Chapter 1
The kidnapper was good, I’ll give him that.
He parked himself right next to the trash can, then pulled out a cigarette and a book of matches. He flubbed the first match and tossed it in the bin. That gave him the chance to eye the paper bag sitting on top of the lunchtime leftovers and discarded morning papers.
He flubbed the second match—not a hard thing to fake on a blustery January day. He tossed that second match in the bin, which gave him the opportunity to glance around and check out the people in his immediate vicinity.
There were plenty.
There might have been busier intersections in New York City than the corner of Forty-second Street and Madison Avenue, but you’d have to go hunting. Two dozen restaurants, bars, and greasy spoons were throwing their lunchtime crowds onto the sidewalk. Everyone was hustling to get out of the cold and back to work, warmed by overcoats, hats, and three-martini lunches.
It was a smart place and a smart play. It gave the kidnapper cover, and it made anyone standing still look mighty conspicuous.
People standing still included:
The newsstand owner hawking the latest copies of Life and Vogue and the Monday, January 20, 1947, edition of the Times and its assorted competitors. The kidnapper had probably scoped this spot out several days running, so he’d recognize the owner for genuine.
The drunk panhandling at the mouth of the alley twenty yards down. Too old to have served in the Pacific, but that’s what his cardboard sign proclaimed. The line seemed to be working for him if the pile of coins in his hat was any indication. He was a regular, too.
The girl in the phone booth, the one in the private-school uniform arguing with her mother in that kind of why-me whine fifteen-year-old girls hold a patent on.
“I want to see the matinee and it’s closing this week and Billy invited me! . . . He is not. . . . He would never. He’s a gentleman. His dad is vice president at Mavis and Mulgrave.”
No one to set off the fine-tuned alarm bells wired into the kidnapper’s nerves.
The man in question was dressed in assorted grays—light-gray suit, charcoal overcoat, gunmetal-gray porkpie. He had the kind of easy-smiling face you’d hire to play second-fiddle in a Seagram’s ad.
Pleasant and forgettable.
That forgettable mug and careful planning were the reasons he hadn’t gotten caught. And we were pretty sure he hadn’t gotten caught a lot.
This was a sample of what was going through my head as I defended fictional Billy to a dead telephone line: “I’ll come home after the show, I promise. . . . But, Mom, we’ve already got our tickets.”
I was thinking he didn’t look much like a kidnapper. Then again, they never do.
To be fair, I didn’t look much like a fifteen-year-old girl playing hooky. Even with the wool skirt and the school jacket and my frizzy red curls pulled into place with plastic barrettes.
Up close, I looked every bit my twenty-four years. Maybe a couple more, once you factored in mileage. But through the smeared, breath-fogged glass of the telephone booth, I could pass.
Also, I had the whine down pat.
“No, Mom, I love Billy. I loooove him.”
The easy-smiling man tore off a third match, struck it, and lit his smoke. He shook the match out. Then he carefully placed it in the garbage can, dipping ever so slightly to scoop up the paper bag at the top.
He took a moment to feel what was inside—three stacks of tightly bound bills. Then he was off, moving as fast down Madison Avenue as the post-lunchtime crowd would let him. I was out of the phone booth a moment later, hurrying to keep up, slipping in between the cracks in the masses with ease. I top out at five-two in flats, with a narrow frame that makes dress-fitting a pain but helps when I need to tail a crook.
Twenty seconds in and I was only three people back. The hope was that I could ride the kidnapper’s slipstream all the way to Wyatt Miller.
Wyatt had been snatched from his pram in Central Park three days earlier. His mother had been distracted giving directions to a German tourist, and when she turned back she found her fourteen-month-old darling gone. In his place was a typewritten note.
we have wyatt.
do not call the police.
we have people on the force.
we will know.
go home and await further instructions.
Gloria Miller ran back to her Upper West Side apartment and showed the note to her husband, who did the reasonable thing. He picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect him with the cops.
An overly gruff voice answered.
“Twentieth Precinct.”
“This is Simon Miller. My son’s been kidnapped. My wife was in Central Park and—”
The voice cut him off.
“What did we tell you, Mr. Miller? We told you not to call the police. We have people everywhere. This is your only warning if you want to see your son again.”
Then the voice instructed the Millers to gather ten thousand dollars in ransom money. The voice went so far as to instruct them on the best way to do it, naming bank accounts and telling them to cash in this or that stock.
The kidnapper really did seem to know everything.
What he didn’t know was that Mrs. Miller played a weekly bridge game with a group of wives, one of whose sister’s best friend had had something similar happen to her daughter a year before.
Back when it happened, it had made for juicy conversation between bids or rubbers or whatever the lingo is. I’m a poker girl, myself.
Naturally, the chatter had expanded to include what each card player would have done if such a thing happened to them. Someone had suggested that a private operator would be the best choice—someone who could work to bring the child back without the flash and show of the NYPD.
Gloria Miller raised the idea with her husband, who quickly nixed it. Private detectives were nothing but glorified grifters, he told her. While Mrs. Miller loved and cherished, she didn’t always obey. Which is why, while her husband was tying up the house phone making calls to his bank, she walked down the street and made a call of her own. This one to the offices of Pentecost Investigations, Lillian Pentecost being known far and wide as the greatest private detective working in New York City in that year of our lord 1947.
That reputation was kept fresh through the efforts of her erstwhile assistant, Willowjean “Will” Parker, who made sure her boss’s name appeared in the paper as often as legitimately possible, sometimes going so far as to flirt shamelessly with the editors. Which, if you’d met the editors in question, you’d know took a lot more acting chops than playing a whiny schoolgirl.
We took the case.
What followed was a whirlwind seventy-two hours. While the Millers got the ten grand together, Ms. Pentecost and I tracked down the friend of the sister of the bridge player—a Mrs. Diane Neary.
We couldn’t pick apart the Millers’ lives. There was a chance the kidnappers had them under surveillance, and we didn’t want to trip any alarm bells. So we dissected the Nearys’.
We talked to grocers and bankers and lawyers and landlords and housepainters and hairdressers and everyone listed in their address book. If we’d ever worked faster, I couldn’t remember it.
By the time the Millers got a call from Mr. Gruff giving them the details of the ransom drop, we had a theory and a plan and I was the first person on Mrs. Miller’s phone tree.
When the call came, I was camped out at a hotel two blocks from the Millers’ apartment. I’d spent the morning lounging in a robe, waiting as patiently as humanly possible. Laid out on the bed were a dozen choices. There was housewife, cabdriver, delivery girl, socialite, and barfly, among others.
As soon as Mrs. Miller told me the drop location, I hung up and placed a call of my own, relaying the information and confirming my own quick calculus that schoolgirl was the way to go.
I set a land-speed record for dressing, then ran downstairs and took a cab in the direction of the ransom drop. I got out five blocks short and walked the rest of the way in character, just in case the kidnappers had a lookout.
I got there about ten minutes before Simon Miller arrived, clutching the paper bag in both hands and looking terrified. I had already grabbed the phone booth, dropped in a nickel for show, and was deep into my one-sided conversation.
Ten minutes later, Mr. Pleasant-Face showed up.
Two minutes after that, I was riding his wake down Madison Avenue.
Now you’re all caught up.
I was two arm’s lengths away when Mr. Pleasant-Face made his move.
He put on a big show of looking at his watch, then took off running. I’d expected it. The fastest way of checking for a tail is to start sprinting and see who keeps pace.
Forewarned or not, he gained half a block on me before I got up to speed.
Luckily I’d added a pair of ten-inch military-style boots to my schoolgirl uniform. Not easy on the feet, but great for getting traction on the slush-slick sidewalk.
Early in the chase he glanced back and saw I was following. He picked up speed, then without warning dove into traffic. He slipped through unharmed, but I had to juke and dodge. A delivery truck screeched to a halt, its grille coming so close to my face I could feel the heat of its engine blast against my cheek.
At the end of the block he turned right on Thirty-ninth Street, sprinted the long block, turned left, sprinted another two blocks, then turned right again.
It seemed random, but I knew it wasn’t. This guy was a planner. He would have an escape route.
The best-case scenario had been trailing him unawares to wherever he was keeping Wyatt Miller. That was out.
The worst-case scenario was that he disappeared into one of the many office buildings we were passing. Then it’d become a snake hunt, and we didn’t know how much time Wyatt had.
I saw the move before he made it.
There was an alley halfway down the block. He sped up, glanced at the alley, then quickly looked away. I waved my arm in a circle over my head, sending a signal I hoped would be understood.
He darted into the mouth of the alley and I followed a second later.
Halfway down, he leapt over a broken crate. I opted for around rather than over, seeing too late the chain that had been stretched knee-length across the width of the alley.
I hit it full speed and went ass over teakettle, landing hard on concrete and filthy snow.
I wasted half a second making sure nothing was broken, then stumbled to my feet and started running again. By then he was nearly at the end of the alley. There was no hope of catching up.
A squeal of brakes and a chorus of car horns, and suddenly the mouth of the alley filled with the broadside of a yellow cab.
Pleasant-Face slammed against it and rebounded. He managed to stay on his feet and began a stumbling run back toward me. By that time I was up to full speed.
I brought my right leg up, kicking straight out and sending my size-seven boot deep into his gut.
He collapsed like someone had cut his strings.
I took the paper bag out of his limp hand and tucked it in my coat pocket. He groaned, and I saw him shoot a look past me and back to the end of the alley where we’d come in.
“Please don’t,” I said, unzipping my school jacket and giving him a peek at the holstered Browning Hi-Power. “My boss would like a word.”
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen Spotswood. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
