Capone maybe, or maybe somebody named Ricca—asked if you wanted to go straight. Go into farming. Drop out of that life.”
He looked at me blankly, but there was respect in his eyes. “You’re pretty good, mister.
“Of sorts. Let me guess something else, while I’m at it. You two are a childless couple. You’ve been married for maybe twenty years, maybe twenty-five, but there was never an off-spring. You wanted a family. With your background, adoption was tricky. But then, finally, like a miracle—somebody gave you a son.”
He took a small step back and slipped his arm around his wife’s shoulder; she pressed close to him, weeping quietly. “That’s right,” he said. “And we love our son, mister. And he loves us.”
“That’s just swell. You do know who the boy is?”
“Yes, we do. He’s Carl Belliance, Jr.”
“You got the ‘junior’ right, anyway.”
Madge Belliance, lip trembling, said, “We’ve never said that…never said that name. Never spoken it.”
I raised an eyebrow, the gun still trained carefully on them. “Charles Lindbergh, Jr., you mean? Where is he?”
“He’s at school,” she said. She was trying to summon some defiance, but it wasn’t playing.
“When does he get home?”
“You’re not going to hurt him…” she wondered, gripping her husband’s shirt; he patted her.
“Hell no, lady. I’m giving him back to his real parents. When does he get home?”
“It’s a long walk,” she said. She licked her lips. “In half an hour, maybe. We never did anything wrong, mister.”
“Ever hear of a guy named Hauptmann?”
“Yes,” Belliance said, and he raised his chin. “We hear he was a goddamn extortionist and is getting what he deserves.”
“Oh, is that what they told you? That’s a good one. You got a hired hand?”
“Not now,” he said. “Some of the year I do.”
I glanced quickly around the place. “You seem to be faring pretty well, here, despite hard times. What are you raising on this farm, besides a stolen kid? Berries? Corn? Never mind—I don’t really care. Here.”
With my left hand, I extended the roll of electrical tape toward Madge Belliance. She took it, with reluctance and confusion.
“Use some of that to tie your husband’s wrists behind his back. Do it now.”
“But…”
She exchanged glances with her husband; he looked at her gravely, and nodded, and she sighed heavily and nodded back. He turned his back to her, put his wrists behind him and she bound him with the tape.
When she was done, she held the tape out to me. I took it and told her to turn around and put her wrists behind her. With the nine millimeter held in the crotch of my left arm, I quickly wound the black tape around her wrists. Then I nudged her forward. I told them to turn and face me again, and they did.
“Let’s go to the cellar,” I said.
They led me there; the double storm-cellar doors were along the side of the house where I was parked. They went down the half-flight of wooden steps ahead of me. The basement was hard-packed dirt. It had that same reddish cast.
“Sit against that wall,” I said. “I don’t want to have to knock anybody out.”
They sat. Keeping back from them, the gun tucked under my arm, I used the hunting knife to cut the rope. I bound both their ankles, and added a length of rope to the wrists of each. Then I had them sit back to back against a support beam and tied them together, around the chest and waist, the beam between them. Nobody said anything through any of this.
Her apron I cut into strips with the knife and gagged them that way; that was kinder than using the electrical tape, which had been my original plan. When you’re pulling a kidnapping, you have to be flexible.
I stood before them. “I don’t want you to make a sound,” I said. “Don’t alert that boy you’re down here.”
Belliance’s eyes were hard; his wife’s were soft.
“You behave yourselves,” I said, “and maybe I won’t turn you in. All I want is to put that boy back with his rightful parents. Understood?”
They just looked at me.
“Understood?” I repeated.
The father nodded curtly; then, hesitantly, his wife nodded, too, several times.
I put my gun in my shoulder holster, not in my raincoat pocket, and left them in the cellar with the dirt and some rakes and a wall of jarred preserves.
Then I climbed from the cellar to the cool fresh air and walked around and sat on the front-porch swing and waited for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., to come home from school.
