Stolen Away

“That, I’m afraid, was just wishful thinking on my part. I can’t have you around. You’re too dangerous.”

“Don’t judge me by the other day,” I said, nibbling buttery toast. “I hardly ever get in shoot-outs.”

“It’s not that.” She had a tiny, bittersweet half-smile. “Frightening as that was, I will treasure the memory. The fear will fade, the romance will sustain.”

“Evalyn, I’ll go back to Chicago if you tell me to.”

“Go back to Chicago, Nate.”

“Oh. Well. Sure.”

Her eyes glistened with regret. “Nate-my husband wants my children. And my children are the most important thing in my life. If Ned found out about us, about you and me, he could use it against me, and could have them. He could win them. And I can’t have that.” She shook her head, with a look of unmistakable finality. “We mustn’t see each other again.”

She reached across the table and touched my cheek.

“It’s been wonderful,” she said. “A real adventure. But it’s over.”

I got up and went over and gave her a kiss; a nice fat buttery smooch.

“Let me know if you ever need me,” I said.

Then I wiped off my face with a fancy napkin, went upstairs, got my bag, caught a cab and hopped a westbound train. The only thing this detective hoped to find, right now, was Chicago, Illinois.

2

INTERIM

APRIL 1932-SEPTEMBER 1934

25

I witnessed the rest of it long-distance, via the newspapers and an occasional on-the-qt call from Colonel Henry Breckinridge, who had come to agree with me that Slim’s no-cops-allowed approach was (as Breckinridge put it) “counterproductive.”

The only other difference, this time around, was that Colonel Schwarzkopf was kept abreast of the Norfolk ransom negotiations (though the Virginia authorities weren’t). Not that it mattered much: Schwarzkopf and his spiffy state police continued to obey the Lone Eagle’s hands-off orders and stayed well away from Curtis and the supposed kidnap gang he was dealing with.

For the rest of April and well into May, Lindbergh followed Commodore Curtis’s lead and boarded first a small rented vessel, then the yacht Marcan, belonging to a hotel-owner pal of Curtis’s, and finally the eighty-five-foot ketch, the Cachalot, belonging to another Curtis crony, for various attempted sea rendezvous with the kidnappers. Raging storms, rough sea and dense fog seemed to conspire with heavy boating traffic to keep any meeting from occurring. Between outings, Curtis-all by his lonesome-would rush ashore for phone calls and meetings with Hilda, Larsen and sundry others of the kidnap gang members, who seemed eager to return the little boy to his weary parents. Detailed descriptions of several boats the kidnappers were using were provided by Curtis, as were various specific rendezvous points.

On May fifth, while Lindy and Curtis and crew were searching for kidnappers off the coast of Virginia, Gaston Bullock Means was getting arrested by the FBI on an embezzlement charge-specifically, “larceny after trust.” Immediately after I suggested it, and Lindbergh himself okayed it, Evalyn had first fired Means, demanding the return of her money, and then-after Means gave a typically wild excuse for not being able to do so-she tipped the feds to him.

But the crime having been committed in the District of Columbia meant Means had to be arrested in D.C. And his home in Chevy Chase was just over the Maryland state line. The feds shadowed him till he drove those few blocks into federal territory, got pulled rudely over and found himself deposited in the office of old J. Edgar himself, who despised former-agent Means for the black eye he’d given the bureau.

And to Hoover, Gaston Bullock Means told a story which he had already tried (unsuccessfully) out on Evalyn and her lawyers.

It seemed when Mrs. McLean requested the return of her one hundred thousand dollars, Means had picked up the money in his brother’s home in Concord, North Carolina, and was on his way to Washington to hand it over when, just outside of Alexandria, a man waving a red lantern flagged him down. This fellow (who Means hadn’t seen all that well) had put a foot on Means’s running board and said, “Hello, Hogan-Eleven told me to take the package from you, here.”

And of course Means had turned the money over to this stranger, because, after all, the stranger knew Means’s code name and Evalyn’s code number.

Later, it came as a devastating shock to Means to discover that the stranger had not really been a representative of Mrs. McLean’s; that her money had never been returned to her.

Unfortunately, nobody questioned Means about this story with the aid of a Chicago lie detector.

And so, naturally, Means pleaded not guilty, and served six days in the red-brick D.C. jail before a bondsman put up the $100,000 bail-a fitting amount, I thought.

The afternoon of the day Means got out of jail-May 12-a colored driver hauling a load of timber pulled his truck alongside a narrow, muddy back road between Princeton and Hopewell and wandered into the underbrush, braving a steady rain, to take a leak. But before he could, he noticed something half-buried in dirt and leaves.

A small, decayed corpse.

Colonel Lindbergh was at the time on the Cachalot, just off the New Jersey coast, trying to make contact with another boat, called (Curtis said) the Mary B. Moss. Curtis was ashore trying to make contact with the kidnappers through “Hilda.” The yacht eased into Cape May Harbor that evening, after another day of miserable weather, though prospects for a better day were imminent. Lindbergh remained aboard ship, where he’d been sleeping nights of late; hopeful that tomorrow the rendezvous would finally be made.

But a naval officer and a Curtis associate boarded the ketch and discovered that the news that had already been on the radio and in headlines had not reached the storm-tossed ship. Gingerly, they told Lindbergh, but I’m told that Slim knew at once from their faces that his son was dead.

The next afternoon-Friday the thirteenth-Lindbergh spent three minutes in the morgue identifying the decomposed body as his son. Anne stayed home.

A few days later, Commodore Curtis-who’d failed to provide either Treasury Agent Frank Wilson or Schwarzkopf and Inspector Welch with any conclusive proof of the existence of Sam, John, Hilda, Larsen, et al.- confessed that it had all been a hoax. Investigators said Curtis’s business was in trouble, and that the year before he’d had a nervous breakdown; also, in the thick of his “negotiations” with the “kidnappers,” he’d signed with the New York Herald-Tribune to tell his story.

The yacht-club commodore was tried for obstructing justice and fined a grand and sentenced to a year in the pokey, though the latter was suspended.

Gaston Means got fifteen years. Nobody could find Evalyn’s hundred thousand (actually one hundred and four thousand, including Means’s “expense account”), though feds ransacked his Chevy Chase home and checked several safety deposit boxes.

The feds also checked the safety deposit boxes of the late Max Hassel and Max Greenberg, who Means in court fingered as the real kidnappers. Nearly a quarter of a mil in cash was found in Hassel’s safety deposit box, but the denominations were fifties and up, whereas both Evalyn and Lindbergh had paid out fives, tens and twenties.

Meanwhile, the “Fox” turned out to be a disbarred lawyer named Norman Whitaker who had indeed been Means’s cellmate; he claimed never to have laid eyes on the Lindbergh boy, that he had assumed the role of “mastermind kidnapper” to help out his old swindler pal. He was in fact in jail at the time of the actual kidnapping.