Stolen Away

So the plan was hastily changed, and Ricca had sent Bernice Rogers and her hot little package (its hair dyed black) back to Chicago, where somebody other than Bernice would take charge of the child, who would be sent deep into hiding and safekeeping.

And that was how, and where, plainclothes officer Nathan Heller of the pickpocket detail screwed up.

On the train last night, not long before it pulled into (of all places) LaSalle Street Station, the truth had come to me—only four years and several days too late.

A switch had been pulled.

Bernice Rogers had hustled her pretty ass off that train and into the train station and directly in the ladies’ room. She’d been in there less than two minutes. Not time enough to change a diaper; not time enough to take a decent pee.

But plenty of time to trade babies with another surrogate mother, waiting for her in that can.

Bernice Rogers Conroy had turned Charles Lindbergh, Jr., over to an awaiting accomplice, who had given her in return the son of a Jewish bootlegger named Goldberg.

Substituting not only another child, but another kidnapped child, would make it possible for all of Bernice’s elaborate precautions—adopting another kid, going east, shuttling home—to be written off as having been done in relation to the Goldberg kidnapping. Which probably wasn’t a kidnapping at all, of course.

What this boiled down to was, young detective Heller fucked up, major league. I should have followed that bitch into the bathroom. Grabbed her, and the kid. But I was too fucking shy—I didn’t want to wound the sensibilities of any ladies going potty.

I was the potty one. Fuck! The grief I could have saved myself, Lindbergh, Hauptmann, the world, if I’d just had the balls to go in a goddamn ladies’ room!

On such trivialities does history hinge—not to mention my sanity.

Well, that was a long time ago, and now I was back in Chicago, back on Sheridan, back in front of the apartment building I’d tracked Bernice Rogers to, once upon a time. I was older, wiser, and Bernice Rogers presumably was, too—though you’d have to add “dead” to her list.

The building janitor had a small basement apartment, shot through with pipes and scattered with dreary secondhand furniture, stacks of sleazy magazines, and pointless knickknacks. There were several pinup calendars taped to the painted cement wall, none of them the current year. The guy was a scavenger, and a pack rat. For my purposes, that was good.

“Sure I remember Mrs. Rogers,” he rasped. He was younger than thirty and older than time, a stooped lunger with four days of stubble, a sweated-out gray T-shirt and baggy blue pants with suspenders. He had a chipmunk overbite yellow as piss, no chin and eyes that were as clear and blue as a summer sky.

“She sure had a good build,” I said, and grinned.

“She sure did! She got in trouble, though.” He narrowed his inexplicably beautiful blue eyes and leaned forward, to get confidential; his breath smelled of Sen-Sen. “There was a shooting upstairs, back in ’32. She was involved in a kidnapping, I heard. But she got off.”

“Did she stick around after that?”

“A while, is all. A month, maybe. Then one night, all of a sudden, no notice or nothing, she lit out. Took her clothes, but she left the furniture. It wasn’t a furnished flat, neither.”

I imagined some of that furniture was in this very room. “Did she leave anything else behind, besides furniture? Personal effects? Like letters, for example?”

He coughed for a while; I waited. Then he said, “No, sir. But I remember, a week or so after she left, a letter did come for her. She didn’t leave no forwarding address. Sometimes people do that, you know. Move on without no forwarding address.”

“What do you do with their mail, then? Return it to the post office?”

He shook his head, no. “I keep it in a box. In case they should ever come for it.”

“I’d like to see that letter.”

“Mister, no offense, but that badge you showed me—it was a private badge, wasn’t it?”

“Right. Would you like to see some more identification?”

And I showed him a five-dollar bill.

“That’s very official-looking,” he said, taking it, grinning wolfishly, sticking it into a deep pocket. “You stay here.”

He opened a door and I caught a glimpse of the basement laundry room and storage bins for each apartment. The door stood open, but I couldn’t see him. I could hear him, rustling in there, ratlike.

He soon returned, baring his yellow overbite. He was holding a cigar box in one hand, like a church usher with a collection plate. In the other hand was a letter, which had been opened, but then so had several dozen more in the cigar box.

I reached for the letter.

He pulled it back; his mouth was tight and pouty. “I want more ‘identification.’ I could get in trouble with the landlord for this kind of thing.”

“I already gave you five bucks, pal.” I grinned at him again, but it wasn’t at all friendly. “And your landlord isn’t going to give you the kind of trouble I’m going to give you, if you don’t hand that fucker over.”