Stolen Away

“About three different ways, Frank. He may have been there when Wendel wrote the first note, and sneaked out a copy or an earlier draft. He may have gotten it through underworld circles—Rosner and Spitale were circulating a copy, remember? Or a tracing could have come from Violet Sharpe or Whately—the note was just stuck in Slim’s desk drawer, where the servants had easy access. Remember?”

Glumly, he nodded.

“Now, it’s also possible Wendel and Fisch were in league, in this interloping extortion effort. Since Wendel once tried to scam Capone, maybe Wendel was working for nothing, to even the slate with Snorkey. So Wendel, wanting some dough to show for his trouble, might have gone in with Fisch on the extortion scheme. Hard to say. At any rate, about this time, you and Irey come along and convince Lindbergh that Capone is bluffing, and Slim says, either way, he’s not going to deal with slime like Scarface Al—even if it means his little boy’s life. So soon it’s clear that Lindbergh won’t play—that the kidnapping has been for nothing. Capone cuts his losses, and fades.”

“Where is the child?”

“I’ll get to that. But I’ll say this much, at this point: the kid is not dead. In fact, he still isn’t.”

Wilson’s eyes clouded. I was losing him.

“Never mind that, right now. Stick with me.”

Reluctantly, Wilson nodded.

“Now that Capone is out of the picture, the way is clear for Fisch to go full throttle into his negotiations. He sends more notes. The spiritualist group, with Marinelli probably in on the game but his wife probably not, manipulates this old fool they know, Professor John Condon, into offering himself up as intermediary.”

“And how do they know Condon?”

“Why, Frank—didn’t Pat O’Rourke mention that? Jafsie attended that spiritualist church, too!”

His mouth dropped open, just a bit. He swallowed and scribbled something on his notepad.

I shrugged. “I don’t think Jafsie is a bad enough person, or smart enough person either, to be part of this extortion scheme. But he was a visible, easily manipulated blowhard—I think he may have been Marinelli and Sivella’s grade-school teacher, in Harlem—and a prime candidate to funnel information to Lindbergh, and to funnel cash back through to them. The Marinellis even gave that hotel-room séance I attended at Princeton to help prime the pump, mentioning Jafsie by name and nudging Breckinridge about a note he’d receive soon; and maybe to get some play in the press for the veracity of Sister Sarah’s psychic abilities. That was a stupid risk, and the mistake that should have cracked this thing wide open. But it didn’t.”

“You’re saying this spiritualist church group, led by Fisch, got the cemetery money. And that they never had the child?”

“Exactly.”

“What about the sleeping suit that was delivered to Jafsie?”

“That could have happened a couple ways. Jafsie slept in the nursery, the night he came to Lindbergh with the note from the ‘kidnappers.’ I caught him red-handed going through a chest. He took any number of things to use to identify the child—some of these were toys he asked for…maybe you remember the safety pins he took and showed to ‘Cemetery John’ and asked him to identify?”

Wilson nodded.

“Well, he may have taken the sleeping suit at that time, as a souvenir, or for ID purposes. But I think it’s more likely that Violet Sharpe provided the sleeping suit.”

“Violet Sharpe?”

“Yes. The child had a sizeable, unspecified number of the sleepers that were exactly the same. A good many of them were kept in the other nursery, at the Morrow estate at Englewood—where Violet lived and worked. Everybody wondered why the sleeper seemed freshly laundered, and why it took two days for the ‘kidnappers’ to provide Jafsie this proof.”

“Well, the answer is obvious,” Wilson said, almost testily.

“They had to go back to the woods where they’d buried the child, to remove the sleeper.”

“Do you really think that’s likely? Besides, these are extortionists, not kidnappers—they don’t have the kid, they never did have the kid. Didn’t you wonder why they didn’t have better proof than a fucking sleeping suit? Why not a photo, or a phone call from the tot—he could talk a little, you know.”

“If he was dead, he couldn’t talk.”

“If he was alive, and they didn’t have him, he couldn’t talk, either, not for them, anyway. But one of their inside contacts, either Violet at Englewood or Ollie at Hopewell, could take another sleeper from a drawer in either nursery—and of course the sleeper would seem freshly laundered. It hadn’t been worn since it was last washed!”

Wilson was thinking. I knew I’d made a dent. I let him think for a bit.