Stolen Away

pipe and looked like a farmer halfheartedly dressed for church.

The office was as quaint as a Currier and Ives print, only not near as cute: the desk littered with correspondence, reports, case histories and memos; a windowsill precariously balancing numerous telephones and directories; baskets and boxes in corners teeming with books, trial-exhibit photographs and maps; bulletin boards papered with police-department circulars, some boldly inscribed “Captured” and “Convicted” in black grease pencil; and sitting in one corner, on a chair, wearing a hat, a human skeleton.

“The Chicago man,” he said, smiling with the natural condescension of the rural for the urban. “Have a seat, young fella.”

I pulled up a hardwood chair. “I’m surprised you remembered me,” I said, as we shook hands.

He snorted, holding onto the corncob pipe with his other hand; the tobacco smelled like damp leaves burning. “Couldn’t forget the feller who ran interference for me-got me in to see Colonel Lindbergh, when that son of a bitch Schwarzkopf was set on keeping me out.”

“As I recall,” I said, “getting in to see Lindbergh didn’t do you much good.”

He shook his head, no. “He’d been poisoned against me. Politics. It’s all politics.” He smiled privately. “But he’ll listen to me now.”

“It’ll have to be by wireless,” I said. “He lives in England these days, you know.”

“He’ll come back for this,” Parker said confidently. “It’s gonna be a whole new ball game, when this hits the fan.”

“What is ‘this’?”

He ignored the question. “You said on the phone you’re working for the Governor.”

I nodded. “You realize, of course, that Governor Hoffman is concerned about this investigation of yours.”

“And here I thought I had his blessing.”

“You’ve got his blessing, as I understand it, but he’d like to know what the hell you’re up to. Time is running out for Richard Hauptmann.”

The smile disappeared from around the corncob pipe. “That poor unfortunate son of a bitch. Sitting in the death house waiting to be executed for a crime he’s completely innocent of.”

“I think he’s innocent myself,” I said. “Why do you feel that way?”

“Nathan…mind if I call you Nathan? Nathan, you’re the kidnapper of this baby, you’re the master criminal of this century, you plan the crime of the century and you execute it. If you’re such a genius do you take a piece of wood from your own attic to make a ladder and then leave it behind as a clue?”

“Probably not.”

“Never. Especially not if you’re Hauptmann, who has all kinds of lumber in his garage and his yard. That was contrived evidence, I know that from my friends in the State Police. It’s bullshit.”

“Well, you’re right.”

“Let me ask you something, Nathan. If you had the brains to collect this ransom, would you go to a gas station with your own car, your own face, your own license plate, and give the guy a gold note and add insult to injury and tell him you got more like it at home?”

“I guess not.” I shifted in the hard chair. “No offense, Ellis-you don’t mind if I call you Ellis? Ellis, this is all old news to me. I didn’t drive up here from Washington, D.C., to sit around the pickle barrel and chew the fat.”

His mouth twitched around the pipe. “Do you know that that little corpse found on that mountainside probably wasn’t the Lindbergh baby?”

“I suspect it.”

He sat forward and his jaw jutted like the prow of a ship. “Yes, but do you know it? I’m not talking about the unlikelihood of them bones going undetected when the woods had been searched by everybody from the New Jersey State Police to the Boy Scouts of America. I’m talking about talking to pathologists about the rate of decomposition. I’m talking about looking up the weather records for that region in those three months.”

“Weather records?”

He leaned back, smiling like a fisherman who’d just made a big, easy catch. “Ever build a compost heap, Nathan?”

“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