Stolen Away

waiting-room pews at left and right. No sign of her. The room was filled with filtered light, from a huge circular window so high it reached up and caught some sky above the el tracks that fronted the station; people bustled through the gauzy midday unreality, ghosts hurrying through the dust-mote-speckled streaks of sun, but none of those people was the blonde.

And then I heard the echoing howl of a kid and there she was: heading with her bundle back to the women’s restroom.

I weaved through passengers coming and going, found my way to one of the wooden pews facing where she’d gone in, and settled myself down.

I glanced over at the bank of phone booths. Should I call in? No backup from the detail was available anyway; even Sapperstein, the boss, was out in the field, over at Dearborn Station. I looked up at the silver-metal futuristic clock that loomed like a benignly neglectful God over the station’s sprawling waiting-room world: four-fifteen. Sapperstein would be heading back to the Detective Bureau soon.

Didn’t matter. I wanted this collar for myself, and right now. If it panned out, I didn’t want to share the glory. If it was a false alarm, then nobody need know. Should I go in the ladies’ room and grab her while she was changing a diaper? But what if it wasn’t her? Or worse, what if it was, and a bunch of innocent ladies got shot to shit with their scanties down around their ankles?

A Trib had been left on the pew next to me; I picked it up and pretended to read it. Even the inside pages were full of Lindbergh news. Dopes like me who thought they spotted the kid everywhere from Duluth to Timbuktu.

In less than two minutes, she exited the restroom as quickly as she’d entered.

I folded the paper, tossed it on the pew, yawned, and sauntered after her. She was headed for the stairwell.

Despite her armload, she bolted recklessly down the stairs toward street level like she was being pursued; which she was, only I hoped she didn’t know it. I followed her at an easy pace, buttoning my topcoat and snugging my fedora as I went. She had taken the stairs at the right. I took the ones at the left. I wanted to ease up behind her and slip on the cuffs.

When I got to the landing where the two stairways met, she was already gone. And when I took three steps at a time down to street level, hand sliding along the curving stainless-steel banister, I found she was still way ahead of me. I pressed through people huddled around the newsstand by the doors, and stepped outside, into an afternoon as gray as the city itself, icy snow flecking my face, Chicago’s famous wind earning its reputation. My breath rose before me like a wraith. The el tracks and station looming before me made the world darker and gloomier still. Where was she?

Stepping into a waiting taxi, down to my left.

I headed to the right and picked out another cab. I climbed in, just as the Checker Cab, bearing the babe with the babe, glided by like a memory.

“Follow that car,” I said.

And the cabbie, a rumpled-faced Hunky with a shabby green cap and a wide space between his front teeth, glanced back and grinned. “Figured some day somebody’d ask that.”

“That’s peachy,” I said. “Here’s your fare in advance.”

I showed him my badge, and his cheerfulness faded.

“Might be a fin in it,” I allowed, “if you don’t lose ’em, and they don’t make you.”

“They won’t,” he said, relieved there was maybe a buck in this after all, and wheeled his Yellow out onto Van Buren.

This Bernice Rogers was about thirty, with a record that included prostitution and petty theft. A few months back she had adopted a boy from the Cradle, an Evanston agency; she’d been fussy about the age—had to be less than two years, older than one.

Chief of Detectives Schoemaker, a.k.a. “Old Shoes,” a canny old copper, figured the adopted kid was a front. In which case, it would have gone something like this….

The adopted child is looked after by a woman member of the Bonelli gang (presumably Bernice Rogers) for a number of months. People seeing Rogers with the kid assume it’s hers. In the meantime, the kidnap gang executes a snatch on a specific kid (presumably Charles Lindbergh, Jr.); the woman then substitutes the snatched kid for the adopted one—while the latter is abandoned or otherwise disposed of.

And when Bernice Rogers is seen with the kidnapped child, suspicion is nil because that child is mistaken for the one she’s been seen with previously. You seen one baby, you seen ’em all.

But if that had been the plan, why was Bernice Rogers turning back up in Chicago? Schoemaker figured she’d been out east of late, living rather conspicuously as the mother of a small infant. Were things too hot out there? Was somebody in the gang crumbling under the pressure? Was a double-cross in the works?

I smiled and sat back in the cab and relished the thought of answering some of those questions by busting Bernice Rogers. Savoring the idea of being the cop who single-handedly cracked the Lindbergh case, half a continent away. Not bad for a kid, which is what I was: twenty-six years old and enjoying a relatively easy life in undoubtedly hard times.

As for making the collar itself, I was eager, not apprehensive. I knew molls like Bernice could be dangerous, but on the pickpocket detail, you get physical with crooks every day. Hardly a week went by, I didn’t take a gun off some punk.

And I had a gun of my own under my arm, besides—a nine-millimeter Browning—and was not afraid to use it.

Not that I was trigger-happy. In fact I carried this specific weapon, rather than the usual revolver most cops carry, partly because I preferred automatics, and partly because this was the gun my father shot himself with.

My father, whose bookstore on the West Side had run to radical literature, was an old union guy who hated the idea that I became a cop. He specifically hated it when he found out, or figured out, that some money I’d given him, to renew the lease on his store, was a payoff I got for testifying in the Jake Lingle murder trial.