“I’m only here because Bob Keenan wants me.”
“I think he needs you here,” Kruger said, nodding, “for his peace of mind. Just stay on the sidelines.”
I nodded back.
Kruger had turned to move on, when as an afterthought he looked back and said, “Hey, uh — sorry about your pal Drury. That’s a goddamn shame.”
I’d worked with Bill Drury on the pickpocket detail back in the early ’30s; he was that rare Chicago animaclass="underline" an honest cop. He also had an obsessive hatred for the Outfit, which had gotten him in trouble. He was currently on suspension. “Let that be a lesson to you,” I said cheerfully. “That’s what happens to cops who do their jobs.”
Kruger shrugged and shambled off, to oversee the forensic boys.
The day was a long one. The FBI arrived in all their officious glory; but they were efficient, putting a tape recorder on the phone, in case a ransom call should come in. Reporters got wind of the kidnapping, but outside the boys in blue roped off the area and were keeping them out for now — a crime lab team was making plaster impressions of footprints and probable ladder indentations under the bedroom window. A radio station crew was allowed to come in so Bob could record pleas to the kidnappers (“She’s just a little girl... please don’t hurt her... she was only wearing her pajamas, so wrap a blanket around her, please”). Beyond the fingerprinting and photos, the only real police work I witnessed was a brief interrogation of the maid of the family upstairs; a colored girl named Leona, she reported hearing JoAnn say, “I’m sleepy,” around half past midnight. Leona’s room was directly above the girl’s.
Kruger came over and sat on the couch next to me, around lunchtime. “Want to grab a bite somewhere, Heller?”
“Sure.”
He drove me to a corner café four blocks away and we sat at the counter. “We found a ladder,” he said. “In a backyard a few houses to the south of Keenan’s.”
“Yeah? Does it match the indentations in the ground?”
Kruger nodded.
“Any scratches on the bricks near the window?”
Kruger nodded again. “Matches those, too. Ladder was a little short.”
The first-floor window was seven and a half feet off the ground; the basement windows of the building were mostly exposed, in typical Chicago fashion.
“Funny thing,” Kruger said. “Ladder had a broken rung.”
“A broken rung? Jesus. Just like...” I cut myself off.
“Like the Lindbergh case,” Kruger said. “You worked that, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“They killed that kid, didn’t they?”
“That’s the story.”
“This one’s dead, too, isn’t she?”
The waitress came and poured us coffee.
“Probably,” I said.
“Keenan thinks maybe the Outfit’s behind this,” Kruger said.
“I know he does.”
“What do you think, Heller?”
I laughed humorlessly. “Not in a million years. This is an amateur, and a stupid one.”
“Oh?”
“Who else would risk the hot seat for twenty grand?”
He considered that briefly. “You know, Heller — Keenan’s made some unpopular decisions on the OPA board.”
“Not unpopular enough to warrant something like this.”
“I suppose.” He was sugaring his coffee — overdoing it, now that sugar wasn’t so scarce. His hound-dog face studied the swirling coffee as his spoon churned it up. “How do you haul a kid out of her room in the middle of the night without causing a stir?”
“I can think of two ways.”
“Yeah?”
“It was somebody who knew her, and she went willingly, trustingly.”
“Yeah.”
“Or,” I said, “they killed her in bed, and carried her out like a sack of sugar.”
Kruger swallowed thickly; then he raised his coffee and sipped. “Yeah,” he said.
4
I left Kruger at the counter where he was working on a big slice of apple pie, and used a pay phone to call home.
“Nate,” Peg said, before I’d had a chance to say anything, “don’t you know that fellow Keenan? Robert Keenan?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I just heard him on the radio,” she said. Her voice sounded both urgent and upset. “His daughter...”
“I know,” I said. “Bob Keenan is who called me this morning. He called me before he called the police.”
There was a pause. Then: “Are you working on the case?”
“Yes. Sort of. The cops and the FBI, it’s their baby.” Poor choice of words. I moved ahead quickly: “But Bob wants me around. In case an intermediary is needed or something.”
“Nate, you’ve got to help him. You’ve got to help him get his little girl back.”
This morning was forgotten. No talk of divorce now. Just a pregnant mother frightened by the radio, wanting some reassurance from her man. Wanting him to tell her that this glorious post-war world really was a wonderful, safe place to bring a child into.
“I’ll try, Peg. I’ll try. Don’t wait supper for me.”
That afternoon, a pair of plainclothes men gave Kruger a sobering report. They stayed out of Keenan’s earshot, but Kruger didn’t seem to mind my eavesdropping.
They — and several dozen more plainclothes dicks — had been combing the neighborhood, talking to neighbors and specifically to the janitors of the many apartment buildings in the area. One of these janitors had found something disturbing in his basement laundry room.
“Blood smears in a laundry tub,” a thin young detective told Kruger.
“And a storage locker that had been broken into,” his older, but just as skinny partner said. “Some shopping bags scattered around — and some rags that were stained, too. Reddish-brown stains.”
Kruger stared at the floor. “Let’s get a forensic team over there.”
The detectives nodded, and went off to do that.
Mrs. Keenan and ten-year-old Jane were upstairs, at the neighbors’, through all of this; but Bob stayed right there, at the phone, waiting for it to ring. It didn’t.
I stayed pretty close to him, though I circulated from time to time, picking up on what the detectives were saying. The mood was grim. I drank a lot of coffee, till I started feeling jumpy, then backed off.
Late afternoon, Kruger caught my eye and I went over to him.
“That basement with the laundry tubs,” he said quietly. “In one of the drains, there were traces of blood, chips of bone, fragments of flesh, little clumps of hair.”
“Oh God.”
“I’m advising Chief of Detectives Storms to send teams out looking.”
“Looking for what?”
“What do you think?”
“God.”
“Heller, I want to get started right now. I can use you. Give Keenan some excuse.”
I went over to Bob, who sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair by the phone stand. His glazed eyes were fixed on the phone.
“I’m going to run home for supper,” I told him. “Little woman’s in the family way, you know, and I got to check in with her or get in dutch. Can you hold down the fort?”
“Sure, Nate. Sure. You’ll come back, though?”
I patted his shoulder. “I’ll come right back.”
Kruger and I paired up; half a dozen other teams, made up of plainclothes and uniformed men already at the scene, went out into the field as well. More were on the way. We were to look under every porch, behind every bush, in every basement, in every coal bin, trash can, any possible hiding place where a little body — or what was left of one — might be stowed.
“We’ll check the sewers, too,” Kruger said, as we walked down the sidewalk. It was dusk now; the streetlamps had just come on. Coolness off the lake helped you forget it was July. The city seemed washed in gray-blue, but night hadn’t stolen away the clarity of day.