Stolen Away

Which was what I needed to do anyway, about now, prowl around and keep an eye out for single-o dips, moll whizzers and cannon mobs. Besides, it was winter, and warmer in the train station itself, rather than out here on the noisy, windy platform.

I was a plainclothes detective on the pickpocket detail, under Lt. Louis Sapperstein, and it was my job to hang around train stations and bus depots and the like, just me and the perverts, looking to get lucky.

And maybe I had gotten real lucky, this afternoon—lucky as Lindy when he made it across the Atlantic. I was already the youngest plainclothes dick on the department; maybe I could be its youngest lieutenant.

We’d been handed a circular this morning, sent around by Chief of Detectives Schoemaker to every division in town, showing a brunette, attractive, hard-faced woman named Bernice Rogers, who was an “associate” of one Joseph Bonelli, “reputed New Jersey kidnap-ring chieftain.” Schoemaker considered both Bonelli and his moll likely candidates for the Lindbergh snatch. This was not so farfetched: most of the country had either Chicago’s Capone crowd or Detroit’s Purple Gang pegged as the culprits.

As if to ward off that suspicion, Capone himself—locked up in Cook County Jail, after his recent tax-evasion conviction—was filling the papers full of indignation, concern and reward offers for the return of the kid. Hell, Big Al was a parent, too, wasn’t he?

I wasn’t specifically keeping an eye out for Bernice Rogers. But a pickpocket dick’s duties include observing good-looking women, and making sure they aren’t crooked, as some good-looking women are known on occasion to be; I collared many a beautiful moll whizzer in my time.

Anyway, as I sat peering over my racing form at her as she approached, my gaze fixed upon that harshly pretty mug of hers, I unobtrusively slipped out Schoemaker’s circular from my topcoat pocket to compare the brunette on paper to the blonde in the flesh.

But I barely had the sheet out of my pocket when she walked briskly by, seamed silk stockings flashing. Apparently she had no luggage, other than that precious parcel in swaddling.

So there I sat, as the blonde barreled by, charging through the doors into the train station like she was a quarterback carrying the ball. That woke the kid up, finally, and it began to howl; well, it was alive, anyway.

I hopped down, leaving my racing form on the chair, and nodded to Cletus, who nodded back, as he slapped the shoe leather of some real customer; and I strolled, counterfeit casual, out into the big square airy waiting room.

And she was gone.

The stairs down to street level were directly in front of me; had she taken them? Was she already stepping into a cab at the curb? I looked beyond the stairwell, to the sprawling central newsstand, slow-scanning the half-filled waiting-room pews at left and right. No sign of her. The room was filled with filtered light, from a huge circular window so high it reached up and caught some sky above the el tracks that fronted the station; people bustled through the gauzy midday unreality, ghosts hurrying through the dust-mote-speckled streaks of sun, but none of those people was the blonde.

And then I heard the echoing howl of a kid and there she was: heading with her bundle back to the women’s restroom.

I weaved through passengers coming and going, found my way to one of the wooden pews facing where she’d gone in, and settled myself down.

I glanced over at the bank of phone booths. Should I call in? No backup from the detail was available anyway; even Sapperstein, the boss, was out in the field, over at Dearborn Station. I looked up at the silver-metal futuristic clock that loomed like a benignly neglectful God over the station’s sprawling waiting-room world: four-fifteen. Sapperstein would be heading back to the Detective Bureau soon.

Didn’t matter. I wanted this collar for myself, and right now. If it panned out, I didn’t want to share the glory. If it was a false alarm, then nobody need know. Should I go in the ladies’ room and grab her while she was changing a diaper? But what if it wasn’t her? Or worse, what if it was, and a bunch of innocent ladies got shot to shit with their scanties down around their ankles?

A Trib had been left on the pew next to me; I picked it up and pretended to read it. Even the inside pages were full of Lindbergh news. Dopes like me who thought they spotted the kid everywhere from Duluth to Timbuktu.

In less than two minutes, she exited the restroom as quickly as she’d entered.

I folded the paper, tossed it on the pew, yawned, and sauntered after her. She was headed for the stairwell.

Despite her armload, she bolted recklessly down the stairs toward street level like she was being pursued; which she was, only I hoped she didn’t know it. I followed her at an easy pace, buttoning my topcoat and snugging my fedora as I went. She had taken the stairs at the right. I took the ones at the left. I wanted to ease up behind her and slip on the cuffs.