Stolen Away

“No. That’s why I came to you. One of the reasons, anyway. You have the manpower and the skills to follow up my leads and my scenario. You can do it in a short period of time, which if we want to keep Hauptmann’s ass from getting scorched is a must. And here’s the really sweet part, Frank—you can get Capone again, big-time.”

He raised his chin; his eyes sharpened.

“You nailed him once, but only temporarily. He’ll be out in a few years. Imagine if you could pin a murder and kidnapping rap on him. Imagine pinning the Lindbergh kidnapping on him. You’d be more famous than J. Edgar Hoover.”

“Fame means little to me, Heller.”

Maybe so, but he sure was doing his best to climb the bureaucratic ladder.

“How about the simple satisfaction of finally solving this goddamn case?” I said.

“Heller, this case is solved.”

“Frank, after all I’ve laid out in front of you, how can you…”

“Look,” he said edgily, “most of these people you’re talking about are dead. Fisch, Hassel, Greenberg, Violet Sharpe, Ollie Whately…”

“Whately’s wife Elsie is in Great Britain; she had to be at least peripherally involved. Get her!”

“Heller, she’s dead, too.”

“What? What…what were the circumstances?”

“I don’t know exactly.” He shrugged. “Natural causes, I understand.”

“Jesus! Find out! All these deaths are a little goddamn convenient, don’t you think?”

He was shaking his head slowly, no. “If there is anything left to solve here, short of Hauptmann fingering his confederates at the last minute, there’s little chance at this point of clearing it up. Too many dead. The rest are fringe characters like Means, Wendel, Jafsie, the Marinellis. Dead ends. Red herrings.”

I leaned forward, put my hands on his desk. “You’re one of the few people on earth, Frank, who can pick up the phone, reopen this investigation and save Hauptmann’s life.”

He shrugged. “I don’t want to save Hauptmann’s life. Even if your ‘scenario’ is correct, and it strikes me as extremely farfetched and fanciful, I still see Hauptmann as a major figure—Fisch’s accomplice. There’s no doubt in my mind, Heller: Hauptmann is guilty, one hundred percent. He had a previous record in Germany and is, without a doubt, as cold, hard and vicious a criminal as I have ever run into.”

I just looked at him.

“Let me read you something,” he said, and he reached behind him and plucked the picture of Lindbergh off the wall. With a sad, proud smile, he read: “To Frank J. Wilson—if it had not been for you fellows being in on the case, Hauptmann would not have gone to trial and your organization deserves the full credit for his apprehension.’”

I stood. “Well, jeez, Frank—I’d hate like hell to fuck up your inscribed photo with the truth.”

He gave me a sharp look; he put the photo back on the wall, hastily, and it swung crookedly on its nail, unnoticed by him. “Heller, I gave you a fair hearing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got real work to do.”

I leaned on his desk. “Let me just ask you something. Just one thing. You were on the Bob Conroy case, weren’t you? You and Lt. Finn from Manhattan. Did you see the crime scene? This ‘double suicide’?”

He nodded.

“Well, come on, Frank—what did your nose tell you? I don’t know anything about the case, but that ‘suicide’ had to smell. It had to be Capone and Ricca tyin’ up loose ends.”

“You want to look at the file?” he asked. And he started riffling through a stack of manila folders. “You can look at the damn file.”

“What’s it doing on your desk?”

“It’s a counterfeiting-related case. I told you, that’s the area I’m working in right now.”

“Why is it counterfeiting-related?”

“They were living in poverty, Conroy and his wife…”

“Lying low, it sounds like.”

He shrugged that off. “Well, they’d come up with a new scheme, it appears, ’cause they had a neat little printing press in their flop, and plates that turned out embarrassingly good counterfeit money.”

“That doesn’t sound like somebody getting ready to commit suicide.”

“Who knows why people kill themselves? Here. Here it is. Sit down and look at it, if you like, but I got to get back to business.”

I started flipping through the file, and came to a mug-shot photo of a woman, an attractive, hard-looking pockmarked brunette. I froze.

“Heller? Nate? What’s wrong with you? You look like you saw a ghost.”

“No, uh, it’s nothing,” I said, and I sat and I quietly read the file and then I set it on Wilson’s desk, and thanked him for his time.

“You look funny,” he said. “Don’t you feel good?”

“See you, Frank,” I said, and went out.

I leaned against the wall in the hall, government workers moving briskly by. Had I seen a ghost? In a way.

The better half of the Conroy double suicide, Bob’s wife, Bernice, was someone I’d seen before. Someone I’d briefly known. She’d been a blonde, then. It had been years ago—a little over four years, but the memory of her was vivid.

I’d seen her in Chicago, in LaSalle Street Station, where she stepped down off the Twentieth Century Limited.

With a baby in her arms.

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