Stolen Away

When I got to the landing where the two stairways met, she was already gone. And when I took three steps at a time down to street level, hand sliding along the curving stainless-steel banister, I found she was still way ahead of me. I pressed through people huddled around the newsstand by the doors, and stepped outside, into an afternoon as gray as the city itself, icy snow flecking my face, Chicago’s famous wind earning its reputation. My breath rose before me like a wraith. The el tracks and station looming before me made the world darker and gloomier still. Where was she?

Stepping into a waiting taxi, down to my left.

I headed to the right and picked out another cab. I climbed in, just as the Checker Cab, bearing the babe with the babe, glided by like a memory.

“Follow that car,” I said.

And the cabbie, a rumpled-faced Hunky with a shabby green cap and a wide space between his front teeth, glanced back and grinned. “Figured some day somebody’d ask that.”

“That’s peachy,” I said. “Here’s your fare in advance.”

I showed him my badge, and his cheerfulness faded.

“Might be a fin in it,” I allowed, “if you don’t lose ’em, and they don’t make you.”

“They won’t,” he said, relieved there was maybe a buck in this after all, and wheeled his Yellow out onto Van Buren.

This Bernice Rogers was about thirty, with a record that included prostitution and petty theft. A few months back she had adopted a boy from the Cradle, an Evanston agency; she’d been fussy about the age—had to be less than two years, older than one.

Chief of Detectives Schoemaker, a.k.a. “Old Shoes,” a canny old copper, figured the adopted kid was a front. In which case, it would have gone something like this….

The adopted child is looked after by a woman member of the Bonelli gang (presumably Bernice Rogers) for a number of months. People seeing Rogers with the kid assume it’s hers. In the meantime, the kidnap gang executes a snatch on a specific kid (presumably Charles Lindbergh, Jr.); the woman then substitutes the snatched kid for the adopted one—while the latter is abandoned or otherwise disposed of.

And when Bernice Rogers is seen with the kidnapped child, suspicion is nil because that child is mistaken for the one she’s been seen with previously. You seen one baby, you seen ’em all.

But if that had been the plan, why was Bernice Rogers turning back up in Chicago? Schoemaker figured she’d been out east of late, living rather conspicuously as the mother of a small infant. Were things too hot out there? Was somebody in the gang crumbling under the pressure? Was a double-cross in the works?

I smiled and sat back in the cab and relished the thought of answering some of those questions by busting Bernice Rogers. Savoring the idea of being the cop who single-handedly cracked the Lindbergh case, half a continent away. Not bad for a kid, which is what I was: twenty-six years old and enjoying a relatively easy life in undoubtedly hard times.

As for making the collar itself, I was eager, not apprehensive. I knew molls like Bernice could be dangerous, but on the pickpocket detail, you get physical with crooks every day. Hardly a week went by, I didn’t take a gun off some punk.

And I had a gun of my own under my arm, besides—a nine-millimeter Browning—and was not afraid to use it.

Not that I was trigger-happy. In fact I carried this specific weapon, rather than the usual revolver most cops carry, partly because I preferred automatics, and partly because this was the gun my father shot himself with.

My father, whose bookstore on the West Side had run to radical literature, was an old union guy who hated the idea that I became a cop. He specifically hated it when he found out, or figured out, that some money I’d given him, to renew the lease on his store, was a payoff I got for testifying in the Jake Lingle murder trial.

The cops and Capone had a patsy lined up to take the fall for that killing, and I was the witness that swung it. It was no big deal: the patsy was a willing participant, getting well paid for his prison stay. And my cooperation got me a promotion to plainclothes and an envelope with a grand in it. But my Papa could not understand that I was just trying to get ahead, trying to land a better job, playing by the rules of the Chicago game.

Well, really, he did understand. What he could not do was condone it. He put this very gun to his head and blew his brains out; that had been last year. And I carried the gun with me to make sure I never forgot that. I wouldn’t hesitate to use it, but I wouldn’t use it carelessly. It was the only conscience I had.

I was still not above taking a little honest graft—you didn’t take a job this dirty and this dangerous for the piddling paycheck alone.

But I owed it to Papa not to abuse the policeman’s power. That’s what he hated about us: billy-club-swinging, trigger-happy bastards is what we were, to that old communist.