Stolen Away

went quickly out.

“Eleven!” he called after her, pawing the air. She didn’t answer. A door closed, heavily.

I walked over to him. “Hands up, Means. You know the procedure.”

“What’s the meaning of this, Sixteen?”

“You remembered my code number. I’m flattered.” Patting him down, I found a small automatic, a .25. In his fat hand it would have looked like a party favor. I tossed it gently on the couch.

“Who are you?” he asked indignantly.

“Not the chauffeur. What do you really know, Means?”

He gave me his innocence-personified expression; he looked like a dissipated cherub. “Know?”

With measured sarcasm, I replied, “About the Lindbergh case.”

He shook his head, dignified, stubborn, idealistic. “I’m sworn to secrecy.”

“I want names. I want to know who engineered this thing.”

“What thing?”

“The kidnapping, you fat bastard. The kidnapping.”

He held his chin up; it was shaped like the end of a small garden shovel. “I don’t know anything more than I’ve told Mrs. McLean.”

“Would you be willing to take a lie-detector test, Means?”

He snorted. “I don’t believe in those things. Wires and electrodes and needles. Poppycock.”

“I didn’t mean that kind of lie detector.”

He snorted again, skeptically. “What kind did you mean?”

“The Chicago kind.”

“And what, pray tell, is the Chi—”

He didn’t finish the question, because I’d stuck the barrel of the nine millimeter in his mouth.

“We use this kind of lie detector in Chicago,” I explained.

His eyes were as wide as Mickey Mouse’s, and just as animated. His dimples had returned but, with his mouth full like that, he wasn’t smiling.

I was. “Get down on your knees, Means, and do it smooth. This has a hair trigger, and so do I.”

Carefully, he got down on his knees, a kneeling Buddha on an Oriental carpet, unwillingly suckling the Browning all the way.

Once he was settled in his prayerlike posture, he made some sounds; he seemed to want to know what I wanted.

“Names, Means. I want the names of the people that did the job.”

He made more sounds around the gun, apparent protestations of innocence, of ignorance. I pushed upward, so the gun-sight would cut the roof of his mouth. He began to cough, which was dangerous. His spittle turned reddish. He began to cry. I had never seen a man that big cry, before. I would have felt sorry for him if he weren’t the scum of creation.

“Nod,” I said, “if you’re ready to tell the truth.”

Choking a little, he nodded.

“Okay,” I said, and slid the gun out of his mouth. It dripped with his reddish saliva, and I wiped it off on his suitcoat, disgustedly.

“Max Hassel,” he said, breathing hard. “And Max Greenberg.”

“Are you making that up?”

“No! No.”

“They’re both named Max?”

“Yes! Yes.”

“Who are they?”

“Bootleggers.”

They would be.

“Where can I find them?”

“Elizabeth.”

“New Jersey?”

“New Jersey,” he nodded.

“Where in Elizabeth?”

“Carteret Hotel.”