Stolen Away

Then I pressed on. “Now the actual kidnappers, the bootleggers who worked for Hassel and Greenberg, they also know that Capone has picked up his cards and gone home. They, too, figure that there’s extortion dough for the asking. So they contact this respectable fella in Norfolk, who has some vague connections to the Lindberghs through society, a shipbuilder they know ’cause he’s repaired boats for guys in their line of work.”

“John Curtis?” Wilson said, dumbfounded. “That hoaxer?”

“He wasn’t a hoaxer, Frank. He was telling the truth. So pretty soon Curtis is contacting Lindbergh, and now we have two extortion groups who are active—both with inside information about the kidnapping, and neither of whom at this point possesses the baby.”

“Heller, isn’t this getting a little Byzantine?”

“This case has been Byzantine since the day I showed up in March of 1932. If you’d care to point out any one part of this case that has ever made rational sense, I’ll slip on my raincoat and go home. Right now.”

“Go on. Go on.”

“Let me touch on Gaston Means. He also has been told, by Ricca probably or maybe Hassel and Greenberg, that Capone is cutting his losses; Means has been told to stop trying to contact Lindbergh through the likes of Guggenheim and others. So what does Means do? He begins using his inside information, not to swindle Lindbergh, but over to one side, where Capone is unlikely to notice or care…he focuses on a soft-hearted, deep-pocketed society matron, Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean.”

Wilson made a note.

I went on. “Now the payoff in the cemetery takes place, and the kid isn’t returned, and all of a sudden it’s all over the papers; so Capone obviously now knows that somebody is interloping. Capone also knows from the papers that Lindbergh and Jafsie are trying to get back in touch with the ‘kidnappers,’ and are obviously willing to pay more money, and this thing Capone has put in motion just seems to have no end, to be completely out of fucking control. Capone and Ricca don’t necessarily know for sure that these extortionists are anybody who was really in on the kidnapping—it could be somebody from the outside entirely. Whatever the case, Capone decides to bring this farce to a halt. He has a baby planted in the woods not far from the Lindbergh estate…”

“Hold it, Heller! That baby was identified by its father, for God’s sake.”

“That baby was a pile of decomposed bones that couldn’t even be identified as to sex; the family pediatrician said he couldn’t ID that kid as the Little Eaglet if you paid him ten million bucks! Those woods were trampled over and over again by search parties and telephone linemen, and in any case, that corpse was decomposed way beyond what it should’ve, in that period of time, with weather that cold.”

“There was an identifying garment…”

“Yes, a few scraps of cloth with blue thread. It was the blue thread that Betty Gow recognized, because she’d made this makeshift garment the night of the kidnapping, with thread provided by Elsie Whately—the butler’s wife. I’m sure Capone could have reached out through his various intermediaries and procured that simple spool of thread from his accomplices among the Lindbergh servants. Or, the little shirt itself may have been within Capone’s grasp.”

“The garment was planted, you’re saying.”

“Like the little body was planted. It was an act of closure, on Capone and Ricca’s part. To shut down the extortion schemes. To put an end to this goddamn case.”

Wilson was thinking. “Capone was in Atlanta at this point.”

“Right. And optimistic about getting out via traditional avenues, such as his lawyers and bribery, not outlandish schemes like the ill-fated Lindbergh snatch. And Ricca’s on the outside, cleaning house. Ricca uses the beer war between Waxey Gordon and the New York mob as a convenient front for bumping off Hassel and Greenberg and maybe a few others involved in the conspiracy; Bob Conroy and his wife get iced about this time, too.”

“No,” Wilson said flatly. “Conroy and his wife, that was a double suicide.”

“My ass! And why in fucking hell didn’t you ever tell me you finally tracked Conroy down? I must’ve called you about Conroy half a dozen times.”

Rather meekly, he said, “You were off the case, at that point. Never occurred to me, frankly. If you’re right about all this rampant assassination, why was Gaston Means allowed to stay among the living?”

“Why kill Means? Nobody believes anything he says, anyway. Besides, I was closing in on Hassel and Greenberg, right before they got hit. I found out about them by beating their names out of Means…but before I could follow up, they got theirs in the ‘beer war.’”

“You think Means sold them out to Ricca.”