Stolen Away

“You shook hands with him,” I said, “before he went off into the woods.”

“Yes,” Condon said, “but not as friends. Rather as negotiators who have come to a preliminary meeting of minds.”

Any meeting of minds with Dr. John F. Condon was a poorly attended affair.

But the professor was tickled with himself and his adventure—delighted that channels were open for continued negotiations that would lead to the boy’s safe return.

I was hoping Wilson’s men had followed us here, had been silently watching, and had shadowed “John” home.

Yet I couldn’t help feeling I’d fucked up, that I should have got out of the car to eavesdrop and either follow this bastard “John,” or just nab him and beat the life, or the truth, out of him.

Whichever came first.

14

The sleeping suit, which “John” had promised would be in Condon’s hands by ten o’clock Monday morning, did not arrive until Wednesday’s mail.

The days between were both tedious and tense, though the weather had turned pleasant. Overnight winter had transformed itself into spring, which wasn’t entirely good news, as it heralded a new, worse-than-ever tourist assault on the Lindbergh estate. The New Jersey State cops were in their element, for a change, finally doing what they were qualified to do: direct traffic. Schwarzkopf’s boys in their spiffy uniforms manfully warded off the sightseers, although—somewhat ironically, considering whose estate it was—the interlopers who could not be curtailed were the airplane pilots who, at $2.50 a ticket, were flying over the house and grounds all the sunny day long, to the delight of their rubbernecking passengers and the annoyance of all us on the ground.

On Tuesday, two weeks since the kidnapping, Colonel Schwarzkopf held a press conference about, among other things, Henry “Red” Johnson; seemed the sailor had been deemed innocent of any wrongdoing in the Lindbergh case, but was in federal custody awaiting deportation for entering the country illegally. What Schwarzkopf didn’t tell the newshounds—because he didn’t know it—was that I’d suggested to Frank Wilson of the IRS that Johnson’s deportation proceed at a snail’s pace, in case later on Johnson turned out not to be quite so “innocent.”

Wilson continued to be cooperative with me, and I with him, but he had confirmed my suspicion, the night of the cemetery rendezvous with “John”: nobody had trailed Condon and me, and nobody had, accordingly, been able to tail and trail John home.

“The orders come straight from the top,” Wilson told me. “Lindbergh and Mills are pals, you know.”

Wilson meant Ogden Mills, Secretary of the Treasury.

“That’s insane,” I said.

“We’ve been told to lay off,” Wilson told me gloomily. “No stakeout on Condon, no interference in any way in how Colonel Lindbergh wants the case handled.”

Hamstrung as they were, Wilson and the IRS agents were continuing their own investigation, including the ongoing search for Capone’s man Bob Conroy; but Jafsie, John and the whole sorry crew were getting a free ride.

Around ten-thirty Wednesday morning at his house in the beautiful borough of the Bronx, Professor Condon received a pliant oblong brown-paper package, obviously the sleeping suit, though the old boy didn’t open the bundle. Instead he called Breckinridge, at the attorney’s office, to arrange for Lindbergh himself to come do the honors. Condon said he had his reasons for this, and one of them was obviously a desire to have Lucky Lindy as a houseguest.

But it was well after dark before Lindbergh and I were able to sneak away from the estate. The place was still crawling with reporters and sightseers. I drove the flivver, and Lindy crouched in back, wearing a cap and large-lensed amber glasses and a flannel shirt and well-worn, faded denim pants; it was a cool night, but he wore no topcoat—he looked like a delivery boy. He had the baby face for it.

We arrived at Condon’s Bronx bungalow a little after 1:00 A.M. The professor answered the door and, for a moment, didn’t know who Lindbergh was, till the amber glasses were removed. Not that Slim’s disguise was impenetrable: I figured Condon gave himself the same puzzled expression every morning in the mirror.

“I have something for you,” Condon told Lindbergh archly, as we followed him through the hallway and into the living room, where Colonel Breckinridge—still Condon’s houseguest—waited.

The brown-paper bundle was on the grand piano, on the paisley shawl.

“Are you quite sure,” Condon said, touching Lindbergh’s arm, “that you wish—that you can bear—to inspect the contents of this package?”

Lindbergh said nothing; he just reached for the package and began to carefully unwrap it, like a fussy woman undoing a Christmas present, wanting to save the colorful paper for next year. A note had been enclosed, which he set aside. He lifted out a small woolen garment—a gray sleeping suit. A red label in the back collar identified it as a Dr. Denton’s, size two.

Lindbergh looked at it curiously. He sniffed it. “I think it’s been laundered,” he said.