Stolen Away

She smiled; her eyes sparkled like the champagne in her glass. “But there is a Dover section. Some interpretation is required, remember? A man in a trance pronounces things indistinctly; he gathers information from the haze, after all.”

“I guess,” I said, somewhat impressed by the Cordova/Dover notion, but not bowled over.

“Garboni and I,” she said, “were able to locate a densely built-up mill section in East New Haven. We stopped at a filling station there, inquiring about an area called ‘Cordova,’ and were informed that just across the Quinnipiac River from New Haven there was a Dover section.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Then I asked if he knew of an Adams Street. That was the street that Cayce said led to Scharten Street.”

“Right.” This was truly idiotic. I was embarrassed to be having this conversation. I sipped my Bacardi. Maybe I’d get laid, later, if I could keep a straight face through all this horse-doodle.

She was as serious as the portrait of her husband’s daddy over the fireplace. “The gas-station man didn’t know of an Adams Street, so I asked him if he knew of a street that might sound similar to ‘Adams.’ He suggested Chatham Street.”

Well, that was pretty close.

“We went to Chatham Street, Garboni and I, and we followed Cayce’s directions. The child, according to Cayce in his trance, was supposed to have been taken first to a two-story shingled house, then moved to another house nearby—a brown house—that was two-tenths of a mile from the end of ‘Adams’ Street.”

“Right. I remember, more or less.”

She grinned. “The house number Cayce gave was Seventy-Three. And do you know what we found at Seventy-Three Chatham Street? A two-story shingled house.”

“No kidding.” Those must be scarcer than hens’ teeth.

“Next we turned right from a point two-tenths of a mile from the waterfront end of Chatham, and found a brown store building.”

“What was the name of the street?”

“Not Scharten,” she admitted. “Maltby.”

“Evalyn, that’s not even close, phonetically or backwards or sideways.”

“I know. Maybe it used to be Scharten or something closer. Anyway, the brown building was there: an apartment over a neighborhood grocery store. We went into the store, but the manager wasn’t there, so we kept asking around the neighborhood, if anybody knew who’d been the tenant in the apartment over that store, back in 1932. We were referred to a local gossip, in a candy store, a few blocks away.”

All in all, this was sounding like a trip I was glad I didn’t make.

“We went into the candy store and it was indeed run by a very talkative old woman. We asked her if she’d ever heard any rumors about the Lindbergh baby being in the area.”

“Christ, that was subtle, Evalyn.”

She frowned defensively. “Well, she had! And Nate, I hadn’t even mentioned the apartment over the grocery store to her. But out of the blue, she said there was a rumor that, for a short time, a couple was caring for the Lindbergh baby, in that very apartment! That there was a house-to-house search of the neighborhood, in the early weeks or maybe even days after the kidnapping, and the couple took off. The house search made a big impression on her, and everybody in the neighborhood. She called it, ‘King Herod time.’”

“Why?”

Evalyn shrugged, smiled. “Seems the police were taking the diapers off every baby around, to check the sex.”

I tried to express my skepticism gently. “You know, Evalyn, I remember hearing about a New Haven search, because some of the construction workers who built Lindbergh’s house were from there, and were early suspects—so that could naturally give rise to a rumor like that. It doesn’t mean…”

“Nate, there’s something else. There was a name in Cayce’s notes. An Italian name, remember? The man who Cayce said was the leader of the kidnap gang.”

“Yes…”

“That name was Maglio, right? It must have been important—you underlined it in your notes, three times.”

“Yeah, uh, right.” Now I was getting an uncomfortable tingling.

“Well, we asked the old lady at the candy store, and a couple of other people as well, if they knew who owned or rented or lived in that shingled two-story house at Seventy-Three Chatham in ’32.”

“Yes? And?”

“Well, there were two apartments. The man living in the top apartment was named Maglio. Maglio, Nate! Can that be a coincidence?”

My mouth was dry. I sipped the Bacardi. It didn’t help.

Paul Ricca, the Waiter, also known as Paul DeLucia, had frequently used the name Paul Maglio, particularly out east.

Of course, Evalyn didn’t even know who Paul Ricca was, and I wasn’t about to tell her. Nor was I about to call Frank Nitti back and say a soothsayer, four years ago, fingered the Waiter.

“How did I do?” she asked.

“You did well. That’s potentially interesting.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve got to find the right person to approach with this.”

“Someone needs to go to New Haven and really dig in, really investigate, right? Will it be us?”

“I think we need a bigger gun,” I said.