Stolen Away

And it was obviously empty—though apparently such had not been the case for long. Several of its windows had been broken out, and it wore a general air of disrepair and neglect. Which was puzzling in itself: why a building of this size and worth would be abandoned made no sense at all. Had a bank foreclosed here, there’d have been at least minimal upkeep.

“Come around back,” Dixon said; he had dug a chaw of tobacco out of his jacket pocket and took a healthy bite.

Leaves and twigs under the thin frozen layer of snow crunched under our feet as we climbed the gently sloping ground, and circled around, to approach the rear of the building.

“Holy shit,” I said.

Dixon grinned at me, chewing his tobacco vigorously. “Pretty sight, ain’t it?”

The whole ass-end of the big building was blown out; two large barnlike double-doors, on the ground floor, had been torn away—one was missing entirely, another hung by a thread and a prayer. On the lower, built-up basement level, the wood walls between brick support posts had also been blown out. Lumber and refuse were piled behind the building to form a misshapen hill half as wide as the structure itself and a third as tall.

“Must have been one hell of an explosion,” I said.

“Must have been one hell of a still,” Dixon said. He spat tobacco juice.

“Is that what this place was? A moonshine distillery?”

“No! That was just a little part of the operation.”

I pushed my hat back, scratched my head; the cold air was nipping at me, and seemed as impatient as I was. “Well, it looks like a hotel. What was it, a roadhouse?”

“Kee-rect, Nate.” He smiled brownly. “Not your regulation roadhouse that dots the back roads of our beautiful land, from sea to shinin’ sea, the kind designed to pull in your tired businessmen or your thirsty pampered college kids. No sir. And it wasn’t for the Hopewell clientele, neither.”

“Willis—what the hell was this place?”

He beamed at me; a hick taking great pride in educating a city slicker. “A gangster hideaway, Nate. Where all the big shots outa New York and your other major metropolitan areas gathered to enjoy their own company in their own private whoopee parties.”

“Jesus. Including Chicago?”

He nodded. “I spotted Cook County plates ’round these parts many a time.”

“Why didn’t you ever bust this place? Oh. Sorry.”

He waved a dismissive hand. “No, no. It ain’t that. It’s not that I wouldn’t have taken a taste if it was offered me. But this is not our jurisdiction. It’s outside of city limits.”

“Whose jurisdiction is it? Oh. Sure—the state police.”

He nodded again. “Schwarzkopf’s little girls, is right.” He put his hands on his hips, spat an elegant brown stream into the pile of rubble. “Think of it, Nate. Some of the biggest wing-dings imaginable, with Broadway entertainers and whores so pretty they qualify as table food. Gamblin’ and orgies and it all took place right inside there, for the sole enjoyment of our nation’s mob chieftains.”

Capone would have been here. More than once. Just a few miles from the Lindbergh estate.

Dixon began to wander, hands on hips. “Can you picture it? How could a night of revelry pass by without those big shots making some passin’ reference to the famous Lindy and his family, so close by? I’ll lay you twenty to one that many a night they passed the time tossin’ around how much easy dough there was that could be had by grabbing that famous kid.”

“But they never went through with it,” I said, thinking aloud. “It just stayed idle speculation, fun after-dinner talk, because the estate was too close. Suspicion would point in their direction.”

“Right! But then this big old still blew to hell and back, and a guy was killed in the explosion, one of them that ran it, and the place was closed down.”

“So protecting the roadhouse was no longer necessary.”

“Right-o,” Dixon said. “And since there never was an arrest or raid or anything out here, what sort of trail was there for anybody to follow?”

“Somebody should’ve tried,” I said. The wind sighed, rustling the trees. “Somebody should be trying right now….”

A few minutes later, we were pulling into the Lindbergh estate. As we drove around by the command-post garage, Dixon said, “Well, I’ll be damned—look who it is!”

He pointed to a trio of men standing outside the garage, milling about with expressions of impatience. One of the men was older and clearly the leader, albeit an unlikely one: a short, round bald man in a rumpled brown topcoat, a straw fedora in one hand, with which he was slapping his thigh. White-mustached, lumpy-faced, he was smoking a corncob pipe and looked like a gentleman farmer, although not much of one—gentleman or farmer. His two associates were taller and younger, and better dressed, but not much; they looked like plainclothes cops, backwoods variety.

Dixon pulled in next to another of several cars parked in the outer cement apron and turned the engine off, but left his hands on the wheel. His expression seemed weirdly glazed.

“That’s the Old Fox himself,” he said.

“Old Fox?”