Stolen Away (6 page)

“What?” Irey said.

Lindbergh shrugged. “Mr. Rosner wanted to show it to certain individuals in the underworld—Owney Madden, among others—who might be able to identify the handwriting or that strange ‘singnature.’”

Madden was an underworld figure who was to New York, roughly, what Capone was to Chicago.

“Let me get this straight,” Wilson said tightly. “The New York Police can’t have a copy, J. Edgar Hoover can’t have a copy, and we can’t have a copy. But Mickey Rosner can.”

Irey, obviously disturbed by this news, and rightly so, said, “I’m afraid the legitimacy of any future notes is endangered. You’ve opened yourselves up to interlopers.”

“Gentlemen,” Breckinridge said, “a mutual friend of ours, Bob Thayer, a partner in Colonel William Donovan’s office, accompanied Mr. Rosner to see Madden and several others of that ilk. Rosner never left Thayer’s sight, nor did his copy of the note.”

“I believe we’ll have no difficulty,” Lindbergh said, defensiveness creeping into his tone, “telling communiqués from the real kidnappers apart from those of any pretenders seeking extortion money.” He reached into the still-open desk drawer. “In fact, though it’s not publicly known…we have received a second letter.”

The usually unflappable Irey sat up; Wilson was already sitting forward.

Lindbergh handed Irey another white bond sheet, written on both sides in ink. Again, I read over Irey’s shoulder:

Below this were the words “Singtuere on all letters” and an arrow pointing to a symbol similar to the one on the first note, but in this case the blue circles were distinct. The central, smaller circle was again blood-red; and three holes had again been punched.

Irey turned the letter over and on the other side it said:

“When did you receive this?” Irey asked.

“Yesterday,” Lindbergh said.

Irey passed the note to Wilson, who’d already leaned over to read it, but now read it again. “I’m no handwriting expert,” Irey said, “but that does look very similar. As does the distinctive symbol.”

“It’s not exactly the same,” I pointed out.

“But close,” Irey said. “Can I see the first note again?”

Lindbergh obliged him.

“They contain many of the same misspellings,” Irey said, pointing to the first note. “Good is ‘g-u-t,’ money is ‘m-o-n-y.’”

“Signature is misspelled in both notes,” I pointed out, “but in two different ways.”

Wilson said, to nobody in particular, “A German, you think?”

“Possibly,” Irey said. “Probably.”

“Or somebody trying to sound German,” I said.

Lindbergh’s eyes narrowed. “Why would anyone do that?”

I shrugged. “Same reason you’d try to disguise your handwriting. To leave a false trail. The war’s not that distant in the American mind—Germans make swell fall guys.”

“You might be right, Mr. Heller,” Irey admitted. “There’s another oddity, here—particularly in the second note. Small, easy words like ‘not’ and ‘soon’ and ‘hole’ are misspelled; but larger, more difficult words, such as ‘consequences,’ ‘appointment,’ ‘interested,’ among others, are spelled correctly.”

“So maybe somebody’s posing,” I said. “Maybe it’s somebody literate playing semiliterate German immigrant.”

“Or,” Wilson offered, “a semiliterate German using an English/German dictionary…looking up only the hard words.”

“Could be that,” I admitted.

Lindbergh seemed to be enjoying listening to some real cops discuss the case; Schwarzkopf, not surprisingly, hadn’t contributed a goddamn thing. His face twitched with frustration.

“What interests me more than the way the letter looks,” Lindbergh said, “is what it says. It says my son is in good health, and that his abductors saw the diet Anne and I gave to the papers, and they’re following it. That’s good news.”

“They’re also hitting you up for another twenty grand,” I said.

“That doesn’t concern me,” Lindbergh said.

I didn’t know whether that meant that he was rolling in dough, or that he didn’t measure his son in monetary terms.

“It’s clear to me,” Lindbergh continued, “that police participation in this case has to be minimized.”

“What?” Irey said. “Colonel Lindbergh, you can’t be serious…”

“I’m deadly serious. The biggest mistake I made was waiting two hours for the fingerprint officer to arrive, before I allowed that first note to be opened. I’d already called the police in, and the newspapers were already all over the story, before I knew that that note would warn me against the participation of either group.”

“Colonel Lindbergh,” I said gently, “there’s no way you could’ve kept either the cops or the reporters out of this case.”

“Gentlemen,” Lindbergh said, standing, “I appreciate your counsel.”

He extended his hand to Irey, who suddenly realized he was being dismissed; awkwardly Irey stood, as did Wilson.

“Colonel,” Irey said, as they shook hands, “I have to return to Washington, but Agent Wilson is setting up shop with several other agents, in New York. They’ll be working the case from there.”

“Discreetly, I hope,” Lindbergh said.

Irey didn’t seem to know what to say to that.

“We’ll, uh, keep Colonel Schwarzkopf informed of our progress,” Wilson said. “I hope he’ll pay us the same courtesy.”

Lindbergh came out from around the desk and put a hand on Irey’s shoulder; it was a rare gesture of warmth from this reserved man.

“I know you’re disappointed by my desire to deal honestly with the kidnappers,” he said. “You want to capture them, and of course I would like to see that happen, one day, as well…but my priority now is to get my son back, safe and sound.”

“I’m a father myself,” Irey said softly.

“On the other hand,” Lindbergh said, walking the men to the door, “as far as Capone is concerned…I wouldn’t ask for the release of that monster, if it
would
save a life.”

Irey nodded solemnly.

Then Wilson asked if they could have a look at the nursery, the kidnap ladder and so on; Lindbergh put Schwarzkopf in charge of that.

Which I thought was a smart move. Even Lindbergh knew that Schwarzkopf and the feds had better get used to each other.

Then I was alone with Lindbergh and Breckinridge.

“Thanks for your insights, Nate,” Lindbergh said.

“My pleasure, Slim,” I said, trying to get comfortable with this level of familiarity.

“What do you know about psychics?” he asked, suddenly.

“Not a hell of a lot. Most of ’em are bunco artists.”

“But some aren’t?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I’d like you to help Colonel Breckinridge check a couple of them out. One of them has quite a reputation. His name is…what is it, Henry?”

Breckinridge checked his notes.

“Cayce,” he said. “Edgar Cayce.”

Paradise, in the off-season, was a hell of a place. From May to October the hamlet of Virginia Beach, a block wide and six miles long, swelled from around 1,500 inhabitants to 15,000 or more, as the concrete walkway above its endless white beach was jammed with tourists and summer residents. Right now those sidewalks were bare of anything but blowing sand, and most of the cottages that had begun popping up between the dunes were as empty as the rambling, shingled, many-balconied Victorian hotels that gave Virginia Beach the eerie atmosphere of a ghost town.

Colonel Breckinridge was behind the wheel, but I had done my share of the driving, as well. It was an eight-hour trip, even in Breckinridge’s fancy Dusenberg sedan—which I’d taken up to one hundred miles per hour, once, while Breckinridge was sleeping, just to see what it would do. It might’ve gone faster than that, if I’d have pushed it, but I backed off when the thing started to shake. Later I realized it was me, shaking. That Dusenberg was as smooth as sliding down a brass banister, and about as noisy.

When I wasn’t driving, I was sleeping; the few hours I might’ve slept the night before were spent tossing and turning. Colonel Lindbergh was going to line up a hotel room for me, but with the influx of reporters, that would take some doing, even for Lindy. In the meantime, they put me up in the house, on a cot.

Which was fine; but the spare bedrooms were all taken (Breckinridge and his wife Aida had moved in, as had Anne Lindbergh’s mother) and the cot provided me was in the nursery.

I sat staring in the half-light—the moon entering through the curtainless glass like another abductor—at the crib, the cedar chest, the windowsill, the festive wallpaper. Turning all of it over in my mind like evidence I was trying to make sense of. Feeling the presence of the child, his innocence haunting the nursery, like a tiny, nagging specter.

Also, my stomach had been churning. The Lindberghs had invited me to supper that night, and their cook—Elsie Whately, butler Oliver’s wife—had served rare roast beef with boiled potatoes and carrots and Yorkshire pudding. It looked delicious but the meat was tough and the rest of it flavorless. Only in America would the wealthy be saps enough to hire the English to cook for them. In conversation, at the dinner table, while I was attempting to eat my roast beef, Anne’s mother—noting how little her daughter was eating—had reminded her she was eating for two, now.

It seemed that Anne was again pregnant—three months along.

Before dawn, as if we were heading out on a fishing trip (which perhaps we were), Breckinridge collected me from the nursery and we took off in his fancy car, with its leather-and-wood interior and built-in backseat bar, just the two of us.

Now it was early afternoon in Virginia Beach, and Breckinridge turned right on Fourteenth Street, and then off onto a curving road. But for a nearby Catholic church, the house was isolated, a large, dark-green shingled affair on the bank of a small lake. The spacious lawn, with its wide-trimmed hedge and shrubs and trees, had begun turning green, as if spring had arrived here early. We parked in front and started up the curving flagstone walk, next to which a small wooden sign bore the neatly wood-burned words:
Association for Research and Enlightenment.

Which was probably just another way of saying: step right up, suckers, right this way….

“We have every reason to believe this man Cayce is sincere,” Breckinridge had said in the car on the way down, “even if he is the crackpot I suspect he is.”

“Why do you figure him as sincere?”

“Well, for one thing he comes highly recommended from friends of the Lindbergh family. Tom Lanphier arranged this psychic reading for us.”

“Who the hell is Tom Lanphier?”

“Major Lanphier,” Breckinridge had said with mild indignation, “is a distinguished aviator, and Vice President with TAT.”

Well, at least he wasn’t a colonel. TAT, of course, was Transcontinental Air Transport, the so-called Lindbergh Line, for which Lindy was a highly paid technical consultant, having charted their coast-to-coast flight routes.

“The Major believes in Cayce, and feels the man can help us.”

“And what do you think, Colonel?”

“I think we’re wasting our time, just as you do. But I think it’s more likely that Cayce is a self-deluded fool than an outright charlatan.”

Breckinridge explained that Cayce, son of a Kentucky farmer, a sixth-grade dropout, was known as a seer and a healer—and was called the “Sleeping Prophet” because all of his readings were given in his sleep.

“Oh, brother,” I said.

“It’s self-hypnosis of some sort. He goes into a sort of trance; it’s claimed that Cayce can give detailed diagnoses of illnesses, assigning home remedies as well as medical ones, using highly technical terms he’s supposedly never heard of, when he’s not asleep.”

“Brother,” I repeated, and dropped off to sleep myself, against the window of the Dusenberg; but I didn’t give any psychic readings.

The woman who answered our knock gave me a start. Not because she was wrapped in ash-cloth or wearing a turban or anything: quite the contrary. She was a small, slender woman in her fifties, with dark, graying hair and large, luminous brown eyes; she wore a simple blue-and-white print dress with an apron, and looked about as sinister as milk and cookies.

What gave me the start, frankly, was the delicate prettiness of her face: she had the same sort of fragile beauty as Anne Lindbergh.

Breckinridge must have noticed the resemblance, too, because the lawyer damn near stammered, as he removed his hat and said, “We’ve come as representatives of the Lindbergh family. We have an appointment…?”

She smiled warmly and took the lawyer’s hat. “I’m Gertrude Cayce,” she said. “You’d be Colonel Breckinridge. And the other gentleman?”

“Nathan Heller,” I said.

“Police officer?” she asked pleasantly, gesturing us inside.

“Why, yes.”

She laughed; it was the lilting laugh of a much younger woman. “No, I’m not psychic myself, Mr. Heller—your profession just shows on you.”

I had to smile at that, as we were ushered into a modest, unpretentious home entirely lacking in occult trappings. It was also lacking in luxury. Faded floral wallpaper and a recently re-covered sofa and easy chair were typical of the lived-in look of the place.

She guided us down a short hallway toward a room that had been added onto the main house; here, I thought, I would encounter the mystic trappings of the soothsayer game: we would pass through a beaded curtain into a room where the signs of the zodiac were painted on a wall around which hung weird masks, across an Oriental carpet to a table where a crystal ball was overseen by a stuffed cobra and a swami in a pink turban and caftan holding a black cat in his arms….

But there was no beaded curtain; no curtain at all, or door, either. We entered directly into a cluttered room lit by natural light from windows on two sides that looked out on a dock and the lake. A worn studio couch was against one wall; at one end of the couch was an old straight-back chair with a black cushion, and at the other a schoolchild’s wooden desk chair. Over the couch were countless inscribed photos from, apparently, satisfied customers. The other walls were thick with framed family portraits, prints of Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln, and religious pictures, including a cow-eyed Christ and an etching of the Good Samaritan. Against one wall was an old wooden filing cabinet, near a wooden bric-a-brac rack whose shelves brimmed with seashells, colored rocks, miniature elephants, and various worthless trinkets. A frayed throw rug covered most of the wooden floor.

“This is Edgar Cayce,” she said, gesturing formally, “my husband.”

He was rising from an old, beat-up typewriter at a big, messy rolltop desk. He was as tall and slender as Lindbergh, but not at all stoop-shouldered; he had the perfect build for and general look of a stage magician, but not the demeanor. His hair was thinning and brown, and his round, small-chinned, genial face was at odds with his long, slender frame; he wore rimless glasses, and appeared to be, like his wife, in his mid-to late-fifties. He moved quickly toward us, extending his hand first to Breckinridge, then to me.

“Colonel Breckinridge,” he said; his voice was warm, soothing. That much fit the charlatan mold. “And you are?”

“Nate Heller,” I said. “I’m with the Chicago police.”

He smiled; he had the aura of a friendly uncle. His lips were full, his eyes as gray-blue as the water out the window behind him.

“You take in a lot of territory in your job, Mr. Heller,” he said.

“I don’t usually cut this wide a swath. But the Lindbergh kidnapping isn’t your usual case.”

He grew sober. “No. It is not. Would you gentlemen sit down, please?”

He plucked several wooden chairs from against a wall and we sat in the middle of the room, his wife joining us, like four card players who forgot their table.

“I pray that I can help you, gentlemen,” he said, hands on his knees, his kindly face solemn. “Like all Americans, I have great admiration and affection for Colonel Lindbergh. Of course, I can’t promise anything. My gift is not something I can control.”

“Your gift?” I asked.

Cayce shrugged. “I don’t claim to understand it at all. I only know I do have some kind of strange gift, or power. I put myself to sleep, and words come out of me that I don’t hear at the time and don’t even understand later, when I read them transcribed. I do know, that in the thirty-odd years I’ve been at this, thousands of folks have been healed and helped and not one has been harmed.”

Spoken like a true con man.

“Now you realize, I rarely deal with criminal matters,” he said. “My readings are primarily related to health problems.”

“Psychics have been known,” Breckinridge said, in a friendly tone, “to help the police, on occasion. There have been recorded instances of success….”

He raised his hand. “I’ve dealt in such matters, but I don’t like to. Once, many years ago, I gave a reading about a murder in Canada.” His eyes looked upward, as if he kept his memory on the ceiling. “There were two old maids, both of them wealthy, both of them misers…. One of them said the other was shot and killed by a prowler. The police interrogated every suspect and vagrant around the countryside, and got nowhere. I gave a reading in which I stated that there’d been no prowler—one sister killed the other in a rivalry over a suitor. After which, I said, the surviving old maid had thrown the murder gun out of the window, where a heavy rain carried it some distance away. The police found the gun exactly where I said it would be, down a slope in the muddy ground—and then they came around to arrest me. Said only an accomplice could know the details I did.”

I smiled. “But you had an alibi.”

“An excellent one,” he said, returning my smile. “First of all, I was many hundreds of miles away at the time. Second of all, I had never met any of the principals.”

“That would do it,” I admitted.

“But that,” Cayce said reflectively, “was not what put me off detective work. Shortly thereafter, a private investigator contacted me about some stolen bonds he was trying to track. I agreed, reluctantly, to help him. I described the person who’d stolen the bonds, a woman on the ‘inside,’ who had a red birthmark on her thigh, and a bad scar on her toes from a childhood accident.” He shook his head. “It seems my description fit the wife of the owner of the bonds—who thought the little woman was in Chicago visiting her sister. Instead, she was in a Pennsylvania hotel with her boyfriend. It was a hotel I identified in my reading, and they were both brought to justice.”

“Why,” Breckinridge asked, “did that ‘put you off’ of the detective game?”

“Because,” Cayce said, “I don’t like to feel that my power is being used to hound and punish anyone. Even if they are crooks, and deserve to be caught.”

“I didn’t like it either,” his wife said. “Edgar was given his gift for healing the sick. Whenever he has used it for any other purpose, he’s been struck with severe headaches and other physical ailments. It makes him ill and unhappy—and it frightens me.”

Cayce was nodding. He obviously viewed his wife as his partner in the practice of his gift—or grift, whichever.

“Why are you making an exception, here?” I asked him. Smelling an approaching con.

Cayce lowered his head. His hands were still on his knees, but slack, now. “Some years ago, Gertrude and I lost a son. He was a sick little boy, colicky, crying endlessly. My wife was very worried, but I was busy with readings for patients. And I’ve always been…reluctant to use the gift where my own family is concerned….”

He touched his fingers to his eyes, head still lowered.

Then he continued: “I was stunned, when the doctor told me Milton was dying. Colitis. They had done all they could, but he was a small boy, and frail. Finally, I gave him a reading, wondering why, dear God, I hadn’t done it before.”

And now tears were rolling down Cayce’s cheeks.

I felt very uncomfortable. I was pulled between thinking I was a heel for doubting this guy, and wondering if I was seeing the world’s greatest scam artist at work.

His wife rose and stood next to him and put her arm around his shoulder; her eyes were moist, but the tears weren’t flowing like Cayce’s were.

“I awoke,” he said, “and knew the answer without asking. My father, who helped me with my readings, looked pale, looked terrible. My wife was weeping. And in the hour before dawn, my son, died…just as my reading had said he would.”

His wife squeezed his shoulder. They smiled at each other, as she dabbed his tears away with a hanky.

Christ, this was embarrassing! I hated being close to this, whether it was legitimate or ill.

I didn’t know whether Breckinridge bought it or not. But he said to Cayce, “And this is why you are willing to get involved in the Lindbergh matter.”

Cayce nodded vigorously. “I will do anything I can to reunite that family with its missing boy.”

Mrs. Cayce left the room, while Cayce began to take off his coat and necktie. He loosened his collar and cuffs and sat on the studio couch and began to untie his shoes. Then a good-looking blonde in her late twenties, in a trim pink-and-white dress, her sheer hosiery flashing, entered the room with Mrs. Cayce trailing behind.