“Of course.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Hell, Slim. I’m honored. It’ll almost be like being there.”
He sipped his tea. He smiled slyly at me, his eyes narrow and shrewd. “Tell me, Nate. Did you work on Irey? And Wilson?”
“What do you mean?”
He nodded sideways toward the other room. “Those bills in there. That money. Wilson spent the morning recording all the serial numbers at J. P. Morgan and Company.”
I grinned. “Well, that’s swell. It really is. You won’t be sorry.”
He shook his head, sipped more tea. “I guess it took over a dozen clerks to help get the job done. Five- thousand-some items of currency, with no two numbers in sequence.”
“Don’t look at me, Slim—I didn’t put the pressure on Irey. He’s capable all by himself of figuring out that recording those bills is the thing to do. But what made you change
Lindbergh’s mouth twitched. “Irey,” he said, and then added, admiringly: “He’s a hard-nosed bastard.”
I didn’t push him, and Slim didn’t elaborate further, but that evening, as I waited with the two IRS agents in the Morrows’ vast library, I asked Irey how he’d convinced Lindbergh.
“He gave me some noble malarkey,” Irey said, “about wanting to keep his promises to the kidnappers, to encourage them to keep their promises to him.”
“Slim doesn’t know much about crooks, I’m afraid.”
“When it comes to being a detective,” Irey said, “Lindbergh makes a damn fine airmail-pilot. At any rate, I told him that unless he allowed us to record the serial numbers of the bills, the Treasury Department would play no part in the case.”
“But what about his pull with your boss?”
Irey’s smile was as thin as a stiletto blade. “Even the Secretary of the Treasury knows that his department damn well better not compound a felony. Which is what we’d have been guilty of, if we allowed those bills to go out unrecorded.”
“And that sold Slim.”
“Not immediately,” Irey said, with a shake of his head. “We withdrew—from his home and from the case—and didn’t hear from him till this morning.”
“He must have checked with Secretary Mills, after all.”
“Maybe. But it didn’t do him any good. He gave us the go-ahead.”
“Mills?”
“Lindbergh. And that second packet, the one with twenty thousand in it, is strictly gold certificates.”
“Gold certificates?”
“Yes. Fifty-dollar ones. Four hundred of them. Those will be child’s play for bank tellers to spot.”
“Nice thinking, Elmer.”
“Thank you, Mr. Heller—but the gold-certificate notion was Frank’s work. The smaller-denomination bills are mostly gold certificates, as well.”
I nodded and smiled at Wilson, who nodded and smiled back at me. We were one big happy family—three cops sitting in a posh townhouse library, while an eccentric professor and a stunt flyer were off in the night somewhere with seventy grand to turn over to some self-proclaimed kidnappers.
Earlier that afternoon, when Lindbergh and I had spoken about the marked bills, I’d attempted to make another point, with considerably less success.
“Why don’t you,” I’d suggested, “let Irey and maybe the New York cops follow you to wherever the ransom drop is, then pull in undercover men to throw a net over the area?”
He shook his head sternly, no. “That’s out of the question. That would be much too dangerous….”
“No it wouldn’t. You’d have cops acting as cabbies, drunks, truck drivers, washerwomen, priests…undercover cops do that kind of thing all the time, and well.”
“The kidnappers wouldn’t be that easily fooled, Nate. They’ll go into this thing suspicious as hell.”
“Slim, it’s not suspicious to be passed on the street by a milk wagon or a bunch of college whoopee boys…it’s natural to have people on the streets, even at night, especially at night, when this ransom drop will probably come off.”
But he wouldn’t hear of it.
Later Irey confirmed that he’d made a similar plea to Lindbergh to no avail; and in this case, the word from above was to stay out of Lindy’s way.
So those of us who were thinking like cops were one for two—and batting .500 in the Lindbergh game was a goddamn good average.
I’d been at Condon’s most of the day and into the evening, when the doorbell rang around a quarter to eight; the daughter, Myra, answered the door and a cabbie—she described him as young, thin, dark—handed her an envelope and scurried back to his cab and was gone before any of us could stop him or even get his license number.
