I didn’t know what to say to that. It was just so goddamned sad.
“They’re maintaining a sort of vigil,” he said. “We talk on the hour. Do you have any suggestions?”
I told him it was time to let Agent Grapp take over. “Bob, the FBI have cracked hundreds of kidnapping cases over the last several decades, almost always with a successful outcome. Sometimes kidnapped parties stay in their captors’ hands for weeks before their return. So this is far from over.”
He nodded, his expression dazed; his dark blue eyes rarely blinked behind the browline glasses. “We’ll let the Pittsburg thing play out,” he said. A light wind was turning the wispy white hair atop the rounded square of his head into dead-dandelion tufts that refused to fly away.
“Bob, is there anything more I can do for you on this end?”
His head shake was understandably weary. “I don’t believe so, Nate.”
I got out my billfold and removed the check. As I handed it his way, the light wind whipping it a little, he raised two palms.
“That’s not necessary, Nate. You’ve earned it.”
“No. I’ll send you an invoice for five hundred dollars — that’ll cover my time and any expenses. Hotel and airfare were pre-paid, so this isn’t generous of me in the least.”
I kept the check held out and it flapped like the golf course flag on a nearby hole. Finally he took the thing before the wind did.
The thin line of his mouth said, “But if I need you...”
“You’ll have me. I’m opening a New York office next month, so you may have to get in touch there. My people in Chicago will help you on that score.”
“You sound busy.”
I leaned an elbow on a glass tabletop. “Listen. I have a six-year-old myself, remember. You need me, I’m here. In the meantime — and you’ve probably thought of this — I’d get a priest in to talk to the family. Maybe a nurse for your wife.”
He looked alarmed. “Nate, do you anticipate bad news?”
“Let me ask you. Is Bobby high-strung?”
A rare blink came. “No. I suppose it’s fair to say he’s been sheltered. Pampered, perhaps. We love him very much. Such a good boy.”
Which was why he’d been trusting enough to go with a strange woman when she came for him at his school. To a child, the world of adults is unknowable — you did what they told you to.
“That ‘piss and vinegar’ remark,” I said. “Did that ring true to you?”
Greenlease said nothing. He looked toward the golf course. Some fools were playing. Hadn’t snowed yet.
Finally, he said, “No.” Then his eyes came to mine. “You think he’s dead. That’s why you’re talking about priests and nurses.”
“I think you need to prepare yourself for the possibility. Your wife, too. In the meantime, get the FBI on this full-throttle. If the worst happens, I can ask people I know in my world and see if we can find the bitch who took your boy and this bastard M, too. The feds can trace serial numbers. But I know how to trace lowlife scum.”
I got to my feet and so did he. We shook hands and went back inside, where he returned to his daughter’s side. Finally she smiled at me, just a little. But it was enough.
I was on my way out, back in my Burberry with my hat in hand, when an unfamiliar female voice called out to me, although I immediately knew just who it was.
“Oh, Mr. Heller?” The voice was a sweet, soft second soprano. “Would you wait a moment?”
I turned and a tall nicely built woman in her mid-forties approached from down the hall; her hair dark and short and well-coiffed, she was attractive in a dignified manner, reminiscent of Irene Dunne in some late ’30s tearjerker. She wore a navy suit, white silk blouse and low heels, as if ready for church on this Monday. Of course Catholics went to church all sorts of times we heathens couldn’t keep track of.
“We may have met years ago,” she said. “I know you’ve done a number of jobs for Bob.” She seemed utterly composed, but her dark eyes screamed red like her husband’s.
She had offered her hand for me to take — not a handshake, but for me to hold, which I did in both of mine. “No, Mrs. Greenlease, I would have remembered. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about all this.”
“You were very kind to come from Chicago to help us,” she said. “I understand you played a crucial role last night.”
I wished I’d played a more crucial role, like grabbing that M by the goddamn throat when he picked the money up and squeezed out of him what he’d done with her son.
I said, “I have a boy Bobby’s age. Glad to do anything to help. I’m heading back to Chicago for now, but I’ll be on call.”
Her smile was a lightly lipsticked wound. “You were on the Lindbergh case, I understand.”
Oh, Christ — not that again.
I risked the smallest smile. “Yes, I was a liaison between the authorities there and the Chicago police department — I didn’t have my own agency then.”
“Why a liaison?”
“Well, Al Capone was claiming he could get the child back through his underworld connections if we’d just let him out. All kinds of crazy things were going on back then.”
Her hand was still in mine. “Are things really any different now?”
“Yes, and for the better. Out of that tragedy came the FBI’s ability to look into this kind of crime. I’ve advised Bob to let them take over. People like me, and family friends like Will Letterman, can only do so much.”
Her smile widened enough to reveal perfect white teeth. “That sounds like good advice. But we’ve had wonderful help. Paul has been just a dear. I don’t know what...” The tears she was holding back were pooling, threatening to overflow, and the smile was crinkling.
She hugged me. Cried into my shoulder, quietly, softly, but she cried. That was what this had come to: a mother needing a stranger’s shoulder to cry on.
She drew away, leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, and nodded, slightly, embarrassed now, and turned away and started up the stairs. But then she paused two steps up, at the first landing, and leaned a hand on the newel-post lion.
“You know, Mr. Heller... Bob and I would be lost without our faith in God’s constant and abiding love. Even in our darkest hours, we know God is holding each one of us in this family very close. Bobby included.”
As if ascending into heaven, she went slowly up.
Me, I had my doubts. If God was in this, He might have whispered in the ear of the young nun who was so quick to hand over their kid.
And that was it.
I booked a late afternoon flight back by phone, then made a call to my partner Lou Sapperstein at the A-1 in Chicago, letting him know I’d be in tomorrow. Lou had a few things that couldn’t wait and we took care of those over the phone. I hadn’t bothered with a shower before going out to the Greenleases’, so I took one now. Then my minor hangover was dogging me enough to encourage lying down and I fell asleep for a while.
The two o’clock check-out time had come and gone when I awoke. Brushed my teeth, packed hurriedly and went down to the palatial lobby, which was pretty dead again. I was waiting for a salesman from somewhere to settle up his bill when a voice called out to me. This one was male and I didn’t recognize it — a husky baritone.
“Nate! Nate Heller!”
I turned and a big man — and I mean big, six-four and pushing four hundred pounds — came trundling toward me like a runaway circus elephant. Appropriately, he was in a tent of a brown suit with a yellow and red tie adding a clownish splash of color. His oblong head was too small for his massive body, eyes close-set and an unexpectedly pretty light blue, eyebrows perpetually high, hair curly black and pomaded, mouth small and thick-lipped, a little chin enveloped by a thick neck rising from the preposterous torso.