“I’ll be waiting,” she said.
As I went out to get in Gus’s pickup truck, she stood watching me from the back doorway, like another ghost in that damn haunted house.
In the pickup, I unfolded Inga’s message; it was from Breckinridge.
It said: “Jafsie has heard from John.”
20
I sat in a comfortable chair near a crackling fire emanating from a marble fireplace in an expensive, high- ceilinged library worthy of Evalyn Walsh McLean’s Massachusetts Avenue mansion; but I was not in Washington, D.C. I was in Manhattan, in a stately graystone townhouse just off Central Park on East 72nd, the New York residence of the late Senator Morrow, Lindy’s father-in-law.
Nearby, at a long mahogany conference table, sat Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson, the dour frick-and-frack IRS agents whose mutual round black-rimmed glasses and black suits and dark ties made them humorless mirror images. Wilson was the more clearly restless of the pair, drumming his fingers, searching his balding scalp for clues of hair. Irey was as immobile as the face on a coin. But both were worried.
So was I.
We were waiting.
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
“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?”
