Stolen Away

“I’m a city boy, Ellis. I don’t know shit about compost.”

He laughed. “In a compost heap, even tiny leaves take more than three months to decompose and you’re doin’ everything humanly possible to make ’em decompose faster, you’re adding manure and such to make it break down as quick as you can. And it still takes months. This body they want us to believe was the Lindbergh baby, it decomposed way too fast to have been out there in that cold, cold weather for three months.”

“That’s interesting,” I admitted, and it was. I was even writing it down. “Is that it?”

The sleepy blue eyes woke up. “You’re not impressed, city boy? You want to know what I know that you don’t?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” he said, and I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t hook a thumb in his suspenders, “I know who the real kidnapper is.”

“Oh, really. Who?” I pointed to the skeleton in the hat in the chair. “Him?”

“No. This is the feller.” He was searching in the papers on his desk; finally he withdrew a mug shot and passed it to me.

I looked at the front and side views of a bucket-headed man with inexpertly slicked-back gray hair, dark eyebrows, a lumpy drink-dissipated nose, a fleshy face that looked pasty even in a black-and-white photo. His mouth was a crinkly line, a bow tie bumping a saggy double chin. He could have been fifty, he could have been seventy. His eyes had the dull, sullen look of a man who cared about nothing, except maybe himself. I wouldn’t have trusted him for the time.

“His name is Paul H. Wendel,” Parker said. “Known him all his life.”

That didn’t quite seem possible. “How old is he?”

“About forty-two, forty-three, I’d say.”

Jesus. This guy was decomposing faster than the little Sourlands corpse.

“Knew his father before him,” Parker was saying, “knew the boy since he was born. His daddy was a Lutheran minister, and tried to push his son into following in his footsteps. Didn’t take.”

“Looks like he’s been around.”

“He practiced pharmacy at one time. But when he was in that business he perpetrated a holdup against himself to collect the insurance money. He was saving up for night classes. Studying law.”

“Law?”

Parker nodded, grinned around the corncob pipe. “So before you know it, he become a lawyer. And as a young lawyer, he embezzled clients’ funds and was convicted and went to the pokey. Yours truly, as a friend of his old Bible-beating daddy, helped him get a parole. I tried to get him reinstated with the Bar Association but I didn’t pull ’er off.”

I studied Wendel’s battered face. “And you think this guy is the Lindbergh kidnapper?”

“I know he is. The man has a brilliant mind—studied medicine for a while, too, you know. Medicine, the law, the ministry, pharmacy—that’s Paul Wendel.”

“It sounds like you’re…friends.”

“We are, or we were, before he committed this crime. Smartest man I ever met, Paul Wendel, but a failure in so many ways, and bitter about it. He felt that all the things he’d tried to accomplish came to nothing, that nothing good had ever happened to him; that he never got a break.”

“Was this self-pity occasional, like when he was in his cups, or…”

“It was constant. He’d say, The world has always mistreated me, Ellis, but one day I’ll do something that will make the world sit up and take notice.’”

“And you think he finally did.”

Parker’s mouth was tight, but his eyes smiled, as he nodded. “Not long before the kidnapping, Paul was getting himself into trouble writing bad checks. There were warrants out for him in New Jersey. He came to me and asked if I could help, and I said I would try, but in the meantime he should go away someplace.”

“When was this, exactly?”

“Several months before the kidnapping. He began living in New York, in various cheap hotels, but his wife and his daughter and son stayed behind in Trenton—he’d sneak home and visit ’em from time to time, when the coast was clear.”

“It wasn’t like there was a big manhunt out for him.”

“Not at all. He just had warrants on him for this bad paper he passed. Anyway, after the kidnapping, I made a statement to the press and the radio that if the kidnapper would just come forward and talk to me, I would do all in my power to see that he was not punished. All I wanted to do was get that baby back safe.”

“Figuring with your reputation, it might just draw the kidnapper out.”

“Such was my thinking, yes. Hell, pretty soon I had bags of mail, phone calls from here to hell and back. My secretary would screen these calls. She’d only have me listen in on the more promising ones. And one of these calls was from Wendel—trying to disguise his voice.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“Positive. I know Paul Wendel’s voice, for Christ’s sake; heard it for forty-some years. He calls disguising his voice, and even my secretary recognizes it, so she puts him on the line with me, and he’s saying he knows who has the baby, and he’d like to come in and talk to me about it. I pretended not to recognize who it was, and invited him in.”