the study, which explained why Lindbergh might not have seen anybody going up a ladder outside his curtainless window.
Two troopers returned, Lindbergh leading them; each of the men carried a section of the thing, and “thing” more than “ladder” was the correct word: a ramshackle, makeshift affair that seemed composed of weathered, uneven lumber scraps. The rungs were spaced too widely apart for even a tall man to make easy use of it.
Lindbergh set his section down. “Put it together, would you, men?”
“Good God,” I said. “That thing’s a mess, isn’t it?”
“It’s ingenious in its way,” Lindbergh said. “Slopped together as it is, inexpert as the carpentry may be, it was designed so that each section fits inside another. One man
The troopers were inserting wooden dowels to connect the sections. The top rung of the bottom section had broken, apparently under a man’s weight.
I walked over and pointed to the broken pieces. “One of the kidnappers did that?”
Lindbergh nodded. “And I may have heard the bastard climbing either up or down. I heard what sounded like the slats of an orange crate breaking, around nine o’clock.”
“Were you in the study?”
“No—the living room, with Anne.”
“Did you check on the sounds?”
“No,” he said glumly. “I just said, ‘What was that?’ to Anne, and she said, ‘What was what?’ and we both went back to our reading. Shortly after that, she went upstairs to bed and I went into the study.”
So Lindbergh was probably in the study at least part of the time the kidnapping was taking place.
“Place that in the holes, would you?” he said to the troopers.
It took both of them to maneuver the clumsy, towering affair. They placed it carefully in the indentations in the ground and placed it against the side of the house, where it rose several feet above, and to the right of, the nursery window, stretching damn near to the roof.
“Well, it’s way off,” I said, craning my neck back. “Obviously.”
“I just wanted you to see that,” he said. “We figure the kidnappers miscalculated on the ladder.”
“They sure as hell didn’t have a carpenter on their team,” I said. “So, what? They must have just used the lower two sections.”
Lindbergh nodded. “The ladder was found over there…” He pointed about sixty feet to the southeast. “…with the two bottom sections connected.” Then he directed the troopers to haul the ladder down, remove the dowel and lift off the top section, and put the now two-sectioned ladder back up.
“It’s still way off,” I said.
Now the ladder was about three feet below the nursery window. And, again, to the right. You could see the places on the whitewashed fieldstone where the ladder had scraped; no doubt about it: only two sections of the ladder were used, and this was where it rested.
“Well, what do you make of it, then?” Lindbergh asked.
“I’m revising my opinion about this not necessarily being an inside job.”
Lindbergh’s frown was barely discernible, but it was there. “Why, Mr. Heller?”
“Somebody had to have handed your baby out to an accomplice on the ladder. That’s about the only way it figures…unless two people went up the ladder, one at a time. I doubt that thing would support two people at once.”
“Perhaps that’s why it broke,” he suggested.
“The weight of the child, added to whoever carried him down, probably did that.”
“Good God. If Charlie fell…”
I lifted a hand. “From that height, there’d have been the impression of whoever fell—and it would’ve probably been both of ’em, the child and the kidnapper. If…excuse me, Colonel…if the kidnapper dropped the child, but managed to retain his own footing on the ladder, there still would’ve been an impression in that wet ground.”
Which even the New Jersey cops couldn’t have missed.
“Perhaps a woman went up first,” Lindbergh said, studying it, hand on his chin. “We know a woman was standing around out here…”
“A woman’s touch might explain the baby staying quiet. I mean, the baby didn’t wake up crying, or someone would’ve heard him, I would imagine.”
“Yes. My wife was in the next room, separated only by a bath.” Impulsively, grabbing my arm, he said, “Come. Look the nursery over.”
We went up the uncarpeted stairs, and the upstairs was as clean, fresh-smelling and impersonal as below.
Lindbergh hesitated outside the nursery, and I went on in. He stayed in the doorway and watched me look around.
It was the warmest-looking room I’d seen here—and the most lived-in. Evergreen trees, a country church, and a man with a dog were gaily pictured on the light green wallpaper; between the two east windows was a fireplace with a mosaic of a fisherman, windmill, elephant and little boy with a hoop; on the mantel was an ornamental clock around which were gathered a porcelain rooster and two smaller porcelain birds. A kiddie car was parked near the hearth. Against the opposite wall was the child’s four-poster-style maple crib; nearby was a pink-and-green screen,
