“Well,” I sighed, “anything to get a roof over my head.”
Any roof that wasn’t over the kidnapped kid’s nursery, that is.
So now Breckinridge, his usual gray, three-piece-suit self, was knocking on the door to 414 in the Old Princeton Inn; we had hung our topcoats in the lobby. The dimly lit hallway fit the Halloween mood.
The door cracked open. A thin, sallow male face peered out; bald, spade-bearded.
“Ah,” the cadaverous figure intoned, in a mellow, minister’s voice, “you would be Colonel Breckinridge.”
“Yes,” Breckinridge said. “Are you Martin Marinelli?”
Opening the door wider, the cue-ball bald, devil-bearded fellow nodded. He was wearing a flowing black robe; around his neck was a heavily jeweled gold cross on a gold chain. He turned his gaze on me, arching a plucked-for- effect eyebrow. His eyes were small and dark, but piercing, in deep sockets.
“And who would you be?”
“You’re the psychic,” I said, nicely. “You tell me.”
Breckinridge flashed me a reproving look.
Marinelli’s nostrils flared, and he stepped back, and shut the door; it clicked ominously.
I sighed. Without looking at Breckinridge, I said, “Yeah, I know. I got too smart a mouth. But I can’t take too much of this carny hokum lyin’ down.”
“Speaking of lying down,” Breckinridge said, “
“Good point. Knock again. I’ll behave.”
Breckinridge’s fist was poised to knock when the door swung open.
Marinelli, seeming to float in space in the long flowing robe, was haloed in soft light against darkness.
“Come in, gentlemen,” Marinelli said, gesturing theatrically. And this he directed to me: “But I would request you leave your skepticism in the hallway. If we’re to have success this evening, we will need open-minded cooperation from all participants.”
The sweet, smoky scent of sandalwood beckoned; somewhere in the darkness, incense was burning.
We were in a nicely furnished sitting room-lit, or barely lit, by a large red candle dripping wax in the middle of a wooden card table set up in the middle of the floor, with three chairs. There were several closed doorways, one of which was to a bedroom, presumably. If we could chase these fortune-tellers out, I’d have some pretty fancy digs.
“You still have not given your name,” Marinelli said to me, sternly.
I stood twisting my hat in my hand, wondering why the flickery darkness was making me so damn nervous.
“My name is Heller,” I said. “I’m a police officer assigned to the Lindbergh matter.”
“I sense you are not local,” Marinelli said.
He didn’t have to be psychic to know that; I have the flat nasal Chicago accent you’d expect. But Breckinridge seemed a little impressed.
“I’m not local,” I said, and smiled politely, and didn’t tell him a nickel’s worth more.
Marinelli gestured grandly to the candle-dripping card table, finding an extra chair for me; one of those already placed at the table seemed to be reserved.
“Gentlemen,” Marinelli said, after we’d settled into our wooden folding chairs, “I am the father of the One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street Spiritualist Church in Harlem. My wife Sister Sarah Sivella is the mother of that church. As you have already surmised, Mr. Heller, I have no great gifts of second sight, myself. But my wife has definite, even staggering, abilities in that realm.”
“Abilities,” Breckinridge said, “which she is willing to lend to the search for Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Is that correct?”
“She does not use these abilities,” he explained patiently. “They use her.”
“What do you mean?” Breckinridge asked.
Marinelli sculpted the air with his hands. “She did not seek information, on this matter, directly, consciously. She began speaking of the kidnapping during the course of a seance at the church. The seance was part of our regular church ritual, that happened to have been held one day after the tragic occurrence.”
“So you came here,” I said, “to be close to Colonel Lindbergh.”
“Yes. To try to help. Ours is a Christian church. We believe in the father-motherhood of God. Christ, the son of the father-mother God, is the light that shines through wisdom and love in the human heart.”
Great. A guy with a Satan beard in a black robe in a room lit by a blood-red candle is going to tell an agnostic Jew about Jesus. What a guy will go through to get a bed to sleep in.
“Life is governed by five cosmic laws,” he was saying. He held up five fingers and ticked them off; maybe I should’ve taken my notebook out to write these down. “Reincarnation. Cause and effect. Opportunity. Retribution. Spiritual communion…”
Wasn’t that six?
“I’m afraid I fail to see what relevance this has,” Breck in-ridge said, “to the situation at hand. Specifically, the missing Lindbergh child.”
Marinelli raised a hand as if passing a benediction; his nails were long and manicured. “Gentlemen, my wife will join us momentarily. I will begin by inducing an hypnotic trance. Then we will join hands, and I must ask you not to break the circle.”
Well, this was a far cry from Edgar Cayce and his down-home soothsaying. Here we had what looked to be a traditional phony seance-and if this snake-oil merchant thought I was going to buy his scam, he was as nutty as he looked.
“Mr. Marinelli,” I said, “I mean no offense, but I know the Chicago supply house that sells you people your glow-in-the-dark trumpets and bells. If you have something to say about the kidnapping, fine. But spare us the cheesecloth ghosts, paste-and-newspaper ectoplasm and levitating furniture.”
Marinelli’s smile was faint and condescending. “You are under a basic misapprehension, Mr. Heller. Sister Sarah is not a physical medium. You’ll hear no bell ringing, table rapping, nor experience any table tilting or other unexplained transportation of objects. Sister Sarah is a
“Joan of Arc got burned at the stake for that,” I reminded him.
“Ah yes,” he said, raising a forefinger heavenward. “But these are more enlightened times.”
Tell that to the Scottsboro boys.
“Sister Sarah,” he went on, “is what we call a ‘sensitive.’ She has a control, a spirit guide, who frequently speaks through her.”
“This ‘spirit guide,’” Breckinridge said, interested despite himself, “is a specific entity?”
Marinelli nodded momentously. “His name is Yellow Feather.”
“Yellow Feather?” I asked. And I looked at Breckinridge and said, again, “Yellow Feather?” How bad did I want this room, anyway?
“Yellow Feather,” the bald spiritualist continued, “was a great warrior. An Iroquois chief.”
“Dead many moons,” I said.
“That is correct,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “If you have no other questions, Mr. Heller, Mr. Breckinridge…I will summon Sister Sarah.”
“Yeah, I have one more question,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Heller?”
“Do you shave your head?”
Breckinridge kicked me under the table.
Marinelli only smiled. “No. My hair fell out when I was a youth. It was a psychic sign. It signaled my psychosexual awakening.”
“Just wondering,” I said.
Marinelli closed his eyes, bowed his head slightly. The incense-scented room was an eerie study in shadows and shapes as the wavery candlelight, and a modicum of streetlight from the sheer-curtained windows, turned the mundane hotel furnishings into Caligari-like onlookers. Those windows were rattling as the wind crept in over their sills. Maybe our medium wasn’t of the flying horn and floating disembodied head variety, but this was a seance all
