Stolen Away

“I wouldn’t trust screwballs like Wendel or Means with the garbage.”

“Ah, but Frank, that’s the beauty part. Even if Means or Wendel decide to talk, were dumb enough to finger Capone and Ricca-who would believe them? With their records, with their individual eccentricities, they make the perfect fall guys.”

There was a pause; I let him think. Then he said: “So what’s going to happen?”

“I’m working to try to clear Hauptmann. That’s what Governor Hoffman’s paying me to do. I’m finding a lot out, but so far I don’t see any of it doing any good.”

“You don’t see this coming back to Chicago. You don’t see this landing in the Outfit’s lap.”

“No. Not yet, anyway.” The hell of it was, I didn’t know whether Nitti wanted it to, or not.

“Okay,” Nitti said. “Okay. Appreciate you checkin’ in, Nate. You’re a good boy.”

The phone clicked dead.

I hung up.

“Who were you talking to, Nate?”

I turned in the chair and saw Evalyn standing in the doorway of the study. How long she’d been there, I didn’t know. She looked a trifle confused. She was wearing flowing wide-legged black slacks and a black cashmere sweater with pearls; and looked sporty and stylish, but a tad frazzled. It had been a long day for her, too.

I stood, smiled, approached her; put my hands on her tiny waist. “Contact of mine in Chicago,” I said. “Bouncing a few ideas back and forth.”

“Oh,” she said, vaguely troubled. Then that look transformed itself into a girlish smile. “Nate, I have exciting news. The New Haven trip was a success!”

“Huh?” I’d damn near forgotten that was what she’d been up to today: trying to follow the “lead” of the long-ago Edgar Cayce reading. This would be rich.

“You’re going to be proud of me. I don’t even want to freshen up. Let’s go in the other room and talk.”

Once again that fireplace was aglow, in a room otherwise dim, and she led me before it, where she curled up catlike on the Oriental carpet to bask in the warmth of the fire. It painted her a lush orange. I stood over her and suggested I get us some drinks from the nearby liquor cart; she agreed, requesting champagne (“To celebrate”), studying the fire, smiling enigmatically, looking at once as sophisticated as a Vogue cover girl and as naive as a Girl Scout wishing she had a wienie to roast.

She sipped her wine and, sitting Indian-style next to her, I sipped my Bacardi.

She said, “Was your day eventful?”

I had already decided not to tell her about Wendel’s captivity; it could only get her in trouble. I gave her a brief rundown of what Parker had told me about his suspect, and left it at that.

“Do you think this Wendel fellow might be the kidnapper, or at least involved in the kidnapping somehow?”

“It’s possible. But Parker’s pursuing that angle. We have to look elsewhere. Now, Evalyn, I know you’re dying to tell me what you’ve discovered. And I,” I lied, “am dying to hear all about it.”

She sat up, striking a more serious posture: “In your notes, Nate, you wrote that Edgar Cayce spoke of a house in a ‘mill section’ on the east side of New Haven. In the region of ‘Cordova,’ he said.”

“Only there is no Cordova.”

She smiled; her eyes sparkled like the champagne in her glass. “But there is a Dover section. Some interpretation is required, remember? A man in a trance pronounces things indistinctly; he gathers information from the haze, after all.”

“I guess,” I said, somewhat impressed by the Cordova/Dover notion, but not bowled over.

“Garboni and I,” she said, “were able to locate a densely built-up mill section in East New Haven. We stopped at a filling station there, inquiring about an area called ‘Cordova,’ and were informed that just across the Quinnipiac River from New Haven there was a Dover section.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Then I asked if he knew of an Adams Street. That was the street that Cayce said led to Scharten Street.”

“Right.” This was truly idiotic. I was embarrassed to be having this conversation. I sipped my Bacardi. Maybe I’d get laid, later, if I could keep a straight face through all this horse-doodle.

She was as serious as the portrait of her husband’s daddy over the fireplace. “The gas-station man didn’t know of an Adams Street, so I asked him if he knew of a street that might sound similar to ‘Adams.’ He suggested Chatham Street.”

Well, that was pretty close.

“We went to Chatham Street, Garboni and I, and we followed Cayce’s directions. The child, according to Cayce in his trance, was supposed to have been taken first to a two-story shingled house, then moved to another house nearby-a brown house-that was two-tenths of a mile from the end of ‘Adams’ Street.”

“Right. I remember, more or less.”

She grinned. “The house number Cayce gave was Seventy-Three. And do you know what we found at Seventy-Three Chatham Street? A two-story shingled house.”

“No kidding.” Those must be scarcer than hens’ teeth.

“Next we turned right from a point two-tenths of a mile from the waterfront end of Chatham, and found a brown store building.”

“What was the name of the street?”

“Not Scharten,” she admitted. “Maltby.”

“Evalyn, that’s not even close, phonetically or backwards or sideways.”

“I know. Maybe it used to be Scharten or something closer. Anyway, the brown building was there: an apartment over a neighborhood grocery store. We went into the store, but the manager wasn’t there, so we kept asking around the neighborhood, if anybody knew who’d been the tenant in the apartment over that store, back in 1932. We were referred to a local gossip, in a candy store, a few blocks away.”

All in all, this was sounding like a trip I was glad I didn’t make.

“We went into the candy store and it was indeed run by a very talkative old woman. We asked her if she’d ever heard any rumors about the Lindbergh baby being in the area.”

“Christ, that was subtle, Evalyn.”

She frowned defensively. “Well, she had! And Nate, I hadn’t even mentioned the apartment over the grocery store to her. But out of the blue, she said there was a rumor that, for a short time, a couple was caring for the Lindbergh baby, in that very apartment! That there was a house-to-house search of the neighborhood, in the early weeks or maybe even days after the kidnapping, and the couple took off. The house search made a big impression on her, and everybody in the neighborhood. She called it, ‘King Herod time.’”

“Why?”

Evalyn shrugged, smiled. “Seems the police were taking the diapers off every baby around, to check the sex.”

I tried to express my skepticism gently. “You know, Evalyn, I remember hearing about a New Haven search, because some of the construction workers who built Lindbergh’s house were from there, and were early suspects- so that could naturally give rise to a rumor like that. It doesn’t mean…”

“Nate, there’s something else. There was a name in Cayce’s notes. An Italian name, remember? The man who Cayce said was the leader of the kidnap gang.”

“Yes…”

“That name was Maglio, right? It must have been important-you underlined it in your notes, three times.”

“Yeah, uh, right.” Now I was getting an uncomfortable tingling.

“Well, we asked the old lady at the candy store, and a couple of other people as well, if they knew who owned or rented or lived in that shingled two-story house at Seventy-Three Chatham in ’32.”

“Yes? And?”

“Well, there were two apartments. The man living in the top apartment was named Maglio. Maglio, Nate! Can that be a coincidence?”

My mouth was dry. I sipped the Bacardi. It didn’t help.

Paul Ricca, the Waiter, also known as Paul DeLucia, had frequently used the name Paul Maglio, particularly