, on a high spot near the main road, where he could signal if another car pulled into the lane. Nils and John, with a three-sectioned ladder, went to the nursery window. They climbed through the window, with a blanket, a rag and some chloroform. Because the ladder was so unsteady, they exited with their human parcel via the front door.

“The front door?” I asked.

“They knew the layout of the house,” Curtis explained. “They showed me a map, a huge floor plan, which judging from my two visits here would seem to tally. They knew how to lock the pantry door, to keep everyone in the kitchen and the servants’ quarters away from the front hall, if anybody heard anything. There was a key on a nail for them to use—the servant they bribed had told them where to find it.”

I looked at Slim.

“That key does exist,” Lindbergh admitted.

Curtis said, “They had a letter for Colonel Lindbergh, describing the child. I didn’t read it, but I saw it—it seemed to be sort of half-printed, half-written.”

The notes Lindbergh and Jafsie received did mingle printing with cursive, somewhat.

“I was of course ecstatic that they’d finally provided the proof of identification the Colonel sought. And I suggested that one of them accompany me, that very moment, here to Hopewell, to present the letter to Colonel Lindbergh.”

“But they refused,” I said.

“Quite the contrary,” Curtis said. “Larsen went with me. We drove through the night. At Trenton, the next morning, first thing, I attempted to call Colonel Lindbergh, and finally did get through to him, but was unable to arrange the meeting—the Colonel had a pressing engagement.”

I glanced at Lindbergh, finding it hard to believe that he’d decline a chance to meet with Curtis and someone who claimed to be one of the kidnappers.

Lindbergh shrugged. “That was the day you and I went out in the Lockheed-Vega, Nate.”

The second day of searching for the “boad” Nelly. No wonder Curtis and his possible kidnapper fell through the cracks.

“Larsen was pretty jumpy,” Curtis said. “He insisted I drive him back.”

“What about the letter,” I asked, “with the physical description of the kid?”

“He wouldn’t hand it over to me; he hung onto it.”

“Why in hell?”

“He was angry with Colonel Lindbergh, and suspicious.”

“Have you had any contact with Sam or John and company, since?”

He nodded. “Yes. There has been one subsequent meeting.”

After the papers had been filled with lists of serial numbers and speculative stories about “Jafsie,” Curtis was contacted by Sam for another meeting at the Newark train station. He found all of the self-proclaimed kidnappers but Larsen squeezed into Sam’s car, and was told to join them. He did, and was driven to a three-story house in the Scandinavian section of Newark. In a small, sloppy one-flat serving as a bedroom, dining room and sitting room, the men found chairs and Curtis asked John about Jafsie.

Curtis continued his impression of John’s accent. “He said, ‘Sure, I did the work with Condon. That was the idea all along—to chisel this Lindbergh through Condon, then turn the boy in through you. That’s why we were willing to let the kid go cheap to you.’ I told him I didn’t call twenty-five thousand dollars ‘cheap,’ but John said the Lindberghs were ‘rolling in dough.’”

Curtis asked for the letter, describing the boy, and John bragged that he’d torn it up—“Do you think we’re fool enough to keep something that hot around?”

“I was getting skeptical,” Curtis admitted. “So I demanded hard proof. They gave it to me.”

“Yeah?”