Stolen Away

He stood and backed up, knocking over several chairs; she remained still as death.

“Izzy Fisch and Violet Sharpe and Ollie Whately,” I said, rising, “have a lot in common, don’t they? They’re all members of your church—and they’re all dead. Maybe we can have a little informal séance, and conjure ’em up.”

“What…what do you want from me, Heller? What do you want me to do?”

I inched forward, gun in hand. “Spill, you phony bastard. Spill it all or I’ll start spilling you…”

He was backing up; backing into the pulpit. “I don’t know anything!”

“Ugh,” someone said.

I turned and looked at Sarah.

She had begun to speak. “Who seeks Yellow Feather?”

“Aw, fuck,” I said, moving toward her. “I’m going to slap her silly…”

“No!” he said, moving forward. He touched my arm. “No. Whatever I am, Mr. Heller, Sarah is an innocent. And truly is genuinely psychic…”

“I can see a child,” she said, her voice a register lower than normal. “He is in a high place. There is a small house, low, with a high barn behind. The child is in the house. On the second floor. There is a bald-headed man, with pouches under his eyes. He is looking down at the child. There is a woman in the house, too. The house is on a hill.”

She shuddered, and her eyes popped open. It made me jump.

“I’m sorry,” she said, quietly. “Did I fall asleep?”

He went to her, touched her shoulder, gently. “You were in a trance, my dear.” He told her what she’d said.

“How can you see the baby,” I said, sarcasm hanging on my words like a week’s worth of wash, “when you already ‘predicted,’ accurately, its dead body on the heights over Hopewell?”

“She never said it was the Lindbergh baby’s body,” Marinelli said, his arm around his wife’s shoulder.

“First, she sees a dead baby in the heights, four years ago. And now she sees it alive, only now it’s a ‘child,’ not a baby, and it’s in some farmhouse?”

“It may not be the same child,” Marinelli said. “We can’t always know the meaning of what a medium says in a trance—interpretation is required, Mr. Heller. Will you put your gun away, please?”

He was standing there protecting his wife, who looked small and pitiful and, hell, I’d screwed her once upon a time, so maybe I owed them this one.

“All right,” I said. And I put the gun away. “Will you cooperate, if I need you to talk to somebody?”

“Certainly,” Marinelli said, summoning his dignity. “Who?”

“Governor Hoffinan of New Jersey,” I said.

He nodded solemnly.

I went to the door.

“Goodbye, Nate,” she said, quietly.

“So long, Sarah,” I said, shaking my head, and I went down to the sidewalk and stood there and shook my head some more and sighed. Evalyn, watching from the cafe across the street, came over and joined me.

“What did you find?”

“I’ll tell you all about it,” I said, “on the way.”

“On the way where?”

“We have one more stop this afternoon….”

The neat, trim two-story white clapboard in the Bronx was unchanged; so was the quiet residential street it was perched along. The lawn was brown, but evergreens hugged the porch.

I told Evalyn to stay in the car; she didn’t like it, but I made her understand.

“If there’s a witness,” I said, “this guy is liable not to say anything.”

The attractive dark-haired woman who answered the door did not recognize me at first.

“Yes?” she said, warily, the door only a third of the way open.

“Is Professor Condon in? Tell him an old friend’s dropped by.”

Her face had tightened. “Detective Heller,” she said.

“Hiya, Myra.”

The door shut suddenly—not quite a slam.

I glanced back at Evalyn, sitting in the Packard, and smiled and shrugged. She looked at me curiously, wondering if this interview was over before it began.

The door opened again and there he stood, in white shirtsleeves and vest and pocket watch, in all his walrus-mustached glory.

“Long time no see, Professor.”

“Detective Heller,” Dr. John F. Condon said stiffly. He extended his hand and I shook it; he squeezed to impress me with his strength, as usual. “I hope you’ve been well.”

“I’ve been okay. You’re nice and tan.”

“I have just returned from Panama.”

“So I hear. You took off, day before Hauptmann’s case came up before the Court of Pardons.”

He snorted. “That’s true. Though it is of no particular significance.”

“Isn’t it? Didn’t the Governor of New Jersey request that you stick around? And help clear up a few discrepancies in your various versions of various events?”

He raised his head. Looked down his nose at me with his vague watery blue eyes. “I had full permission of Attorney General Wilentz to depart on my holiday.”

“I’m sure you did.” I smiled blandly at him. “You might be wondering why I’m still interested in this case, after all these years.”

“Frankly, sir, I am.”

“Well, I’m working for Governor Hoffman now.”

He backed away, stepping into the entrance hall; I half expected him to hold up a cross, as if I were a vampire.

“Sir,” he said, pompously, “during my stay in Panama, I followed all reported developments in the Lindbergh case, and this man Hoffman seems bound and determined to maliciously impugn my character, my motives, my behavior.”