Stolen Away

I turned onto the rutted dirt road that was Featherbed Lane. Dawn was starting to sneak through the thickets on either side of us, like another nosy sightseer.

Suddenly, Lindbergh burst out with something as if both eager and embarrassed to say it. “Did you ever hear of a man named Gaston Bullock Means?”

I snorted a laugh. “Are you kidding? Sure I’ve heard of him. Biggest con man who ever lived, in a couple senses of the word ‘biggest.’ Chicago is one of that fat bastard’s favorite sucker ponds.”

There was a faint defensiveness in Lindbergh’s soft response: “My understanding is that he’s a former Justice Department operative.”

“Yeah—he worked for Bums, before J. Edgar Hoover cleaned house. Hoover’s an ass, but he’s not a crook like Bums and his boys. Gaston Means was the Ohio Gang’s bagman, during the Harding administration. What in hell are you asking me about that son of a bitch for?”

Lindbergh was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Means also claims to be in touch with the kidnap gang.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“I had a call from Admiral Land…”

Another admiral!

“…who’s a relative of mine. My mother’s cousin. Anyway, Admiral Land was approached by Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, the Washington society woman.”

“The Hope diamond dame?”

“That’s the one. She lost her own son a few years ago—whether it relates to the Hope diamond curse is anybody’s guess—but at any rate, she’s sympathetic to Anne and my situation. Means is in her employ.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know exactly. He’s done some private detective work for her before. But through her he passed along two pieces of information that make me think we shouldn’t rule him out.”

“Which are?”

“He says the kidnappers have raised their ransom demand from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. That ties in, at least roughly, with the notes we’ve received, from Cemetery John and his gang.”

“And the other?”

Lindbergh seemed hesitant to share that. But finally, as we were drawing up to the closed, locked gate, he said, “He told Mrs. McLean the description in the papers of the sleeping suit was a false clue.” Lindbergh pointed to, but did not touch, the loosely wrapped brown-paper package next to him. “And he described the sleeping suit Charlie was really wearing.”

“A lot of that going around,” I said, “wouldn’t you say?”

He frowned, but not in anger. Frustration.

It was light out by the time we reached the house. Anne Lindbergh, in a thin blue robe, met us at the door to the servants’ sitting room; her face was pale, bare of makeup, her hair drawn back tightly. She looked haggard but hopeful.

I was carrying the package. Lindbergh nodded to me and I handed it to her.

She drew out the sleeping suit and held it in her hands out away from her, like something both precious and terrible. Then she clasped the package to her bosom, the paper crackling, one arm of the garment slinging itself over her shoulder.

Her eyes were glittering and her smile was a tragic fucking thing.

“It’s his,” she said. “It’s Charlie’s.”

“It’s a good sign,” he told her, with a deathly smile. “It means the kidnappers can be trusted. It means negotiations are finally, truly, fruitfully, in full sway.”

She hugged the brown paper and the Dr. Denton and said, again, “It’s Charlie’s. It’s his.”

And after that, there was never any doubt of it.

Slim wouldn’t allow any.

15

Late the next afternoon, Lindbergh, Schwarzkopf and I met a black touring car that rolled to a stop near the garage command post. The car had Virginia license plates and a small American flag on its radio antenna. Three men stepped out.

The driver was a long, lean man in his late sixties wearing a well-tailored navy-blue suit under a tan camel-hair topcoat; his face was hawklike, with a trim gray mustache, his stone-gray hair parted neatly in the middle. In the backseat had been a stocky, balding fellow in black and his vague fifties, several chins rubbing his clerical collar, his eyes wide-set and buggy. Riding in front had been the most prepossessing of this singular trio, a big, tanned, muscular-looking man with a round, pleasant face under a jaunty bowler; he wore a gray topcoat over his dark suit, a red-white-and-blue tie peeking out from under.

Lindbergh greeted them, speaking to the thin, mustached hawk-faced man first. “Admiral Burrage,” he said. “Good of you to come.”

“Pleasure to see you again, Colonel,” he said, his smile somber. “Sorry the circumstances are such as they are. Is your mother well?”

“She is, thank you.”

“Good. Good.” Burrage introduced the clergyman as the Very Reverend Dobson-Peacock, and the tanned hail-fellow-well-met as Commodore John Hughes Curtis.

“This is Colonel Schwarzkopf of the New Jersey State Police,” Lindbergh said, gesturing to the impressively uniformed police official, and the men began shaking hands all round. “He’ll be sitting in with us. So will Detective Nathan Heller, of the Chicago Police Department.”

They looked at me curiously, as well they might, and Curtis said, with a pixie smile, “Have you wandered off your beat, son?”