Stolen Away

I’d been with Lindbergh and Breckinridge at Professor Condon’s bungalow all afternoon; Irey and Wilson had stayed away, in case the house was being watched. Final preparations were made at Condon’s, including stuffing the two cord-and-brown-paper-wrapped packages of cash—one containing fifty thousand dollars in the various denominations specified by the kidnappers, and the other containing the additional twenty thousand—into Dr. Condon’s duplicate antique ballot box, an oblong wooden affair with brass hinges and clasps. Work of a first-rate Bronx cabinetmaker or not, it didn’t hold up under the bulk of the bills: one side split. The twenty-grand packet had to be carried separately, and the box wrapped with cord.

We were responding to the note that had arrived with Jafsie’s April Fool’s Day mail, while I was away; it read:

Dear Sir: have the money ready by Saturday

evening, we will inform you where

and how to deliver it. have the money

in one bundle we want you to put

it in on a sertain place. Ther is

no fear that somebody els will

tacke it, we watch everything

closely. Please lett us know if

you are agree and ready for action

by Saturday evening.—if yes—

put in the paper

Yes everything O.K.

Is a very simble delivery but we

find out very sun if there is any trapp. after 8 houers

you gett the adr, from

the boy, on the place

you finde two ladies, they are innocence.

The message was signed with the familiar symbol.

“If the ransom drop comes off tomorrow night,” I’d told Slim, “I’ll go with the professor.”

We were sitting in Condon’s living room, sipping tea served by the professor’s shell-shocked wife; the pretty, pretty unfriendly daughter was lurking, too, worried about her father. Right now she was helping her papa and Breckinridge with the ransom package. The ad—saying “YES. EVERYTHING O.K. JAFSIE.”—had appeared in the morning New York American.

“I don’t want you going along, Nate,” Lindbergh said. “They might recognize you from last time. They might know, by now, you’re a cop.”

“You can’t let the professor handle this by himself.”

“I won’t. I’ll go myself.”

“Is that smart? You’re a prime kidnap target yourself.”

“In that case, you can do me a favor, then.”

“Yes?”

He shrugged. “I knew Anne would be disturbed if she happened to see me leave the house with a gun.”

“I guess she might at that.”

“So I didn’t bring one. Can I borrow your nine millimeter?”

“Why, sure.”

“And shoulder holster?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Hell, Slim. I’m honored. It’ll almost be like being there.”

He sipped his tea. He smiled slyly at me, his eyes narrow and shrewd. “Tell me, Nate. Did you work on Irey? And Wilson?”

“What do you mean?”

He nodded sideways toward the other room. “Those bills in there. That money. Wilson spent the morning recording all the serial numbers at J. P. Morgan and Company.”

I grinned. “Well, that’s swell. It really is. You won’t be sorry.”

He shook his head, sipped more tea. “I guess it took over a dozen clerks to help get the job done. Five-thousand-some items of currency, with no two numbers in sequence.”

“Don’t look at me, Slim—I didn’t put the pressure on Irey. He’s capable all by himself of figuring out that recording those bills is the thing to do. But what made you change your mind?”

Lindbergh’s mouth twitched. “Irey,” he said, and then added, admiringly: “He’s a hard-nosed bastard.”

I didn’t push him, and Slim didn’t elaborate further, but that evening, as I waited with the two IRS agents in the Morrows’ vast library, I asked Irey how he’d convinced Lindbergh.

“He gave me some noble malarkey,” Irey said, “about wanting to keep his promises to the kidnappers, to encourage them to keep their promises to him.”

“Slim doesn’t know much about crooks, I’m afraid.”

“When it comes to being a detective,” Irey said, “Lindbergh makes a damn fine airmail-pilot. At any rate, I told him that unless he allowed us to record the serial numbers of the bills, the Treasury Department would play no part in the case.”

“But what about his pull with your boss?”

Irey’s smile was as thin as a stiletto blade. “Even the Secretary of the Treasury knows that his department damn well better not compound a felony. Which is what we’d have been guilty of, if we allowed those bills to go out unrecorded.”

“And that sold Slim.”

“Not immediately,” Irey said, with a shake of his head. “We withdrew—from his home and from the case—and didn’t hear from him till this morning.”

“He must have checked with Secretary Mills, after all.”

“Maybe. But it didn’t do him any good. He gave us the go-ahead.”

“Mills?”

“Lindbergh. And that second packet, the one with twenty thousand in it, is strictly gold certificates.”

“Gold certificates?”

“Yes. Fifty-dollar ones. Four hundred of them. Those will be child’s play for bank tellers to spot.”

“Nice thinking, Elmer.”

“Thank you, Mr. Heller—but the gold-certificate notion was Frank’s work. The smaller-denomination bills are mostly gold certificates, as well.”