piled behind the building to form a misshapen hill half as wide as the structure itself and a third as tall.
“Must have been one hell of an explosion,” I said.
“Must have been one hell of a still,” Dixon said. He spat tobacco juice.
“Is that what this place was? A moonshine distillery?”
“No! That was just a little part of the operation.”
I pushed my hat back, scratched my head; the cold air was nipping at me, and seemed as impatient as I was. “Well, it looks like a hotel. What was it, a roadhouse?”
“Kee-rect, Nate.” He smiled brownly. “Not your regulation roadhouse that dots the back roads of our beautiful land, from sea to shinin’ sea, the kind designed to pull in your tired businessmen or your thirsty pampered college kids. No sir. And it wasn’t for the Hopewell clientele, neither.”
“Willis-what the hell was this place?”
He beamed at me; a hick taking great pride in educating a city slicker. “A gangster hideaway, Nate. Where all the big shots outa New York and your other major metropolitan areas gathered to enjoy their own company in their own private whoopee parties.”
“Jesus. Including Chicago?”
He nodded. “I spotted Cook County plates ’round these parts many a time.”
“Why didn’t you ever bust this place? Oh. Sorry.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “No, no. It ain’t that. It’s not that I wouldn’t have taken a taste if it was offered me. But this is not our jurisdiction. It’s outside of city limits.”
“Whose jurisdiction is it? Oh. Sure-the state police.”
He nodded again. “Schwarzkopf’s little girls, is right.” He put his hands on his hips, spat an elegant brown stream into the pile of rubble. “Think of it, Nate. Some of the biggest wing-dings imaginable, with Broadway entertainers and whores so pretty they qualify as table food. Gamblin’ and orgies and it all took place right inside there, for the sole enjoyment of our nation’s mob chieftains.”
Capone would have been here. More than once. Just a few miles from the Lindbergh estate.
Dixon began to wander, hands on hips. “Can you picture it? How could a night of revelry pass by without those big shots making some passin’ reference to the famous Lindy and his family, so close by? I’ll lay you twenty to one that many a night they passed the time tossin’ around how much easy dough there was that could be had by grabbing that famous kid.”
“But they never went through with it,” I said, thinking aloud. “It just stayed idle speculation, fun after-dinner talk, because the estate was
“Right! But then this big old still blew to hell and back, and a guy was killed in the explosion, one of them that ran it, and the place was closed down.”
“So protecting the roadhouse was no longer necessary.”
“Right-o,” Dixon said. “And since there never was an arrest or raid or anything out here, what sort of trail was there for anybody to follow?”
“Somebody should’ve tried,” I said. The wind sighed, rustling the trees. “Somebody should be trying right now….”
A few minutes later, we were pulling into the Lindbergh estate. As we drove around by the command-post garage, Dixon said, “Well, I’ll be damned-look who it is!”
He pointed to a trio of men standing outside the garage, milling about with expressions of impatience. One of the men was older and clearly the leader, albeit an unlikely one: a short, round bald man in a rumpled brown topcoat, a straw fedora in one hand, with which he was slapping his thigh. White-mustached, lumpy-faced, he was smoking a corncob pipe and looked like a gentleman farmer, although not much of one-gentleman
Dixon pulled in next to another of several cars parked in the outer cement apron and turned the engine off, but left his hands on the wheel. His expression seemed weirdly glazed.
“That’s the Old Fox himself,” he said.
“Old Fox?”
“Ellis Parker. Don’t tell me you never heard of him.”
I’d heard of him, all right. That fat, bald, rumpled, apparent nonentity was Ellis Parker, a.k.a. the Old Fox, a.k.a. the Cornfield Sherlock, a.k.a. the Small-Town Detective with the Worldwide Reputation. Parker was chief of detectives of some county or other in New Jersey-I didn’t remember where-but he was widely known as one of the nation’s top investigators, and frequently was brought in on cases in East Coast cities larger than his own tiny Mount Holly, wherever the hell that was.
I’d read of many of his cases; he was written up in magazines and in the papers, and there were books about him. How at Fort Dix he discovered who murdered a soldier by investigating the fellow soldier (one of a hundred- plus uniformed suspects) who had the best, most complete alibi; how he discovered that a soaking-wet corpse had been treated at a tannery to fool the medical examiner about time of death; how he tracked a homicidal mulatto with a sweet tooth by alerting every restaurant in his own and neighboring counties to be on the lookout for “a pudding-loving colored boy.”
“I suppose it was natural he’d show up around here,” I said. “This case could use a mind like his.”
“Twenty to one Schwarzkopf won’t agree with you,” Dixon said, sourly. He shook his head, admiringly. “I’ve had an application in over at Burlington County for over two years, now. There’s a hell of a waiting list, though.”
“You ever meet the old boy?”
“Sure! Burlington is the adjacent county.”
“Really. Why don’t you introduce me, then, Willis?”
A few moments later we’d ambled over to Parker, who nodded at Willis.
“Constable Dixon,” Parker said. He seemed to force a smile as he offered a hand, which Willis shook. “How the hell are you, son?” His voice was as rough-hewn as his appearance; his face was stubbled with white, his eyes were sleepy and blue and anything but piercing; his tie was food-stained and floated several inches below the notch of his collar. Sherlock Holmes posing as his own dim-witted Watson.
“Fine, Chief Parker. This is Nate Heller.”
Something in the eyes came to life. “The Chicago feller. The Capone theorist.”
I grinned and shook the hand he thrust forward. “Well, nobody ever accused me of being any kind of theorist before, Chief. Where did you hear my name?”
He sidled up close to me; he smelled like pipe tobacco-foul pipe tobacco. He slipped a fatherly arm around my shoulder. “I have my confidants in that horse’s ass Schwarzkopf’s camp.”
“Do tell.”
“I hear you’re the boy who has stood up to that asshole of creation, Welch.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“I hear you suggested that he kiss your behind.”
“Words to that effect.”
He laughed heartily-he apparently liked subtle humor-and patted me on the back. “Allow me to introduce my deputies.”
He did. I don’t remember their names.
“Maybe one of these days Constable Dixon here will come work for me,” Parker said, finally relinquishing my shoulder.
Dixon lit up like an electric bulb. “I’d like that, sir.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have any pull with the Colonel, would you, son?”
“Schwarzkopf?” Dixon asked.
“Hell’s bells, no! Not that asshole.
I raised a hand. “Let me see what I can do.”
Parker’s lumpy face broke apart in a smile. “That’s goddamn white of you, son.”
I went inside, through the servants’ sitting room and then the kitchen, where I saw Betty Gow and Elsie and Ollie Whately in passing, as well as Welch and several of Schwarzkopf’s upper echelon lounging having coffee and
